Classic Movie Review: 'The Opposite Sex and How to Live With Them'

The Opposite Sex and How to Live With Them (1993)

Directed by Matthew Meshakoff

Written by Noah Stern

Starring Arye Gross, Kevin Pollak, Courtney Cox, Julie Brown

Release Date March 26th, 1993

Published June 9th, 2023

There is a scene in the 1993 'romantic comedy' The Opposite Sex and How to Live With Them that demonstrates the ugly toxicity of the early 1990s. Courtney Cox has gone to the beach with her new boyfriend, played by a sentient loaf of wonder bread named Arye Gross. As he lounges on the beach, Gross's friends grab Cox and drag her away to play some beach game. When she returns, she's nude, save for a towel. His friends have stripped her naked during this 'game' and she was able to limp back to her boyfriend who could not be less interested in her plight.

Cox's character appears shaken by this. She makes clear that she did not consent to being stripped nude by her boyfriend's friends. And yet, the tone of the scene is clearly comic. We are expected to laugh about this implied sexual assault. We know this because Gross appears to find this situation very funny as he jokingly blames her for letting his friends drag her into their game. Apparently, she should have known better. That scene is par for the course on how ugly, toxic, and misogynistic this movie is, especially through the lens of 30 years later.

For those thinking I am going to defend this in any way by saying 'it was a different time,' I will not be doing that. What happened in this scene was wrong when it took place as it remains wrong today. This casual attitude toward assault is reflective of a culture at the time that excused far too much awful male behavior with the phrase 'boys will be boys.' That attitude is almost always followed by an admonishment of the victim, blaming the woman for putting herself into this situation. You can think 'it's just a movie,' but this movie is a product of the attitudes of the time. It's a reflection of the casual ugliness around it.

The entirety of The Opposite Sex and How to Live With Them is terrifically awful. Moment one to moment last, this very stupid, mind-numbing 'romantic comedy' is never funny. It's a cringe inducing relic and somehow, it's a mere 30 years ago that this gross movie was released. If you wonder why we are reckoning with toxic masculinity and a culture of sexual harassment to this day, this movie is indicative of where we were just three decades ago. It was a time when were so comfortable with men assaulting an unwilling female victim that we made a joke of the assault in a romantic comedy. Let that sink in for a moment.

The film starts on a note of ugly misogyny as Arye Gross's creep has what this movie views as a 'meet cute.' That this supposed 'meet cute' happens when Gross is seen using a periscope in a basement bar in New York City to look up women's skirts is, like everything else in this god-awful movie, seen as charming comedy. Yes, Gross uses a periscope to try and look up Courtney Cox's skirt and she catches him. For a moment, the character is given the dignity to confront this creep and call him out but, within minutes she's required by the plot to find this lump of a man with the charisma of a damp sponge charming.

The film employs comedian Kevin Pollak to try and make Gross look attractive by comparison but that only works to a point. Pollak is a genuinely funny performer and while he's just as gross as every other man in this ugly nightmare of a supposed comedy, at least Pollak is capable of delivering a punchline. Pollak is used in interstitial scenes meant to shove this plot along. He makes jokes that would make the audience of Everyone Loves Raymond roll their eyes in disgust and the movie proceeds through its unbelievably idiotic plot.

That we are asked to believe that a woman as attractive as Courtney Cox would find Arye Gross attractive and charming is like asking me to believe that Transformers are real. Cox is simple too innately intelligent for this movie. She seems embarrassed throughout the film but perhaps desperate enough for work that she tolerates a plot that asks her to treat this man as if he were worthy of a relationship. For his part, he's a jealous, loud mouth moron, a sub-sitcom level schlub who even the best writers who made Kevin James a star on television would struggle to make believable as a romantic lead.

Admittedly, I've developed a perhaps unhealthy level of enmity for Arye Gross. I've had to suffer his presence in two of the worst movies I've ever seen for our Everyone's a Critic Movie Review Podcast spinoff, Everyone's a Critic 1993. Gross starred in the first wide release film of 1993, Hexed, a deeply misguided and dunderheaded comedy that isn't quite as toxic as The Opposite Sex and How to Live With Them, but approaches the same level of incompetence. With this film, I have seen far too much of Gross's doughy mug. I'm tired and I never want to see him again. He may just have been an actor seeking work and taking what he could get as a leading man but what he made of his opportunities are a pair of shockingly, stunningly, awful movies. He's part of the problem.

The bigger problem, however, is the culture of the time. The toxic, 'boys will be boys' excusing of cruelty created a culture full of young men who got all of the wrong messages from our popular culture. Objectifying women is one thing, but making comedy out of physically assaulting women is a whole other matter One leads from the other, but both are indicative of what has come to be called 'rape culture,' a culture in which consent exists in a gray area rather than being the concrete desire of one party not to be assaulted by the other. Cox's character takes her sexual assault in stride only because the plot requires her too.

I know many of you don't want to have this conversation. I get it. We all would love to be able to throw on the nostalgia goggles and pretend the past was a rosy, sunny, safe space for everyone. Reality is a bit different. It's not wrong to point out flaws of the time. It's not wrong to be critical of the past, even as the past cannot defend itself. Some things are just wrong no matter what. The attitudes exhibited in The Opposite Sex and How to Live With Them were wrong and stupid at the time and few people noticed because the culture of the time reflected what was in the movie. This behavior was so normalized that people barely batted an eye about this truly awful movie exhibiting toxic masculine values passed off as comedy.

The Opposite Sex and How to Live With Them was the subject of an episode of my new podcast, a spinoff of the Everyone's a Critic Movie Review Podcast, Everyone's a Critic 1993. On that show, myself and my co-hosts, teenager M.J and Gen-Xer Amy, watch the movies of 1993 in chronological order of release. It's fascinating to see how movies and culture have changed over a mere 3 decades. This review is certainly indicative of that change. You can listen to the Everyone's a Critic 1993 podcast on the Everyone's a Critic Movie Review Podcast feed, wherever you listen to podcasts.

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