Cameron Diaz T&A in Sex Tape (2014)

At 5.1, it’s kind of an underrated comedy at IMDb. OK, it’s dumb, and some of the jokes fall flat. So? I found it both sexy and funny, which is about all you want when you rent this kind of movie. I’m pretty sure that people preparing to watch a film called Sex Tape are not the same ones rushing to IMDb to deconstruct The Seventh Seal.


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There is also some very entertaining and spectacularly athletic nudity from Cam’s stunt double.

Oh, my God, I just re-read this and realized that I used the term “deconstruct.” The horror! The next thing you know I’ll be thanking people for joining me on my life’s “journey.”

6 thoughts on “Cameron Diaz T&A in Sex Tape (2014)

  1. Using the word deconstruct to define the kind of people who deconstruct things is perfectly fine and does not indicate incipient intellectual pretentiousness (IIP), in my opinion. Now, if you had used the word hermeneutics, you would have been beyond hope.

    Actually, I don’t know if people still talk about hermeneutics any more. Maybe they were just a fad. People talked about them when I was in college, and I have forgotten if I ever had an inkling of what they meant. I bet people in line at the Pick N’Save would look at me funny if I started talking about them now.

    1. For me, also, there are certain words that trigger an EGO (eyes glaze over) response. One example: “eschatological.”

      1. Yup, I’m not fond of syncretism or heuristic, even when they are used correctly.

        But even more than when I hear vague sesquipedalian terms, I shudder when people use verbose cliches in place of a simple and precise English word or phrase. One that always raises my hackles is “at this point in time,” or the emphatic “at this particular point in time.” The language has highly precise ways to express those thoughts with one or two syllables: “now” or the emphatic “right now.”

        1. As I recall, “to the best of my recollection at this point in time” was a favorite of Nixon Administration offcials testifying before Congress about Watergate. But most of the people involved there were lawyers.

          Somebody should make a synthetic concrete and call it Syncrete. I think I have seen the word before, but the only sentence I can use it in comes courtesy of South Park: “Syncretism is a hard word to spell.” Ditto for eschatalogical.

          Crimes against language go way back. I can still remember a footnote Winston Churchill put in his history of WWII apologizing for the British Army’s use of “de-potabalized” to mean “rendered undrinkable”.

        2. I agree that using vocabulary to pull rank is not a virtue. I’ve put some effort into writing in a less pretentious way. Not that I used to be conscious of using big words. I just had a lot of words from reading. I’m antisocial—not gregarious.

          My dad noted my use of “maximize” or “optimize”, the summer after my freshman year. He thought it was a rare word. He was praising me for it. It’s just that, well, WTF.

          As for heuristic, my school, 4 decades ago, was on ARPANET. I’d emailed with Don Woods, author of an early computer game called Adventure. I received a daily newsletter called The SF-Lovers Digest. Many of the contributors were at MIT-AI & SAIL. I knew the word “heuristic” from the Heuristic Programming Project. The main success of which was called Expert Systems. One such system did a fair job of diagnosing illnesses & was touted as a physician’s robo-assistant. Another was an attempt to base computer chess on advice from chess masters. That failure was instructive. The conscious thoughts of intuitive experts doesn’t track well with their underlying unconscious process. They were able to provide only their rationalizations of the moves they’d make. Their guidance to a young learner. But it wasn’t literally the way they played.

          Anyway, I picked up on “heuristic” as a generalized “rule of thumb”. I have to say, after a career in Silicon Valley, it’s a very ordinary word to me. I get no cringe from it, not in the slightest.

          OTOH, I’ve been in an odd position of awarding a scholarship to older JC transfers to UC. Their applications needed 2 letters of rec & a short essay on their goals. OMG, they used so many big words that they’d failed badly guessing the meanings of. So used to getting away with bullshitting, maybe. I even wonder if 4 years of college these days actually fixes that. The pretending they know stuff they don’t.

          I also used to interview job applicants. Misspellings in their resume was a bad start with me. I felt, if they had any brains & couldn’t spell, they should damned well have the good sense to run it past someone who could. Not to mention, critique for them. I mean, it’s nice if you don’t lie. But screwing up on the mechanics is plain stupid.

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