Purity culture and abstinence-only education get a gross comedy send-up in Sara Zandieh\u2019s new film \u201cDoin\u2019 It.\u201d It\u2019s exactly as it\u2019s advertised, a comedy about sex, only this time, its main character is far from a hedonist. Like \u201cThe 40-Year-Old Virgin,\u201d what our hero lacks in experience, she makes up for in curiosity, stumbling into a belated journey of self-discovery that will challenge her family\u2019s notions of what it means to behave \u201clike a decent woman.\u201d<\/p>\n
After a particularly embarrassing high school incident, Maya (Lilly Singh<\/a>) moved to India with her strict mother and grandmother. Now in her 30s and still never been kissed, Maya returns to the U.S. as a computer engineer, hoping to launch the next big app aimed at teens, but finds resistance as she hasn\u2019t spent enough time with her target demographic. To rectify the oversight, she signs up to be a substitute teacher at a local high school, where she lands a spot as a substitute teacher talking about sex ed, a subject she knows next to nothing about. Saddled with a subpar abstinence-only curriculum, Maya decides to spice things up to engage her students, teaching them about anatomy, sexual orientation, and having frank conversations about sex. The unorthodox teaching lands her in hot water, and it\u2019s a question of whether or not she can stay and continue to learn life lessons from her students or get kicked out by the pearl-clutching school board.\u00a0<\/p>\n Written by Zandieh, Singh, and Neel Patel, \u201cDoin\u2019 It\u201d mixes a few moments of fun, some heartwarming conversations, and, of course, some moments of low-brow jokes meant to make the audience reel in disgust, channeling the humor of horny comedies of the 1990s like \u201cAmerican Pie.\u201d The jokes in the film run the gamut between meaningful and distracting. That wild card probability makes the film feel less sophisticated than it\u2019s trying to be.\u00a0<\/p>\n In addition to the film\u2019s larger conversation of sexual education as a means to sexual empowerment, there\u2019s also a cultural reckoning between Maya and her mom, Veena (Sonia Dhillon Tully), who holds outdated beliefs on how a woman is supposed to behave. Originally, Veena moved her daughter out of the country to an all-girls\u2019 school when she was younger in an effort to restore her reputation, something Maya later learns did not happen to the boy who was also caught in the act during the school talent show. But in trying to address her mother\u2019s outdated cultural expectations on women, Maya\u2019s conversations eventually soften her mother\u2019s stance on a new potential suitor, Farhad (Cas Anvar). The other meaningful relationship upon Maya\u2019s return to the States is with her old friend Jess (Sabrina Jalees), a free-wheeling spirit whose running joke is to update Maya with a new stage of her new relationship, which is getting more serious with every meet-up. Their reconnection also allows Maya the chance to catch up on the high school hijinks she missed out in her strict schooling.<\/p>\n Singh, in her first leading role with \u201cDoin\u2019 It,\u201d is no stranger to making audiences laugh. The YouTube comedian broke out with the late-night talk show \u201cA Little Late with Lilly Singh\u201d and is trying something different with her part as Maya. She\u2019s at ease making dirty jokes and engaging in deep conversations with her students, and even her shared moments with resident scene stealer Stephanie Beatriz<\/a>, as Barbara\u2014a janitor with a secret\u2014are enjoyable, even if narratively speaking, they make little sense. With a supporting cast that includes SNL legend Ana Gasteyer as a flustered principal and Utkarsh Ambudkar (\u201cGhosts\u201d) as the high school crush who has, ahem, grown up, Singh has more than enough support around her in her maiden leading role.\u00a0<\/p>\n Zandieh is also no stranger to making audiences laugh, as her previous film, \u201cA Simple Wedding,\u201d took on Iranian family tensions and marital expectations. With \u201cDoin\u2019It,\u201d both she and Singh are in on the joke, even milking the disgusting moments for every laugh. Although the movie never quite graduates from its juvenile sense of humor, it\u2019s not all that there is in \u201cDoin\u2019 It.\u201d Zandieh and Singh attempt to have meaningful conversations about sex education that needs to be more than birthing videos and STD scare literature, and taking on double standards against women between scenes of using a dildo as a smoothie blender and comparing different faces made during orgasm. \u201cDoin\u2019 It\u201d is more of a fling than one for the books, but it\u2019s a fun one, nonetheless.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Purity culture and abstinence-only education get a gross comedy send-up in Sara Zandieh\u2019s new film \u201cDoin\u2019 It.\u201d It\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":156634,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,337],"class_list":["post-156633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=156633"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156633\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/156634"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=156633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=156633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=156633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}