7/6/15: Cthulhian Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

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Aaron Scott Moorhead, Americans abroad, cinema, co-directors, co-writers, dramas, film reviews, films, Francesco Carnelutti, genetic research, horror films, immortality, Jeremy Gardner, Jimmy Lavalle, Jonathan Silvestri, Justin Benson, Lou Taylor Pucci, love story, Lovecraftian, Monsters, Movies, mutations, Nadia Hilker, nature, Nick Nevern, relationships, Resolution, romantic films, self-sacrifice, set in Italy, Spring, true love, twists, writer-director-cinematographer-editor

Despite what rom-coms, TV commercials and the greeting card industry might say, true love is actually a pretty ugly business. Once the initial pie-in-the-sky phase of any relationship is over, couples actually have to get down to the nitty-gritty of living with each other, warts and all. We all have aspects of our personalities that we shield from the world at large (call ’em “dark sides” but do it with a sinister glare, for effect), aspects which our significant others tend to get the brunt of, for better or worse. When everyone else has gone home, when the TV is silent and the phones are off, when there’s nothing between you and another human being but the skin you were born with and the neuroses you picked up along the way…well…that’s amore, my friends.

The trick in any new relationship, of course, is to try to see through the cotton candy and unicorns into whatever “monsters” might be lurking in the background: we’re all damaged goods, to one degree or another, but the amount of damage varies from individual to individual. Accepting our partners at their absolute worst, just as we accept them at their absolute best, is one of the key tenets of being in love: you can like people, lust after them, respect the hell out of them or any combination of the three. You can’t truly love someone, however, unless you’re willing to also love their dark side, as well.

Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson’s Spring (2014) is about this duality of romance, in ways both symbolic and much more explicit. At its core, the film is about the stirrings of new romance, the courtship and subtle dance that unites two complete strangers via their commingled heartstrings. It’s about the feelings (and thoughts) that rush to one’s cerebellum after the blood has finished rushing to points south, the questions and concerns that extend beyond “What now?” into “What next?.” Spring is about the eternal need for companionship, the primeval drive to continue the bloodline and find a sympathetic audience for our own endless tics, quirks and delusions. It’s about what happens when the person you love displays monstrous qualities…when they might be, in fact, a literal monster. Does love really conquer all or are our individual biologies really the unmitigated masters of our destinies?

When we first meet him, Evan (Lou Taylor Pucci) is in a bit of what might best be described as a complete and total tailspin into oblivion. His beloved mother has just died after a long, drawn-out illness, he’s relentlessly angry and the world at large is just one big fight waiting to happen. While drowning his sorrows with his buddy, Tommy (fellow indie writer-director Jeremy Gardner), in the same dive bar where he works, Evan gets picked on by a meat-headed moron who’s looking to tussle. Evan cleans his clock righteously (for a small guy, he fights like a wolverine) and gets fired, on the spot, for his trouble. He also ends up in the crosshairs of the vengeance-seeking jerk and his buddies, as well as the local cops: weighing his options, Evan decides to bid a not-so-fond farewell to the U.S. of A and hightail it for the beauty and grandeur of Italy.

As the American ex-pat triapses about his newly adopted homeland, he meets a couple of assholish backpackers (Nick Nevern and Jonathan Silvestri), as well as a kind-hearted old farmer, Angelo (Francesco Carnelutti), who sets Evan up with honest, hard work, as well as room and board. Just when it seems that Evan might, successfully, slip into anonymity, he lays eyes on the alluring Louise (Nadia Hilker). The rest, as they might say, could be history.

Louise is an intriguing character: a smart, droll student studying evolutionary genetics who also happens to be a vegetarian (although she admits to “craving meat” occasionally), Louise speaks several languages, raises the rabbits that she rescues from medical trials as her pets and seems but one quirky Vespa away from your standard “manic pixie girl” in a rom-com meet-cute. As mentioned previously, however, Louise has a dark side that she keeps carefully hidden from the world at large: she’s constantly injecting herself with mysterious fluids, like some sort of cyberpunk drug addict, refuses to see Evan after dark and has a tendency to turn into a slimy, reptilian, Cthulhian monster, from time to time. In other words: pretty much your usual relationship baggage.

As Evan continues to fall madly in love with Louise, she struggles with telling him too much about her own, unique genetic background: it’s hard enough not farting around your loved one…try not turning into a monster and see how it goes! For his part, Evan discovers one of Louise’s discarded needles and makes the natural assumption (no, not the monster one, silly) that his dream girl might have one foot firmly in nightmare territory. “I need to know if you’re the kind of crazy I can handle,” Evan says, at one point, a slightly goofy grin on his face. Suffice to say, Evan will have his answer before too long…whether he likes it or not.

Writer-director team Moorhead and Benson first hit my radar thanks to their astounding debut, the impossibly clever, thought-provoking and radical Resolution (2012), a film that manages to completely upend conventional notions of horror by getting all meta with the very basics of story/narrative construction. Resolution was a helluva film, by any definition, and my level of anticipation was through the roof for their full-length follow-up (their V/H/S Viral (2014) segment was tasty but not much more than an appetizer). While Spring is nowhere near the achievement that Resolution was (to be honest, few modern films are), it nonetheless finds Moorhead and Benson polishing up their craft, moving ever farther afield from the ultra lo-fi approach of their debut.

As far as mysteries go, the secret of Louise’s dual nature is pretty much dead on arrival: between the various posters, one-sheets, trailers and synopses floating around, I find it hard to believe that any semi-aware audience member would find this to be surprising in the slightest. This, of course, is never the film’s intent: Spring is much more interested in Evan and Louise’s tangled romance than it is in pulling another tired “twist” on the audience. Moorhead and Benson spill the beans approximately a third of the way into the film, leaving the remaining two-thirds as fall-out, as it were. This isn’t a film about a man who ends up falling in love with a woman who’s revealed to be part monster: it’s a film about a man who falls in love with a woman who just so happens to be part monster…it’s a subtle difference but a major one and it forms the crux for everything we see.

No romance works unless we buy into the lovers, however, which is one reason that Spring has no problem pulling off its particular hat-trick: not only are Lou Taylor Pucci and Nadia Hilker completely comfortable in their roles, the pair have genuine romantic chemistry…we actually believe that they do (or could, as it were) love each other, which makes it a lot easier to empathize with everything else that happens. One of my primary concerns with “meet-cutes” is that they often feel so forced: we’re told that Quirky Girl A and Square Dude B are perfect for each other because the story requires it. Spring overcomes this obstacle by making the “falling in love” portion of the film feel like something out of a Linklater opus. There’s a genuine sense of tragedy to the proceedings because we see what a great couple Evan and Louise might be under any circumstances other than the ones they’re given.

While Pucci (who also featured prominently in the recent Evil Dead (2014) remake, as well as Richard Kelly’s nutty Southland Tales (2006)) walks a fairly predictable route as Evan, Hilker does much more interesting things with her performance as Louise. Despite this being the German actress’ first big-screen role, she absolutely owns every inch of the frame: the character of Louise is an intoxicating combination of eldritch biology, innate urges, human femininity and misplaced mothering instincts, a combination which Hilker handles with aplomb. One of the film’s biggest coups is that Louise is such a sympathetic creation: by keeping our empathy high, Moorhead and Benson allow us to slowly become as enrapt with her as Evan is.

While the filmmaking duo gets nice supporting work from a good cast (although I can’t help but wish Gardner had much more screen time than he does), this is Evan and Louise’s movie, through and through, meaning that it’s also Pucci and Hilker’s film, through and through. In many ways, it’s not a radical departure from what Leigh Janiak did in the recent Honeymoon (2014) (or even what Andrezj Zulawski did much earlier in Possession (1981)), but Moorhead and Benson’s star-crossed lovers are much more sympathetic than either Janiak or Zulawski’s protagonists. When we’re going to be spending nearly two hours with a couple of young lovers, they damn well better be interesting and Evan and Louise are anything but dull.

From a production standpoint, Spring looks gorgeous, certainly much more so than its predecessor (which was much more of a found-footage film). Aaron Moorhead’s cinematography (he also edited and produced the film, along with Benson) makes terrific use of some truly beautiful Italian scenery, taking us into picturesque old towns, lovely grottos and lush countryside in ways that split the difference between travelogue and old-world mystery. One of the most eye-popping aspects of Spring’s camerawork is the numerous crane and helicopter shots that pop up throughout: aside from giving a thoroughly awe-inspiring view of the surroundings, the cinematography also instills a proper sense of scope and scale to the narrative. When set against the backdrop of such ancient beauty and serene nature, the body-horror aspect of Spring becomes even more pronounced and grotesque, a streak of brain matter on an otherwise pristine wall.

Despite how well made Spring is, however, I couldn’t help but be a bit disappointed by the whole thing. While Moorhead and Benson handle this occasionally musty material with plenty of energy and wit, there’s almost no comparison to the unhinged brilliance of Resolution. In many ways, Resolution was much closer to the mind-fuck cinema of Nacho Vigalondo or even Darren Aronofsky: there was a genuine sense that absolutely anything could happen and any easy sense of narrative continuity or logic was effectively thrown from the penthouse window. Resolution was an inherently tricky film but it wasn’t a gimmicky film: rather, it used the conventions of narrative filmmaking (and even narration, itself) to make particularly incisive comments on the ways humans create.

For its part, Spring is a much more straight-forward, streamlined film: in many ways, this is just your typical indie love story, albeit one with a foot firmly set in H.R. Giger’s nocturnal dream-world. While the film is undeniable well made and entertaining, I kept expecting it to develop into something trickier and deeper, developments which never really happened. Aside from an atypically sunny ending (all things considered), there are very few genuine surprises to be found here, although there’s also a decided lack of tone-deaf or eye-rolling moments, either. If anything, Spring feels like a way for Moorhead and Benson to announce themselves to the world at large, an employment ad, if you will: “Available for thought-provoking puzzlers, multiplex popcorn fare or any combination of the two.”

Even though Spring is a solid step-down from Resolution, it’s still one of the more evocative, atmospheric and interesting films of the year: if Moorhead and Benson can just find a way to effortlessly meld the aesthetics of their two full-lengths (the anything-goes intellectual swirl of Resolution with the top-notch production values of Spring), I have a feeling that they’ll be virtually unstoppable.

6/18/14: Every Group’s Got One

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Amanda Lund, Barry Burke, Brett Gelman, cinema, comedies, comedy, Damon Wayans Jr., Damon Wayons Jr., Ed Helms, father-son relationships, feature-film debut, film reviews, films, Frances Shaw, friends, Greg Germann, Hayes MacArthur, J. Robin Miller, Lucy Punch, male friendships, Melanie Miller, modern dating, Movies, obnoxious friends, Our Time is Up, relationships, Rob Pearlstein, romantic-comedies, Someone Marry Barry, Thomas Middleditch, true love, Tyler Labine, writer-director, Wyatt Oleff

Every group has one, whether they want to admit it or not: that hyperactive, obnoxious, vulgar “life of the party” who always manages to say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing and drag everyone down with them. These are the kind of people who get their friends thrown out of bars for starting fights with karaoke machines, punch police horses in the face and wear cargo shorts to fancy cocktail parties. They’ll be all too happy to blab your innermost secrets to the nearest available ears and have the special ability to attract more attention while out in public than firecrackers in a bubble-wrap factory. These people are embarrassing, crude, rude, loud-mouthed jerks and, more often than not, are supremely pleased by this: there’s no notion of changing these folks because they’re quite happy as they are, thank you. Every group has a name for these “special” individuals, these life-long friends that will always have your back, seemingly so they can concoct new ways to mortify you. We’ve all known people like this and, just perhaps, we’ve even been people like this. In the case of Rob Pearlstein’s uproarious new film, Someone Marry Barry (2014), this particular “someone” is named Barry Burke and, boy…is Barry really something!

Kurt (Thomas Middleditch), Desmond (Damon Wayans Jr.) and Rafe (Hayes MacArthur) are lifelong best friends with a bit of a problem: namely, Barry (Tyler Labine), the fourth member of their group. Kurt is trying to take his fractured relationship with longtime on-again/off-again girlfriend Camille (Frances Shaw) to the next level, Desmond is trying to find ways to balance his crushing work-load with spending more time with his neglected wife, Rachel (Amanda Lund) and Rafe is trying to balance the trials of modern dating with being a single father to precocious tyke J.T. (Wyatt Oleff). On their own, any of these tasks would be full-time jobs: throw in the frequently outrageous antics of best friend Barry, however, and things become that much more intolerable. After a particular humiliating experience at the funeral for Rafe’s father, during which Barry manages to not only reveal the deceased’s affairs in front of the assembled mourners but also manages to work in references to Kurt’s previous experience in an adult theater (Kurt the Squirt), the friends decide that something must be done with their boorish best friend. Since bumping him off is out of the question (despite Kurt’s continued protests), the friends decide to do the next best thing (in their minds, at least) and get Barry married off. If Barry has someone to keep him in line, like Desmond and Kurt do, they reason, he won’t be able to get them all into as much trouble. If wishes were horses, of course, we’d all ride away. In this case, Kurt, Rafe and Desmond might be wise to wait before investing in that stable.

Throwing themselves headfirst into the task, the trio try everything they can to help Barry find true love, including a disastrous speed dating session (turns out Barry is actually harder to take in small doses, fancy that) and an attempt to purchase a mail-order bride that could best be described as “potentially terrifying.” Just when all else fails, however, true love appears to rear its bizarre head in the form of one Melanie Miller (Lucy Punch). Mel, for lack of a better descriptor, is a female Barry: we first meet here in the middle of a date with the unlucky Ben (Ed Helms) which involves her graphic description of her yeast infection (her “beast inspection”), as well as the lovely declaration that she needs to take a shit. Turns out that Barry is on an equally successful date at the same restaurant and ends up sharing a cab with Mel after their respective dates run for cover (with each other, ironically enough). Barry and Mel hit it off like penguins and polar bears, at first, with each person trying to one-up the other in terms of sheer unpleasant foulness. In short order, however, a grudging respect has been forged: neither Barry nor Mel has ever met anyone quite like the other person. It’s almost like they were made for each other…although, if not for each other than, quite frankly, for whom?

In no time at all, sparks are flying and Barry and Mel seem to be head over heels for each other. Seeking to bring all of the friends together, as it were, the group plans a nice weekend away at the cabin: what should be a perfect opportunity for Kurt, Camille, Desmond, Rachel and Rafe to meet their “savior” for the first time devolves into abject horror once the group realizes that Mel is just a female Barry. After a car-trip filled with tag-team farting, annoying techno music and irritating laughing, the group is just about ready to pull their hair out. Is putting up with another Barry worth the price of preserving their childhood friendship? Should they all tell Barry how annoying Melanie is? Just what, exactly, is true love and does everyone have the right to experience it…including the truly irritating? At what point do friends need to sever ties and go their own ways…and does the needs of the group ever outweight an individual’s desire to be happy?

There are a few things that I ask of comedies but the main thing is pretty basic: I ask that they be funny. Comedies can be subtle, provoking a few chuckles and some smiles, or they can be explosively hilarious, prompting belly laughs and doubling-over on the floor. While either approach is valid, they have to at least broach the subject in order to get me on board. How does Someone Marry Barry stack up in this regard? Explosively. Quite frankly, Pearlstein’s film is one of the absolutely funniest I’ve seen in quite some time: I started laughing early on in the film and ended up laughing all the way through. Without putting too fine a point on it, Someone Marry Barry is a pretty great film but the humor is one of its strongest attributes. Pearlstein’s script is exceptionally sharp, full of tons of great dialogue, vulgar but hilarious situations and outrageous but sympathetic character development.

Actually caring about the characters in a film like this is paramount to its success and Pearlstein knocks it completely out of the park in that regard. Not only are the characters in the film funny, on their own, but they work together amazingly well as an ensemble. I actually felt like Kurt, Rafe, Desmond and Barry were life-long friends, with all of the baggage that such relationships require. Since the friendships felt justified and real, it was a lot easier to take Barry’s outrageous behaviour in stride: watching the film, I would often think back to my own churlish actions and how my friends reacted, which weren’t so far off the mark. The acting in the film is really top-notch: Damon Wayans Jr. is a dependably put-upon performer and Silicon Valley’s Middleditch brings just the right amount of pathetic “puppy dog”-ness to his portrayal of Kurt (his ultimate meltdown with Camille is one of the highlights of the film).

While the acting is superb across the board, especially from the principal actors, Someone Marry Barry ends up being a complete tour de force for Tyler Labine and Lucy Punch. I’ve always really enjoyed Labine as an actor: in fact, he’s one of those guys, like Ray Wise or Ron Perlman, that will draw me straight to a project, regardless of what I know (or don’t know) about said film. In the case of Someone Marry Barry, his prominent place on the box art was 100% responsible for my choosing the film in the first place and, as usual with Labine, I wasn’t disappointed. Quite simply, Labine is one of the very finest comedic actors in the business right now and is perilously close to approaching “living treasure” status: if you don’t automatically watch all of his films, correct that mistake immediately. While I really can’t praise Labine enough, however, I’d be a complete fool to deny Punch any of her own glory in the film. Punch is a vibrant, vulgar, loud-mouthed, brash, completely obnoxious, thoroughly alive and absolutely indispensable character. She’s one of the most joyous, realistic female characters I’ve ever seen portrayed and is absolutely the match for any bloke in the house. Were there a belching contest involved, I’d put my coins on Punch’s Melanie. First person to help out a friend in need? I’m more than willing to wager Melanie would be there, too. Far from being just “one of the guys,” Punch’s Mel is just “a person” who happens to be female: as she reminds us (frequently) throughout the film, women shit, swear, fuck, pick their noses, make mistakes and act like total assholes…just like guys.

While the film functions superbly as a buddy-comedy focused on male relationships (I hesitate to use the “bro-mance” tag but if the slipper fits…), the messy, wonderful romance between Mel and Barry serves as its big, beating heart. While Barry and Mel might be fairly awful people, in many ways, they’re perfect for each other and there’s something truly magical (and kind of old-fashioned, which ends up suiting the film well) about watching these two soulmates find each other. It’s to the film’s immense credit that despite the endless jokes about bathroom habits, sexual functions and inventive swearing (Barry and Mel bond over their mutual use of the portmanteau “twunt,” which you should be clever enough to figure out), all of the typical romance film beats (finding love, getting separated, re-finding each other) are delivered with such energy and genuine interest. This is isn’t a filthy comedy that threw a romance in to “even things out.” Rather, this is an honest-to-god romance that just seems to come wrapped in a pretty degenerate casing: think There’s Something About Mary (1998) but with a much more likable lead.

Writer-director Pearlstein makes his feature-film debut here, although he already comes with a pretty decent notch on his filmmaking belt: his 2005 short film, Our Time is Up, was nominated for an Academy Award. Pearlstein is completely self-assured behind the camera, although the film has the occasional tendency (never overly so) to be a tad bit silly. With a little more focus on the sharper, more incisive aspects of his very funny script, Pearlstein would have had an unmitigated masterpiece (no hyperbole intended): as it stands, however, he’ll just have to be satisfied with one of the funniest, big-hearted and impressive comedies I’ve seen in quite some time. While I’ve been a fan of Labine’s for years, Someone Marry Barry was my first experience with Rob Pearlstein: after this, however, I’ve made sure to add him to my “Ones to Watch” list. I’m a guy who really likes to laugh and Pearlstein managed to hit all the right buttons: here’s to hoping this guy has a long, fruitful career ahead of him.

4/25/14: JGL Loves His Computer

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addicted to porn, Barbara Sugarman, Brie Larson, Catholic church, character dramas, cinema, Clint Eastwood, Don Jon, dramadies, dramas, eponymous characters, fantasy vs reality, feature-film debut, film reviews, films, Glenne Headly, internet porn, JGL, Jon Martello, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Julianne Moore, Movies, New Jersey, porn, pornography, relationships, Saturday Night Fever, Scarlett Johansson, sex addiction, Tony Danza, Tony Manero, voice-over narration, writer-director-actor

It’s always a dicey proposition when a beloved actor decides to makes his/her mark behind the camera. On one hand, who could possibly understand the methods and motivations necessary to elicit the best performances from actors than a fellow treader of the boards? There’s a special skill to directing actors, a skill that becomes even more impressive when one begins to take note of the numerous films, popular and otherwise, that feature serviceable (at best) acting. The modern Hollywood mode appears to be to distract from any basic flaws (storytelling, script, acting) by focusing on the showier, punchier details (special effects, fast-paced editing, bigger, better and louder everything). When a career actor throws his/her hat onto the directing chair, we usually (but not always) get films that focus on the characters and acting: a quick look through Clint Eastwood’s exemplary resume gives a good example of this. When current golden boy Joseph Gordon-Levitt made his directing/writing debut with Don Jon, a fairly modest little film about a porn-obsessed, body-building, mook looking for love in all the wrong places, I was hoping he would bring the same deft touch behind the scenes that he normally does before them. For the most part, JGL delivers the goods, even if the final result ends up being a little more “same-old-same-old” than I’d hoped.

A montage of highly sexualized female images from film, TV, cartoons and the internet jumps us head-first into JGL’s story about porn-addicted guys and the women who (try to) love them. A voice-over introduces us to the titular hero, one Jon Martello (JGL) who appears to have only four interests in life: masturbating to internet porn, picking up and screwing any living thing with lady parts, cleaning his house and lifting weights. That, as Porky Pig would stammer, is all folks. Frequent super-flashy cut-scenes and montages lay out Jon’s personal philosophy pretty clearly: real girls are great but they ain’t the real thing. You see, everything about porn is cooler to Jon than the actual act of sex: the positions are better, the people are hotter, the angles are better and nobody makes goofy “O” faces. Jon may pick up and bang a new club hottie every night but he always finishes the evening by slipping away from his snoozing conquest and spending a little one-on-one time with his fave XXX sites. As we come to see in pretty short order, Jon is obsessed with the ideal of everything over the reality: ideal sex, ideal body, ideal house, ideal everything. Real life, when compared to the air-brushed perfection of fantasy, just doesn’t rev Jon’s engine, as it were.

All of this, supposedly, changes when Jon lays eyes on Barbara Sugarman (Scarlett Johansson) in the club. She’s a “ten” in his book, even though his friends proclaim her to be “long game”: she’s way too “classy” for Jon and he ain’t getting her in the sack anytime soon. Not to worry, of course, because Jon has a little way to help keep his mind off of Barbara’s naughty parts. For a while, this seems like the best of both worlds, to Jon: he gets to romance Barbara as slow as she’d like while still indulging in his own pleasure on the side. Regular visits to the confessional help keep his conscience scrubbed clean (Hail Marys are all-purpose cleaners, it turns out) and Barbara even begins to insinuate herself into the rest of Jon’s life, getting him to enroll in night school and bring her home to meet his folks (Tony Danza and Glenne Headly). Thing’s just get better when Barbara decides that it’s finally time to take it all the way. Jon is thrilled but the sex ends up being just as unfulfilling as ever and he sneaks back to his laptop while Barbara snoozes. She ends up catching him in mid-act, however, which prompts a massive blow-up and promise from Jon that this was all a misunderstanding.

As Jon denies himself the self-gratification that he’s always relied on, however, he finds the rest of his life beginning to fall apart: he’s always pissed off, for one thing, which culminates in a nifty bit of road rage where he puts his fist through a car window. Big Jon may be trying to walk the straight and narrow but Lil’ Jon is the one who calls the shots and, in time, it’s inevitable that the whole flimsy structure will fall to the ground. After Jon learns about browser histories the hard way, he sets out on a journey of self-exploration that eventually leads to Esther (Julianne Moore), the older, philosophical, sexually-secure student in his night class who’s been interested in him for some time. In time, Jon will learn that sex without an emotional connection is just as empty as the internet porn he’s addicted to, forcing him to make some hard decisions. As Blink-182 once said: I guess this is growing up.

As a feature-film debut, Don Jon hits most of the right notes. The acting, as expected, is top-notch, with Tony Danza being a particular stand-out as Jon’s ultra-mook father, Jon, Sr. I’ve never been a fan of Scarlett Johansson, finding her to easily be one of the most irritating, over-rated non-actors in the business but I admit to really enjoying her as Barbara Sugarman. There’s an honesty and vulnerability to her performance that I’ve found lacking in everything else I’ve ever seen her in (with the possible exception of Lost in Translation) and it really helps to shore up the film’s (occasional) emotional disconnect. As always, JGL is a highly personable tour-de-force in the film but he doesn’t do much different with the role: this may be JGL as envisioned by the creators of Jersey Shore but it’s still noticeably JGL: good, old’ reliable JGL.

As a film, Don Jon is a bit more problematic. The quick-cut, fast-paced editing that makes an appearance at the beginning continues throughout the film and, to be honest, it gets old kinda fast. As a rule, I’m not a big fan of hyper-active editing unless it really fits the production (Fight Club and Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels being two of the best examples) and too much of the editing in Don Jon feels superfluous and unnecessarily flashy. The film also ends up being fairly predictable by the third act, mostly due to a softening of its core idea: despite all of the evidence to the contrary, Jon isn’t a porn addict…he just hasn’t found the right girl. While this may be fine and dandy for a stereotypical Hollywood happy ending, it seems to give short shrift to the film’s previous insights into addiction. In my opinion, it would have made for a much better, more powerful film if we could have truly seen Jon caught in the unhappy throes of his addiction, unable to pursue his own happiness due to his obsessions. As it stands, we get the equivalent of the nice guy who spends the entire film being unhappy with the popular girl only to find true love with the mousey librarian in the final scene. It may make for a “nicer” ending but seems to ring a bit false with everything that preceded it.

That being said, Don Jon is a good film with some genuinely interesting things to say (before it pulls its punches, that is). Some of Jon’s observations about the Catholic Church’s policies regarding confessions are both hilarious and spot-on (it seems to rely on a vague point system where masturbation and out-of-wedlock sex are each assigned different, seemingly arbitrary values) and there’s some great, messy energy to the home scenes involving his parents and (seemingly) mute sister. If some of this seems to unconsciously mimic similar scenes in Saturday Night Fever, it’s only because Jon Martello and Tony Manero are probably long-lost cousins. Julianne Moore, like JGL, is consistently good, although her character may have one quirk too many to be completely believable.

As a directorial debut, Don Jon is good but not great. While his focus on the acting results in some truly great performances, there’s a bit too much reliance on style and flash over substance which, combined with the overly conventional resolution, gives the whole production a bit of a “been there, done that feeling.” Nonetheless, I was a huge fan of JGL’s before watching the film and I don’t find my overall impression of him changed in the slightest: I still think he’s a hair’s breadth away from being a national treasure and I’ll eagerly await his sophomore effort.