Don Jon (***)

A word that is never used in the movie, and is often regarded as derogatory, will nonetheless, I suspect, quickly come to mind for many people watching this movie. It’s title character (Joseph Gordon-Levitt — macho, fit, masculine, Catholic, Italian American, living in north Jersey — fits every stereotype attached to the word guido, except maybe that he talks a lot about masturbation — at least in the copious, but often funny, narration. And in the confessional booth. Not so much to his pals when they’re trying to score some female companionship. He talks, in voice-over, about porn a lot, and, for example, how annoying it can be when the camera suddenly focuses on the guy when you’re about to…you know.

Truth be told, Jon likes porn better than real women, despite his skills at attracting them. Naturally, he meets the one woman (Scarlett Johannson) who might be the exception. This leads to a wave of shame, and lying, and, for a change, self-reflection. He’s also helped along by an odd, unhappy woman (Julianne Moore) he meets at one of his college courses. She’s what I call a convenient character, one whose appearance in the story seems useful to the plot, in this case to provide a contrast to the other woman. Moore’s terrific, funny and sad, in the part; I’m just not sure I found it believable the way she gloms onto him. I’m also not sure that sex addiction is necessarily a manifestation of some deeper hole in one’s life, as suggested here, but maybe sometimes. I did like the way the story develops, and the family dynamic, worthy of a sitcom. Tony Danza and Glenne Headly plays the parents and there’s a sister (Brie Larson, of the concurrent Short Term 12) character who never takes looks up from her phone, or says anything — until it counts.

The performances are good all around. Gordon-Levitt might have made his mark in the innocuous show 3^rd Rock from the Sun, but has gone for more unusual, sometimes challenging characters as an actor, and here he has additionally made his debut as writer and director. It’s not the serious work one might have expected, but I found it more interesting than 2011’s sex-addiction drama, Shame. (Sex addicts also feature in another 2013 comedy, Thanks for Sharing.

IMDb link

viewed 6/4/13 7:30 pm at Ritz East and posted 9/26/13

For Greater Glory: The True Story of Cristiada (**1/2)

Sometimes movies are a nice way to get a primer on a less-known historical event, and I confess my ignorance about Mexico’s Cristero War of 1926–1929. This followed President Plutarco Elias Calles’s attempts to enforce strict rules against the Catholic Church, including criticism of the government by priests and the wearing of clerical vestments in public. Understandably, the drama is presented from the point of view of the rebels and their “fight for freedom,” as the opening titles put it. There are no subtitles, as the dialogue is all in English.

Primarily, the story focuses on Enrique Gorostieta Velarde (Andy Garcia), a general with atheistic leanings hired to lead the scattered rebels. Other segments follow one of the female contingent of Cristeros (Catalina Sandino Moreno) who transported ammunition and other equipment; President Calles (Rubén Blades) and his efforts to contain the rebels; a barely teenage boy swayed to the rebel cause by an elderly priest (Peter O’Toole); and a few of the other Cristero leaders, who included priests. Eva Longoria has a small role as the general’s devout wife. Although O’Toole lifts his few scenes, and I enjoyed watching Bruce Greenwood, as the American ambassador, negotiate with the Mexican president, most of the strongest sequences are with Garcia. The exceptions are the ones in which he forms a father-son bond with the boy. Although not as corny as it could have been, this relationship is the most obviously fictionalized thing about a movie that simplifies, but does seem to be basically accurate as to the important facts about the rebellion.

What it doesn’t do is present a historical context or explain why the president believed that the Church needed to be suppressed. It is clearly meant to be inspirational, and even if the historical figures portrayed here had all been as uniformly heroic and brave as is presented, what is inspirational is not always compelling. However, in this case it is at least competent, and, under first-time director Dean Wright, a veteran visual effects producer, it’s always nice to look at, including the brief but frequent battle scenes.

IMDb link

viewed 5/23/12 7:00 pm at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 5/23/12

Brideshead Revisited (***)

Set vaguely in the period between the world wars, this adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel not only tackles the usual British period drama themes of class, wealth, and nostalgia, but religion too. Successfully working these into a two-hour feature must have been a daunting task, considering that they provided enough material for the acclaimed 1981 BBC miniseries, which ran eleven hours.

Even as pared down, director Julian Jarrold (Becoming Jane) has kept the major plot points. Callow Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) and fey, drunk, wealthy Sebastian (Ben Whishaw) meet cute at Oxford, and soon Charles finds himself involved with the entire clan, including sister Julia, a self-proclaimed hedonist, and their prim mother (Emma Thompson). Whishaw seems diffident, not attractive as he is apparently supposed to be, but the other performances are very good. There is too much here; though it’s never confusing in terms of plot, the switch in thematic focus can be jarring. Ryder transitions from being the audience surrogate to the ultimate subject of the piece, and Catholicism, touched on earlier, comes to the fore in a surprising way.

IMDB link

viewed 8/1/08 at Ritz 5

The Life Before Her Eyes (***1/2)

Watching a movie is like time traveling. You sit for a couple of hours and watch someone’s life go by. Fifteen years can seem to evaporate in an instant. All of the possible plot developments are alternate realities for the characters we meet at the start of a film. Usually you don’t think of it this way, but you might when watching this melancholy drama in which Evan Rachael Wood and Uma Thurman play the same character, Diana, one as a high school student, one as a a troubled wife, parent, and teacher, living in the same small town the younger Diana speaks of leaving. The central event that divides these two selves is a horrific school shooting. The young gunman confronts Diana and her best friend in the opening sequence, but the movie cuts back and forth in time before we learn exactly what happens.

The adult-Diana scenes reveal an emotionally scarred woman, once who has lost the carefree air of the young one. Wood’s performance captures the restlessness and slight smugness of a girl who knows she is pretty, yet in adulthood this confidence is gone. Later on, though, you see the seeds of this self-doubt. Does tragedy change people, or merely bring out different aspects of their personalities? Director Vadim Perelman (The House of Sand and Fog), saturating the screen with dreamy close-up shots and recurring dialogue and images, gives the film a dreamy quality in which past and present seem to merge.

I wavered about the ending of the movie. Is it brilliant, or just a gimmick? Ultimately, the extreme cleverness in the way Perelman and screenwriter Emil Stern (who adapted a novel by Laura Kasischke) structured the story won me over. Parts of the movie that seemed unclear, or anachronistic, suddenly made sense at the end. I noticed some of the hints it drops about this beforehand, but didn’t quite figure it out. However, the quality of the movie, especially its depiction of the relationship between Diana and her good-girl best friend, would have won me over even had the ending been the more predictable one I’d imagined.

IMDB link

viewed 5/8/08 at Ritz 5; reviewed 5/9/08

Bad Habits (***)

The title is a goofy pun, considering that this somber drama only rarely means to be funny. It refers, partly, to one lead character’s attempts to lost weight, by starvation and exercise, and equally obsessive efforts to combat her young daughter’s slight pudginess. Her husband, meanwhile, finds a sensuality in food and is repelled by her increasingly thinness. “Habits” also refers to those worn by nuns, one of whom seems to feel that she will halt the torrential rains flooding Mexico City by starving herself.

First-time director Simón Bross fills the screen with striking images of rain, of food, and of flesh. The pace is on the slow side, but it didn’t bother me. The attempts to cobble together all of these stories of food and obsession may be, pardon the second pun, half-baked, but the artistry somewhat conceals the artifice.

IMDB link

viewed 4/10/08; reviewed 4/11/08; screened at Philadelphia Film Festival