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

Shame (**3/4)

Sex addiction is a trendy topic in print, but fairly novel as a film topic. Most notably it was dealt with in Choke. That uneven 2008 film took a psychoanalytic approach in depicting a grubby main character, whereas director Steve McQueen (not the late actor, but the Brit who directed Hunger) tries a behavioral approach with a more polished one. Michael Fassbender (also the star of Hunger) plays a New York City office worker whose free time is spent on casual sex, purchased or not, alone or not. It’s about a sex addict, but as McQueen and Fassbender portray him could be any white-collar junkie who’s revolted by his own weakness.

More novel, actually, is the brother-sister relationship explored in the film. The sister, a sometimes singer played by Carey Mulligan, is her own kind of basket case, as well as a nuisance interfering, by her presence, with his habit. His revulsion for her instability (and casual approach to sex) and inappropriate behavior, suggests, besides a kind of self-loathing, a troubled family history, though McQueen leaves this mostly suggested. For a film whose very name is an emotion, it’s rather dry, though stylish. A clinical approach can work, as in A Single Man, where fastidious behavior belies inner turmoil. But here the approach comes off as rather bloodless. The grand show of feeling with which the film climaxes is not heartbreaking, but simply gaudy.

IMDB link

viewed 10/21/11 7:55 at Ritz East [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and reviewed 12/9/11

Choke (**1/2)

This psychological comedy-drama is based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk, who’s best known for his first novel, Fight Club. Palahniuk has written several books, but the two that got made into movies are about men in their extreme. The protoganist here is Victor (Sam Rockwell), who’s stuck on step four of his twelve-step plan to defeat sex addiction, stuck in a job he doesn’t care for (costumed in a reconstituted colonial village), and stuck with a mother (Angelica Huston) too self-absorbed to raise a child, now too dementia-addled to recognize him. His best friend is another sex addict, a compulsive masturbator.

The film completely avoids sentimentality by allowing Victor to seem like a jerk at times and by injecting a fair amount of often-vulgar (but sometimes-dry) humor. To be sure, the laughs frequently come from mocking some of the minor characters. There are the more-perverted sex addicts (versus Victor’s garden-variety promiscuity), the silly old folks in Mom’s nursing home, and even a sex partner of Victor who interrupts her rape fantasy to berate his acting skills. Dramatically, Huston shines in the flashback scenes of a younger Victor, and Kelly Macdonald brings a warmth to her role as the nursing-home doctor who challenges Victor’s fear of intimacy.

Though the movie isn’t that much like Fight Club, I had the same feeling about it, which is that, despite being consistently watchable, there was kind of a put-on quality about it. The way the nursing-home patients unnaturally gravitate toward Victor is one example. Some of what I initially found implausible, like the doctor’s affection for Victor, gets explained later. (A few small twists substitute for the one major one in Fight Club.) And there’s enough originality that I can easily see Choke gaining favor with many, although probably not the cult following that Fight Club attracted. But for me it was kind of funny but not that memorable.

IMDB link

viewed 9/22/08 (screening at Ritz 5); reviewed 9/25/08