Only Connect

Don Jon: written and directed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt; starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Jon), Scarlett Johansson (Barbara), Julianne Moore (Esther), Tony Danza (Jon Sr.), Glenne Headly (Angela) and Brie Larson (Monica) (2013): A surprisingly witty and accomplished first outing as a writer-director-star for Joseph Gordon-Levitt. The studio marketed Don Jon as some sort of obscene laugh-riot last summer; it isn't. It's a comic drama about how cultural fictions can overwhelm an unquestioning consumer, leaving him or her either eternally unsatisfied or the eternal unsatisfier.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the eponymous Jon. Despite being a smooth operator when it comes to getting sex in the form of one-night stands, his greatest sexual satisfaction comes when he watches porn. But he does form a relationship with Scarlett Johansson's Barbara. However, she's only satisfied if she can get her love life to fit the formula of the dreadful romantic comedies she devours as ravenously as Jon does money shots and DP's.

Almost everyone else in the movie appears to be isolated in their own little fictional world as well, to the detriment of both communication and happiness, or at least personal fulfillment. Jon's mother agitates for him to get married and have children. His father espouses the central importance of family even as he ignores his in favour of the Jets game on TV.

Jon's friendship with an older woman in his night-college class (Barbara coerces him into taking the class so he can improve himself and become a white-collar worker) eventually shakes things up, along with an assist from porn and Jon's desire to clean his own apartment, a desire Barbara decries as unmanly and demeaning in one of the more uncomfortably funny scenes in the movie.

Don Jon may be a bit too schematic, and its ending comes in a rush (ha ha). But it left me wanting more, not less, and I'll be interested to see what Gordon-Levitt comes up with next. Recommended.

Screen Cap

Captain America: The Winter Soldier: written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely; based on characters and concepts created by Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, Ed Brubaker, and others; directed by Anthony and Joe Russo; starring Chris Evans (Steve Rogers/Captain America), Samuel L. Jackson (Nick Fury), Scarlett Johansson (Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow), Robert Redford (Alexander Pierce), Sebastian Stan (Bucky Barnes), Anthony Mackie (Sam Wilson/ Falcon), Georges St-Pierre (Batroc), Toby Jones (Arnim Zola), Emily VanCamp (Agent 13) and Cobie Smulders (Maria Hill) (2014):

Having Georges St-Pierre play long-time Captain America foe Batroc as a monosyllabic murderer pretty much encapsulates the Marvel movie approach to its comic-book properties. It's all business. Batroc is a Chatty Cathy in the comic books, a mercenary with a comical French accent who generally avoids killing people. Here, he's a surly plot device -- the first guy Captain America has to punch out on his way to the showdown with the Big Boss.

The Marvel Studios movie model has been, for the most part, breathtakingly efficient in its approach to making money from competent superhero movies. And it sorta has to be efficient: the two biggest draws on the Marvel Comics card, Spider-man and the X-Men, were optioned to other studios prior to the creation of Marvel Studios. It's as if Time Warner were stuck making DC Comics movies without recourse to either Superman or Batman.

Cinematic style is very much secondary in these movies. Perhaps tertiary. The Winter Soldier's directors are veterans of TV (including Community!). The plot chugs along from Point A to Point Z. There's a fight every 10 minutes or so, or an explosion, and a climax that goes on for the last half of the movie. You will be entertained if these are the things you seek in an entertainment. The 1940's-infused visuals that previous Captain America movie director Joe Johnson worked with are gone, replaced by an occasionally murky, thoroughly contemporary movie palette.

The biggest plus the Captain America movies have is Chris Evans as Cap, and if someone had told me this would be the case when he was cast four years ago, I'd have laughed. However, asked to assay a character as tricky as DC's Superman, Evans has delivered. It's not easy being a superhero whose primary attribute is Goodness. Evans sells it, partially with humour, partially by looking like a Jack Kirby Captain America as inked by Dick Ayers come to life. The rest of the acting is competent as well. Every time Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow talks, though, I marvel at how the character apparently erased all traces of a Russian accent from her delivery. That's committment to your adopted homeland!

So, you know, it's sorta fun. There's nothing epic or poetic here, just a solid franchise film meant to get you to the next franchise film. Given that Marvel Studios does such an efficient job of making blockbusters that are essentially big-budget TV episodes, its failure with its actual TV show, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., seems doubly baffling. Lightly recommended.

De Palma, Late and Early

The Black Dahlia: adapted by Josh Friedman from the novel by James Ellroy; directed by Brian DePalma; starring Josh Hartnett (Bucky Bleichert), Scarlett Johansson (Kay), Aaron Eckhart (Lee Blachard), Hilary Swank (Madeleine Linscott), and Mia Kirshner (Elizabeth Short) (2006): Apparently, postmodern crime-fiction writer James Ellroy, who wrote the novel this movie was based upon, really liked the 3-hour cut director Brian De Palma showed him. Unfortunately, the studio subsequently trimmed the movie by a full hour. What's left, Ellroy wouldn't comment upon.

Based on a real-life unsolved Hollywood murder mystery of the 1940's, The Black Dahlia looks great and contains solid performances by everyone involved, though Scarlett Johannson sounds way, way too modern for a period picture. De Palma gets in some of his signature camera movement, most notably in a long POV shot at a dinner party. But he's not overtly showy -- the more involved pans and tracking shots all serve the story, and there's a great, lengthy bit involving the discovery of the murdered, partially dismembered body of Elizabeth Short, the so-called 'Black Dahlia.'

What seems to have been cut are most of the scenes involving actual detection, along with at least a couple scenes fleshing out Detective Bleichert's growing obsession with the case. His partner, played by Aaron Eckhart, does become obsessed -- but Bleichert's later obsession seems to occur off-screen. And the revelation of the killer or killers falls somewhat flat, given that scenes introducing and explaining the role of that character seem to have been cut from earlier in the movie.

So instead we're left with a weirdly off-balance detective film more focused on the love triangle between Hartnett and Eckhart's detectives and Johannson as Eckhart's live-in love interest. The mystery comes and goes. In attempting to trim the multiple plot lines of a novel, the studio chose the wrong ones to trim. Lightly recommended.

Carrie: adapted by Lawrence D. Cohen from the novel by Stephen King; directed by Brian De Palma; starring Sissy Spacek (Carrie White), Piper Laurie (Margaret White), Amy Irving (Sue Snell), William Katt (Tommy Ross), John Travolta (Billy Nolan), Nancy Allen (Chris Hargensen), and Betty Buckley (Miss Collins) (1976): Wow, is there a lot of female nudity in Carrie. I'm pretty sure there won't be in the remake because in many ways Hollywood (and America) is far more prudish now than in 1976, at least when it comes to mass-market film releases. Nudity needs to stay in hardcore, niche pornography, where God intended it to be!

One of the quintessential movies about high-school alienation and bullying, Carrie is really cut to the bone from the novel. We see scenes of Carrie's traumatization by fellow high-school students and by her Jesus-Freak mother (played with eye-popping, scenery-chewing gusto by Piper Laurie). Then things seem to get better. Then all Hell breaks loose because some bullies never seem to know when to stop.

It all works, pretty much, and only the red filter for some of the concluding scenes comes across as dated in terms of actual film-making (as it does in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver from the same year). And there's a real, chilling, accumulating horror to the scene directly before the fireworks start at the end, as the camera circles around a fairy-tale ending lurching inevitably towards horror. The editing in these concluding scenes is top-notch. De Palma could give good montage when he wanted to.

What of Carrie? Sissy Spacek is way too pretty for the novel's version of Carrie, and with Chloe Moretz playing her in the (second) remake, this doesn't seem like a trope that's going to change any time soon. In Hollywood, pretty people get bullied too because no one's putting one of the less-pretty ones at the centre of a movie. So is the dominant ideology reinforced and reinscribed. Here endeth the lesson. Recommended.