Written and Directed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Running time: 90 minutes
Joseph Gordon-Levitt offers up a sparky directorial-writer debut, which is in turns a sharp, funny, charming and smutty comedy about a Catholic (albeit a guilt-free one) porn-addict who suddenly finds himself smitten by a gorgeous, smart woman. She wants a man on her own terms, someone who can offer her a silver screen version of romantic love. The film is really about a dilemma facing many present-day males – the challenge in balancing real-life love and lust - with a desire for the digital porn version.Joseph Gordon-Levitt himself stars as “Don” Jon, a label his friends come up with because he’s a player who picks up a new hot woman every weekend when the lads hit the pubs and clubs. The problem is, no real woman ever comes close to fulfilling what he gets from porn. He’s an old fashioned guy: he loves his family and goes to church. Equally important to him is in making sure his pad and his body are in top-notch shape.
Enter Barbara Sugarman (Scarlett Johansson), a beautiful woman on a mission to find a real-life version of a Hollywood leading man, even if that means manipulating him to mould him into her ideal.
Tony Danza (the more mature may recall him from the classic tv series "Taxi”) is a scream as Don Jon’s dad, who has his own media addiction: televised American football. Glenne Headly is perfect as his mother, who is longing for a grandson or granddaughter. Brie Larson is his mute sister.... someone else with an addiction: her smart phone to which she is perpetually glued, and the ever-reliable Julianne Moore, playing an older woman who ends up changing Don Jon’s life.
Every performance is excellent – and they’re all extremely endearing. Some very serious questions are posed, but with a very light touch, in what is a smart, sexy comedy - and a fine debut in the helmer’s chair for a rapidly maturing talent.
PARKLAND
Directed by Peter
Landesman
Cast: Zac Efron,
Marcia Gay Harden, Ron Livingston, Billy Bob Thornton, Paul Giamatti
Running time: 93 mins
On November 22 1963, the NBC news presenter David Brinkley said on American television, "What has happened today has been just too much, too ugly and too fast." His sombre tones were summarising the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. There are other elements from that period in Peter Landesman's hugely depressing re-enactment of that event - such as Walter Cronkite's distressed commentary on the CBS channel, news footage of the president and first lady stepping off the plane on to the Love Field tarmac, an appearance in lighthearted vein at a charity function by the 35th president just hours before his motorcade wound its fateful way toward Dallas' Dealey Plaza. All around these events is a cast of actors attempting to recreate the chaos, confusion, and devastation of that day in Dallas, and the events of the ensuing weekend. Based on Vincent Bugliosi's book Four Days in November, which reconstructs the assassination and its aftermath, Parkland shows in at-times graphic detail how doctors at Parkland Hospital responded when the bloody, skull-shattered body of the president was wheeled in. Also depicted is how agents in the regional office of the FBI bungled an investigation of Lee Harvey Oswald in the weeks before his sniper attack. The film also portrays how Abraham Zapruder climbed up on to a plinth close to the motorcade route to film the president with a then modern technology 8mm film camera - the footage from which would become a chilling piece of history. We also bear witness to how Oswald's mother responded in denial to the news of what her son had done. Similarly, his brother, who heard his family name on the radio. Parkland has quite an array of varying talent. Zac Efron as Charles "Jim" Carrico, the inexperienced hospital resident on call when Kennedy was rushed in; Marcia Gay Harden as an attendant nurse; Paul Giamatti as Zapruder; Ron Livingston as a seemingly hapless FBI guy; Billy Bob Thornton as the head of the Dallas branch of the Secret Service; Jacki Weaver as Marguerite Oswald, the assassin's demented mother and Jackie Earle Haley as the priest who administered the last rites in the operating room. There is a flurry of Texas Rangers and Dallas police, news reporters and Secret Service agents, and glimpses of Jackie Kennedy with her husband's blood and brain matter on her clothes. Parkland just about succeeds in its attempt at demonstrating how ill-prepared everybody was for the cataclysmic events of that day, and in the days that followed. The film paints a portrait of a bleak, hellish place, and of people who were not the most intellectually developed. There are no heroes here, and no inspiration to be found in the hospital, the office buildings, the police station, on the streets. Parkland simply provides nostalgia in the form of despair.
