Image via Complex Original
The third round of movie-watching brings with it one high, two solid entries, and one maddening low.
Don Jon
Director: Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Stars: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Scarlett Johansson, Julianne Moore, Tony Danza
Running time: 89 minutes
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Score: 6/10
Before seeing Joseph Gordon-Levitt's writing and directorial debut, Don Jon, ask yourself, "Am I from New Jersey?" Or, "Do I have any close friends and/or relatives from New Jersey?" If the answer is "yes," then there's a good chance that the entertaining, at times clever character piece Don Jon will come across as a thin collection of guido observations (disclaimer: I am from Jersey). The title character (also played by Gordon-Levitt) often feels like an exaggeration of The Situation, hitting all of the cliched details associated with the GTL crowd. Granted, Gordon-Levitt is satirizing the Jersey Shore crowd here, but he's also attempting to create a protagonist who's as endearing and agreeable as he is heightened and stereotypical.
The ability to either look past or tolerate Gordon-Levitt's on-the-nose interpretation of musclebound, self-obsessed Garden State playboys is key for appreciating Don Jon, which, heavy-handed moments of characterization aside, is an engrossing look at one man's coming of age. He's a ladykiller in public who can't stop watching online porn whenever he's home alone, or, hell, even when one of his female jump-offs is sleepily recovering from sexual overload in his bed. He also comes from a strict Italian home where his mother constantly asks him when he's going to settle down, and when he sees the bodacious Jersey princess Barbara (Scarlett Johansson, whose handling of a Sammi Sweetheart-like character is wonderfully spot-on), she seems like the one. They start dating, though his porn predilection remains.
Gordon-Levitt goes to great lengths to make his character likable despite his shallow interests, and having Jon routinely attend church with family, even bringing Barbara once he and she are officially an item, is a nice touch. It's that kind of non-abrasive characterization that helps to lift Don Jon above its sporadic inefficiencies.
Wisely, Gordon-Levitt introduces someone who's anything but GTL-focused later into the film to further distance his film from the obvious Jersey Shore parallels. Played by the ever-great Julianne Moore, she's a fellow student at Jon's nighttime college course who sees through his put-on exterior and from whom Jon learns exactly why his life feels so unfulfilled. Moore doesn't come fully into action until Don Jon's third act, but when she and her character, Esther, do usurp Johansson's Barbara for screen time, the film really hits its stride and becomes undeniably poignant.
Downloaded
Director: Alex Winter
Running time: 106 minutes
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Score: 8/10
Go ahead and admit it: You can't even remember the last time you trekked to a record store and actually purchased a compact disc. The rationale: Why waste hard-earned gas money driving to the nearest Best Buy when digital applications like iTunes and Spotify are effortlessly accessible from any desktop or laptop?
Now that online music providers are so readily available and simple to use, it's easy to forget about the cyber revolution that started it all: Napster, the file-sharing creation of a Massachusetts teenager named Shawn Fanning. Along with his co-founder, Sean Parker, and their trusty staff of mostly same-aged and similarly brilliant buddies, Fanning drastically altered the entire music industry, angered the likes of Lars Ulrich and Dr. Dre, and empowered young people by showing them that the Internet was theirs to inventively utilize, not their elders.
In his pulsating and extremely well-reported documentary Downloaded (another SXSW world premiere), actor turned filmmaker Alex Winter recounts Napster's unexpected rise and inevitable fall through firsthand accounts of all the major players, namely the usually reclusive Fanning and his more outgoing ex-partner, Parker. Upholding a balance of fairness, Winter affords nearly as much talking time to Fanning's enemies as he does to the Napster mastermind himself, interviewing several record label executives (including Columbia Records President Donny Iner) and musicians (Noel Gallagher, Beastie Boys member Mike D., Henry Rollins).
Many of Downloaded's best moments come from the clever ways in which Winter and his editor, Jacob Craycroft, weave in their surplus of archival footage—big laughs come from dated interviews with two out-of-touch Spice Girls and the pre-cyber-boom ignorance displayed by Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel as to what this whole "Internet" thing is all about. That's what makes Downloaded so fascinating: It reminds us that, merely a little over a decade ago, the World Wide Web was an open terrain for any and all whiz kids to explore.
Without the efforts of Fanning and his colleagues, there'd be no Myspace or Facebook—thus, in a way, Winter's film is the much-needed, real-life prequel to The Social Network.
The Wait
Director: M. Blash
Stars: Jena Malone, Chloë Sevigny, Luke Grimes, Josh Hamilton, Devon Gearhart, Lana Green, Michael O'Keefe
Running time: 96 minutes
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Score: 1/10
Every film festival has a few insufferable examples of pretentious independence, and only the luckiest attendee can spend his or her entire time at said festival without unknowingly subjecting themselves to the painfulness. Well, behold SXSW 2013's first movie of this type: The Wait. And, as you can tell, my luck ran out on day three.
A plot description is pointless, since writer-director M. Blash's The Wait goes out of it's way to muddle any storyline that may have at first existed. In it's opening minutes, the film shows two solemn, unpleasant sisters (Jena Malone and Chloe Sevigny) standing next their just-deceased mother's deathbed. And then the phone rings, Sevigny answers it, hears a voice telling her that mom will soon return, and then understandably gets creeped out.
The remaining 80 minutes, unfortunately, aggressively defy logic. Malone's character starts an unconvincing romance with a random stranger who initially stalked her family's home. Sevigny buys a puppy runt and, in The Wait's apex of ridiculousness, shows her young daughter video footage of her giving birth, up close, personal, and wrongfully disgusting.
All of this could've achieved a Lynchian weirdness if anyone involved appeared to give a damn, but the cast's across-the-board dullness lends the already detached film a distinct coldness.
Within a half-hour, four people in attendance at the SXSW world premiere grabbed their bags and hauled ass outdoors. Less than an hour later, that number reached above 20, with those still seated laughing at unintentionally hilarious moments like the sight of Malone running headfirst into a sliding glass door for no good reason.
There's a lesson that should be learned from The Wait, though: When stepping foot into a screening venue at a film festival, it's best to sit as close to an aisle as possible, especially if you're considerate of others and don't like bumping your way out of rows.
Those who stayed until the film's end all shared something; It would have been befitting if everyone had the filed into an Austin trauma center to assess what just happened. Whether they realized it or not, we all bonded inside Austin's Stateside Theatre.
Milo
Director: Jacob Vaughan
Stars: Ken Marino, Gillian Jacobs, Peter Stormare, Stephen Root, Patrick Warburton, Mary Kay Place
Running time: 85 minutes
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Score: 6/10
Milo certainly wins the award for SXSW's silliest premise: Ken Marino (VH1's Burning Love) plays a guy who's struggling with the realization that an infant-sized creature lives inside of his ass. Yes, that's the actual plot. And, yes, Milo is a tongue-in-cheek, goofball comedy made by a writer-director, Jacob Vaughan, who's well aware of the concept's lunacy. The opening credit sequence, for one, is a rapid navigation from Marino's character's mouth right down to his colon.
And frankly, there aren't many comedians in the movie business who could pull of such bizarre material. Blessed with the ability to make being stressed the hell out seem hilarious (see: Party Down), Marino the perfect actor to embody Duncan Haislip, an easily pushed-over accountant who's dealing with a multitude of personal headaches. He's been demoted at work and repositioned from his own office to working inside a converted bathroom; his loving, understanding wife (Community's Gillian Jacobs) really wants to start a family; and his mother is shacking up with a much younger dude. Duncan's many stress factors somehow impregnate him with the titular mini-monster, a freakier, chubbier lookalike of Mac from Mac & Me that shoots out of Duncan's derriere whenever somebody pisses him off and rips them apart with its razor-sharp fangs.
There's an enjoyably '80s vibe to Milo that comes directly from Vaughan's wise decision to go with a puppet over CGI to bring the eponymous critter to life. Giving his actors the chance to physically interact with Milo allows Vaughan to stage some nifty spurts of comedic violence, as in one particularly nasty bit where Milo chows down on a man's member and a montage in which Marino tries to co-exist domestically with his new pal.
Considering that it's literally about a man's complicated relationship with his very own ass monster, Milo gets a lot of mileage out of its inherently limited construct, yet the repetition in sight gags and high-concept jokes gradually diminishes the film's charms. By the time Milo goes on his ultimate rampage, Vaughan's film gets dangerously close to overstaying its welcome. That moment of panic doesn't arrive, thankfully—Marino and the bonkers puppetry always combine to elevate even the corniest of jokes.