Don Jon (2013)

 

Don Jon, Joseph Gordon Levitt’s writing and directing debut, is a skittering and sweet film filled with humor, heat, and heart. At once openly satiric and disarmingly sincere, the movie manages to be both funny and touching, sometimes in the same instant.

Playing against type as a brawn-bound Jersey boy and an inveterate lothario obsessed with himself, porn, and Scarlett Johansson, Levitt might at first seem like an odd choice for the eponymous Jon—dubbed Don because of his way with the ladies. But the immensely talented young actor has tricks up his sleeve we hadn’t seen before, boldly displayed in front of as well as behind the camera.

My Belated Oscar Comments

It seems like only yesterday I was throwing a half-eaten apple at the screen when Meryl Streep won the best actress Oscar over Viola Davis, but yet another year of movie-going and relentless, mostly misguided predicting finally came to a close with the 85^th Academy Awards ceremony held on Feb. 24.

Hosted by Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane, Oscar night was filled with surprises. MacFarlane opened the ceremony with a hilarious, irreverent, edgy monologue taking the usual jabs at the academy, the industry and its stars. William Shatner joined the host, appearing on a giant screen as Star Trek’s Capt. Kirk to warn MacFarlane from the future, “Your jokes are tasteless and inappropriate, and everyone ends up hating you.” 

Les Misérables (2012)

 
Based on the musical written by Alain Boublil and composer Claude-Michel Schönberg (with English-language lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer), Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables opens up the teeming fresco of squalor and upheaval beyond the limitations of the theater. This story of oppression, liberation, and redemption produces a swooping, splashy cinematic panorama of an unjust, compassionless, unfeeling world, in which the innocent and the idealistic pay for crimes they have not committed, and plants a seed of barely flickering hope.

A work of audacious ambition, Les Misérables, Victor Hugo’s 19th century 1,400-page historical novel of rebellion and romance ran the emotional gamut, and the film, as well, sweeps viewers on a stirring, swelling wave of feeling that will leave few eyes dry. Mixing gritty, grimy realism with the artifice of stage production, Hooper brings Hugo’s characters to celluloid life with gusto and grace.