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.

Punch-Drunk Love (2002) Analysis

Calling Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love a romantic comedy seems inappropriate; although it utilizes many of the conventions of the genre, it does so self-consciously, and subverts more conventions than it embraces, casting a knowing gaze on the lighthearted, predictable, and frequently mindless Hollywood fare and twisting it into this surreal, darkly funny, completely surprising and truly original movie of often fearsome beauty. In traditional romantic comedies, as in P.T. Anderson’s film, boy meets girl and has to overcome substantial obstacles strewn across the path to true love; if only more movies could incorporate the use of crowbars, novelty toilet plungers, hundreds of cups of Healthy Choice pudding, harmonium abandonment, and phone sex extortionists into their love stories, a trip to the multiplex would be ever so much more exciting. From the first scenes of Punch-Drunk Love, it is clear we have left the world as we know it and entered the writer/director’s universe, in which the earth seems to rotate and revolve much as it does in real life, only at a rather skewed angle, and everything stands suspended a few degrees away from logic and reality.

Annie Hall (1977) Analysis

Woody Allen’s Annie Hall captures the full development of the director’s carefully constructed persona. Like Chaplin’s Tramp, Woody is also the eternal underdog; his story is undeniably funny, but also poignantly sad. Under the comedy lies a barely concealed truth, a healthy amount of the tragic. Over the years, Allen has become predictable, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. He has us laughing before we ever hear the punchline, because we know exactly what it’s going to be. Allen, like Chaplin, draws on his own life for inspiration, and always puts feeling into his movies, whether they are dramas or the usual romantic comedy. Alvy Singer is self-consciously a New Yorker, an egocentric intellectual, and an overly anxious, death-fearing paranoid comedian made in the director’s own image.

The film starts and ends with jokes, but we’re decidedly less likely to laugh by the end, because we recognize the truth behind the punchline. Alvy warns us in the beginning that life is “full of loneliness and misery and suffering and it’s all over way too quickly.” He also spells out his belief on relationships: he’d “never want to belong to any club that would have [him] as a member.” About an hour and a half later, he concludes that relationships are “totally irrational and crazy and absurd, but we need the eggs.” What Alvy wants is something unattainable, and he’s an expert at making it unattainable.