Girl's Eye View: Don Jon

Allow me to quickly introduce myself: My name is Kara, and I live over at www.karaschatter.com . I have no experience in the movie industry, other than watching and appreciating them. I thought I would offer up my movie reviewing skills, or lack thereof, to The Basement to give readers a female perspective on movies, new, old, good, and bad.

I will say right off the bat that when I saw the trailer for Don Jon on TV I wasn’t 100% sure what the movie was about. I knew that Joseph Gordon-Levitt both directed and wrote it, that Scarlett Johansson’s character catches Gordon-Levitt’s character watching porn, and that Gordon-Levitt sings an awesome rendition of Marky Mark & the Funky Bunch’s “Good Vibrations.” (Because who hasn’t sung like that when they’re alone in the vehicle?)

So, moving onto the movie -- in a nutshell, it’s about porn. Yep. Bow-chicka-wow-wow. The main character, Jon (Gordon-Levitt), is obsessed with porn and loves it more that the real deal. But, he’s still a ladies man and enjoys the challenge of picking up a new lady at the bar to take home for the night.

Cue ScarJo’s character. Barbara gives Jon a run for his money and makes a good try at getting him to change his porno watching ways. I’m not a huge ScarJo fan to begin with, and adding a nasally Jersey accent to the mix didn’t really do it for me.

Enter Julianne Moore. She catched Jon watching porn on his cellphone during night school and befriends him, teaching him great life lessons like how to connect and that porn sex isn’t like real sex. (What, it isn’t? Who knew ...) Adding her acting chops to the flick made me take it a bit seriously.

There’s also Tony Danza playing Jon Sr. Who wouldn’t want this iconic actor playing his Jersey Shore dad? His role was small, but the moments were good.

So sure, it’s a movie about porn, but there’s a lot of great life-lessons to be learned while watching it. Gordon-Levitt did a decent job at his first crack directing and writing a full-length film, and Moore was fantastic as she always is.

I’ll give Don Jon a Good.

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