Don Jon might not reach the cumulative impact it desires to achieve, it’s a film that serves a cocktail of sharp entertainment, playful contradiction and occasional brilliance from a first-time director who has something to say about gender study, bodily image obsession and the rom-com cinema culture. All good laugh, yes, but it also leaves us pondering about how the media influences our notions of love, sex and our relationships with others and ourselves. Not bad for a debut film.
Browsing: Janno Datinguinoo
There are two types of audiences prevalent in our cinemas – those who eat popcorn and those who don’t. Somewhere along the quieter moments of Iron Man 3, when director Shane Black isn’t loudly crashing metal against metal, a cacophony of popcorn-munching rises above conversations between Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow on-screen, blatantly reminding myself that despite this being a multimedia screening full of press and critics, I am also in a room of the popcorn crowd.
Joseph Kosinki’s sci-fi pretender Oblivion arrives at our cinemas with an unmistakably bulky baggage. It piles up an excessive weight of borrowing, conscious or unintentional, bearing the absolute misfortune of being compared to a live-action version of Pixar’s dystopian romantic sci-fi WALL-E, featuring a protagonist, operating as a mechanic/repairman, roams a desecrated post-apocalyptic Earth where humans have buggered off to a different planet somewhere (this time, one of Jupiter’s moons Titan, of all places).
This will satisfy gorehounds in the planet – it’s balls-to-the-wall gory, graphic and executed to exaggerated extremes. Too bad it’s a needless rehash. Bruce Campbell seems to be having the last laugh.
There’s probably no better way Pablo Larraín could have concluded his thematic trilogy-of-sorts revolving around Augusto Pinochet’s 17-year iron-fist dictatorship…