Don Jon / Rush

Earlier this year, I saw a movie called The Internship, which was a pretty ridiculous comedy starring Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn. It wasn't a good movie but it was funny and charming and I gave it a B-. Now I'm not trying to say The Internship was a better movie than Don Jon or Rush, but their grades are about to equal or less than B-. Why? Did it have to do with the fact that I saw The Internship in the middle of a pretty disappointing summer where the stakes weren't as high? Or is it just because I've been looking forward to Don Jon and Rush and found them both sort of disappointing? Whereas, I had no expectations of The Internship other than for it to make me laugh, which it did? Who knows. Maybe I'm just getting meaner as the year goes on.

Don Jon is Joseph Gordon-Levitt's directorial debut. He also wrote it and stars in it as Jon, a New Jersey bartender who sleeps with a different hot girl every week but would prefer watching hardcore porn to all the sex he is having. Then he meets a hard 10 named Barbara (Scarlett Johansson), who turns his world upside down. She's pretty much the perfect woman to him, although he still would rather watch porn, which, of course, causes major problems with their relationship. Don Jon is deftly directed by Gordon-Levitt, who is confident in his characters and story telling and does a really great job directing this movie. It didn't bother me that the movie was super raunchy (although it did bother the 80 year old woman who, I guess, came to see Robin and Black Widow in a love story and walked out after 15 minutes). The performances here are all top notch, with best in show going to Johansson and her hysterically spot on New Jersey accent and mannerisms and Tony Danza, who all but steals the movie away from every one else. The great thing about the movie is how it steers clear of cliches every step of the way. I didn't see the ending coming a mile away, which is a nice change of pace, but it also felt very organic and realistic. Still, Don Jon seems sort of self-absorbed. The repetition of scenes (we see the same thing over and over again) gets exhausting, and there isn't a single likable character in the entire movie. The worst thing I can say about this movie is that despite its 90s minute running time, it feels twice that long. Bad pacing will kill a movie every time. This isn't a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination. Parts of it are actually pretty funny and the performances are all around great. Maybe I was expecting too much, but I was certainly a tad disappointed with the final product.

Where Don Jon tries to be sexy and almost entirely fails, feeling sleazy instead, Rush is very sexy. I never thought I would use the words Ron Howard and sexy in the same paragraph, but there it is. Rush is the true story of Formula 1 race car drivers James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Niki Lauda (Daniel Bruhl) and their 1976 rivalry. Hunt is a gorgeous, carefree, charismatic Brit who loves to drink and womanize and drive cars really fast. Lauda is the straight-laced Austrian who attacks racing from an intellectual space and knows there's a 20% chance he might die on any given race day. He's willing to except that but not a percentage more. Like Don Jon, the performances in this movie are pretty spectacular, especially Bruhl, who is a revelation. Howard directs this movie with a dizzying excitement, with a sort of energy that makes you think he is falling in love with movies all over again. The final act of this movie is edge of your seat excitement; you couldn't take your eyes from the screen if you wanted to. That's the good news. The bad news is the first two-thirds of the film are largely dull and forgettable. Race after race. So much exposition that it's exhausting. Sure, there is all the sexiness dispersed here and there (thanks to Hemsworth and Natalie Dormer and Olivia Wilde), but mostly the first two-thirds is just boring. So, Howard has managed to make a really great ending to a movie, but not much more. It's a shame and, again, a disappointment.

Don Jon - C+
Rush - B-