DON JON

2011, debuted director Steve McQueen’s compelling “Shame” starring Michael Fassbender; still in theatres: “Thanks For Sharing”  with inimitable Mark Ruffalo; excellent films focusing on sex addiction, kept alive and fed by internet pornography.

“Don Jon” is a pathetic imitation on the same theme: Joseph Gordon-Levitt (a talented actor) stars and directs this sad, and insipid scenario of a pumped -up neat- nick, living a meaningless existence, seducing women, (most whose intellect atrophied at birth) but never as happy as when he is master of his own satisfaction. “Jon” (Gordon-Levitt) so vapidly uninteresting the audience would have been better served if he had stayed in his apartment doing the only thing he has a certain degree of proficiency in accomplishing.

Instead, we have to suffer his unbearable attraction to “Barbara” ( an annoying Scarlett Johansson); physically perfect, gun-chewing harridan, who sees Jon as a malleable tool; Johansson depiction is nothing short of nails scratching a blackboard.

Julianne Moore is totally miscast as the older woman, “Esther”; the “cure” for an addiction that needs the twelve -step program;  Moore graces all her roles with intelligence and immense sensitivity; here, the age difference is creepily reminiscent of a mother/son dynamic.

Legendary, fictional “Don Juan”, “Seducer of Seville” a seventeenth century lothario; with a velvet tongue, capable of beguiling, rendering defenseless, the highest bred princesses and knights, would be aghast at this contemporary bastardization, plagiarized rendition of his fabled reputation.

ONE STAR!

For Now………..Peneflix