Joseph Gordon-Levitt
36 connections found
Filmography
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Connections, in both directions
Saturday Night Fever (1977)
Directed by John Badham
influenced Don Jon (2013)
Plot Themes Characters
Visits with the family â?? Tony Danza has a great time as Jon’s dad â?? evoke “Saturday Night Fever,” while Barbara’s increasing efforts to help Jon improve himself ultimately echo the one-sided endgame of Neil LaBute’s “The Shape of Things.”
There's no dancing in Gordon-Levitt's writing-directing debut, Don Jon, although the movie is so heavily reminiscent—in the good way—of Saturday Night Fever that an arm-swinging paint-can reverie wouldn't be out of place.
Though it’s set in New Jersey rather than Brooklyn, “ Don Jon ” -- written and directed with frenzied energy by Gordon-Levitt -- cheerfully steals from the 1977 “ Saturday Night Fever ” in its tale of an Italian-American stud-slash-dolt who harbors a spark of life that draws him toward the wider world.
The “Saturday Night Fever” of its generation, “Don Jon” addresses a definitive generational issue (young men and Internet porn) in a way that is hilarious, honest, insightful, sexy and not (too) creepy.
A strutting Guido, Jon is part Tony Manero from Saturday Night Fever, part Tony Soprano, and a jot of Jersey Shore'sThe Situation.
Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt does double duty, making his feature writing/directing debut with this terrific and unusual comedy that taps into this year's cinematic focus on porn while following the basic groove of "Saturday Night Fever."
Visits with the family â?? Tony Danza has a great time as Jon’s dad â?? evoke “Saturday Night Fever,” while Barbara’s increasing efforts to help Jon improve himself ultimately echo the one-sided endgame of Neil LaBute’s “The Shape of Things.”
It’s like he took the sex and Catholic guilt tropes that fueled Martin Scorsese’s Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1968) and discarded the guilt.
By the time Esther enters the picture, Jon seems like he's on the verge of giving himself over completely to his vices, not unlike Michael Fassbender's bleak meltdown in Steve McQueen's "Shame."
Steve McQueen gave it arty, explicit treatment in “Shame.”
Where Steve McQueen’s “Shame” took the more obtuse artfilm approach to this sex-obsessed phenom, Gordon-Levitt weaves the topic into a broadly accessible romantic comedy, one that ultimately uses its in-your face style to sneak a few old-fashioned insights about how self-centered guys can learn to respect their partners.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s directorial debut is a curious little picture – a well-intentioned porn addiction dramedy (it isn’t really a rom-com, although it’s being sold as one) that acts as an oddly salient companion piece to Steve McQueen’s Shame.
Considering how many short-sighted perceptions of sex exist, and the devastatingly intimate vision of sex addiction delivered by Michael Fassbender and writer-director Steve McQueen in "Shame," Gordon-Levitt plays it safe by making a movie about a fool brought up to speed without ever facing the consequences of addictive behavior.
What separates Don Jon from, say, Steve McQueen's Shame , and what made dropping "addiction" from the title a wise idea, is that other than Jon's masturbation frequency going up, his porn habit doesn't really escalate--this isn't the kind of movie that makes a point about desensitization, until he's fapping it to horses.
>“Don Jon” reminds me of Kevin Smith’s “Dogma,” about which I have heard non-stop praise for its bold ideas (e.g., what if God is a woman, what if Jesus was black, etc.).
This has the most explicit and frankly sexual dialogue I’ve encountered in a film since Barry Sandler’s screenplay for Ken Russell’s Crimes of Passion (1984).
Gordon-Levitt’s maternal grandfather, as it happens, directed the Doris Day-Rock Hudson rom-com classic “Pillow Talk,’’ which in its way is as much a time capsule of its early ’60s era as “Don Jon’’ is of our own time.
The movie threatens at one point to turn into the early ’90s Eddie Murphy movie “ Boomerang ,” in which the womanizing lead gets a taste of his own medicine from a woman.
More recently, Stuart Blumberg chose the earnest, didactic route in “Thanks for Sharing.”
Opening a week before Joseph Gordon-Levitt's portrait of a porn obsessive, Don Jon , Stuart Blumberg's Thanks for Sharing takes as its subject a group of sex addicts who meet at a 12-step program.
Two films about sexual addiction—Don Jon and Nymphomaniac—will be released later this year, both of which follow last year’s painful-to-watch Shame.
Though Joseph Gordon Levitt’s upcoming “Don Jon” is an overall stronger movie about the subject of sex addiction, the sympathetic characters in “Thanks for Sharing,” along with Blumberg’s authentic details of this world, make it a big group hug of a movie.
Like last year's Shame and next week's Don Jon, it's about a guy, and his fellow 12-steppers, who can't get enough sex.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt is among our fastest rising stars although the 32-year-old actor is already a vet, having his break-through as a youngster in Robert Redford’s 1992 drama “A River Runs Through It.”
But in using porn as Jon's touchstone and the Leonardo DiCaprio - Kate Winslet "Titanic" affair as Barbara's, Gordon-Levitt has zeroed in on the central friction of media-enhanced romantic expectations.
There are elements of everything from Annie Hall (1977) to the aforementioned Crimes of Passion in what’s to come, and I’m not spoiling them.
I know this was the point with a character like Barbara, but the revelation of her a bad person is so underhanded (and also derivative of Kevin Smith’s “Clerks.”) that it barely negates all the accolades she receives through most of the movie.
His New Jersey is not the New Jersey of Todd Solondz (Dark Horse, Welcome to the Dollhouse) or Woody Allen (Broadway Danny Rose), although we can see the broad outlines.
The novelist Cormac McCarthy hasn’t been short of attention from cinema: John Hillcoat made a fine, harrowing film of The Road and there were middling versions of No Country for Old Men and All the Pretty Horses.
There's really only one flaw in "Don Jon" and that's Esther's persistence in engaging Don - it doesn't make sense, he recoiling from her surface emotions, her very otherness, even though the relationship's payoff in Don's sexual redemption works (rooted possibly in another 70's film, "Summer of '42").
It's as if Danza's character from the Taxi TV show were fast-forwarded.
It's not the place where Patton Oswalt got into trouble in Robert D. Siegel's Big Fan, and despite the Italian-American connection it's most definitely on a different planet than the one the late James Gandolfini inhabited, either on The Sopranos or in David Chase's sentimental Not Fade Away.
Actors writing a role for themselves often go overboard on their character’s depth, intelligence and sensitivity (Zach Braff in Garden State , anyone?).
In their subsequent if cautious friendship is a hint of Harold and Maude.