'It Felt Like Love''s Beautiful, All-Too-Real Take on Adolescent Female Sexuality

Gina Piersanti has one of those faces. It is a face that could be filmed for hours and you would never get tired of it. Piersanti films well, yes, but, moreover, she has an unusual, distinctive face. She is not a great beauty in the traditional sense. She is beautiful as we grow to know her (as some modest friend of yours might grow to be a knockout in your eyes as you begin to realize she’s far more interesting than half the dullards in your life).

Piersanti’s Lila in It Felt Like Love is like many of us in early adolescence. For many of us, there may be an uncomfortable recognition of our awkward past selves, possibly even more so for female viewers. The way director Eliza Hittman and director of photography Sean Porter shoot her, Piersanti always comes at the film’s material with naturalism and understatement. The events of the film feel like they’ve happened. They have unshakable aura of not just realism, but something that occasionally borders on vivid truth (or, put another way, there is an emotional fidelity to it as much as a faithful rendering of reality). 

It Felt Like Love’s subject is adolescent sexuality and that of a young female. Films and television shy away from this subject. Western society is so deeply puritanical and the United States is so repressed that we get squeamish at the thought of this. It must be doubly hard for a person like Lila. She is fourteen years old. She is smart and, more importantly, she is weird. She is different, with a mess of dark, bushy hair and a constant external humming of young insecurity. She owns her strangeness with a quiet defiance. But she still would like some boys to notice her and pine for her. Lila’s closest friend is Chiara (Giovanna Salimeni). Chiara has already had sex and goes through a steady rotation of boyfriends. This is the one area where Chiara is wiser and better versed. 

The difference between Lila and Chiara is like the difference between Laura and Claire in Eric Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee. At one point, in that film, it is remarked about how Claire is currently more beautiful than Laura, but how it is also easy to tell that Laura’s beauty will only grow and surpass Claire’s as she becomes older. All Claire has is her looks and the fact that she is young. The same can be said for Lila and Chiara. Chiara’s beauty is fleeting, and she is taking advantage of the gifts puberty has provided her. Meanwhile, Lila is drowning in puberty and the new found interests it has given her.

Lila is navigating a minefield. She has a strong fascination with sex. She goes out of her way to try to lose her virginity. She is out of her depth. Lila has not quite discerned the larger, complicated cultural and social views of women and sex. She doesn’t understand that there is so much more to sex than the act itself. And even the act of sex itself she doesn’t entirely comprehend. All she knows is that she wants it. Her friends are doing it, and she feels like she is getting left behind. 

Lila talks to her younger neighbor with a careless bragging bravado. Much of it is word-for-word repetition of what she has heard from older, more experienced individuals. She doesn’t get what it means. She feigns. This is the one time and place where she can reign supreme. It is the only time where her confidence and self-esteem can be raised, where she doesn’t have to feel uncomfortable, confused and uncertain. In a better world, she would stop pursuing much older guys who have no interest in her. She would date the age appropriate next door neighbor. They would simply make out and it would be enough. 

But the world wants Lila to grow up, and grow up faster than she can always handle. It is easy to imagine that a few years earlier that Lila’s awkwardness and gawkiness were fine. She was just a little kid and being a little frumpy and strange was acceptable. Now, she must be constantly hyper-aware of her body and the changes taking place to it. She must be deeply self-conscious of how people are looking at her and thinking about her. She has been asked to grow up faster than is possibly fair. 

It Felt Like Love has one of the best titles of any film released in 2014. The title beautifully captures the delicate, bittersweet poignancy of the film. It wonderfully sums up Lila’s complicated feelings and her journey throughout the film. When we are young, we assume our emotions and feelings have a purity and honesty. We believe them to be real and true. Life is constantly forcing us to readjust our beliefs and to recalibrate our emotions. Lila mistakes her budding sexual feelings for something deeper and more meaningful than they actually are. 

And yet, there is a resiliency to Lila. She has an inner strength to her. Piersanti’s performance is great because it invites us into Lila’s headspace. Piersanti reveals to us an inner life through posturing and small facial adjustments. Lila is vulnerable, but she doesn’t want anyone to pick up on that. Yet there is constant anxiety fluttering underneath. Even when she is willful and impulsive, there is a sickly sense of doubt and fear that bubbles under the surface. I want to see Piersanti appear in more. This is her first featured performance and she is remarkably assured. She is so well-matched with Hittman’s vision. It Felt Like Love’s vibrancy comes from Piersanti tapping into that all too familiar adolescent apprehension and laying it bare like an exposed nerve.

Review for "About Alex"

I recently wrote this Way Too Indie film review for the lightweight indie dramady About Alex, about old college friends getting hung up about the past. Here is an excerpt:

"As noted through casual meta-jokes, About Alex is essentially The Big Chill for a new era: a group of college friends spend a weekend together rehashing the past after one of their own attempts suicide. The meta-ness ends at the passing references to the film’s familiarity though (“This is like one of those ’80s movies,” one person says at one point). From there on out, About Alex falls into the traps associated with its subgenre. Jesse Zwick’s script (Zwick also directed) is laboriously constructed to the point where the summer home the gang goes to feels like it has more personality and well-worn history."

Why You Should Watch Teen Drama "Skins"

Skins, a British teen drama that aired from 2007 to 2013, seems, like many teen dramas, easy to write off.

Initially, anyway, that is. 

Skins is a strange series that was bred out of unique circumstances. The series was produced by E4, a companion channel launched by Channel 4 in hopes of attracting the profitable 15–35 demographic. For its first few years, E4 aired American programming that it had acquired syndication rights to. But by the mid 2000’s, E4 was looking to make a name for itself (If you’re trying to get a picture of this network’s brand, think edgy WB/CW). Skins, created by the father-and-son writers Bryan Elsley and Jamie Brittain, was the channel’s first stab at scripted original programming. With that came a certain degree of creative freedom, and that can be read in a lot of the series’ odd, distinctive, free-wheeling storytelling. This freedom soon became coupled with the fact that the series quickly proved itself to be E4’s most successful program, and it proceeded to grow into a British cultural phenomenon, drawing on the fervency of its young fan base and the coinciding rise of the internet to help cull fandoms. 

While it has since become influential in England, here in the states it has remained more of a cult favorite. This is something I wish to see remedied. The show uses its stories and its freedom in telling them to address subjects that are pressing and relevant, and yet it always packages this into something so raucous and lively, overflowing with unmistakable spirit and spunk. But underneath its silliness, whimsy, and flippancy lay something darker, bolder and often hugely affecting. All the sensational elements were merely a way to grab your attention in order for the series to deal with the things that it was truly concerned about. Conceptually, it is a series built as if the stoner class clown and the valedictorian feminist got together and made a show. Raunchy, vulgar contours sit comfortably side by side with thoughtful, pointed, emotionally florid, centers. 

The series’ concept starts off familiar enough: an ensemble piece that follows the lives of Bristol teenagers as they finish up their final two years of secondary education in sixth form (essentially high school). The first kink in that traditional design: Every two years a new generation of characters is introduced, allowing for new subjects and issues to be broached, and ensuring the series didn’t attempt contrived reasons for keeping characters around that would have no business of logically sticking about. The second kink: the series is primarily written by young writers who are actually the age of, or, at least, close to the age of, the main characters, writing their personal experiences and perspective into the series and helping make it more true to life.

These teens fall into love, and they fall out of it. They pine for people, some unattainably out of reach. They hook up. They have sex, lots of it. They drink and do drugs and throw parties -- it’s quite possibly the only thing they do more than obsess over sex. We observe their home and family lives, working and middle class and not always cushy. We observe them by themselves, alone with their thoughts and feelings, anxieties and insecurities. We observe them amongst peers. And when they’re not amongst their friends, who they like but also have the sneaking suspicion they might be better off without, they contemplate how bored and lonely and utterly lost they are. They believe in the singular uniqueness and tragic unfairness of their life. They are you. They are me. They are us in our late teens. It is painful and poignant how notably they remind us of ourselves. And just as things are getting too unbearably deep and jagged and raw, the show makes an absurd, juvenile joke to cut through the cloud of angst. 

That prior description encapsulates much of what I love about Skins, but, before I go overstating my adulation for the show, I must caution that wonderful as the series is, it is undeniably flawed. Good intentions can only go so far. Execution is what really counts, and it is here where I have to do a slight bit of walking on egg shells. I will be the first to admit that Skins is somewhat messy. It has a penchant for broad, silly, sometimes plain dumb, humor, and it too often gets caught up in relationship drama that doesn’t always ring true. The show also doesn’t have a strong handle on long-term plotting (outside of its excellent third season, easily its best) and occasionally it makes some rather outlandish or flat-out bad storytelling choices – most defensible, some not so much.

That said: Skins is a good, sometimes great, always singular series. And, at its best, the show nicely matches its pleasurable surface charms -- a playful, irreverent sense of humor, delectable romance, angsty drama – to some interesting, even under-examined, issues and topics. While a fair amount of defenses and praises of the series are guarded and likely to begin with some variant of “I’ll admit…” (look no further than to earlier in this post), for everything Skins gets wrong (more than I’d care to admit and sometimes breathtakingly so) it gets a dozen or more so genuinely and refreshingly right that it often erases away a lot of the potential ill-will its shortcomings create (As Flavorwire’s Judy Berman noted, “It’s hard to explain if you haven’t seen the cult British series … but Skins can somehow get away with things that would just seem cheesy and overwrought”. The elements that should clunk more often than not don’t because they aren’t a bug but a feature). These types of gauged defenses are slightly unfair though. They treat the series like it is a guilty pleasure. Besides the fact that guilt or self-flagellation over the things we like/enjoy, and in the process crafting a moral cultural hierarchy, is needless, pretentious, outmoded, helps no one, and adds little of critical value; we should also simply accept that the show when it was on its A-game was honestly just a pleasure, purely, simply and with little need for justification or qualification.    

The show’s distinctive ability to create admiration and amusement began with its unusual formatting. Skins is one of the most structurally audacious series of recent memory, which is both one of its greatest assets and something that lead to all sorts of weird storytelling issues. Each episode focuses on one, or in some instances multiple, characters. Essentially the show takes on the form of a collection of short stories with serial elements playing out in the background. Its odd structure was a boon to what was something the show was always good at: character and characterization. (Even at its worse, the show’s storytelling typically made sense on a character level even if on a plot level it could be eyebrow raising). 

The show’s structure opened it up to trying on new identities and personalities week-to-week and season-to-season. One week it could be a raucous comedy, the next a peculiar avant garde play, and yet another a quiet family drama. This meant that some episodes could reach brilliant, ecstatic highs – acting as fantastic examples of what this tv genre is capable of at its finest – and still others could crash and burn as fevered, frustrating blunders – sometimes these drastic tonal shifts existed from scene to scene leading to greatness and significant enjoyment buried even amongst the most misguided efforts (This was especially true in the third generation’s seasons, the most divisive and uneven, and the ones to have the lowest lows to counter the highs. The show was simply running out of steam by that point, but there is still some good and especially some very curious stuff there). Thankfully the counterweight typically balanced out more towards the good than the bad. Like other shows with outsized ambitions and that changed markedly episode to episode, such as Lost or Community, this made diving into each new installment of Skins thrilling to watch. You never knew quite what you were going to get (or whether it would be fully, successfully pulled off), but you knew it would look nothing like any other episode, and sometimes like nothing else on television.

Each episode starts from a place of: “Let’s hone in on this one character and dig into what makes them who they are, and why they matter”. It’s that last point that makes the show stand out; Skins is a deeply empathetic show and sympathetic towards and interested in people that films and television have never really had a good handle on. This begins with having an earnest, meaningful look at teens, but it extends to the writers’ choices in who those teens are – from people from rarely seen ethnic backgrounds and people from rarely depicted subcultures to individuals with atypical personalities and identities.

Skins was noted upon its release for its “authenticity”. Others were critical of it for its lack of realism. These differing opinions aren’t as hard to reconcile as it might sound. Skins, to an extent, is a soap opera or melodrama, and in the best tradition of that genre the series uses a heightened sense of emotion and dramatic storytelling – and, like the best melodramas, Skins’ underlying true interests are also unexpectedly incisive and provocative. 

This heightened, exaggerated sense of reality began with the show’s depiction of and attitude towards carnal pleasures. Skins was criticized for the excessive drug use, drinking and sexual escapades of its characters. “Teens do those things, sure,” enraged parents and introverted youths said, “but not to this ludicrous extent!” But critics missed the point. No one was depicting these aspects of young people’s lives – not really. Either you got something really, really earnest (which isn’t necessarily bad: just ask Switched at Birth) or something heavy on having a message (a la Degrassi -- that makes it sound worse than it is, but it’s very after school special-y). Yea, you have other series that feature these things in a non-preachy way, but those series often tend to glamorize it (your Gossip Girl’s and 90210’s) -- and their general sense of storytelling and character are too often odious. Skins, instead, just sort of matter-of-factly has it as atmosphere and minutiae, a meaningful part of the environment: teens do these things, so it makes sense that you would have them. (I’ve always seen Britain’s far greater tolerance of drinking – England has a massive, widely accepted drinking culture – and their always cheeky treatment of sex as having a big impact on this. It’s hard to imagine these depictions happening or working on American television. Something proven by an American remake of Skins failing due to extensive outcries – some claims went so far as to equate it with child pornography. The amorality just doesn’t fly over here).  

In particular, the most true to life element of this sticking point was the adolescent sexuality. Due to social prudishness and cultural denial, we don’t really consider the sexuality and sexual experiences of adolescents (especially young females, of whom Skins does a much better job of fully, seriously putting front and center than most media content). We couch sex in innuendo, suggestion and winking knowingness, but we exclude the actual messiness of its realities – which only serves to make it all the more confusing and complicated for those first discovering and learning about it. Skins is, by turns, sexy and tantalizing, but it has a real eye for the underlying messiness of sex and sexuality. The show finds its character having their first sexual encounters and their first real relationships, and the show takes time to portray what that entails, how simultaneously perplexing and thrilling those first discoveries and experiences can be (Plus, it's also one of the most sex positive shows, showing a variety of sexual experiences and refusing to criticize or pass judgement). In the world of Skins, romance is all consuming. Sometimes that could make love seem like an inescapable addiction – one of the more problematic underlying suggestions of the show and its obsession with one true pairings  -- but it also had a more logical gravitational pull, something viewed with a fervent, delirious attentiveness familiar to teens; a thing marked with signifiers of status, self-worth and identity. 

The implausibility of some of this party readiness (from “how the hell do they afford this” to “how are they not dead”) is intentional. The show isn’t supposed to always make literal sense. It trades in tactile authenticity for emotional authenticity. By placing us thoroughly in the perspective of these characters, we are meant to understand to a large extent this is a subjective presentation of events (This often makes a lot of the sillier, broader elements, such as the caricature-esque depiction of parents, a lot more forgivable and palatable than they might otherwise be). On one level, it’s faithful to the all-consuming emotional surplus of the age-group it depicts, with the associated self-involved drama in tow. 

Moreover, and more importantly, the show utilizes its heightened emotionality to create a more direct emotional connection with its characters. Perhaps the show’s greatest value and most admirable feat was its desire to take seriously its young characters. Characters on Skins can, and do, act awful and take some terrible, impulsive actions. But the show reserves judgment. The show’s interest lies in understanding motivations, aspirations, and desires. In other words, it aims to do nothing short of recognizing, identifying, and appreciating the complex inner emotional lives of its young characters. This is something frankly pop culture tends to avoid doing. The culture at large has infantilized our comprehension of what it means to be a young adult. We presume children and teens don’t have complicated, fascinating inner lives. Skins recognizes and understands that simply isn’t true.

Skins has a deft, intuitive sense for the psychology of its characters, and each installment asks us to consider some new character, sometimes someone the show has gone out of its way to make us dislike. That distaste may not necessarily go away but it needn’t for the intended effect to work. Skins doesn’t always beg for your sympathy (though it usually achieves it) but it does insist on your empathy – something too infrequently seen of tv series.

Some of this probably makes Skins seem more serious-minded and heady than it actually is. First and foremost, the show is interested in being entertaining and it’s largely very good at that. Skins places the “deep stuff” in between lots of amusing comical digressions – dramatically and emotionally dark as the show can get, it often plays more like a racy and lewd yet effervescent comedy -- and involving interpersonal drama. The ongoing drama makes for something that’s easy to get invested in, as it creates relationships (romantic, platonic, and familial), and complications for those relationships, that are absorbing and even a little resonant. 

The series is also progressive, transgressive, and subversive, and that makes it exciting, surprising and fascinating. While it features a number of the outward appearances of the average teen drama, and indulges occasionally in a few tropes, Skins is consistently smarter and deeper than its genre counterparts. 

For instance, the first generation’s ostensible central protagonist Tony (Nicholas Hoult) has all the outward appearance of the vacuous, pretty-boy nice guy lead, but he reveals himself to be a Human Monster, a manipulative sociopath. Tony’s disturbing behavior becomes a way into indirectly deconstructing all these wonderful issues of masculinity, privilege and the hierarchies of young social orders. Meanwhile, the wounded, bleeding heart of the first generation slowly proves itself to be such unexpected, winning presences like bottoming out pill popper Chris (Joseph Dempsie) and spacey head-case Cassie (Hannah Murray) (The show benefited tremendously from its stellar casting, which paired fantastically capable, largely untested, young actors – actually the age of their characters, for a change -- superbly well with particular characters that they then made their own). 

The second generation’s seasons -- for my money, even better than the already quite good first two seasons -- confidently doubled down, inviting us to look at a range of challenging and underserved issues, including depression, sexual identity, immigration, and autism (as well as the more familiar, but no less important, issues of race, class and gender). This made the show rather controversial, but the show’s treatment of this material demonstrated tact and sincere engagement. Throughout its run the show would tackle remarkable, difficult subjects, and often with relative insight and understanding. The show was perceptive and sincerely concerned about such rarely dealt with topics as living a religious life in a modern world, combatting and learning to live with mental health problems, and learning to accept and embrace having non-traditional sexual orientations and identities (The latter of which produced, in the third season, the show’s single best storyline: a beautiful, poignant tale of first love, played with achingly real vulnerability by Kathryn Prescott and Lily Loveless. This is, simply put, the best treatment of the discovery of sexual orientation I’ve ever seen, and it acted as a lovely center that spun outward to elevate everything around it, turning the third and good portions of the fourth season into exceptionally good television. I’m not sure what’s more admirable and impressive: that, to my mind, there has never been a lesbian story like this or that at the end of the day it’s just matter-of-factly a story of young love). Then there were the non-controversial stories still underwritten in media that Skins less brashly and more quietly depicted: female friendship, fundamental human decency, and the acceptance of the consequences of one’s actions.  

The series is highly evocative of a particular time and place. It is flavored by the distinctiveness of taking advantage of its setting in Bristol (It never feels generic or bland; it very much feels like its slice of life of a certain locale). But it also feels very much of its time; in a few years’ time, we may look back on the show as something of a time capsule of what it meant to be a teen in the early 2000’s. But Skins has a universality to the experiences it depicts that cuts across generations. The details may not be the same but the general evocation of that feeling of confusion, disaffection and ennui; of close but tenuous bonds; of heartache and heart-break; of loneliness and connection during that fleeting but defining point in our lives is unmistakably familiar. 

More than anything else that made Skins a good show was its generosity. Warmly, intimately, invitingly, the series kept its arm wide open to embrace its characters, to suggest that they mattered, and that if you were like anyone on the show you mattered too. But it rarely achieved this cloyingly. It would put its characters through hell and high water for some compelling drama, but it would usually only dangle them over the ledge so far. Its heart – so transparent under all that supposed edge and grit, and boundary pushing – was something it wore on its sleeve. It cared a heck of a lot, and it made us have a heck of a lot of fun doing it.

Sure, Skins is far from perfect, but, then again, whose teen years are?

Review of "Cannibal"

Recently I wrote a review for the uneven and somewhat dull, but occasionally dazzling, horror film Cannibal.  Here is a sample of the review:

"Considering its lurid premise, Cannibal is oddly reserved in how it tells its story. The film begins with a striking opening shot, a long, unbroken scene, shot from a distance, of a couple at a gas station at night. It’s a slow and ponderous scene that ends with the point of view of protagonist and titular cannibal Carlos (Antonio de la Torre). The shot is reminiscent of the incredible shot in The Bling Ring when the hapless teen criminals rob Audrina Patridge’s glass, steel cube house as the building’s light emanates out through the nighttime shadows. Like that film, and even more closely aligned with Michael Haneke’s directorial coolness, Cannibal is detached and distant from its subject matter. This makes the film often frustrating, but it also leads to some of its most disturbing moments where the uncertainty and ambiguity leaves us with startling horrors."

This was my first review as a writer for the independent film criticism site Way Too Indie, and I am really excited about this new opportunity. Hopefully I'll be having a few more reviews forthcoming.

Thoughts on "Guardians of the Galaxy"

Considering it’s an action blockbuster bankrolled by one of the most dominant, successful company brands, Guardians of the Galaxy is a strange film. Yes, it has its moments of extravagant spectacle, and it falls prey to a last act action sequence so enamored with CGI and special effects that it is always a little emotionally disconnected. But it also has a band of misfit anti-heroes who do the right thing not because it is necessarily right but because it benefits them in some way. And by placing its emphasis on these characters and their playful, occasionally self-consciously wry, interactions the film feels lively and snappy. Marvel took a risk with a film like Guardians which is based on a comic book property that is obscure and features characters who are downright bizarre (a sentient tree (voiced by Vin Diesel) and a talking raccoon (voiced by Bradley Cooper), anyone? – the former of which is possibly the most memorable and endearing of the film’s characters). But that clout is being used smartly and confidently. At its core, Guardians isn’t especially daring though. It is familiar really: a space opera meets an old adventure serial. It is a throwback, featuring the wit, imagination and sparkle of popcorn films like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark. It also features a good dose of the group dynamic of The Avengers, thrusting a bunch of people that make no sense occupying the same space and watching them riff off one another. The result is inspired and it leads to Guardians, at times, being filled wall-to-wall with jokes. The film may just be Marvel’s funniest outing yet. But it’s, more accurately, the most jubilant, riding on a wave of child-like glee. This starts with central protagonist Peter Quill (played pitch-perfectly by Chris Pratt), self-monikered as “Star Lord”, a dude who is in a deep state of arrested development after leaving earth on the day his mother passed away. Quill is full of himself, and yet he lives life flying by the seat of his pants. He won’t accept responsibility because he essentially has lived his whole life avoiding growing up. That sense of loss and sadness lingers in the background of the film but sits there understatedly, threatening to bubble up every so often. The five members who make up the titular Guardians (also featuring Zoe Saldana as warrior-princess Gamora and former-wrestler Dave Bautista as the deadpan comic wonder Drax the Destroyer) are trying to outrun dark, pained pasts, often through sheer force of quip-delivering will. Towards the end of the film, Quill labels himself and his compatriots “losers”, and he is right. These aren’t the heroes we’ve been taught we deserve; they act cowardly, foolish, dumb, and selfish. Co-writer and director James Gunn gets a significant mileage out of that fact. The scope here is large, gallivanting from planet to planet in a large corner of this universe. The story being told is needlessly dense and intricate and not always easy to follow. But the mythology is almost beside the point, a Rube Goldberg-ian device to facilitate character-based fun. As A.A. Dowd notes, “What’s faintly delightful about Guardians Of The Galaxy is that half of its heroes seem bored by the mythology, too.” By placing the perspective primarily on a bunch of ill-equipped people/creatures, heroic only by circumstance, swept up in politics, intrigue and conflict that is beyond them, it makes for a story Marvel has yet to tell and one that finds new, quite entertaining notes to hit.

Thoughts on "Only Lovers Left Alive"

Is there any genre more worn out than the story of vampires (perhaps the rom-com)? It’s not like we needed another one, but Jim Jarmusch has breathed new life in to the desiccating corpse by making, well, a Jim Jarmusch movie. If you went into Only Lovers Left not realizing it was about vampires, it might take a while to catch on (probably by the point they start downing some blood and reacting like they just shot-up heroin). The signifiers of vampirism have been stripped and what remains is a droll, lushly gloomy mood piece. Jarmusch is more content to soak up dripplingly melancholy atmosphere and observe his protagonists, married vampires fittingly named Adam and Eve (Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton), as they barely muster up the energy to keep existing after centuries of just that. They look – with frazzled states of dress and unkempt hair -- and act exhausted, and while mentions of adventures with historical figures and events hint at a once vibrant life, they, like the central setting of Detroit, feel like they’ve seen better days (Setting the majority of the film in a city like Detroit feels like a wonderful, understated joke, another way of removing the romanticism that has come to seep into the genre). They're anachronisms of a more cultured, literate time watching the world give itself over to the digital and short-attentioned. Jarmusch isn’t too keen on plot, outside of the late arrival of Eve’s reckless, care-free sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska) shaking up the endless languor. Instead, he is more interested in giving us a sense of the rituals that come with being a vampire, noting small details of what perpetual, never-ending existence really entails. For instance, the way Adam and Eve fetishize cultural items, such as books or guitars, they have become attached to, or the manner in which they acquire blood. A fair amount of this Jarmusch uses towards his signature, dry wit, humor so rigorously deadpan it doesn’t always register immediately. Jarmusch balances between finding humor in playing around in such an overly familiar genre and in giving his own revisionist spin on the tired tale. Like last years’ vampire flick Byzantium, but to an even greater and less commercial extent, Jarmusch depicts life as a vampire as an existential crisis, filled with longing, desperation, and sadness. But for all its apparent, lingering ennui, Only Lovers refuses to be solely a downtrodden affair but also a thoroughly sensuous one, in a dreamily, other-worldly way, reminiscent of Wong Kar-Wai. The warm invitation also comes due to the central couple, who's romance remains swooning, even as all these centuries have passed. There is a distinct pleasure to be had from being invited into this abode, crossing the threshold into this strange place with the weary figures who reside there.

Review: "Date and Switch"

Sex comedies, despite all their sexual voraciousness, are inconsistent and questionable in the one thing they are so adamant about: sex. The sexual politics of too many sex comedies are regressive and more than a little shameful, indulging in not only the childish humor but the perspective of adolescents. That is, in part, due to the protagonists of most of these movies being virginal teen boys who are desperately in want of sex. Teen boys don’t have the most admirable views of sex or sexuality, and the views of teen movies too often have the quality of a misogynistic bro mentality.

Date and Switch starts from that place of infantile humor and questionable views of women and sex, but it quickly throws a wrench into the equation. The film begins with a familiar premise: best friends Michael (Nicholas Braun) and Matty (Hunter Cope) make a pact to get laid in time for prom. Problem is that Matty happens to be gay, something he confesses for the first time. Michael doesn’t take this well, and the film takes advantage of this situation to call bullshit on some of the more unfortunate laden homophobic views in adolescent and straight male culture. 

In Matty, the film creates the antithesis of the stereotypical notions of homosexuality. Like Happy Ending’s Max, Matty is a schlubby slacker who outwardly appears like a guy’s guy. He’s only gay in the one sense that really matters, his desire to sleep with men. The film uses Matty’s coming out to show how uncomfortable and difficult this kind of thing is for a young newly out gay person.

Admirable as the film’s underlying messages and themes are, it still falls prey to typical sex comedy traps, getting caught up in some truly idiotic jokes and some overly familiar scenarios. Outside of its big twist, which it plays up to great effect, the film doesn’t have that many new things to add to the tired stories of male friendship or the quest to lose one’s virginity (not that we needed much more said about either in the first place).  

Braun and Cope are both far too old for the parts they’re playing, which only serves to make the scenario, already treated with a juvenile light-heartedness, less convincing (It also doesn’t help that neither is an especially strong actor). Supporting performers help round things out making the most of a little, like Nick Offerman as Michael’s father and Dakota Johnson as  Matty’s understanding former girlfriend (Johnson keeps being great in bit parts that squander her – here’s thinly hoping that 50 Shades of Grey actually changes that). But the film, like the pot brownies at the center of its plot (because, of course, that's a major plot point), feels half-baked.

Grade: C+