Good Dick (BAAAAAAAAAAD)
Don't fucking watch this shit. Seriously. Easily the worst movie I've seen this year, this film tries to be an indie-cred moonshot but instead hits the bottom of the barrel. I would seriously almost rather watch a juvenile comedy by that mewling, puking infant, Adam Sandler than this malformed, sparsely filmed pile of shit.
***SPOILERS*** (as if I fucking care if I ruin this piece of shit for anybody)
The film initially seemed appealing. A weird indie film about a romance porn addict who won't leave her apartment and a recovering drug-addict video store clerk who won't leave her alone. Bleak semiurban environment and vague existential overtones, with a dash of humanism and realism thrown in. And most of the reviews I found on IMDb looked pretty positive. I mean, it had its share of negative ratings, but it's an indie film, and those always do. However, the film's good points ended there, after it's description; the actual film itself had almost no redeeming features.
For starters, the film's scriptwriter, director, and lead actor are all the same person, Marianna Palka. This should be an immediate signal of a Mary-Sue. In the entire film, she is the only character whose motivations are explored at all; her "boyfriend" has just as much screen time, but at the end of the film we understand almost nothing about him. The entire film is constructed along an extremely imbalanced focus on the sexually abused lead female character, devoting no examination at all to her boyfriend who clearly has at least as many issues as she does, and whose issues are much more complex and much less washed-out-indie-director-trying-to-be-edgy.
In some sense, the film seems to be about a story of recovery from sexual abuse, and given the way the characters are set up it seems quite likely that the film is an attempt by the director/writer/actress to recover from her own sexual abuse or something. The basic gist is that the main and only female character in the film never bathes and rarely eats, and only leaves her apartment to rent porn videos, the viewing of which constitutes the entirety of her daily activities. The video clerk at the store apparently falls in love with her, although it is never clear how or why since his only interaction with her is checking out her porn videos, and decides he's going to try to "save" her or something. He finds her address in the store's computer system, and shows up at her apartment, and is pretty much rejected. He shows up again, and loans her a porn movie he's picked out just for her; apparently picking out movies for people is his only redeeming quality as a human being. She mutely accepts it then slams the door in his face. Several rejections later, he makes up a lie about his great aunt dying and works his way into her apartment, although he is kept away at knifepoint. Inexplicably, there is a camera cut and they are amiably sitting against a counter on the floor of her apartment calmly talking about things, and he talks her into letting him sleep on the couch. Keep in mind that this is the first time they've actually had any conversation of any kind, she should reasonably know by now he is lying about his great-aunt, and just a short time ago she was carefully keeping a footlong sword of a kitchen knife between herself and him.
This entire time, he is living out of his car. The best parts of the movie are the hyperrealist shots of his daily life struggling without a place to live. I'm serious about this, the parts of the movie I enjoyed the most are shots of him putting on deodorant in the back seat and washing his face with disposable paper wipes. The movie was that bad.
Anyways, fastforward to later in the movie. The main male character's friend at work finds out that the apartment complex the main character says he's been living at has long been demolished, and suspects him of falling back into a past drug habit. This is the only character development of any male characters in the movie that even attempts to explain why they are all so screwed up, other than vague, disconnected attempts at recounting minutiae of a polish cultural background. However, the script only barely touches this, and instead of having the main character do the sensible thing and say he's been living with this girl, he refuses to say where he's staying, and the friend at work accuses him of going back to drugs and living despondently out of his car, which is basically what he was actually doing minus the drugs.
As the plot develops, the female lead character repeatedly tells the main character to leave her alone, says that she'd rather he weren't there, requests he not talk while visiting her apartment. Oh and also the only thing they do together is eat and watch porn. The film then has some actually realistic parts about dealing with her psychological damage, after which the lead female finally gets the loafer boyfriend to leave by trying to call 911, screaming rape at the top of her lungs repeatedly, and then crying and shouting "leave" about 20 times in a row. Somehow this gives her the courage to go stand up to her abusive father, and she tells him she doesn't want his money, doesn't need him, and doesn't love him. She also threatens him a good deal to maximize the catharsis. Then she goes back to her loser boyfriend's video store to find him and tell him how much she loves him in a scene that is so predictable that you don't even need to watch the last 10 minutes of the movie because you can already see the entire thing in your head, down to each last swing of the head and furtive, apologetic loving smile. The film ends with an attempt at happy catharsis that seems quite forced.
Essentially, the entire movie is a somewhat nonsensical and ineffective vehicle to move the main character through recovery from sexual abuse as a child. A good deal of past history between the father and the main female character is kind of vaguely alluded to in a way that suggests that the writer was only making the movie for herself, and since she already knew said details they weren't really that important. The lead male character white-knights the plot to death, and inexplicably magically knows even before he has a real conversation with her that she needs his help and when she is saying no she is actually really saying yes; in other words, he is the embodiment of the writer's desire for a magical shamanic healer to rescue her from the depths of her own emotional damage, and he comes off as quite conveniently and artificially constructed. Unfortunately life is never quite that simple.
Basically the only thing the movie has going for it is indie cred, and although apparently that was enough to get it into several film festivals, it doesn't make it a good movie. The entire soundtrack is ripped out of NOW that's what I call INDIE Vol. 237, and is all recorded on low-budget acoustic-electric guitars. The entire film is shot in a video store, a couple apartments, and a car, and there are no special effects, giving it a painfully-indie-low-budget aesthetic. The plot is about a male with absolutely no character development but a cool haircut dating a female who masturbates frequently and usually only opens her mouth to tell her friend that he's a pile of shit, the latter of whom is according to the plot synopsis supposed to come off as extremely intelligent, but if I hadn't been told I wouldn't have known. This is supposed to be an intriguing gender reversal from the mainstream Hollywood stereotypes, but it wasn't enough to actually make the movie interesting. Further, it's a film about people who are obsessed with films, which is kind of a cliche for indie cinema. Lastly, the entire thing is written, directed, and acted by the same person; clearly the woman behind it all is attempting for a monolithic undiluted expression of her inedpendent, edgy artistic vision.
But like so many other things on the internet, the most frustrating thing was other people's reaction to the movie. I read hundreds of comments; most of the positive ones seemed to be made by people for whom the simple fact that the movie was about recovery from sexual abuse made it a valuable piece of cinema. I'm sorry, but just putting an abused character in a film doesn't instantly make it a thought-provoking, absorbing work. Apparently some people liked the subtle character development; for me the sexual abuse tropes were about as subtle as, say, the dialogue in Legend of the Seeker. As in, if you thought they were subtle you must have been raised on Teletubbies, Pochahontas, and Hairspray. However, the negative reviews were possibly the most revolting; they almost unanimously objected to the fact that the movie was "weird" and "SO slow, weird, bitter, angry", except one reviewer who claimed the film was unrealistic because "There is no sex in this relationship." Completely missing some blindingly obvious problems that are much more important.
TL;DR it was a shitty movie that tried to hard to be edgy and artistic and ended up being a drab, predictable low-budget piece of shit about someone's mary-sue sexual abuse drama. Oh and also people on the internet are still stupid.