Jack & Diane (2012)

I only gave it a 2 rather than a 1 since the relationship between the two was of interest, which is a guess is the major plot of these gal pals but really has nothing else to offer. Since the minimum lines which one must write is ten, I must continue.Since I must write, write, and write more, I choose to write about why more of this film is a waste of your time. Although the girls, especially the actress playing Diane are easy on the eyes, it would have been interesting of the "monster" had some real implications, a la like maybe the "Howling" but this route was not taken unfortunately!The actress's performances were fine, that alone makes this story one which is able to me followed. There, are those enough lines for this review?

Writer/director Bradley Rust Gray's debut feature "The Exploding Girl" was a mild indie success with its star Zoe Kazan, a twenty-something girl dealing with life and relationship issues. It's a slow burn character study that felt very real and relatable and looked to be a good starting point for the young filmmaker. His follow up film "Jack and Diane" is here and it has taken a pretty vicious critical beating. It stars current "It" girl Juno Temple and Riley Keough in a brief but intense affair, that includes metaphoric intercuts with a werewolf like beast. The film also features brief stop motion tidbits from the brilliant Quay Brothers. In some ways I think it has been unfairly picked on and doesn't deserve such a thrashing.Diane (Temple) is a British girl in New York City who while trying to find a phone runs into Jack (Keough) the stereotypical tomboy. The two girls are complete opposites. Diane is tiny, meek and insecure. While Jack puts up a tough and rigid exterior, full of false self confidence. After partying the night before, Jack is hit by a car while on her skateboard and for the rest of the film she has a nasty scrape on the side of her face. We find out both characters are caring around some heavy emotional baggage.Diane has frequent nosebleeds and strange dreams about a big nasty beast ripping people apart, but this is by no means a horror movie. The animated sequences are thick strands of hair moving around the inside of a persons body like a rope tightening around a heart. It's sticky, grimy and a little gross, but then again so are some of the critics. Early on in their relationship Jack finds out that Diane is leaving for Paris in a few weeks and she tries to distance herself and forget everything about her, but she can't. Eventually they start to embrace the time they have left together. The film does feel a little awkward and strange but then again this is what the characters are feeling. The story also meanders and goes in a few different directions but overall I didn't find it annoying. Towards the end of their time together Jack starts getting the nose bleeds and having these awful visions almost like Diane infected her with something.I know I'm in the minority on this but I kind of dug the film. It's currently available on Netflix watch instantly, so take a chance and give it a watch.

Fans of "Times Square" (1980) and of its Director Allen Moyle might want to check out "Jack & Diane" for a little compare and contrast. The comparison should help them appreciate the many missteps Moyle could have made and credit his instinctive feel for making small films that connect with their target audiences."Jack & Diane" is not badly shot and the audio is good, so you can't explain the lameness away by calling it a student film. It is saved from being a complete embarrassment by it being so modest an effort with so little pretension. Thankfully there is no director's commentary although what could the writer/director of something this sterile possibly have to say? Unfortunately, being embarrassed for the cast and crew would at least constitute some degree of viewer involvement with the film and the story; however perverse.In the absence of embarrassment there is simply nothing here to generate a response from a viewer. It is one of those extremely rare cases where the three-way dynamic between the artist, the work, and the observer simply does not occur; no connection is fused, nothing is engaged in the viewer. Or to put it simply, a example of how decent production and post-production cannot breathe life into something where the pre-production was so becalmed as to be sans pulse.Juno Temple is a transcendent actress with the most interesting a face out there today. To the film's credit there are considerable extreme close-ups of her and sincere attempts by her at nonverbal character development; but nonverbal connections to the viewer only happen when the story has some basic coherence.Once Temple was cast and the comedic potential of her stock airhead character was recognized (along with the almost scary talent disparity between her and her co-star), the answer for the screenplay's absence of life should have been obvious. Think Goldie Hawn playing off Charles Grodin. A little exaggeration in that direction (after all they were already going expressionistic with the effects) and they might have had something worthy of release, or at least something to justify its basic existence. Instead one is left to lament their failure to simply donate the budget to a local children's research hospital.

Jack & Diane (2012) ** (out of 4) This film has been thrown out as a lesbian teen drama, a romantic drama and even a horror drama and while it does try to mix all of those things I think it fails for the most part. The story centers on British teen Diane (Juno Temple) who falls in love with female friend Jack (Riley Keough) and we see their troubled relationship turn into something rather bizarre. I'm really not sure what JACK & DIANE was trying to do unless it just wanted to be one of those indie movies that managed to be all over the place and seem rather other worldly while wanting the viewer to make up their mind on what it's about. I don't think the film was as bad as some of the reviews out there but there's still no question that there are quite a few flaws here. The biggest is that the film just never really makes us care about the characters and this here is the fault of the screenplay. I'm really not sure what writer-director Bradley Rust Gray was wanting to say or do with these characters but they never really come to life. For the majority of the overlong running time I was just sitting there wondering what anything I was watching was supposed to mean. The romantic elements never really work, the drama between the two never works and when the horror elements do show up they just seem out of place. The werewolf creation looks pretty bad but I think this was done on purpose. The horror elements just really seem out of place as if they were added just to expand the market. I did think the director at least made a good looking film and it was certainly professionally done. The biggest draw for me was the two leads and I thought both of them did a very good job. I thought Keough, Elvis' granddaughter, does a very good job in her part and I thought she handled the character well and managed to make you believe her in the role. Temple was absolutely charming in her part and her beauty certainly helped carry the film but she also managed to give an actual performance. With that said, it's hard to know who to recommend this thing to because the film's really all over the map and doesn't really succeed at anything it tries.