Day 5 -- Good Dick

Released: October 10th, 2008

Starring: Marianna Palka, Jason Ritter, Mark Weber

Writer/Director: Marianna Palka

Description: A look at the relationship between a lonely introverted girl and a young video store clerk vying for her attention.

[Review may contain spoilers. Please watch movie before reading, unless you don't care. Most of these films have already been released for a while, so they should be readily available.]

***

The way a movie starts will always determine how interesting it is. If it grabs you in the first 10 minutes or so, you're hooked, but if starts off weird and completely unbelievable, the movie never really comes together for you. "Good Dick" suffers from the latter. 

The way it set up the character's relationship is really creepy and stalker-ish.  Jason Ritter's character gets the address of Marianna Palka's character by stealing it from his work computer. He then, proceeds to sleep outside her apartment for about a week in his car as he knocks on her door every day in order to talk to her, and after she finally let's him in, the movie forgets the ridiculous beginning and becomes more realistic.

Once the movie moves away from the borderline illegal way that the couple meets, Palka's direction, acting and writing begins to shine. As her character backstory is slowly unraveled, she becomes more relatable as a person and therefore, her actions have meaning behind them. Her violent mood swing and odd behavior begin to make sense as Palka make wonderful choices in the role, especially later in the film. She does a good job of portraying a child-molestation victim in a very 3D way without resorting to cliches. You can tell she cared about this character.

Ritter's character's, on the other hand, feels more like a predator-ish guy than a nice guy. It's as though he's only interested in the girl at first because she enjoys soft core porn films, and is probably easy. And until it becomes obvious near the end of the film that he wants to help her, there is no sign that he wants anything but sex. Even his backstory is rushed and never explained fully explained. Just a weird character from start to almost finish. A little disappointed since he's the reason I chose the film.

There was never a moment where I wasn't uncomfortable watching this movie, and I didn't really hate it. There was a very well thought out story that was hampered by an awful beginning. Good cast with good performances but it never really recovered after the first act.

Rating: 6/10 -- Palka does a great job in her triple role, but a bad start kills an otherwise solid experience.