Ever since I heard a movie about pickup was coming to theaters, I have waited patiently to snag it from BitTorrent and see what the fuss was about. Unfortunately, I was greeted with a clicheed Hollwood pile of dogshit that was anything but Red Pill.
The movie follows a horribly miscast Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Jon, a man who runs the town hard and pulls beautiful women frequently despite his addiction to masturbating to internet porn, which he finds to be more satisfying than actual women.
The first clue that this film was written by manginas was its portrayal of pickup process, which was roughly: “Guy sees incredibly hot girl” —> A miracle happens —> “Guy is dancing with/banging girl.” The smashcuts of him fornicating with 9s and 10s is the kind of just-so story that someone without the faintest clue of pickup (e.g. a beta male or a woman) would posit as feasible. He’s reasonably good-looking and has some muscles, so OF COURSE dimes are throwing themselves at him. He can’t miss.
During his club dalliances, Don Jon finally meets “the one,” a dolled-up Jersey version of Scarlett Johansson. She’s obviously an incredibly attractive woman (though many of the women he’s shown pumping-and-dumping are on the same level), but as soon as he begins his courtship of her he makes all of the rookie mistakes: he tries to change his behavior, forsakes going out with his friends, and scoffs at the idea of getting some strange. We all know the pull a new hottie can have on a man, but a player who has been in the trenches is not so easily snared, and also knows not to cut off his relationships with important people in his life just because of some new ass. When they finally have sex it is middling, so Jon continues his internet porn habit.
An obviously disappointing aspect was that the female characters in the film could do no wrong—it shows early on that Johannson’s character is addicted to the fake emotional rush of romantic comedies, yet the movie does nothing to explore the parallelism of her reliance on this artificial stimulation. Once again, it is only the man’s behavior that is maladaptive, despite the fact that it is an outgrowth of his girlfriend being sorely deficient in fulfilling his sexual needs.
There were occasional bits of Red Pill wisdom sprinkled throughout the movie, but they were taken to farcical and illogical conclusions. For example, Jon’s girlfriend openly mocks him for being less of a man for cleaning his own apartment rather than paying someone else to do it. We know that women often don’t respect men who do the housework, but castigating him for sweeping his apartment floor was a reductio ad absurdum example of this principle.
Though the entirety of this movie was saccharine Hollywood pablum, the ending of the movie was the worst part. Throughout the movie, we see an aged Julianne Moore skulking around the main character, the same way an orbiter will follow around a cute girl for a chance at currying favor. After being dumped by his girlfriend for his masturbation habits, he caves in and sleeps with Moore in a moment of weakness. Jon smokes pot with her and bangs her in a car, and all of a sudden he is smitten.
Over a short time, Jon becomes infatuated with skeletor — I mean, Julianne Moore’s character. He begins a relationship with her and the movie just sort of…ends. Yes, just your typical young-player-hangs-up-his-boots-to-settle-down-with-grandmother story, despite no common life situation or any significant bond that is built between them.
This screenplay came off like a bad book report on what people think the player lifestyle is like, epitomized by its romanticization of giving up the lifestyle to court post-wall women (obviously while in their “sexual peak”). I saw nothing redeeming about the movie, barely even entertaining in its cringeworthiness. Save your time and go see one of these films that will teach you something.
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