Tony Danza plays Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s father in Don Jon, and while I suspect he’s there mainly to provide Italian-guy cred to make it seem more okay that the rest of the non-Italian cast are basically doing blackface-level Italian impressions, as you can see in this special Father’s Day clip, he also seems to be displaying some long-forgotten acting chops. I’d be interested to see what the rest of the movie looks like, because in this 54-second clip, he crushes it.
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Joseph Gordon-Levitt already debuted his full-length writing and directing debut, Don Jon (formerly Don Jon’s Addiction), at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year to solid reviews, but most of us simple folk hadn’t seen much of it until the first trailer was revealed yesterday. Starring JGL and Scarlett Johansson, Don Jon is about a New Jersey bro who seems to be pretty obsessed with porn and working out, so I’m a little confused as to whether this is a comedy or a documentary.

A New Jersey guy dedicated to his family, friends, and church, develops unrealistic expectations from watching porn and works to find happiness and intimacy with his potential true love.

ScarJo plays the true love, and she wears really tight dresses, so my $12 is already set aside for Don Jon, but they’re also joined by Julianne Moore, Tony Danza and, you guessed it… Channing Tatum. Only, things go awry for the two heavy-accented lovers, when ScarJo discovers her man jackin’ it to porn on his laptop.

Honestly, that may be the most ridiculously unrealistic thing that I’ve ever heard of. She’d have to be playing a nun with the body composition of a Barbie Doll for this to work.

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The Sundance Film Festival, Hollywood’s premiere celebration of Hollywood insiders celebrating the outsider, recently released their programming schedule, and with the 2013 fest just a few weeks away, Laremy Legel and I decided to attempt to explore just what makes a good Sundance movie. Is it scarves? Non-linear narratives? Magical realism? Melancholic, semi-autobiographical tales of romanticized bohemian narrators trying to find their place in an increasingly alienating world with the help of a manic pixie girls? Is it, as David Sedaris once wrote of hanging out with filmmakers in college, “grainy black-and-white movies in which ponderous, turtlenecked men slogged the stony beaches, cursing the gulls for their ability to fly”?

Laremy and I are a lot like the Supreme Court in that we may not be able to tell you exactly what makes a Sundance movie, we just know one when we see one. While we most likely won’t be making the trip ourselves this year (trivia: we met there two years ago), that doesn’t mean we can’t still drool over the program guide like a pair of old yuppies reading a Zagat’s Guide, and then make wild generalizations as to its content.

Here, using the actual program guide, we tried to rank the Sundanciest Sundance Films in terms of Sundanciness (a very scientific measure, though we didn’t include all of them), as only people who would quote David Sedaris in an article about it could do. And if you’re attending the festival this year, we helpfully included some pairings to help you get the most out of each. Boner Appetite!

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