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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
FINDING BLISS It’s a sad thing when one sees a comic premise taken into shallow, conventional waters. In Finding Bliss, we’re introduced to the sexually awkward Jody Balaban (Leelee Sobieski). (She was spanked for asking her parents what a “BJ” was, and she was too frigid for her first potential sex partner in college.) But she loves making films, and she graduates with high marks from the NYU Film School. Of course, this seems like no small feat until she goes out to Hollywood and finds no work save for directing traffic at a studio. After submitting her short film everywhere, she finally receives a response by an actual film company… a porno studio. What the heck, she can still work as an editor part-time, and at night, when no one’s looking, sneak into the studio to shoot her first feature. This premise sounds full of promise. It could go any number of ways, from being an outrageous sex comedy, possibly in the vein of The Hangover, to a gritty little movie on the down low (one thinks of the film crew sneaking the squid out of the studio in Ed Wood). As it turns out, this potential is squandered, but not because writer/director Julie Davis doesn’t try. She does, up to a point. But her trying is in the context of a romantic comedy, and by this, I mean nearly any given romcom that’s been around the past hundred years or so. We’ve seen it too many times before—a not always likable but plucky woman falls inexplicably in love with a jerk, here the porn director at the company, Jeff Drake (Matt Davis), and everything turns out honky dory. That is, of course, after the inevitable and predictable conflicts that arise or the little bits that are meant to be quirky or strange, like a woman named Bliss (of the title) who keeps appearing on Jody’s editing screen and offering sex advice. The other major problem is that, once taken on its terms as a predictable, by-the-numbers comedy that just happens to use porno as a gimmick, the film’s just not funny. Let me put it this way, when the dazed Jamie Kennedy is one of the funniest things about your movie (he looks as if he’s on Quaaludes most of the time), there’s something wrong. The dialog is lackluster, and Davis’s attempts at visual comedy, such as a montage of the wacky things Jody has to do to make her movie undercover, are poorly edited for comic effect. The chill that filled the room at the screening I attended, the kind where an unfunny romantic comedy falls in the woods and no one laughs, confirmed this. Perhaps
some of the film could have been saved by the charisma of the two leads.
This too doesn’t seem to be the case, despite in real life Sobieski and
Davis becoming a couple. Jody’s mostly a stuck-up girl who turns her
nose up at everyone who isn’t an artist, and Davis plays his smug
director a little too well. When one keeps thinking “when will they get
back to Jamie Kennedy,” it’s still a problem.
Jack Gattanella
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