Saturday 26 May 2012

Kissing Jessica Stein


When I saw the trailer I was intrigued. The idea of not one person is your soulmate has been introduced many times but this was a very different way of showing it. I suggest you watch the trailer and then read this review but if you don’t wish to then it’s pretty self-explanatory.
Let me start with how well the characterisation of Jessica Stein was done.  Jessica Stein is one of those people who are very smart, talented and beautiful. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there? But the problem is that she knows that she’s smart, talented and beautiful. A little too well. The first few minutes into the movie they show her home. All you notice will be books and books and piles and piles of books. It is incomprehensible how many books you will see in her apartment. Yes, she is an avid reader which also adds on to how smart she is. She is a control freak, always has to keep moving, anxious all the time, good at her job, an insomniac. Her complication is that she is looking for The One. But obviously Jessica thinks that nobody is good enough for her. Either they are not smart enough or funny enough. It’s always something. She’s twenty-eight and she’s getting worried that she will die alone. But the funny thing is that even though she thinks so highly of herself she doesn’t exactly believe in her work. She is an artist but she wouldn’t work towards that so she’s working as a copy-editor in the Tribune. She hasn’t given homosexuality a thought-­­­­until Helen comes along.
Now let’s move to Helen. I’m not exactly sure what her job is but from what I understood in the movie is that she promotes artists and is a curator of sorts. Helen oozes sexuality. She is very attractive and as her gay friends puts it in the movie, “She’s had more cock than he’s had.” With Helen, she’s not judgemental about other people’s opinions. The complication with her is she wants to have sex with a woman. Just for the experience.
It is a twisted love triangle. The third corner of the triangle is Josh Meyers. Josh and Jessica dated in college for a year. They broke up because Jessica dumped him saying he wasn’t following his obvious passion-writing. The real irony lies where Josh and Jessica work with eachother at the Tribune.  You see very little of Josh in the movie. OK, not little, but just not compared to how much you see of Helen and Jessica.
The beauty of the movie lies in the ending. The ending is unpredictable and that obviously was surprising. It has been so long since a romance comedy has been unpredictable. It’s a lot like Vicky Christina Barcelona. Helen being Christina and Jessica being Vicky, except that Vicky and Christina weren’t lesbians and in a relationship. The movie ends on a positive note and should I say a realistic note?

I like comments as much as I like this movie so please leave me one. Thanks for reading.

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