Good Dick (2008)

One of the things that's fun about writing this blog is that it reminds me of other movies I have seen and liked. Imbd says that John Ritter played a straight man pretending to be gay in the TV show Three's Company in the 70s, and his son Jason Ritter played a gay man pretending to be straight in Happy Endings (2005). That one was great, written and directed by Don Roos, who had the same duties on the even better The Opposite of Sex (1998). Jason Ritter was quite good in this weird movie, written/directed by and co-starring his girlfriend Marianna Palka. The characters were strange and dysfunctional, and viewers were left guessing about a number of things at the end. One of the video store clerks, Martin Starr, looked familiar to me: he was in Superbad and Knocked Up. He didn't have a lot to do in any of the three. Good Dick won the New Director award in Palka's native Scotland at the Edinburgh Film Festival (she moved to New York at age 16, so apparently she had a good dialect coach). I can't really make a blanket recommendation on this one because it was so quirky. We liked it, though (I also liked the LA locations, including the video store next to the Nuart), and Jack loved the opening song, Big Boots, by Hello Stranger. There was no one else in the theatre with us on a sunny fall afternoon.