Jack and Diane Reviews

Think my obsession with Juno Temple was the main reason I was interested in this movie, and watched until the end. While the lesbian/horror love story was entertaining, I can't help but still call it an average movie, saved by my love for Juno haha.

There just aren't enough lesbian werewolf films, and Jack & Diane fills that niche. The story is paper-thin and involves a friendship between two teenagers that are werewolves? The werewolf aspect is so poorly integrated that it's hard to tell whether they are wolves, whether one turned the other into a wolf, or if it's just a visual manifestation. But beyond that, the acting is poor and there's no point to anything in the film. Jack & Diane is a monotonous piece of rubbish that has nothing to say.

The titular characters, essayed by Keough and Temple, are two star-crossed lesbian teens who fall in love after a chance encounter in one of New York's hipper districts. "Hip" is the keyword for this film. Characters carry skateboards, hang out in tattoo parlors and generally look disillusioned, but in, like, a "hip" way.
Just for the hell of it we get a few dream sequences involving some sort of werewolf creature. I'm guessing this is meant to represent the girls' burgeoning sexuality ala 'Company of Wolves' but don't quote me on that. Despite this injection of weirdness, it's the straightest gay drama you'll see this year. Our heroes even have their own song, The Flying Pickets' 'Only You', used to far greater effect in Wong Kar Wai's 'Fallen Angels'.
If the characters weren't so damn irksome it wouldn't be a bad little romantic drama. Temple gives a great performance and is one to watch in the coming years. Unfortunately, director Gray seems intent on alienating as large an audience as possible.

Unforgivably empty teen lesbian romance that keeps hinting at a percolating tension beneath the surface getting ready to erupt with ominous music cues, a monster, and very bizarre visual themes, but those turn out to be nothing more than a maddeningly unsatisfying tease. The bulk of the movie consists of nothing more than overlong takes, dull conversations, and pointless incidents at every turn. I want to wring the neck of a director who bilks talent like Juno Temple and a name like Kylie Minogue into appearing in their self-indulgent crap for absolutely zero cinematic return. What a shameful abuse of both their willingness and our time. Riley Keough got to kiss them both, so maybe for her alone the experience wasn't a total loss.

I could gaze at the strikingly unique face, untamed hair, and innocent expressions of Juno Temple for hours, so that's the sole reason this waste gets one star instead of rock bottom. Unless you're a completely incurable Juno junkie, please please PLEASE do yourself a favor and spend those spare 100 minutes by doing anything else. Seriously, this movie was such a letdown by failing to deliver ANY sort of entertainment or provoke ANY kind of emotional response that I had to watch another movie immediately after it was over to jump-start my inert central nervous system. THAT'S how big a failure it is.

Juno Temple and Riley Keough are both likeable actresses... too bad everything else about this movie sucks. There's no plot, and really not much background on the characters. I spent most of the film wondering when and if anything was ever going to happen. I look forward to seeing more from the two leads, but this movie is not worth sitting through.

This was a disturbing, but intriguing love story. It was definitely worth a watch - I just wish I understood the monster/creature/thing that kept showing up randomly.

Could have been much better.. but, I liked it for its simplicity. The lack of self loathing was a nice touch too..

Another HD Net Movie Channel grab off the TiVo, and what a waste of my fucking time. I love Juno Temple to death, but this was just a bunch of crap, with a hinted at werewolf (?) storyline told around the budding romance between two young lesbians.

I just couldn't get into this one, and I enjoy a 'style over substance' tale a lot more than the average guy, so me not liking this is very telling,

Pass.

This is a little odDITTY about Jack and Diane ... Jack and Diane could have been a simple, all-consuming teen love story about the titular Jack and Diane; but it continously teases the audience that it is going to become something it is not which makes the film fall flat and fail. Girly-girl Diane (Juno Temple - Atonement, The Dark Knight Rises) meets tom-boyish, skateboarder Jack (Riley Keough (The Runaways, Magic Mike) and the pair begins to develop a seemingly realistic relationship based on friendship, fascination and respect -- and this would all work if there weren't so many intercut scenes of bizarre visuals featuring bodily innards becoming ensnared with human hair (uhm, really). I am sure this is supposed to symbolize Diane's inner turmoil and confusion coming to terms with something she'd never expected; but it is too heavy, grotesque and confusing. The "she's like a werewolf" message is poorly conveyed and distracts from the simple story I would rather have watched as both Temple and Keough are like-able enough actresses. The howls coming from this film aren't intentional and that is never good.

I've been following this film for over five years. I couldn't have been more excited. Now that I've seen it, I wish I hadn't. So many amazing pieces come together to create.... nothing. Bradley Rust Gray seems incapable of creating any sort of energy. It's like listening to someone tell a story while they're falling asleep.

Think my obsession with Juno Temple was the main reason I was interested in this movie, and watched until the end. While the lesbian/horror love story was entertaining, I can't help but still call it an average movie, saved by my love for Juno haha.

"Juno Temple and Riley Keough (who was great in The Runaways) give good performances as the title role. While, they were moments I got hooked in, the movie just doesn't go anywhere, it's pointless, slow and mostly not interesting."

To be clear, Jack and Diane has nothing whatsoever to do with John Cougar Mellencamp's 1982 song of the same name. That song was a brilliant piece of Americana about two kids, a boy and a girl, growing up in Middle America. This movie is a disorganized piece of indie "realism" about two girls in New York who approach falling in love with one another. The problem is that the screenplay doesn't have enough confidence in its characters to develop them in a way that makes us care.

The major focus of the film is Diane (newcomer Juno Temple), a wide eyed Brit with a mop of blonde hair who chooses baby doll dresses to be her ever-present wardrobe. She's a cute girl who misbehaves, drinks to the point of vomiting and has frequent nosebleeds. The other girl is Jack (played by Riley Keough, the granddaughter of Elvis) a skate-boarding butch lesbian, a loner who finds something to like about the dysfunctional Diane.

The girls meet in a store one day and have a few shy, awkward exchanges before the moment is interrupted when Diane has another nosebleed. The relationship is mostly physical. We see them kissing, there are a few hints that they are thinking about sex, but the movie never really gets them there. What passes for romance is just a few scenes in which a mutual attraction. An attraction of personalities, however, never materializes because the movie doesn't really deal with emotions or teenage awkwardness.

There is something in these two girls that, in a better movie, might have made for a pure down-to-earth love story. The problem is that the screenplay won't have it. It keeps intercutting their budding relationship with a lot of episodic nonsense, like a silly scene in which Diane interrupts a date with Jack so that she can escape into the bathroom to shave her pubic area, or an early scene in which Jack is hit by a car which is never mentioned again.

There are lots of camera tricks and clever editing that take away from the underwritten characters, like the director's odd visual effect of a reoccurring microscopic image of something monstrous that is growing inside of Diane. It isn't clear what the manifestation is, maybe we're suppose to think that it is a physical rendering of her twisted feelings about Jack. We see internal organs with hair slithering tightly around them, but we are left to assume what that might be. We are led to believe that it is the manifestation of this new lifestyle but you're never really sure. The scenes are disgusting and fall on the story like a ton of bricks.

Those scenes seem to indicate that the filmmakers didn't know how to create characters with genuine emotions. The actresses playing the girls have screen presence but what they have to talk about is dull and uninteresting when it isn't being intruded upon by another dramatic element. The movie moves away from their relationship as an effort to keep from having to really deal with them. This is a very confused movie that leaves you scratching you're head when it's over.

There just aren't enough lesbian werewolf films, and Jack & Diane fills that niche. The story is paper-thin and involves a friendship between two teenagers that are werewolves? The werewolf aspect is so poorly integrated that it's hard to tell whether they are wolves, whether one turned the other into a wolf, or if it's just a visual manifestation. But beyond that, the acting is poor and there's no point to anything in the film. Jack & Diane is a monotonous piece of rubbish that has nothing to say.

I didn't quite get the significance of the ingrown hair bits. I was hoping to see a little more of Kylie Minogue stealing some scenes. The song Kylie sings ( Whisper ) , is quite lovely and haunting. Juno Temple & Riley Keough had my attention but I was lost on the plot. For a flick to check out about 2 young lovers trying to make out in New York I recommend the movie " Trick " .

This movie was trying to do too many things at one time but all the parts that didn't quite fit together were still lovely on their own.

Slow for 5 mins but decent movie

The titular characters, essayed by Keough and Temple, are two star-crossed lesbian teens who fall in love after a chance encounter in one of New York's hipper districts. "Hip" is the keyword for this film. Characters carry skateboards, hang out in tattoo parlors and generally look disillusioned, but in, like, a "hip" way.
Just for the hell of it we get a few dream sequences involving some sort of werewolf creature. I'm guessing this is meant to represent the girls' burgeoning sexuality ala 'Company of Wolves' but don't quote me on that. Despite this injection of weirdness, it's the straightest gay drama you'll see this year. Our heroes even have their own song, The Flying Pickets' 'Only You', used to far greater effect in Wong Kar Wai's 'Fallen Angels'.
If the characters weren't so damn irksome it wouldn't be a bad little romantic drama. Temple gives a great performance and is one to watch in the coming years. Unfortunately, director Gray seems intent on alienating as large an audience as possible.

Bradley Rust Gray is the guy who gave us The Exploding Girl back in 2009, that guerrilla mumblecore movie that I know has its fair share of hardcore fans out there and that has this seriously terrific performance from Zoe Kazan in it. Now weâ(TM)re getting his follow-up to that one with a film that, back when The Exploding Girl was making the rounds, I remember had Ellen Page and Olivia Thirlby attached to the lead roles, which sounded amazing. Now the roles are tackled by Juno Temple and Riley Keough and, while Iâ(TM)m certainly not assigning blame to them, the result is decidedly far from amazing.

I really am not assigning blame to those two actresses by the way, itâ(TM)s just that I loved the idea of Ellen Page and Olivia Thirlby reuniting so soon after Juno and whatnot. As for these two, I donâ(TM)t also assign blame because I like them, I think Juno Temple is bound to become a hot commodity sooner rather than later and even though I still donâ(TM)t have that much of an opinion of Elvisâ(TM) granddaughter, Ms. Keough, she has been in The Runaways and Magic Mike before this, and those were two damn good movies.

Let me tell you more or less what this film is all about. The movieâ(TM)s set in New York, much like The Exploding Girl was, and Jack (Ms. Keough) and Diane (Ms. Temple) are two teenage girls who meet and spend their first night in the throes of passion. Dianeâ(TM)s innocence slowly works her way under Jackâ(TM)s tough exterior, but then Jack finds out Diane is moving to Paris to pursue a degree in fashion she pushes her away. As Diane deals with her emotions, with love and fear, her body starts acting up on those emotions in really violent ways, as we get two girls that are ultimately just trying to find a way to make their young love last.

That basic stuff in that premise, by the way, is one I like and I could see becoming a really great film, but for some reason Jack and Diane sort of felt like Bradley Rust Gray wasnâ(TM)t as crazy with his own material (he also wrote this film). The stuff that happens when Diane has her emotions manifesting themselves in such frightening ways are of course loaded with metaphorical meaning, but a part of me felt that was unnecessary because all of those things were there in the story itself in its stripped down version.

Mr. Rust should really have just let his story be, trust both himself as a director as well as his pair of stars to be able to pull of a movie thatâ(TM)s essentially about what a young first love really feels like, about all the ups and downs that come with it, about the ecstasy and the confusion, about the fear and the adrenaline. That story is there, for sure, but itâ(TM)s too bogged down with one of its protagonists becoming a fucking werewolf to really come out and shine on its own, that metaphor for the wild feelings of young love being too much for the real story thatâ(TM)s there to really connect.

Yes, Diane becomes a werewolf. Yeah, you get it, their passion so deep it literally awakens something inside of her. That awakening, by the way, is actually done in these rather neat brief animated sequences done by the Brothers Quay. But not even that helps Mr. Rust, you just see him scrambling along, apparently not entirely sure if he wanted to go for the romance with some fantasy in it or with a gore movie with some sex sprinkled in. Disappointing when you consider how cohesive he made The Exploding Girl feel, and even more so when you consider the sublime performance he got from Zoe Kazan in that one and how his two leads here pale in comparison.

Again, thatâ(TM)s not a dig to the actresses. I mean, Ms. Keough doesnâ(TM)t have that much presence but I can see her eventually becoming quite the charming actress, plus I had fun just thinking how much she reminded me of Sigourney Weaver. And Ms. Temple is an actress who always does her job, and does it well, effortlessly conveying the anxiety and confusion of Diane. The thing is theyâ(TM)re not actresses who can elevate material like this, at least not yet. These are characters that arenâ(TM)t fully fleshed out and as a consequence these two actresses donâ(TM)t really know what to do with them and it all feels kind of stale.

Visually the film is what youâ(TM)d expect, something stylized as hell, kind of minimal and abstract and, much like the directorâ(TM)s previous effort, containing quite a few close-ups. It just didnâ(TM)t work me, as much as I honestly wanted to, I felt kind of bored because this was prime territory for a really intimate exploration of a lesbian relationship and these girls pretty much donâ(TM)t talk at all, and when they do you just donâ(TM)t feel it. Yes, it was awesome that the Brothers Quay went ahead and made the animated stuff, and while visually those are amazing they neither scare nor add that much depth to the narrative.

Yes, Jack and Diane is, undoubtedly, quite a curiosity of a movie, and maybe it will find itself a little cult audience if it all goes well. But to me it all just felt overly pretentious in a way, the pacing was just totally off and Bradley Rust Gray seemed like a director who had done a really interesting film before and now just didnâ(TM)t know what to do with the material he came up with. Interesting, for sure (I mean, teenage lesbian werewolf lovers, come on), thatâ(TM)s why Iâ(TM)ll check what he does next, but nothing to write home about (at least not in a good way).

Honestly, the most beautiful movie I have ever seen. Not only is it well made, it's real (minus the werewolf). The story follows what love really does to someone; it changes them. Real love hurts, no other movie could convey that so beautifully.