Culture Blues

The Instant Movie Club: Good Dick

Every week, your friends at Culture Blues get together to watch a movie from their Netflix Instant queue. Then, they sit down over popsicles to discuss what they’ve just been through. This is The Instant Movie Club.

This week, we’ll be discussing Marianna Palka’s oddly humorous romance Good Dick, starring Jason Ritter and Palka herself. If you haven’t seen it yet, you probably want to turn back now. The below discussion contains heavy spoilers.

Next Week: Franklyn – featuring Ryan Phillippe, British parallel realities and something or someone called Wormsnakes.

Jeff Hart: Here’s the skinny on Good Dick:  it’s billed as an indie romantic comedy. The box art is colorful and cartoonish, and depicts lead actress/writer/director Marianna Palka pressing a kiss on co-star Jason Ritter. Going by that, and the cutesy description of the vulnerable girl with a penchant for softcore porn being wooed by an outgoing boy, one could take Good Dick as a typical indie quirkfest. And, it sort of is. Except, that sweet kiss Palka is laying on Ritter in the cover art? It never really happens. Instead, in one of the movie’s funniest and simultaneously disturbing scenes, she simulates raping him from behind.

So, there’s that.

The beginning is generic sensitive indie bullshit; Palka is stand-offish and intriguing, and thus Ritter is forced to insanely pursue her because that’s what emo indie boys with hair in their eyes do. Yawn. Then, jumping to the end, the film inexplicably ties its big, unnecessarily dramatic payoff to a cameo appearance by Tom Arnold, whose natural smarminess is surprisingly useless during his underwhelming turn as Palka’s rapist father. What I’m saying here is that the first fifteen minutes and the last fifteen minutes pretty much blow. That’s like one-third of the movie.

Luckily, the other two thirds are pretty darn entertaining. When Ritter and Palka are feeling out their burgeoning relationship, Good Dick is fun in a dark, dark way. Ritter’s dopey innocence is a great foil to Palka’s schizophrenic vitriol. Their chemistry is great, yet the weirdness of the whole thing is definitely going to turn off the normals. Good Dick is unflinching about the sexual damage that’s been done to Palka, yet manages to make that funny. If you’re the kind of person that didn’t get a laugh out of Ritter screaming “This is not rape!” then you’re probably hopeless. Or unromantic.

On a personal note, my favorite part of Good Dick came after the screening at the Culture Blues office, when contributor Zach Falk announced that he wished he was in a relationship like that. Fucking weirdo!

Jeremiah White: First of all, I completely agree that the DVD box art really gives no indication what you're in for.

I didn't find the early portion generic at all. Palka isn't simply stand-offish; she's militantly anti-social. She would scare off just about anyone. And Ritter didn’t strike me as an emo indie boy with hair in his eyes. He's currently living in his car and his eagerness to spend the night at Palka's right from the jump (despite the fact that she is still in militant anti-social mode) raises serious questions about his intentions.

Jeff pretty accurately describes the middle portion of the film. It's incredibly focused on their growing relationship. The ups and down of this process are surprising, amusing and painful, rather than contrived and predictable, as in most movies.

I also wasn't bothered by the ending at all. I think calling it unnecessarily dramatic is not entirely unfair, but for me it mostly served to explain why Palka was the way she was. This is done in a single scene, much the same way that Ritter's backstory is explained in one scene earlier in the film. I thought that the rest of the movie was pretty restrained in terms of "drama," so I was willing to allow them a little indulgence. I'd also be lying if I said it didn't affect me emotionally, so I guess that helps.

"Restraint" seems an apt way to characterize Palka's writing and directing. She isn't prone to unnecessary exposition or flashy camera work. She noticeably sticks with one static shot for at least two key scenes, completely eschewing cuts and close ups. She wisely allows the two central performances, Ritter’s and her own, to tell the story.

In the end, it looks an awful lot like a quirkfest, but I think that label unjustly minimizes what is actually a pretty unique movie. Many movies feature a guy trying to break down a girl’s tough exterior, but that process has never been this slow, trying and realistic. The end of the film features a pretty big leap when Palka finally seems ready to open up to Ritter, but the process is far from over as we all know it’s not like they’re about to go home and have a serious bangfest.

Jason Arican: I liked the end in general and, specifically, really enjoyed the last scene. The movie boils down to two people that just really like each other, which is a nice moment in an otherwise incredibly weird relationship. Like Jeremiah said, though, it's not like they are about to go home and bang like rabbits. In fact, I'd really like to see what happened when they do get home. She probably shuts him down in epic fashion!

I also felt like the conversation with Tom Arnold was important. Not because it was Tom Arnold (in spite of it, really), but because it felt like the first time she was able to effectively speak in sentences and thoughts that made sense. Remember how much of a breakthrough it was for her to simply repeat "hello" to that old lady? I was amazed she was able to do her hair, let alone tell her father to piss off.

The movie drags when we are forced to watch an awkward man-fight between Jason Ritter and his friend, Eric. It doesn't matter that Ritter used to be an addict; he's just a weird dude to me, I don't care to know why.

And I was not at all a fan of the way these very important scenes were shot. It's tense times like this that you need to see emotion and Palka denies us of that.

Also- did anyone pick up on how exactly the title Good Dick came to be? That was lost on me.

Jeremiah White: I certainly don't think there is anything in the movie that directly relates to "good dick." I think that it somehow relates to how guys believe that some "good dick" can fix the sexual dysfunctions of women. Or more broadly, how we as a society believe that there is good sex and good dick. I would say this movie argues that basically good sex is with someone you love. I don't know, I never found a good answer for this question. But I found the title sort of inexplicable, yet oddly fitting.

Jeff Hart: I'm pretty sure it's called Good Dick because of Jason Ritter's awesome dick. Yes, it could have just as easily been called Awesome Dick. For starters, we know it is huge and, at least at some points, that he is capable of excellent boner control. But also, like Jeremiah alludes to, it is also the metaphorical "good dick" that will save Palka from her solitary existence. Basically, Jason Ritter's penis is the first step on the road to recovery.

Zachary Falk: Maybe "Good Dick" was the phrase Tom Arnold whispered into Palka's ear to seduce her as a child. Or maybe a "Good Dick" was the only thing Palka thought was missing from her favorite naked little girl, whom we are repetitively forced to glance at on her computer, ourselves a second layer of voyeur. What if they put THAT image as the cover art?!? By the way, check out this equally misleading poster art for the movie.

Despite the fact that Ritter's dick is the subject of a few scenes, the "dick" in the title could refer more to a sort of everyman, a generically good guy which Ritter plays (despite qualities here and there that make us question his intent). It's important to note that we refer to them as Palka and Ritter in this thread because the character names in the credits are "Man" and "Woman," seemingly emphasizing a kind of normality within them despite their incredibly fucked up personas. Jason summarizes this effect with his comment that "the movie boils down to two people that just really like each other".

I think this point is also behind my alarming, post-viewing comment that prompted Jeff to look up in-network psychoanalysts in the Culture Blues health plan on my behalf. The comment was stoked in a "whole is better than the sum of its parts" analysis of the relationship between the two main characters. Would I want my girlfriend to tell me I'm ugly? No. Would I want a victorious bet for my girlfriend to mean I'm not allowed to talk when I come over? No. Would I want my girlfriend to randomly come up and pretend to fuck me from behind at the kitchen table while I'm reading the sports section? Maybe....well, no. But as mentioned, the genuine enjoyment the two seemed to get out of their time together seems enviable.

Bringing out the basic building blocks of a relationship in this instance of an intricate psychological match seems to work well with the cinematic simplicity Jeremiah mentions. I loved the fact that most scenes took place in one of two places: Palka's bare-bones LA office style condo or the video store where Ritter works. That choice also really helped us to become comfortable in the setting and focus further on the uncomfortable nature of the characters. While I'd rather the backstories of each character either be explored more or not at all (rather than in a couple token scenes) I suppose I can agree that those couple parts go a long way, along with the conversations with Ritter's tight-knit nitwit co-workers, toward contextualizing the film's place in the world we actually do know, as opposed to the one of an agoraphobic schizophrenic. Though I believe contributor John Burgman is familiar with this underworld, and it would be enlightening to have him weigh in on the comments thread.....

Next Week: Franklyn

Tagged as: good dick, jason ritter, marianna palka, netflix instant queue, sexual dysfuntion