On the Doll

In Los Angeles, Jaron "Jizz" (Josh Janowicz) is a needy teenager that was molested when he was a child and works publishing advertisements for the sex industry. He discounts one hundred dollars in his paychecks to release Tara (Angela Sarafyan), who works in a peep cabin in Paulie's, for the powerful lord of the sex industry Jimmy Sours (Paul Ben-Victor). He teams-up with the whore Balery (Brittany Snow), who is seeking out a partner to steal a rich client, to raise the necessary money to pay Jimmy. Mr. Garrett (Eddie Jemison) is the perverted Health teacher of a high-school; his sluttish students Melody (Candice Accola) and Courtney (Chloe Dumont) like to tease him, crossing their legs while wearing mini-skirts to see him masturbating in his car. Mr. Garrett takes them to join the Internet porn industry and to use pills, and Melody is raped by the sick teacher. The escort Chantel (Shanna Collins) attends kinky clients to satisfy their fantasies and is protected by her pimp Wes (Clayne Crawford). When Wes tries to force the entry in a client's house, the man reacts and the lives of the lead characters are entwined in a tragedy.

"On the Doll" is a dark movie with a confused screenplay that recalls the style of "Crash" about perversions and sex industry that ends in tragedies. The characters in general are poorly developed like, for example, Tara. Is she the girl from Jaron's dream that felt off the roof on the sidewalk? The sympathetic Jaron is under therapy learning to take care of himself and his characters is reasonably developed. Mel and Courtney provoked the situation with their teacher acting like sluts. And Chantel and Wes are the less interesting characters. It is great to see Theresa Russell still very beautiful and elegant since I am a fan of this underrated actress. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Prazeres Proibidos" ("Forbidden Pleasures")

A larded use of content considered taboo and shocking by the general populace with plenty of oddly written dialog coming at you wrapped in artistic pretension. On The Doll serves to exploit a serious issue. Pedophilia, molesters, right along side with their abused children are all here on the plate as entertainment. Though the editing is well executed its the opposite of being a '"star vehicle" for Brittany Snow. The other actors give us their best student like performances. Yes, this film is terrible but not in the fun way. The end leaves one wondering what is the exact personal problem(s)of writer/director Thomas Mignone to take such an interest here.

Heard this was the bad joke of the Austin Film Fest. After reviewing this for myself its more then easy to see why. First off the script comes across as being written by a dirty old man enjoying himself more then the audience would ever as he imagines the lives of low life uncared for teenagers. . The 99% untried actors try to handle the unlikely all over the place creepy fantasy but there are problems to the right and left.

They should mention the cheap background sets in the description on the cover of the DVD. One was supposed to be an eatery that was clearly someones house. Most of the rest were pretty terrible. I'm probably going to have to say its the only fun part of the cheap movie to watch. Unless your a deviant who gets off on watching abused children I'd stay away of this. I thought it would be decent quality..i was wrong.

This film is dark, sick and scary, I assume for the most part it does accurately describe parts of the sex industry and the damaged people who choose and yes I say choose to live in it. I find it very telling that most people in the industry either are screwed up going in or become screwed up while they are a part of it. What is it that attracts damaged people and also what is it that turns descent people into the scum of this earth. OK, back to the film, it seems to represent this lifestyle well, but still not the into the depth of say a Boogie Nights. The actors are of much lower quality and at times you feel that things are on screen just to shock you and not to add anything to the characters or storyline. Then there is what I call the Crash effect, let me explain, since the film Crash came out (one of the best films of all-time if you ask me) many films have tried to imitate the conversation storyline style and none have done it well or anything close to as well as Crash did. This film is no exception of this, it tries to hard to connect it's characters to the point where it just loses any kind of realism factor. Now I don't mind being surprised by a films end or how it connects it's characters when it's good and it works, this is not that. Overall an OK film that does take on some controversial issues without being overly graphic, but the actors and director tried to hard to make it more poignant then it was.

To start off with, I'm habitually bad at objectively rating movies. I know this, my wife knows this, and everyone around me knows this. I'm the kind of guy at the theater that likes a movie but can't explain why. If I like a movie, I like it 100% - and if I hated it, I'll recommend against people watching it.

"On the Doll" was the first movie I ever actually watched that I felt I could objectively rate and comment on without throwing some over-the-top rating to it. There's a LOT of reference to sex, but virtually no nudity. The theme is based around this post-high school, "grunge" style of direction that seems to be rampant amongst the college generation. In other words, the director tries to set the stage for the film on the backdrop of a sub-culture that many people are unaware of. He does this from three different angles: The Prostitute, The Teenagers, and the Hero.

Now, from the premise of the movie - we were supposed to be inundated with life revolving around people who were sexually abused as young kids. Honestly - I found this part of the movie very lacking, and not that I wanted them to explore this verbatim, but I would have liked the back stories to go a bit more in depth. In the end, it left the idea of the movie and the characters stagnant at best. For saying this was the main premise of the movie - you don't really get a look into how they seem to feel about what happened to them. Book after book has been written on the subject from people who have been abused, and I think if you were going to use that as the focal point of a movie - you would, in the least, spend time going over the mental backlash that such atrocities would inflict on young minds.

The director spent more time trying to play a catch and grab game with the audience - that in my opinion, failed miserably. There were certain characters you absolutely hate, others that you love and respect, and some you feel indifferent about. The fact is, if this movie could be rated as half-way decent, it's because of the acting.

In the end, I think it's safe to say that the movie ended quite abruptly and didn't really seem to accomplish much. The character development was strong, and I feel like each story told a very different tale of life in the "sex lane" - but to elude that this movie in anyway represented victims of abuse is just a tag line to get people to watch it. This was a quaint drama with opposing forces mixed in that didn't really accomplish much of anything.

I went into this expecting good things, but was left slightly dissatisfied and felt the presence of good, upcoming young actors was all that saved it from being horrid.

4/10