Jaded

"Jaded" offers a premise with potential as it looks at the rape of a woman by two other women and ask the question "when is rape not rape?". Unfortunately the flick seems to suffer from bad direction as it slogs through legal minutia while trying to weave some kind of story with a handful of foul mouthed and poorly portrayed characters only to end abruptly. "Jaded" is lame stuff only for the bleary-eyed couch potato in the mood for some dark drama.

For a serious movie, the box cover for Jaded is all wrong. With moments of strong sexuality, the movie is not a sexual thriller but a drama. Still, with lack of experience from a first time director, Jaded falls short of anything serious. Carla Gugino is the main draw. Wanting to do a serious role, Gugino offers her naked body to draw a large audience to this movie. The acting, at times, is good. An interesting supporting role from Christopher Guest makes Jaded worth watching, from time to time. Still, Gugion's "assets" are the main attraction. Caryn Krooth's amateur film making loses any true drama that Jaded tries to create. The story and acting can only tell part of the story. With simple direction throughout the movie, the story is unable to progress to anything dramatic with a simple director behind the camera. At times, scenes are shot with only one, maybe two different shots. Whether this was an issue of time or budget, the style of direction loses its feel and reminds the audience that they are watching a low budget movie.

"Jaded" should not be considered as en erotic thriller because the sex scenes are not for viewing pleasure unlike movies like "Indecent Behavior" or "Friend Of The Family".

"Jaded" is not an easy watch as it's story is difficult to conceive and it's not that common in society. From the beginning of the movie, with the first scene, you expect more strong scenes.

The raping scene wasn't (in my opinion) a well created scene. I think that the director didn't use proper camera techniques overall in the movie. That's why it looks sometimes dull and becomes boring almost near the end.

The performances are extremely good from all the five female characters. These women gave strong, intense, but believable performances that demonstrate the actresses' dramatic abilities.

The legal concepts helped a lot to understand the plot's difficulty because the legal term of sodomy is different from a simple raping. From the point of view of Meg's defense, sodomy needs to be penalized as a raping (a huge crime grade B) although it's a different crime. Pat and Alex's defense claims that Meg enjoyed and asked for it. This is where the movie turns interesting to see who is trying to tell the truth. The only thing for sure is that the sex scene fits into a legal definition of a crime.

Watch "Jaded" if you like legal issues that aren't very common in your society. If not, give it a try because it's a very good and strong drama.

"Jaded" takes on the complex question of abuse: the perpetrators and the victims. In lesser hands it would have degenerated into an erotic thriller made for direct-to-video. This director, however, has managed to pull off a textured multi-layered study with a decidedly different point of view.

Given the fact that the director/writer is a woman and the main detective and D.A. are also women, this could have turned into a very anti-male film. It is not. To be a sexual predator IS gender neutral. The nudity of this film is not erotic. The rape is brutal not sexual. We are looking at victims and not titillation.

The gifted cast rings true. For a film that is so little known, I was surprised at the quality of the performances. They are good. Carla Gugino and Rya Kihlstedt are incredible.

Somehow, this film got lost. Perhaps it is too smart for its own good. It is a "should see". Highly recommend. A thinking person's sexual thriller.

Jaded starts out strong, but loses steam quickly and trails off into nothing. It raises a lot of interesting issues and then does nothing with them. Omitting the court scene at the end could be forgivable but leaving several loose ends without resolution was unsettling at best. Although for the most part those threads (such as what exactly the customers in the bar were paying $500 for) have fairly obvious conclusions, leaving them hanging in the air in that way robbed this movie of a satisfying conclusion. As it is it almost seems as if they ran out of money to film the courtroom scene and thus made a movie out of the investigation and then just tacked on a ending.

The low budget for this film was painfully apparent - it seems almost like a student film. I've seen better production values in porno. Which is puzzling since for the most part the actors involved are professionals that are recognizable from more superior efforts (such as Aida Turturro from the Sopranos). Along with any sense of flow, the director failed to elicit good performances from her actors that we know can do better, with the exception of Carla Gugino, who seemed to be acting in a different film with the intensity that she brought to her performance. She was unfortunately the only thing enjoyable about this movie with a strong premise but no follow through.

And shame on whoever commented that Carla was chunky - do women have to be anorexics with stick arms and legs to be acceptable? She's a gorgeous young woman and those kinds of comments are just ridiculous.