On the Doll

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

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.

This movie basically tries to expose the "dark side" of the sex industry, but it does so in a decidedly PG-13 and completely (and at times laughably) implausible manner.

There are three interweaving stories here. One involves a young adult sex abuse survivor named "Jizz" who works at a print sex magazine because he is trying to buy the freedom of a physically crippled childhood friend who works in a peep show booth. Even assuming there are any peep shows still around, it's pretty hard to believe that in Hollywood--a town full of struggling, adult actresses--they would have to resort to keeping a physically disabled sex slave, who never actually seems to take off her clothes. Anyway, "Jizz" gets together with another prostitute (Brittany Snow), who also never takes off her clothes and doesn't seem to have to do anything more degrading than tie up a john and punch him in the gonads. It's not COMPLETELY unbelievable that some pervert would pay a girl hundreds of dollars to tie him up and punch him in the nuts, but this idiot also happens to be a mob "bag man" who's carrying thousands of dollars with him at the time!

Another story involves two "high school" girls who are both implausibly mature-looking and unbelievably naive and stupid. They get preyed upon by a ridiculously evil teacher (if this guy had a moustache he'd be twirling it). A real teacher these days would probably be fired for even having two students in his car, yet we're supposed to believe this guy can drive female students to porn shoots, masturbate in the street while they flash their panties, feed them drugs, and worse, yet they can't tell their parents, the cops, or their fricking school principal because "no one will believe" them. The only halfway believable story involves a young couple trying to save up money for marriage. She's another prostitute who apparently never has to take off her clothes or perform actual sex acts, and he's her pimp/driver.

There's nothing wrong with condemning the modern-day sex industry; it's just that nothing in this film remotely resembles the REAL-LIFE modern day sex industry. And I know that having a lot of sex and nudity might have made this film kind of hypocritical given the dim view it takes on the sex trade, but it also might have made it slightly less boring and worthless. The PG-13 content is just one more element that serves to make this movie the steaming crock of laughable bullsh*t that it is.

Just saw the film and still can't make my mind about it.

while it seems to raise a painful picture of sexual deviancy, and its effect on the main characters it's not deep enough to make the point it tries to make. The main visual representation of the idea is a misfired bullet from a gun (phallic symbol, no doubt) that lands with unforeseen result and causing mayhem, looks a bit student-like, and makes the film seem manipulated and even shallow. However, being an important subject, illustrating modern western moral decay through sexual decadence is an important one, it has some redeeming values. However, that massage as portrayed is quite coarse and unrefined. On top of that the acting is pretty bad all around. This looks like a pretty good student film that deals with an important subject, and I hope it's makers move on to better scripts. On the whole I would say that it is worth watching but not the best of it's kind.