Kissing Jessica Stein

It's a romantic comedy, a friendship comedy, a brand new take on the single girl in Manhattan and a groundbreaking queer love story all at the same time! An exploration of the different kinds of love and connection people need. I dare you not to relate to hopelessly single Jessica Stein who decides to finally do what fed-up straight women have been threatening to do for ages: just switch to girls! Add in a handful of Jewish guilt and **young Jon Hamm** and you've got an absolutely adorable film. I've seen it many times and it never loses its charm!

I've wanted to watch this movie for a long time, but time has passed and I've always pushed for later. Well, it finally happened, and I'm glad it did.

Basically what I have to say, trying to avoid spoilers, is that the script (more specifically the dialogues) and the work of the actors are really incredible, two very talented actresses and little known to me until then, the direction is very competent, the soundtrack is quite pleasant, only the story itself is silly and forgettable, as well as the plot has some flaws and an ending with no guts in my opinion (to say that the ending has no guts is a spoiler?). So, basically, it's a movie that is worthwhile for the pleasantness of the dialogues and scenes and for the work of interpretation than for the inane story itself.

I even went to get more information about the actresses' work after this film, but one of them almost didn't work anymore and the other one only did some second-rate work. I don't know if somehow there was some prejudice with the theme of "Kissing Jessica Stein" that prevented them from taking off professionally, which would be really a shame, because they did a beautiful job here.

Overall a cute movie, 6.5 out of 10.

I really enjoyed this movie. It was hilarious, and very familiar at some degree. Everything in the movie went well until the end. I honeslty wish it would have turned out a little differnet then it did, but otherwise, it was funny, and very touching.

Jessica Stein (Jennifer Westfeldt) is a hopelessly single gal in the city. Her Jewish mother Judy (Tovah Feldshuh) is very concern. Everybody is getting married and moving on. She has nothing but bad dates. She thinks she's getting set up with Charles (Jon Hamm) but he's actually taken. At the group diner date, co-worker Josh Meyers (Scott Cohen) insults her with biting insights and cruelty. Helen Cooper (Heather Juergensen) is a bisexual art gallery assistant who places an intriguing personal ad. Jessica decides to answer it.

Westfeldt is playing the neurotic city girl. It's her goto move. It's cute. It's awkward. It has some fun. It's not particularly profound. It feels like a straight person's vision of a gay relationship. Everybody's life is different. I can buy into this relationship. It just pushes too hard with too many cute moments with cute awkward Westfeldt. It feels too light weight when the material keeps begging to be darker. It feels too much like a TV sitcom for too long.

I would like to begin by saying that this is most definitely not a bad a movie. For anyone starved by the vapid potboilers showing today, this movie offers a refreshing change. What it does not do, however, is distinguish itself in any positive way.

My main complaint with this film is its vapid intellectualism. Quoting famous authors and using lots of fancy (even foreign) words is all good in principle, but when you fail to capture the secular humanism that all great art and literature represent you might as well be reading a McDonald's menu. To illustrate this, Jessica begins the film at a job she hates and with only the memories of a failed relationship. She ends the film in another job she hates and with only the memories of another failed relationship. Where is the personal growth? Why are we watching this? The person that wrote this story seems to believe that simply because one relationship was hetero and the other homosexual, this somehow makes things different. I do not draw such distinctions.

Another thing I did not like about the film was its poor characterizations. The arguments in the film are so trivial that it depends on deep characters to make us believe they are real. I mean anyone that requires literature to get into the act of sex is really missing the point! From a masculine point of view the entire sexual experimentation shown in the film is as bland and uninteresting as the men Jessica is shown dating.

One last comment I would like to make is that the thing this movie does best is bring itself down. Routinely Jessica is told, "You're too obsessed with perfection in others", and that is exactly true for the entire film. She is also told "you're too conservative sexually for this kind of lifestyle", and this is true as well. What I would like to see is some kind change in Jessica to identify with these issues. To use a quote, "we must learn to be happy because of and not in spite of our flaws". Rent Manhattan for a true thinking person's film, and leave this on the shelf.