Good Dick.

Yes, I too laughed when I read the title, but surprisingly this isn't a porno. I'd be careful searching for this on google though, even with safe search on. This is probably a movie you've never heard of and it was released in 2008, so why am I even bothering to review this? Two reasons, first I love helping you guys discover new, good movies and secondly the romance genre is something I'm slowly discovering myself, because it is really one of the few genres of cinema I've left to explore and I love finding obscure little love stories like this. Enjoy!


Just to get this out of the way, the cinematography is pretty awful, I'm slightly better tuned than most to notice these things because the way my brain has been wired these last few years, but even without concentrating there is no denying the camera work is shit. That being said, most of it is normally well staged enough to allow you to ignore the subpar cinematography. This is a beautiful film.


Good Dick surprised me by being genuinely really funny. I explained in the past for reasons I don't really know, I find it very hard for a movie to make me laugh.  But this made me laugh within the first three minutes of its running time, it does get darker and heavier as the film goes and it becomes harder to tell what is comedy or not.

The film is surprisingly opinionated, it could simply be tossed aside as pretentious hipster pandering, much like the whole movie. But as a piece of introspection, it is interesting enough that I took notice. Despite these moments of introspection, this film is well written, the dialogue feels real and natural and is delivered by some great acting.

Good Dick is a love story much in the way 500 days of summer is a love story about a young awkward guy who works in a video store and lives in a car who becomes obsessed with a woman who regularly rents porn from his store and spends her time masturbating over them and looking at pictures of herself naked when she was a kid - this becomes clearly but is never explicitly explained in the last few minutes of the film. The two then form a bond over porn, sitting and watching it together.

The film really starts err on the side of creepy as it depicts how the video store guy (seriously the leads don't have names) goes about dealing with his feelings, I'm not sure if it is done for comedic effect because the guy is kinda weird and awkward, but I just found it creepy as he watches her masturbate, breaks into her flat and just wanders around outside, sends her porn films etc I don't know if this is like a critique that in this day and age romance is dead, but either way, this shit ain't romantic. He is basically a stalker. She isn't much better though, she is just very, very strange. And it actually makes it quite a difficult watch, being that both of the leads are so weird. How are we supposed to connect? Thankfully we learn that both of them are quite damaged, okay thankfully probably isn't the word I'm looking for, so it explains away some of the creepy weirdness but since the reveal is in like the last fifteen minutes of the film it still doesn't really make the strangeness of this film okay as you're experiencing it at the time, it just kinda makes it okay at the end, sorta.

I mean it gets so weird in places, I can't tell whether it is supposed to be a genuinely serious, dark scene or whether it is supposed to be funny. I mean the entire plot is basically straight out of some kind of horror thriller but for the most part seemingly played for laughs. I instead found this film in places, unsettling.

That isn't to say the entire piece is creepy as hell, there are some moments where it is genuinely charming, it's just a shame these scenes are so few and far between. Plus, there are some twists and revelations as the film plays out that make the film worth sitting through some of the weirder scenes. And some moments that are genuinely touching and powerful.

It is hard to explain, but this is such classic indie romance just in the way it is constructed, edited, the use of music and so on. For anyone who knows the genre, they know exactly where they are through visuals alone within moments. For people who like this genre, this is great, but I also recognise this could alienate as many viewers as it could welcome, casting it off as 'hipster bullshit'. I personally found at least on the level of construction, this movie to be very, very beautiful.

So do I recommend this? Good Dick? Good movie. This film is beautiful and is likely to satisfy any fan of the indie romance scene. That being said, the weirdness of the characters, the things they do and the events they share is likely to alienate everyone else. And possibly some of the indie romance film fans too. But I think even with how unsettling this film can be at times, it's worth persevering until the end, I'm sure you'll be left satisfied. Pun intended.

Think About It!

-Locke