Jason Reitman’s latest film Men, Women & Children may not be a hit with critics – Rotten Tomatoes gives it a rating of only 31% — but he certainly went all out when filming it. As the young director told The Huffington Post he actually built a fully functional porn site for it.
The movie, which stars Adam Sandler and Jennifer Garner, is about how a group of high school teenagers and their parents deal with the many ways that the Internet has changed our daily lives, specifically in how we communicate and interact with others. This, of course, also includes on line pornography.
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“What do we do when we’re alone? First, we go online and look up a lot of things and we had to figure out a way to make that cinematic. But there’s a lot of sexuality to being alone, whether it’s physical or simply looking at stuff, ” Reitman said in a HuffPost Live interview Tuesday.
The director went on to explain that he gave someone the most unenviable job of just watching porn on line all day in order to create pages that would look authentic. This was part of the process of creating a realistic porn site that was used just for the film.
“We had to think of the internet as a location. Normally in a movie, you have to build a bedroom, a school classroom, a hallway, a restaurant, ” Reitman said. “And we had to do those things. But we spent more time, more money, more man hours building the actual internet that the actors were exploring.”
But all of the effort may have been for naught as the critics have hated the movie.
The Atlantic’s Christopher Orr calls it “a near-total misfire, by turns sour, preachy, facile, and pretentious.”
Business Insider said, “It’s a movie full of big, relevant ideas that all fail to make any impact due to the film’s lack of subtlety.”
And Steven Rea wrote in the Philadelphia Enquirer, “The only thing at all surprising about Men, Women & Children is the name on the director credit: Jason Reitman, who in Juno, Up in the Air, and even the oddball romance Labor Day, demonstrated a gift for bringing piercing humor to the darkest of situations. Somehow, though, the gravity of the subject here has sunk him – like a suicide with rocks in his pockets, jumping off a bridge.”
