You won't be disappointed!

The Worst Film Ever

Just perfect...

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

This movie is already over 15 years old and I am surprised I never saw it or heard about it because it was pretty good. It is about a woman that has no luck with men and answers an ad of another woman that she finds interesting. While being straight this starts to develop into a relationship.The acting in the movie is really good. The main characters also wrote it. Surprised not to see much acting on Heather Juergensen's IMDb as she was really good, but I guess she stayed in writing.And it is because of the writing that I liked the movie so much. The dialogues are great. I loved the argument they had when Jessica didn't invite Helen to brother's wedding. The talk Helen had with her gay friends. The conversation Jessica had with her mother. There was a lot of good writing.There are many small characters that are also a delight and adding a lot in the few scenes where they appear. I loved Grandma Esther, and this is the only acting credit of Esther Wurmfeld! Kevin Sussman also made me laugh a lot in his dating scene.The ending doesn't seem to be a typical happy ending but I loved them nonetheless. They break up because after all Jessica isn't gay and sex doesn't work. But they are best friends so this doesn't go away. Helen finds a woman to be happy with and Jessica meets Josh again and now that she found out more about herself and being happy it may even work out.A very creative and outstanding rom com.

Relationships are complicated things. Sometimes even messy. When does a "friendship" cross the boundary line and become a "relationship?" Can it? Will it work? What do we do when we find that the relationships we've been involved in are unsatisfying, and we want - more. Of something? "Kissing Jessica Stein" explores the complicated nature of relationships and it does so in a very mature and thoughtful way. The very nature of the story could have lent itself to the movie becoming a sort of slapstick comedy. Jessica (Jennifer Westfeldt) is a terminally single young woman in New York City. Her mother (Tovah Feldshuh) is constantly trying to find the right Jewish man for her, but none of the relationships click. Then, seemingly out of the blue and on a whim, Jessica responds to a personal ad from Helen (Heather Juergensen), whose looking for "friendship and possibly more." Helen wants the experience of being with a woman, Jessica's looking for the connection. They meet, and the movie charts the course of their relationship, and it does so both well and tastefully.Although it obviously is the engine driving the movie forward, the lesbianism angle is never really the front and centre issue. It's the development of the relationship, and the way in which the people around both Jessica and Helen react as the relationship cautiously becomes more open: from Helen's gay male friend who sees this as a betrayal of the gay community because he doesn't think either Helen or Jessica are really gay, to the very touching scene with Jessica's mother in which she basically tells Jessica that she just wants her to be happy with whoever can do that. But the awkwardness is always front and centre - especially the awkwardness between the two leads. I thought that Westfeldt and Juergensen had a great on-screen chemistry, and a part of that chemistry was the ability to showcase the awkwardness. This began as an experiment for Helen, but in the end she wanted something deeper, more passionate and long-lasting. For Jessica, everything began cautiously - and it's hard to know exactly what she wanted. Did she just want a friend, with some intimacy mixed in, or did she want an actual relationship? A partner to share her life with? It was interesting to watch the evolution, and to wait to discover if this was going to have a "happily ever after" ending or not.I was happy that this didn't turn out to be a lame comedy. It had that potential, but turned out to be at times humorous but always sensitive. I was also glad that it wasn't a "message" movie. I never had the sense of having any sort of agenda pushed at me. It was just an account of two people struggling through a relationship that was both fulfilling and awkward for both of them for various reasons. It's a bit dated by now, almost 12 years after it first appeared. Does anybody really use personal ads to meet someone anymore? But update that in your head, and pretend that they met online, and this still has a fresh and satisfying feel to it. (6/10)

Scott Cohen and especially Heather Juergensen were absolutely fantastic in this film! How is it possible that this movie is the ONLY acting credit listed for each of them on IMDb? A crime against nature! A great, funny, moving film. Everyone in the cast was excellent, the film was shot beautifully, and the writing was sharp, crisp and laugh-out-loud funny on numerous occasions. As a professor of psychology, I plan on adding this film to the many I show in my Human Sexuality classes at grad schools here in Los Angeles. One quibble: the film felt oh-so-complete once we reached the dancing montage after Jessica and Helen were finally able to negotiate their way to a mutually satisfying partnership, along with the support of family and friends...I would have much preferred the film ending here. The subsequent scenes felt a tad pandering (to dominant hetero-normative discourses), but small complaint in response to a really terrific film.

Lets face it, more than a few female Jewish thirtysomethings in Manhattan take a stopwatch to bed to time the length of their orgasms, then ask their therapists to evaluate the mechanism of the watch, rather than the act itself, or the person with whom it was conducted.There are plenty of neurotics around, but sometimes, just sometimes, a film like this makes you feel, well, a little neurotic about them. One Woody Allen is enough.Jennifer Westfeldt and Heather Juergensen get off with each other, the former, apparently because she finds most guys emotionally retarded or losers, the latter, because she is sleeping around in an unfulfilled manner. So far so good. But these women are supposedly intellectual and creative, the "decent" guy who secretly fancies her even quotes Anais Nin, implying Jessica's search for perfection relates to her perception of it, rather than perfection itself.Beyond the schmaltz and warm family scenes, particularly pleasing when Jess's mother acknowledges she knows she is with another woman, there are few home truths and little analysis of the human condition. The best vignette ended on the cutting room floor - Jackie Hoffman, who works in the same newspaper officer as our heroine, has settled down with a NJB (nice Jewish boy) and will forgo wild sex as she adapts to motherhood; she kisses Helen (Juergensen) on the mouth during a stairwell assignation at the wedding, you can see waves crashing on the beach as she experiences a taste of the medicine from this femme fatale, who has transformed Jessica's life.The two stars, who also wrote this piece, have excellent chemistry together and the ending is not as bad - or clichéd - as some would suggest. But this wasn't exactly the Jewish penicillin I'd hoped for, mind you, I might start reading Anais Nin again.