Four days ago (9.17) I mentioned that I had seen Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin‘s Splitsville (Neon, now playing), a freestyle, marital infidelity, fuck-everything-and-everyone sitcom.
I didn’t exactly “like” it because the schlubby-looking, bordering-on-homely Covino and Marvin play the two sexually active male leads, and that’s a stopper right there. Especially with their significant others being played by the seriously fetching Dakota Johnson and Adria Arjona, who in real life wouldn’t give guys who look like Covino and Marvin the time of day, much less kiss or fuck them.
You can’t expect an Average Joe with a suburban upbringing and more or less conventional standards (i.e., me) to watch an indie sex farce of this sort and go “yeah, I can relate to these half-ugly, dweeby-looking guys in their early 40s…that could be me up there!…show me a curly-haired guy in a pair of dorky-looking brown shorts and sneakers and a moss-green polo shirt…a guy who takes a shower early on, allowing us to contemplate his milky white skin, narrow shoulders, slight pot belly and prosthetic schlong…you can’t expect me to relate to this shit, man…you can’t!
“Because in my head I’m Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor or at least I used to be that in my prime, and that’s the kind of guy I want to see married to the thirtysomething Dakota Johnson or engaged to Adria Arjona.”
Boiled down, I don’t want to know about homely guys in any sexual context at all. Fair?
But I did laugh with Splitsville a few times, particularly during a sloppily destructive, drawn-out fight scene between Covino qnd Marvin…an exquisitely clumsy fight scene that could’ve been choreographed by a Buster Keaton wannabe in the mid ’20s. And I did find Splitsville unusual and semi-diverting and therefore tolerable. I certainly didn’t dislike it.
Wiki bullet: “Splitsville is a 2025 American comedy film that follows two couples whose friendship erupts into conflict when the husband of the divorcing couple sleeps with the wife of the open marriage couple. It is directed by Michael Angelo Covino, from a screenplay he co-wrote with Kyle Marvin. It stars Dakota Johnson, Adria Arjona, Michael Angelo Covino, Nicholas Braun, David Castañeda, O-T Fagbenle, Charlie Gillespie and Simon Webster. Johnson is also one of the film’s producers.
Splitsville premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on 5.19.25. It was released by Neon in limited theaters on 8.22.25, before expanding wide on 9.5.25.
“Schlumpies and Dumpies,” posted on 2.11.15:
Standards of hotness change over time. I’ve said more than a few times (most recently in an HE piece posted on 8.15.14) that sexual attractiveness standards have definitely evolved in favor of the notties over the last…oh, 10 or 12 years. We’re now living in an age, partly if not largely perpetrated by the films and scenarios of producer-director Judd Apatow, in which Schlumpies and Dumpies have been sold to the public as the kind of people you want to go out with, go home with, get married to, etc.
When I was in my 20s and carousing around Schlumpies and Dumpies got no action whatsoever. They stayed home, watched TV, wept in their beds, jerked off, etc. But today they make out. If a bearded guy in an Apatow movie has bigger breasts than Cameron Diaz and a dumpy milky-white body with eight or nine pimples on his fat white ass…cool! If a lead actress looks like one of the Andrews Sisters but with somewhat wider or heavier facial features…crazy mama!
I grew up in a world in which conventionally attractive or semi-attractive people used to be the ones who got laid the most often.
Here’s how I almost put it last August about the Apatow change: “Put simply, guys who got the girl used to look like guys who got the girl. And girls who attracted a lot of guys used to look like girls who attracted a lot of guys. But no longer. By today’s standards any homely or marginal or bearded, overfed, gross-looking guy or girl can hook up with good-looking types and nobody bats an eyelash.
“Movies have been a thriving industry for a little over a century now, and for most of this period romantic male leads were cut from a certain cloth. There are two categories, of course — studly, straight-arrow romantic leads (everyone from Cary Grant to Van Johnson to William Holden to Steve McQueen to Ben Affleck to Brenton Thwaites) to less studly, mostly pleasing but less-than-drop-dead sexy romantic male also-rans or “best friends” (i.e., Ralph Bellamy in the ’30s, Wendell Corey in the ’50s).
“Romantic male leads used to be guys whom (a) women could pleasurably imagine going to bed with and/or marrying, and (b) straight guys recognized as superior alpha males with excellent genes. But Apatow has stepped in and said ‘fuck all that superior genes stuff….schlubby genes are actually pretty nice.’
“What’s changed is not only the quality of the alphas but the romantic also-rans — i.e., the guys who never got the girl. Over the last decade or so the rise of cheap digital cinema and…whatever, the Sundance Film Festival aesthetic plus downswirling GenY-ish attitudes plus a few Apatow-perpetrated scenarios have ushered in a politically correct notion that dweeby, dorky-looking guys or less-than-drop-dead-knockout girls (i.e., Lena Dunham being the standard-bearer) are just as acceptable in a romantic context as anyone else.”