Dating Games People Play (2005)

Directed by: Stefan Marc | 90 minutes | comedy, romance | Actors: Austin Peck, Leslie Bega, Stefan Marc, Stephanie Brown, Michael Luckerman, Herb Armstrong, Jan Hoag, Rick Scarry, Andrew Lauer, Ralph Diner, Andrea Grano, Keisuke Hoashi, Dennis Lau, James Kiriyama-Lem, Cheryl Klein, Karin Co, Dante Spencer

In 2005 the low-budget romcome ‘Dating Games People Play’ by debuting director/screenwriter Stefan Marc completed an impressive list of (American) film festivals, where there were even nominations and honorable mentions. About seven years later, the film was released on DVD for the first time. The film tries to paint a comical, but at the same time realistic picture of the dating scene, without romanticizing it. Unfortunately that doesn’t always work. However, you can feel that ‘Dating Games People Play’ is made with the best of intentions. Sometimes there is something lurking that you think might be based on the writer’s experiences, but the intensely lame humor (mostly ambiguities) detracts a lot from this brave attempt at a non-standard romantic comedy.

The messy start doesn’t make it clear who should get our attention, but ‘Dating Games People Play’ revolves around Nick Jenkins (Austin Peck), who bangs his wife-to-be in the first scene of the film. Initially he expects that his parents will resent him, but nothing turns out to be less true: they advise him to enjoy his years as a bachelor and his father compares relationships with the difference between buying and leasing a car, whereby his preference is of course to lease goes out. “If you’re tired of the old model, you just exchange it for a new one”. Nick takes this advice to heart, but then Mona Evans (Leslie Bega) enters his life.

Mona, like her friend Robin (Stephanie Brown), has had enough of looking for the right one. The fact that countless failed dates with men have become very distasteful to them, because there is always something wrong with the men. Either they are digging in their hollow teeth, or they have forgotten their wallets when it comes to checkout, or what everyone has used is calculated to the penny.

At first Nick seems to have found a nice pastime in Mona, when she chats about her work, he realizes that he should not forget to take the car to the garage – Mona interprets his silence as ‘he is a good listener’ . Meanwhile, Robin and Nick’s roommate Jed Rollins (played by the director himself) also become interested in each other.

On the one hand, ‘Dating Games People Play’ is a film that takes a mature approach to problems in budding relationships, but unfortunately the filmmaker found it necessary to make intensely lame and ambiguous jokes. The way Mona eats an ice cream leaves little to the imagination and there are more moments like that, where the viewer is misled and thinks of something sexual, but in which it is something very innocent. Very adolescent.

The acting is also not the strongest point of the film. The dialogues come across as very unnatural and at a certain point you start to get disturbed by the conversations, especially those between Robin and Mona: as if girlfriends don’t talk about anything other than the men in their lives! Had Stefan Marc omitted the bland humor and focused more on the performances of his actors, ‘Dating Games People Play’ would have become an original romantic comedy. He has a clean task ahead of him on his next project.