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Dexter: The Seventh Season

There's no way to discuss the seventh and penultimate season of Showtime's hit Dexter without acknowledging how the previous year ended. Therefore, if you haven't finished the sixth season, stop reading now. You've got work to do.
05/21/2013 | Comments 0

Nightfall

As Simon Lam gets older, he gets better. The veteran actor has appeared in such in seminal HK action films of the 1990s as Once Upon a Time in China (opposite Jet Li) and Bullet in the Head (directed by John Woo); in the aughts, he graced audience and critical favorites Election and Ip Man.
05/20/2013 | Comments 0

Grand Duel

Lee Van Cleef enjoyed a secondary career in Italy cranking out spaghetti Westerns, with little regard to quality. However, 1972’s Grand Duel — aka The Big Showdown — is deserving of its Grand label. No wonder Quentin Tarantino borrowed its sweeping theme song by Luis Bacalov for Kill Bill; you'll recognize it in two notes.
05/20/2013 | Comments 0

The Last Stand

Early in The Last Stand, the small-town sheriff played by Arnold Schwarzenegger says, "It's my day off. Should be a quiet weekend." That's the new way of saying, "I've got one week to retirement," because it signals — with flashing neon and everything — that life is going to royally upend those plans.
05/17/2013 | Comments 0

Texas Chainsaw

One of the most inconsistent franchises in movie history is the one beget by Tobe Hooper's 1974 classic, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. How does one follow all those less-than-beloved sequels? Lionsgate's latest in the series — the seventh — has a solution: Ignore 'em.
05/17/2013 | Comments 0
Home · Articles · Movies · Comedy · For a Good Time, Call ...
Comedy

For a Good Time, Call ...


For a movie about phone sex, 'For a Good Time, Call ...' is surprisingly all heart.

Phil Bacharach September 18th, 2012  

Bridesmaids was the shot across the bow, with HBO’s Girls the follow-up fusillade: Women can cuss, drink and drug with the best of ’em. In that spirit arrives For a Good Time, Call …, a comedy with the scenario of what happens when a pair of unlikely 20-somethings start a phone-sex service.

If you bet that means a lot of one-liners about penises and vaginas, and maybe some sight gags involving zeppelin-sized dildos, I congratulate you on your clairvoyance. But there are surprises here, too, particularly how sweet-natured this film actually is, and how winning are its two stars.

Lauren (Lauren Anne Miller, 50/50), the straitlaced product of well-to-do parents, loses her job at a New York publishing company and is dumped by her callow boyfriend (James Wolk, TV’s Political Animals) because he finds her too boring.

Across town, brassy and vulgar Katie (Ari Graynor, The Sitter) is in danger of being booted from her late grandmother’s Gramercy Park apartment. Enter the women’s mutual pal, Jesse (Justin Long, Going the Distance), to hook them up as roommates.

There’s a hitch: Lauren and Katie have detested each other ever since a night at college 10 years earlier when a drunken Katie accidentally doused Lauren with a cup of urine. But rent money is rent money, and so the gals grudgingly endure requisite resentments over hair on the soap and no toilet paper on the roll.

When Lauren discovers that Katie has a part-time job doing phone sex, however, it gets the entrepreneurial wheels turning. The roomies start their own 1-900 service. Before long, their mutual hatred is thawing along with Lauren’s inhibitions.

Good Time illustrates something rare in movies: a genuine female friendship that isn’t defined by the women’s relationships with men. Even Bridesmaids felt it needed to toss Kristen Wiig a life preserver in the form of the Perfect Guy.

Here, the men folk — when they’re not jacking off in bathroom stalls or in cars — are peripheral to the real romance, or bra-mance, between Lauren and Katie.

And while the story often plays out like a fizzy, mid-’80s comedy you’ve happened across on cable, even down to an ultra-perky soundtrack, the film does hold a few character revelations up its sleeve.

Its ample heart compensates when the raunchiness falls short of Apatowian heights. Sex talk alone doesn’t hold much shock these days, despite some funny cameos by Seth Rogen (Miller’s real-life husband) and Kevin Smith, and feature-debuting director Jamie Travis doesn’t milk big laughs.

But the results are good enough.

Hey! Read This:
Bridesmaids film review    
Girls TV review    
The Sitter Blu-ray review    


 
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