‘For a Good Time, Call...’
Ari Graynor, Lauren Miller
C-
Don’t watch this movie in the same vicinity as your parents, because they will hear the debauched shouting used by phone sex workers and they will think you’re watching a porno.
I’ll start by saying I had low expectations for “For a Good Time, Call ... ,” which was recently released on Netflix.
It’s a movie about two “frenemies,” responsible Lauren and sociable Katie — played by Lauren Miller and Katie Naylon — joining together to form a phone sex line and becoming best friends. I expected to give this movie a big, honking F.
But, it had its moments.
Two females empower themselves by becoming entrepreneurs, using their sexed-up voices to fund living in Katie’s late grandmother’s apartment. Originally enemies after a post-party college interaction ended with urine in Lauren’s new car, the women are forced to cooperate after Lauren loses her boyfriend.
The characters were largely categorized, each representing specific archetypes: Lauren as the uptight moralist. Her ex-boyfriend as the jerk who makes you wonder how the relationship was plausible.
Then there’s Katie as the outgoing blonde, her prince charming as the nice guy. And, there’s Katie and Lauren’s mutual friend, Jesse, as the universal gay best friend.
It’s too prescribed to make you actually care about what happens to these people. Their relationships with each other jumped ship too quickly.
And don’t get me started on the “shocker” that comes when Katie confides a secret to Lauren. This part was, for lack of a better word, lame.
This, along with other somber conversations, left the film starkly unbalanced. It tried to be too many things, which forced the actors to have moments inconsistent with their characters.
I was hoping for some feminist undertones, but I was hard-pressed to identify any. Happily, it also wasn’t demeaning. It didn’t glorify the phone sex industry, but it also didn’t condemn it — a respectable un-stance.
I laughed a couple times, namely at the outrageous things Katie and Lauren said to their callers — one of which is a kinky Seth Rogen. When the movie wasn’t trying too hard to be funny or heartwarming, it was actually, dare I say, a decent watch.
But, I wouldn’t recommend wasting an hour and a half trying to justify not hitting the “Back to Browse” button like I did.
