Girlfriend's Day

The paradigm has finally shifted and you won't be finding any beautiful--in a superficial surface sense--people here. They have been replaced, at last, by the talented people. Hollywood's no longer fashioned out of wood, insincere smiles, and GQish scientologists. Instead we get the great Bob Odenkirk with all of his charm and pathos. He's impossible not to like. His performance is tops here as he fights for his right to write...even if it's only greeting cards. Fine, lighthearted parallelisms are drawn to Chinatown. A touch of light & shadow noir illuminates the film. Whiplash witted one-liners slap you silly at just the right time. Not one but two actors with cleft appear -- Alex Karpovsky & Stacy Keach (it's good to see cleft-palated actors not named Joaquin Phoenix get some love; King Tut had one after all.) Slam poets get rightfully demystified as poetasters. As do novelists as writers who can't edit themselves. This is nothing if not a writer's kind of flick. Speaking, well, typing of, my only gripe is that Amber Tamblyn didn't get to read any of her highly inspired, original poetry. Really the only bummer here. If you dig Odenkirk, the written word, and a movie with a paucity of eye candy, then this one's for you.

The script, the actors, the production values here are excellent.

There's just one thing that ruins it.

The director. Michael Paul Stephenson decided "I want this to be a slice of life movie", instead of a film noir movie. He could have made this artistic and hilarious, bu the decided instead to screw the entire production over. The guy just totally ruined what could have been a fantastic film.

He's a dickhead. Watch this film and try to imagine it much darker, much more stylized, and like an homage to the 1940s/1950s films of Fred McMurray, Humphrey Bogart. Laurent Bacall and Ingrid Bergman. This could have been so much better. SO much better.

So, you're still in bed at 1 p.m. composing comments on friends' FaceBook shares, eating the other half of a stevia-sweetened chocolate bar from the night before, and then you move on to Netflix to get further from reality--where you see the face of beloved Bob Odenkirk in a harmless sounding title: "Girlfriends Day". You give it a look-see. You don't turn from it in irritation or boredom--it's holding you with the inscrutable power of untapped human potential. Every character looking at Odenkirk seems to be waiting for "something" to happen. Then his landlord takes action. And then I'm clapping for a brilliant moment, and barking out loud with laughter from my unused vocal chords at another moment. I get comfortable. I know that I, too, like Odenkirk's character, will write again. This film is exquisite.

I knew nothing about this movie before turning it on, but assumed it would be a comedy, from the main few cast members. Boy, was I wrong. It has a little humor, but no big laughs. It was a drama somewhere between The Big Lebowski and a sendup of a Hitchcock thriller, with a few moments that were almost out of a Wes Anderson film. I'd recommend this if you like the quiet and surrealistic storytelling of Lebowski. The story doesn't make much sense when viewed through the lens of realism, but should be viewed with a bit of whimsy. Bob Odenkirk gives a reliably good performance, as we've come to expect from him after his more serious, introspective work on Better Call Saul, and the rest of the cast present a perfect landscape for his character. This film might not be for everyone, but it's short enough (just over an hour) that it won't put you out much to give it a watch, and the action, while sometimes confusing, moves quickly enough that it keeps your attention from start to finish.

Some will indulge the weirdness, others won't. But if you bail you'll be missing out on a nice little absurdity. It's not exactly laugh-out- loud funny, but it does have its moments, and the cast mostly seems to go along with the idea, playing it mostly as a deadpan film-noir parody. If you think of it that way, it all might fall into place. Odenkirk's world-weary greeting card writer frequenting a card-writer's bar is just a small example. Again, the oddness will put off some people, which is understandable. The narrative, if taken at face value is just as laughable as many other thrillers, but because it's being self-conscious, it has the charm of self-deprecating irony. It can get self-indulgent with how much it falls into this area, and it really has to work to get over its Saturday-Night-Live style setting but I think that's part of the point -- and it does get over itself quite well. And the fact that I'm in love with Amber Tamblyn has nothing to do with this positive review.