Girlfriend's Day

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.

There is a fair amount to enjoy here: the performances are as good as you'd expect from the likes of Odenkirk - if anyone could make writing a greetings card interesting, then Bob's your man.

But I was disappointed with the direction the plot took - which steered away from the central premise of a slightly surreal and quirky tale of a divorced, down-on-his-luck, greetings card writer who, faced with redundancy (in multiple areas), is presented with an opportunity for romance and redemption.

This promising scenario was somewhat side-lined in favour of a murder plotline (this is all in the trailer, but there were multiple routes the plot could have taken).

The initial main hook: can Odenkirk's character write the greatest romance card ever - is answered, to some degree, but felt like a cop-out.

I was more interested in the budding romance between Odenkirk and Tamblyn than who killed a minor side-character - in fact, I could've done without that distraction altogether.

Movies should be judged on whether they achieved what they set out to portray - but I'm left confused as to what the writers had in mind here.

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.

This was a short fairly low budget picture that got made due to Bob Odenkirk and his name after Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. If we had to see the Los Angeles river flood channel (or whatever they call it) one more time I was going to scream. The city must charge very little to shoot there at it was almost a character. I found a few places to laugh but not enough to recommend this as a comedy. It is an offbeat quirky picture with some nice scenes but nothing more. The one standout performance was Amber Tamblyn as Jill.

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.