For a Good Time, Call...

The notion of a love story that's really about two women becoming friends is gimmicky, I'll grant, but Graynor and Miller are so charming together, and the movie is so focused and funny.

The confusion in For a Good Time, Call… is delightful, the phone-sex talk sweetening the vibe. Justin Long is peerlessly funny as the girls' gay pal, but the movie belongs to Graynor, who's like Sandra Bullock with a touch of Ginger Rogers–y brass.

While its heart is always in the right place, the humor – especially in the sludgy first act – is hit or miss.

The dialogue, penned by Miller with Katie Anne Naylon, is subversively salty: surpassing even those Judd Apatow comedies to which it's indebted, this is almost certainly the filthiest movie ever to bear the Universal logo.

The main distinction of this particular raunchfest, about the economic opportunities available to women in the phone-sex industry, is that it does not reconcile its slim narrative conflict with a big, fat wedding.

Even if a good phone-sex movie does exist, For a Good Time, Call . . . is woefully, definitively not it.

Save the money you might spend for a ticket to see For a Good Time, Call... and just read a dive bar's restroom wall for free. That's the sub-level of comedy here, with a litany of crude sexual euphemisms and phallic images passed off as jokes.

I think the movie was hilarious making a phone-sex type of movie instead of a XXX commercial on Playboy TV. Very raunchy, more like Zach and Miri Make A Porno or Striptease. But it's sex first, candy later. I didn't see the movie, but it's worth a buy. I was wondering if Director Kevin Smith is watching in retrospect.

In recent years, the direction of female comedies has taken a turn for the better. It was always believed that a comedy, featuring a mostly female cast, would only work as a buddy comedy. No one ever thought that women would ever be able to successful pull off a raunchy comedy, until Bridesmaids came along and changed all that. For A Good Time, Call... is from the same writers and producers as Bridesmaids and may even be funnier. The story begins with Lauren (Lauren Anne Miller) being dumped by her long time fiancee. On her own, Lauren can't afford the upscale apartment she's been living in, and is forced to move in with Katie, a promiscuous, pill popping OCD, who she'd only met once before, at a party, where Katie threw up on her. At first, the hostility is off the charts, but when Lauren loses her dream job, she is forced to help Katie run her business, a phone sex line. This film is not for the faint of heart, as it is very raunchy, to the point of shocking even me, someone who thinks they've seen it all. While this may seem like a great thing, the truth is, as with most single themed comedies, the longer it goes, the less funny it gets. At first, seeing the things these girls were saying and the people they were talking to was hilarious, but after an hour of this film, it just really wasn't all the funny anymore. Both the female leads are terrific and they are the reason this film works. For A Good Time, Call... is very raunchy and very funny, but it has one centralized theme and doesn't deviate from it much at all. If not for the amazing young ladies who star in it, this film would have got tiresome a lot more quickly then it did. For a good time watch this movie, it's way out there, but some parts are truly hysterical.

"For a Good Time, Call ..." 10 Scale Rating: 6.5 (Decent) ... The Good: Despite it's premise and content, it was actually a charming film. Ari Graynor has a breakout performance and the cast as a whole does a solid job. Genuinely amusing for the most part. The Bad: The end is a little too tidy and very VERY rushed. It just sort of ends after dragging on for the last 20 minutes, which really brings down what was otherwise a good movie.

Quite an interesting premise, which unfortunately, fell a tad flat in the final act. Ari Graynor is certainly a comedienne to keep our eyes on--but certainly not amidst all this raunchiness.

Campy to a fault, For a Good Time, Call... takes an unorthodox subject, phone sex, and lays it on top of a plot which checks off every single cliché in film about friendship. The two protagonists were flatter than cardboard cutouts, introduced more as caricatures than characters. The only exception was Justin Long's character who's quirkiness stole our attention every time he was on screen. A story with no struggle, and no point, dictated by the horrible soundtrack.