For A Good Time, Call...

1-900-Mmm-Hmmm

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Rated: R  Language, strong sexual content and some drug use
Release Date: August 31, 2012
Runtime:  1 hour 26 minutes

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Director: Jamie Travis
Writers: Lauren Miller, Katie Anne Naylon
Cast:  Ari Graynor, Lauren Anne Miller, Justin Long, Mark Webber, James Wolk

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SYNOPSIS:  Former college freinemies Lauren and Katie find themselves sharing the monthly expenses in a fabulous Gramercy Park apartment, and in order to make ends meet, the unlikely pair start a phone sex line together.

REVIEW: Writer/Director Jamie Travis moves from documentaries and shorts to full length features with his first effort involving two girl who are forced together under financial distress. Written by one of the film's stars Lauren Miller (Girls! Girls! Girls!), and co-written by new scribe Kate Anne Naylon, the audience is treated to female raunchiness and humor. 

During her college years, Lauren Powell (Lauren Miller, 50/50) is asked by her friend Jesse (Justin Long, The Conspirator) to take his other drunk friend Kate Steel (Ari Graynor, The Sitter) home. Even though she is uptight, Lauren relents and does Jesse the favor. When Kate pees in an empty soda cup and spills it all over Lauren by accident, Lauren vows to put Kate under frienemy status. Ten years later, Lauren faces her boyfriend Charlie (James Wolk, Happy Endings) who wants to put their 'boring' relationship on hold while he goes to Europe for a new job and new adventures. Kate also faces her own troubles as she faces eviction from her grandmother's spacious formerly rent-controlled apartment. Both having their own troubles, Jesse steps in to bring the two together in their time of crisis. Moving in together at Kate's apartment, the new roommates do not see eye to eye. But when Lauren's life-plan to get an editing job fails, she decides to join Kate in a joint business venture in a sex-chat phone line.   

For a Good Time, Call is a sweet and lightly raunchy comedy with all of the earmarks of a female The Hangover without any of the cursing or nudity. All of the comic gags and sensual situations are suggestive, but no females were harmed in the making of the film. There is a stripper pole in Kate's apartment, courtesy of Kate' grandmother, plus an entire box of phallus symbols of varying widths and lengths. Kate's chosen profession as a sex-chat operator is only made better by the addition of Lauren as their new company's business manager. As their business grows and the money starts coming in, Kate and Lauren have to expand by hiring another girl named Krissy (Suger Lyn Beard, 50/50). The chat line attracts many kooks like airline pilot Jerry (Seth Rogen, 50/50), and a few regulars like Kate favorite Sean (Mark Webber, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World).

Both girls, although succeeding in their business and their healing friendship, they both struggle to deal with their own secrets. Lauren, while successful, shows shame when confronted by her Long Island mother Adele (Mimi Rogers, Hope Springs) and father Scott (Don McManus). Kate, raised wholly by her late grandmother, tries to rely on herself with a carefree smile and light attitude.

Lauren Miller and Ari Graynor play off each other as the Yin-Yang of the same circle. Responsibility versus spontaneity, planning versus doing, and rationale versus emotion. Ari Graynor reminds me of Shaun of the Dead's Kate Ashfield character Liz without the British accent. Her seventies sensibility includes a feathered blond hairdo and terry cloth jumpsuits. Former Macintosh spokesperson Justin Long digs deep into a scraggly flamboyance as the gay best friend to both Kate and Lauren. Seth Rogen is silly as one of the phone johns, plus another notable cameo takes loading dock jargon to a new extreme. Mark Webber is a timid but honest regular Sean, while James Wolk's ex-boyfriend Charlie reinforces why women don't stay in relationships too long.

The story is solid and the laughs come from the silly situations the pair of independent ladies find themselves in. Justin Long's Jesse and Suger Lyn Beard's phone operator Krissy are the break out characters of the flick, each chewing up the scenery with every moment they are in front of the camera.

For a Good Time, Call... is something worth while if you are in the mood for silly, sweet lightly raunchy humor wrapped around a tale of woman empowerment and friendship. The characters work well together and the writing team of Miller and Naylon get the job done. The movie is not anything utterly new, but if you have some spare time, give 'em a call. 

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WORTH:  DVD or Rental

The Sitter

No Adventure In Babysitting

Director: David Gordon Green

Writers: Brian Gatewood, Alessandro Tanaka
Cast: Jonah Hill, Sam Rockwell, Max Records, Landry Bender, Kevin Hernandez, Ari Graynor, J.B. Smoove, Kylie Bunbury

SYNOPSIS: Suspended college student Noah Griffith decides to get off his butt to babysit three kids in order to help his divorced mother go out for a nice evening. Little does he know that a request from his girlfriend will lead him and the kids on a wild ride.

REVIEW: David Gordon Green, director of Pineapple Express and Your Highness, sets his sights on a movie about mishaps in childcare. From a script by relative newcomers Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka, director David Gordon Green looks to make the next great babysitting flick to rival Elizabeth Shue's 1987 Adventures in Babysitting and Christina Applegate's 1991 Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead.

Noah Griffith (Jonah Hill, Get Him to the Greek) finds himself college school-less and living with his mother without a job or any motivation to make something of his young life. When his divorced mother's opportunity to meet a new beau at a dinner party is threatened because the Pedulla family needs a babysitter, Noah begrudgedly relented to babysitting their three children, phobic Slater (max Records, Where the Wild Things Are), celebritant wannabe Blithe (Landry Bender), and recently adopted Venezuelan explosives lover Rodrigo (Kevin Hernandez). During a early evening of boundary crossing and authority bucking by the kids, Noah gets a call from his not-so-girlfriend Marisa for the promise of sex if he picks up and pays for some nose candy for her at a party she is attending. Weighing the options, Noah packs up the Pedulla minivan with the kids and begins a journey that starts with exploding toilets and ends with carjacking, car chases, gun fights, and revelations.

Filled with crude language and lots of sexual references, The Sitter is certainly not geared to kids, no matter how many unaccompanied minors are strapped into the back seats of the family soccer mobile. Jonah Hill manages to be both crude and cuddly, childishly naive while painfully insightful. The kids, each with their own too-grown-up problems, funnel their frustrations at the novice Noah with barbed bravado. Noah's girlfriend Marisa (Ari Graynor, What's Your Number?) is to die for at the start of the film, but ends up someone you want to kill by the end. The highlights of the film? Drug kingpin due Karl with a K (Sam Rockwell, Cowboys & Aliens) and Julio (J.B. Smoove, Date Night), and Soul Baby (Reggie Alvin Green, Coney Island Baby). Rockwell is disarming, maniacal, and in desperate need of friends more than eight. Smoove, as Rockwell's wingman and business partner, enables Karl at every turn, probably fearful of any stray retribution. And Green's Soul Baby, lends a little swagger and jazz cool as the doorman of a downtown New York pool hall.

At some times funny and silly, at other times foul and crude, The Sitter is a film that you would expect Jonah Hill to star in - in 2007. With recent films under his belt like Moneyball  and Get Him to the Greek,   I expect more from Hill but see why he would return to the type of films that he started off with. The pace of the story is fine, but the situations that Noah and his charges find themselves in become increasingly far fetched and coincidental. Even the supposed love interest Roxanne (Kylie Bunbury, Prom) gets minimal screen and scene time with Noah. Maybe that's for the best since Noah has his hands full with all of the other problems on his plate.

The Sitter is not the 80s-styled formula flick that we remember with the late decade Adventures in Babysitting, although some of the soundtrack is reminiscent. The heady days of good natured ill-advised childcare hi-jinks is so last century. Today, The Sitter, with all of its foul-mouth angst seems to be the standard for this century. Oh, to be young again.

WORTH: Rental

What's Your Number?

Better Off Alone

Director: Mark Mylod

Writers: Gabrielle Allan, Jennifer Crittenden, Karyn Bosnak (novel "20 Times a Lady")
Cast: Anna Faris, Chris Evans, Ari Graynor, Blythe Danner, Chris Pratt

SYNOPSIS: After losing her job and breaking up with her last boyfriend, Ally reads an article that says that a woman that has had twenty or more lovers will probably not find a soulmate. Vowing off sex, Ally uses her neighbor Colin to help her track down her former lovers in an attempt to find one that has gotten better with age.

REVIEW: Experienced small-screen director Mark Mylod goes from HBOs Entourage to the big screen, bringing with him a screenplay from Scrubs scribe Gabrielle Allan and The New Adventures of Old Christine scribe Jennifer Crittenden from Karyn Bosnak's novel "20 TImes a Lady".

Ally Darling (Anna Faris from The House Bunny) thinks her life is going along fine. But when she loses her job in marketing and breaks up with her vegan bicycle messenger boyfriend, Ally finds herself on the subway looking at a women's magazine article that claims that a woman's average number of lovers is 10.5, and that a woman with 20 or more lovers will probably not find a husband. Making a list of her previous 19 boyfriends, Ally realizes that she is tittering on relationship hopelessness. Enter the cross-the-hall musician neighbor Colin (Chris Evans from Puncture, The Losers) who uses Ally to hide from his one-night stands until they clear out of his apartment the morning after. Finding out that Colin's father was a cop and taught Colin the tricks of the investigative trade, Ally strikes a deal with him   where she will continue to harbor him during his girlfriends' Walk of Shame if he agrees to run down all of her past boyfriends in the hopes of finding one that actually made something of their life.

Anna Faris, an actress with almost 40 films under her belt or on the way, continues in her kooky, physical, pratfally ways with What's Your Number?. Filled with goofy expressions and wide-eyed optimism, Faris' Ally holds hope that one of her former boyfriends will end up being the "right one". The star-spangled Avenger himself, square-jawed, steely blue-eyed Chris Evans charms his pants off, literally, as his character Colin likes to get his morning paper from the hallway with only his smile and, maybe, a towel in hand.

The story is silly, with Anna Faris even sillier. Filled with nudity from Faris, Evans and others, and gratuitous obscenities, What's Your Number? could have been just as good as a PG-13 outing without all of the extra "stuff" to give it the R-rating. Where The Hangover and Bridesmaids benefited from its restrictive rating, What's Your Number? seems to try too hard for laughs that sometimes don't hit. Evans and Faris play to their physical strengths, but sometimes even a house bunny or a shield-wielding superhero can't save the day.

WORTH: Rental