For a Good Time, Call...





Directed By: Jamie Travis

Starring: Lauren Miller, Ari Graynor, Justin Long, Seth Rogen, Mimi Rogers, and Kevin Smith

For moviegoers everywhere, there's nothing worse than a studio spoiling a film with a trailer that reveals too much.  We've all been there.  It's when a movie is nothing more than an extended version of a trailer.  It's a damn shame.  It's really bad for comedies because then the film's best jokes aren't even funny.  You've laughed at them already.  There's no reason to find any humor in them when actually watching the film.  Most movies can never recover from these spoiler trailers.  While Jamie Travis's For a Good Time, Call... is nearly ruined by overly revealing trailers that pretty much sum up the first half of the movie, the film manages to find its comedic footing in the second half and give us some damn good comedy.

Lauren (Lauren Miller) needs a place to live, and Katie (Ari Graynor) needs a roommate.  When Lauren's boyfriend Charlie (James Wolk) decides to move to Italy for work, she's left to fend for herself and is forced to move out of their apartment.  When Katie's rent starts going up, she can't pay the bills.  If she doesn't pay the landlord in the next four days, she will be evicted.  Both face a very real threat of being homeless in New York in the not so distant future.  Their mutual best friend Jesse (Justin Long) connects these two and helps solve both their problems.  Despite their bad history in college because of a party foul in which Katie spilled her "sterile" urine on Lauren, these two agree to live with one another out of necessity.

With bad blood from the past, these two young women naturally have a tough time living together initially.  Katie is not used to living with someone else and does nothing to help the situation.  As Lauren gets acclimated to her new home, she hears some interesting noises coming from Katie's bedroom on a regular basis.  When she investigates the matter, she catches Katie having phone sex with some random guy.  She learns that Katie is actually working as a phone sex operator and talking many men into fulfilling their sexual fantasies. 

Lauren proposes that Katie should start her own sex line, but will not get involved because she's not interested.  She thinks she's better than phone sex.  When she gets fired and has no prospect of finding a job with another publisher for at least three months, Lauren becomes a little more open to this possibility.  While Katie keeps the men coming over the phone, Lauren becomes the brains of the operation.  By running a phone sex hotline, these old enemies become new best friends as the money starts flowing.

While the trailer revealed a whole lot of For a Good Time Call..., it did not reveal everything.  The first half of the film is basically an extended version of the trailer, and it's tough to endure.  Once you break through the plot points established and the jokes shown in the trailers, the film is comedic gold.  It's a wild, raunchy affair with sex toys, dirty talk, and hilarious clientele.  I shed quite a few tears of laughter in the second half of this movie.  That's the mark of some great comedy.

For a Good Time, Call... is the female equivalent of a bromance.  For the lack of a better term, you could call it a "bra-mance".  Miller's Lauren and Graynor's Katie share a deep bond as two close friends.  Their relationship has many elements of a romance as they try to overcome the blows life deals them.  Given that they're two girls running a phone sex hotline, they can go where no bromance has gone before and get overtly sexual without having to shout "no homo" every thirty seconds.  It only makes the movie even funnier.

The cast in this film is downright awesome.  Lauren Miller gradually becomes more comical as the film progresses.  As her character goes from being a boring chick who thinks she's found her person to a diva with a wild side, Miller becomes more entertaining throughout the movie.  Graynor is a wild one from the start of the film.  All her moaning, fake orgasms, and dancing on her in-house stripper pole is funny as hell.  Justin Long delivers plenty of laughs as well as the girls' gay best friend Jesse.  Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't mention Kevin Smith and Seth Rogen.  As callers trying to get a little pleasure in the midst of their hectic days, they bring the house down in this one in such minor roles.  I lost it during their steamy phone calls.

I can't forgive director Jamie Travis for the first half of the film.  The first half breaks no ground that the trailer didn't and would garner a 0.09% rating on its own.  At the same time, the second half of the film had me in shambles laughing and would garner a 0.03% rating.  Travis even manages to throw a curveball in the plot that caught me off guard.  I'm going to settle with a happy medium and give For a Good Time, Call... a strong 0.06% rating.  Have a few rounds of beer with this one.