ViewGuide

Created Jun 29, 2014 08:37PM PST • Edited Nov 25, 2021 11:25PM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Good 3.0

   I’m not really the target audience for this movie, or at least the target gender. But I like smart comedy as much as the next guy. Well maybe more than the next guy. Most guys won’t be watching Girl Most Likely, even if it’s got Matt Dillon canoodling with an ultraMILFy Annette Bening in two primo performances.

   What’s not to like? No, there aren’t many LOLs, but it is consistently funny just below the LOL line.

   Yes there’s a whole lot of estrogen involved. Thus the movie is absurdly emotional, its milieu one where everybody’s damaged and they want to talk about it. Here’s where most guys get off, and not in a good way.

   Girl Most Likely – written by a woman – Michelle Morgan and directed by wife & husband team Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini, not surprisingly presents life from a woman’s POV. Is that so wrong?

   Morgan, Berman & Pulcini give us younger men with older women in a world where making the TV news is the equivalent of living happily after. GML = feminine dreams achieved, gone bad, with a happy ending.

   Faux Backstreet Boys and the girls they drive wild make it fun for both sexes. That’s not wrong at all.

4. Acting

   Very Good 3.5

   Kristen Wiig & Annette Bening star as Imogene and her mother Zelda, reason enough to view Girl Most Likely right there. Add in Matt Dillon as a relatively young CIA stud and you’ve got a terrific cast.

   Darren Criss, hitherto unknown to me, is the one with rabid fans. He gets to front a faux Backstreet Boys band. Let’s just say this: Darren Criss has the best agent in Hollywood. Can you ask for a better gig?

   Let me get this straight: I get to sing sexy songs to a bar full of hotties and I don’t have to really sing.

   That’s the greatest part any aspiring heartthrob ever got. I mean, it’s damn near Bye Bye Birdie territory.

   Lots of supporting bits from a vast cast. Notables:

   • Christopher Fitzgerald as Kristen Wiig’s autistic brother. He’s into crabs & fashions his own shell.
   • Bob Balaban as a man living a left wing dream, name of Maxwell.
   • Julia Stiles & Andrea Martin as Stage Imogene & Zelda, Wiig & Bening’s doppelgängers.
   • Whit Stillman cameos, escorted by Graeme Malcolm the Culture Vuture

5. Male Stars Very Good 3.5

6. Female Stars Really Great 4.5

   Kristen Wiig & Annette Bening are Really Great.

7. Female Costars Good 3.0

8. Male Costars Very Good 3.5

10. Film

    Good 3.0

    Girl Most Likely is a high quality SNL-inspired film with Silver Screen production values and talent. Politics of the non-sexual kind intrude, but a couple LOLs do come. SPOILER ALERT: Here they are.

    • “Took me a year and a half to grow my eyebrows back” – First LOL
    • Backstreet Boys – Second LOL

    The silly politics include equating a Left Wing Intellectual as a Smart Dad, “the George Clooney of Fathers”. More telling is the title of a successful book that earned its 1% author profiles on NPR and PBS: Agrarian America: the Myth of Thanksgiving. More in the Reality Commentary.

11. Direction Very Good 3.5

12. Play Good 3.0

13. Music Good 3.0

14. Visuals Very Good 3.5
15. Content

16. Edge

    Risqué 1.9

17. Sex Titillating 2.1

18. Violence Gentle 1.3

19. Rudeness Salty 2.3

21. Reality

    Glib 1.9

    It’s about time someone – some man – asked the question: Is that so wrong? I’m happy to get that out there. Referring of course to the question about dudes liking female-focused comedies: Is that so wrong?

    No. No it’s not, if the movie is smart and funny, and the guys in it are no more caricatured than the gals.

    Politically, Michelle Morgan has the wit to poke the Left’s Bad America Syndrome. Kudos to her.

22. Circumstantial Surreal 2.5

23. Biological Glib 1.9

24. Physical Glib 1.4