Line goes dead on raunchy telephone comedy

 North American culture says a groundhog can predict the end of winter. Summer has its own predictor: when movie studios start dumping trash on the screen, then it’s time to pack up your swimsuit until next year.

September is that odd month at movie theaters. The summer blockbusters have come and gone, and the Oscar contenders don’t start showing their smug faces until October. The kids are back in school. The monsoons set in. The failure of September as a valid movie month is perfectly evident with a picture like the overly punctuated For a Good Time, Call … (that’s the first and last time I type the ellipsis, thank you).

Here is a comedy movie with a single premise, plot point and theme: poor New York girls create a phone-sex line to pay the bills. It might be the first movie in a long time to have a one-sentence plot that requires a spoiler alert. By telling you what it’s about, I’ve just given away the whole thing. And I mean everything, because at no point does For a Good Time want you to forget it’s about prude girls talking dirty on telephones. It reminds us at every step. In case you forget, it reminds you at the half steps too.

Lauren (Lauren Miller) has been dumped by her boyfriend because she’s boring, and indeed she is. She needs a place to live so she moves in with wild-girl Katie (Ari Graynor), who reminds us that she lives in an apartment near Gramercy Park in Manhattan, though we’re never told why that neighborhood is so special, nor do we see inside the gorgeous park, which is one of New York City’s two privately owned parks.

Rent is through the roof, so Lauren and Katie hatch a plan to start a phone sex line to make ends meet. Their number is 1-900-MMM-HMMM. (A better film might have made this a working number for marketing purposes, but alas, it’s a dud number.) Lauren works as the front-office person who jots down credit card numbers and other information, and Katie takes the calls, assuming any role a caller desires, from the wacky weirdoes and their elaborate fantasies to her regular nighttime caller, a gentle hipster who she is bound to meet in real life before the movie ends.

Plenty of minerals can be mined from the topic of phone-sex workers — What do they look like? Do their personal relationships suffer? Is there such thing as a taboo request when everything is just non-physical fantasy anyway? — though most often For a Good Time, Call can only muster about 1,400 masturbation jokes. All varieties. In every combination. And with cameos by actor Seth Rogen and director Kevin Smith.

The picture does find some genuine laughs, though they are often few and far between. I did like the bit about a desperate cab driver and his unseen-until-the-very-end cab fare, who sits patiently through a situation most would not. (The other 1,399 jokes are letdowns.) It doesn’t help that the film’s editing is a half-beat behind the punchlines, often ruining any comedic timing that the weak, often unnecessarily perverse, jokes might have.

The movie is a byproduct of two trends: the 50 Shades of Grey books, which have scandalized bookstores and given sexual power (or taken it away, depending on how you look at it) to its female readers. It also closely resembles HBO’s hit comedy Girls, even down to the opening title treatment and Lauren’s supportive parents who cut the umbilical cord very late in life. Girls is subtle and devastating, not to mention clever, while Good Time is trying too hard to tap into that vein of New York women saying exactly what they feel, no matter how taboo it may be to say. Where Girls, and Bridesmaids before it, succeeds is how it involves women on a deeper level. Here are their needs, their wants, their desires, and then they strive to achieve them in ways women can identify with. Good Time has no such empowerment because the film still relies mostly on men and their wants, their desires, their twisted fantasies. Don’t be fooled by the female stars; this is a movie about men.

Though the frank dialogue about relationships and the graphic, though jokey and light, depictions of sex might serve the film well — I did like that it was unafraid to shock me — the movie does neglect much of the underlying subtext written into the characters. For instance, Lauren and Katie are obviously attracted to each other, and one even tells the other she loves her, but the movie barely acknowledges what might have been an interesting little development.

It’s a shame, too, because Graynor and Miller are endearing as these telephone-wielding sex workers. I didn’t always like what they were saying, or how they were saying it, but I admired that the characters were consistently pleasant and chipper amid all the crude jokes and sex humor. They share many of their scenes with a brilliantly aloof Justin Long, who plays one of those New York City street hustlers who relentlessly tries to get tourists to go to comedy shows with overpriced drinks and amateur comics. Long plays a gay man and I kept thinking Lauren and Katie would give him a telephone so he could expand their empire into New York’s gay community, but it’s another dead end as Long, funny as he is, serves very little purpose to the plot.

For a Good Time, Call is a mediocre comedy at best. If it were funnier I could give it a pass, but its humor often falls flat. And it pretends to be a witty female-empowerment movie, but with no wit and no female empowerment. What it has instead are penis jokes in every configuration possible. If that’s your thing, then ring this one up.