Girl Most Likely

Kristen Wiig loves to be glamorous. 

"She has a lot to live up to. And a few things to live down."

Good morrow to you all, and welcome back to the Tagline, where movies are king or sometimes me posting late is king and movies are like the queen regent or something. It's a fresh week and today I'm going back to the Netflix to scrounge up something to watch and talk about. Today that refuse is Girl Most Likely, some slipped under the radar movie with Annette Bening (wow I misspelled BOTH her names on the first go) and Kristen Wiig. The movie centers around Wiig's character Imogene, a woman from Atlantic City who got out thanks to a writing scholarship, but that has since done nothing of note, living a kind of really sad desperate parasite life among New York socialites. You know like just really shitty rich people who do shitty things to each other, especially if one person is maybe not fitting in so well (like poor, incredibly depressing Imogene). After her complete douche boyfriend suddenly breaks up with her, what little control she has over her life is lost and she spirals into a deep dark place that anyone who ever lived in a pretty lie is probably familiar with, and decides that the best way to fix THAT issue is to write a dramatic note, take a bunch of pills, and try to kill herself. Her friend stumbles across her unconscious body though and so instead of dying Imogene wakes up in a hospital, and shares her really unfortunate history to the doctor, who then releases her into the... care of her mother (Bening) who is a compulsively gambling woman from Jersey that leaves Imogene sedated in the back of her car so she can gamble, which seems responsible. So without any of her belongings, money, or a means of transportation, and also with a legal order in effect forcing her to stay in the care of her mother for 72 hours, Imogene has no choice but to endure Jersey once more.

This is basically my worst fear.

So okay, what's the twist on the twist? Well living in her mother's house, there is her very unusual brother, who has a fixation on crabs and works on the boardwalk, her mother's boyfriend "The Bousche" who claims to be a CIA assassin who is also a time travelling samurai? There's a lot of really off the wall stuff sort of nestled in among the less outlandish humor elements of the movie. Also there is Darren Criss as Lee, the guy renting out Imogene's own room, and who performs in a Backstreet Boys cover band at a dive in Ocean City and gave me another excuse to use my Backstreet's Back tag that I so seldom get to break out. If you suspect that the initial clash between Imogene and Lee will lead to romantic entanglement and drunken banging then congrats you're some sort of fucking clairvoyant! The movie's plot never really rises above an extremely predictable level of endearing simplicity, but the cast does a good enough job that the movie isn't offensively bland. In fact like I mentioned above, in parts it is actually pretty bizarre (see the prominent featuring of Imogene's brother's invention the human shell, which is literally a bulletproof crab shell that he drags around with him and can hide in. It becomes important to the plot somehow).

See just LOOK at that high fashion.

The problem is that the movie is weird in a sort of random and unplotted way, like the writer didn't really know what kind of tone they wanted to set, and so just used all of their ideas at once without cutting any of them. While some of the weirder stuff tended to be the funniest parts of the movie, it also made the movie feel like a wacky sitcom smashed into a quirky comedy movie, and that leaves a really weird impression on the audience (I am the audience okay, the whole thing). The ending was a mix of the typical happy resolution, and also just a bunch of other random lunacy. It felt more than a little contrived, but honestly I had zero expectations for the movie so I didn't really give a crap at that point. The fact is that this movie is 1)On Netflix and 2)short and kind of funny, so that gets it a passing grade in my book even if it isn't a really HIGH passing grade. There are worse things you could watch on Netflix. So, SO many worse things. I guess that isn't a shining recommendation but it's the best one I can give. I watched this movie and I didn't hate it.

Everybaaahhddaayy, Rock your body raaaiight!

What else can we look forward to? Well like I said, Dracula is coming to town this weekend, and also there is the I-don't-know-how-to-feel-about-it Horns featuring Daniel Radcliffe as a guy who becomes the devil or something I don't know I don't read books I'm illiterate okay. I dictate these reviews to a robot that types them with its plastic fingers. I'm interested in Horns, but I don't know that I would say excited. Just so long as he doesn't start making out with the Green Goblin again I guess I'll be fine.

That's it for today! Join me again on Thursday for another surprise from Netflix!