Armed with hot-pink dial-tone phones, cunning business acumen and filthy fuck-talk skills, Katie (Ari Graynor) and Lauren (Lauren Miller) are an unstoppable phone-sex team — their wit-misted, sick-twisted, overly open kinship giving every onscreen bromance a raunchy run for its boner-joke money. Wisely placing two very funny and relatively unknown actresses in its lead slots, For a Good Time, Call ... doesn’t take full advantage of its weapons, but it serves as a promising treadstone for the incredibly quick and unexpectedly sweet twosome.
Inspired by a real-life experience shared by Miller and her former roommate/co-writer Katie Anne Naylon, Jamie Travis’ comedy begins with Lauren getting the breakup shaft from her smarmy Ken-doll boyfriend Charlie (James Wolk), who ditches his live-in lover to pursue a job opportunity overseas. Stuck with no place to stay, Lauren falls back on gay-BFF Jesse (Justin Long), whose dialogue is so over-clever that it chimes like Aaron Sorkin scripting Queer as Folk. Jesse, playing rent-control yenta, sets Lauren up with Katie, who’s about to get evicted from her handed-down Gramercy Park walk-up. Though the women hate each other due to an awful urine-soaked incident in college, each grows to tolerate and eventually love the other, culminating in pro-partnership “1-900-MMM-HMMM,” a dirty-talk line that rakes in more cash than they could have imagined.
The movie’s best moments come when the ladies sully their receivers (look for a cameo call from Seth Rogen, Miller’s real-life husband), but everyone stumbles once a few petty grievances jeopardize their bond. After all that time spent coloring in Katie and Lauren’s warm, three-dimensional relationship, the wedge of inconsequence driven between them is nothing but regressive.
