Girl Most Likely (2013)
Content by Tony Macklin. Originally published on July 25, 2013 @ tonymacklin.net.
Girl Most Likely is phony from beginning to end. It's disingenuous tripe.
When I first heard much of it was set in Ocean City, New Jersey, I had some faint hopes that the fresh setting might stimulate a little life into the would-be comedy.
But the movie has the stench of something washed up on the shore and left to rot on the screen.
As a critic I try to avoid lousy movies. But I was gulled by the false pretenses. Ocean City, New Jersey, was my Shangri-La. the movie just shanghais it.
Girl Most Likely is the pretentious story of Imogene (Kristen Wiig). The original title was changed, but a change of title is just a change of lipstick on a pig.
Imogene, living in New York, is jilted by her boyfriend in an awkward scene with badly-timed direction. In her apartment, she feigns suicide and is taken to a hospital. It's all very clumsy.
Imogene is then taken home to Ocean City, New Jersey by Zelda (Annette Bening), her erratic mother. She encounters her mother's boyfriend George Bousche (Matt Dillon) - get the witty writing of calling Bush a douche?
Her room has been rented to a singing impersonator (Darren Criss), and her brother Ralph (Christopher Lawrence) is around obsessed with crab shells.
At the end an international assassin appears from nowhere out of the dim-witted script. But it doesn't matter much, since the movie long ago lost all credibility.
The level of writing by Michelle Morgan is represented by Imogene's line to Zelda, "What mother tells her children that their father died during a routine colonoscopy?"
Morgan probably had a workable idea of loosely basing her film on The Wizard of Oz, but it is threadbare. Imogene is Dorothy, her brother is the Tin Man, her father is the Wizard, and maybe her mother is the Cowardly Lion, but who knows? It's all jabbering monkeys.
It's hard to imagine the directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulciini once directed American Splendor (2003). That was so inventive. Girl Most Likely is embarrassing.
Kristen Wiig, Annette Bening, et al. keep straight faces, but the screenplay is their unbeatable enemy.
It's hard to tell if Michelle Morgan is an incompetent writer or just a very lazy one.
She has no idea of her setting. Why would she set the story in a place she seems totally ignorant about? Since Morgan was born in Santa Monica and graduated from Cal State Northridge, why in Valley Girl's name would she set her screenplay on the east coast and particularly in Ocean City?
She gets it all wrong. She doesn't even know that New Jersey has a law preventing pumping one's own gas at a service station.
She thinks Ocean City is Jersey Shore, as represented by the tv show, when in actuality it's the antithesis of the tv show. Ocean City is a dry town - with no liquor sold. You have to go to Somers Point, outside the placid city.
Morgan also has a woman running a kiosk, who could be a refugee from the tv show, say her boyfriend is a Jets' fan. No Snookin' way.
Ocean City is a Philly town, and you see Phillies and Eagles paraphernalia all over the place. No NY Jets.
The only thing representative of Ocean City, New Jersey, in the entire film is the t-shirt Zelda wears from Mack & Manco pizzeria.
I went in search of Ocean City, and all I got was this stinking movie.
