Customer Review(s)
Customer Rating: 
Summary: an unneeded comedy
Comment: Nothing much to write about: A wonderful
Jennifer Aniston ... a terrible screenplay!
I really don't like to provide one star only for any film because it clearly shows my mistake in picking it up and/or watching it. However, fully unexpected the storyboard as such Aniston was urged to play is that horrible that it justifies this my one star evaluation.
... the basic idea of the story isn't that bad at all but unfortunately the cinematic achievement is really miserable and only Aniston's splendid performance makes the film bearably; GOOD GIRL!
Customer Rating: Summary: Don't bother
Comment: The other one-star reviewers have pretty well covered this movie, but I will say there were a few amusing scenes (not nearly enough in that hour and a half of wasted time). When a character commits adultery, deserts a friend during an emergency, tries to get rid of a mentally unstable lover by feeding him (she thinks) contaminated grapes, lies to her husband that he's the father of her baby, lies about whom she had an affair with, causing that man to be beaten up, and goes on about her life with the same expression throughout, with no change or growth in herself, her story is shallow, and the movie is pointless.
Customer Rating: Summary: A guilty pleasure.
Comment: The Good Girl (Miguel Arteta, 2002)
You know those movies where you laugh, but every time you do you feel guilty for doing so? Yeah, that's
The Good Girl. Arteta (Chuck and Buck) starts this off as if it's going to be a light, breezy (if mean-spirited) comedy, but things just keep getting more and more tragic. The brilliance of the film is that the more tragic they get, the funnier the script becomes. There are quite a few ways in which this film puts me in mind of Very Bad Things, and I mean that in the best of ways.
The story: Justine Last (
Jennifer Aniston) is stuck. She's in a dead-end job, her husband (John C. Reilly) is a house painter with a serious dope habit and a bonehead for a best friend (Tim Blake Nelson), her own best friend (Deborah Rush) is about as deep as a pothole. Is this all there is to life? Enter Holden (Jake Gyllenhaal), a new cashier at her place of business, who feels the trials and tribulations of late adolescence just as Justine feels the trials and tribulations of adulthood, and the two of them strike up a friendship. Complications, as they say, ensue. And as it is in the movies, once complications ensue, everything that can go wrong does at the earliest possible opportunity.
This could have played out as a Lifetime Original Movie melodrama, but Arteta keeps his eyes on the prize-- making the viewer laugh, and making the viewer feel guilty about laughing. Aniston and Gyllenhaal both play their roles perfectly straight while everyone else around them plays for laughs, which only adds to the uncomfortable hilarity.
The more I think about it, the more impressed I am with this movie. Good stuff. ****
