A Nice Girl Like You (2020)

Really good watch, could watch again, and can recommend. I don't think this is one anyone is going to watch over and over, but it's a great one-shot. Lucy Hale is amazing, and I'll admit I wasn't a big fan of her character on "Pretty Little Liars", but it really seems that she can elevate any role she takes, this one included. I honestly have a very short list of actresses that could have pulled this off as well as she did. There was also a fun appearance by Jackie Cruz ("Orange is the New Black") with fun hair which was funny to see her expand her range, just a little, as the last time I saw her she was a scientist in "Tremors: Skrieker Island". The story is a little odd, but it's designed as a "slice of life" sort of rom-com, so the setting is so allegedly normal to contrast the main character as odd in the idea that she's not into sex. I'm really torn on the movie's key concept that she's odd for not being overly sexual or that she's not because she's so uptight. Regardless, she has a fun little list of things to do, but she's clearly going to do it once and move on. I'm a fan of "try it once, and if you don't like, then you can never do it again", but we're told to laugh at someone being brave about this. While the movie is supposed to be about her growth as a character, she clearly isn't designed to actually growth, just get out of her own way long enough to open her to a new experience of a new man, and then have that same openness become a conflict. I'd say that was a spoiler, but I think that is part of the movie's concept.

I... actually kinda like this? It's dumb no doubt, but it works. Just narrowly, I will say that. 'A Nice Girl Like You' does feature moments that don't come out well, though I honestly didn't dislike watching it all unfold. There are a couple of funny moments, particularly one lippy bit, and Lucy Hale (Lucy) makes for an enjoyable lead. It's an amusing and fun premise. Of course it is nothing near perfect and I was extremely close to rating it a notch lower, yet I think it has enough to it to make it a worthwhile watch. I can, admittedly, see it splitting opinion. As noted, Hale is the star but I also found Jackie Cruz (Nessa) and Mindy Cohn (Pricilla) decent. The film is directed by The Brothers Riedell, two guys I in fact used to watch years and years back when they were doing YouTube and Internet Icon. I seem to recall enjoying their content on there so it's nice to see them making films nowadays. I still remember their subscribe song/outro thing seven+ years on... Every now and then I find a film that isn't all that great but I still have a fine time with it, this is one of those occasions. Not gonna lie, I'm cool with this.

This movie’s idea of humor is repeating the names of certain parts of the human body out loud – preferably within senior citizens’ earshot –, and in that sense this film talks the talk but doesn’t walk the walk. It raises the (rhetorical) question, can a sex comedy be entertaining when it’s the audiovisual equivalent of a eunuch? According to IMDb, “After being accused of being too inhibited by her ex-boyfriend, a violinist [played by Lucy Hale and also named Lucy, perhaps to avoid confusion among the intellectually challenged cast and crew] creates a rather wild to-do list that sends her on a whirlwind journey of self-discovery.” How “wild” is this list? Per one if its items, Lucy must go to a strip club, which turns out to be the kind that exists only in the movies and on TV; that is, where the strippers don't really strip (later Lucy says that if one is "naked enough" it doesn't matter how badly one dances. Two things; 1) as I just pointed out, these women aren’t naked, and 2) nudity is an absolute. One is either naked or one isn’t). It’s one thing to be sexually inexperienced, but must Lucy be dumb as well? She and her friend and fellow musician Pricilla (Mindy Cohn from The Facts of Life) are hired to do a gig. At some point before this, Lucy has procured herself a set of Ben Wa balls. There's nothing inherently wrong with the latter, but why would Lucy decide to, so to speak, go balls to the wall right before she has to play in public? And the answer is so that the balls can fall out of her cavity with supposedly hilarious results (“this is not funny!” Lucy tells Pricilla, and we couldn't agree more). I’m not saying A Nice Girl Like You should have been obscenely explicit or overly graphical, which wouldn’t do in a comedy anyway; sex can be fun, but it’s only funny to children and immature people – to put it in perspective, a film like American Pie has a lot of fun with sex because, for as much out of their depth as its characters are, they at least have a basic understanding of the mechanics of the sexual act; on the other hand, a movie like Sex Tape fails miserably because it was made by people who apparently lack the slightest notion of how intercourse works, and who think a woman doing a triple front flip onto her acquiescent husband’s member is somehow a laughing matter. As for A Nice Girl Like You, we're meant to believe that its heroine has undergone a sexual awakening because she goes from having sex in her pajamas to doing it with her bra on – and even then we’re not really sure she went through with it, seeing as how the movie cuts to an outside shot where computer generated fireworks are going off in the night sky (CGI fireworks? Really? Guess that means he wore a rubber).