"For a Good Time, Call..." (Guardian 02/11/12)

For a Good Time, Call… (18) 85 mins ***

After a slow start, Jamie Travis’s comedy warms up as a post-Bridesmaids, popcorn-feminist entertainment about New York flatmates – buttoned-down business brain Lauren (Lauren Anne Miller) and potty-mouthed toughie Katie (Ari Graynor) – pooling their resources to establish a massively profitable phone sex line. The dialogue, penned by Miller with Katie Anne Naylon, is subversively salty: surpassing even those Judd Apatow comedies to which it’s indebted, this is almost certainly the filthiest movie ever to bear the Universal logo. Yet what’s around it is disarmingly sweet, defending the girls’ enterprise and friendship in the face of all judgement. Suffice to say, the Bechdel test is passed with flying colours: the podgy, pathetic men we see phoning it in (cameos from Kevin Smith, Seth Rogen and Party Down’s Ken Marino) are there to be spoken to, not about. Consider it 9 to 5 with dildos. 

For a Good Time, Call... is in selected cinemas.