I assume that fans of the HBO series are going to like this movie. People who never saw the series or who don’t get HBO are going to think that this movie is at best OK. The main thing I liked about this movie is that it provided some sort of an inside view of what it must be like to make a movie; with the problems, producers, money issues and shortfalls and the ego’s and bickering among executives, producers and the creative people who write, act and create the movie in the first place. This movie probably had more celebrity cameo’s than any movie ever has; maybe of all time. The many cameo’s neither took away nor did they add any value to the movie’s content. In the end, I thought the movie was just OK, not bad, but not that good either.

This movie has just a moderate recommendation from me.

Screenwriting pitfalls

Writing Subtext

In all the movie comedies I have ever seen I don’t remember ever hearing jokes like: “You look like this” or “You look like that”, exaggerating the way someone looks in some outlandish comedic way.  This comedic method was way overused in this movie. There had to be about 40 jokes like this and most of them were not funny.   Melissa McCarthy, the lead character in this movie has always been funny in all her movies, some of them in a subtle way and some of them, like the “Bridesmaids” in an overtly comedic way.

This movie was funny a good percentage of the time and enough of the time to recommend, but it could have been a much better movie if the story and the complex plot made more sense.  At the end, the explanations of what was happening barely made any sense which for me ruined the payoff of the movie at the end.

Overall this movie was good enough to recommend.

Screenwriting lessons learned