Netflix Movie Review: Good on Paper


Comedian Iliza Shlesinger has been one of the best standup comedians in the last few years, along with Amy Shumer, Kevin Hart and Dave Chappell. In one of her standup specials she has told a story about a man who she met on a plane who then became her boyfriend. It turns out that this man lied about every aspect of his life, including graduating from Yale, managing a hedge fund and even lying about his mother dying of Cancer. Shlesinger has written a screenplay about this experience – now on Netflix called “Good on Paper”. Unfortunately the ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB are around 50%, once again demonstrating how difficult it is to write and produce any movie.

I thought this movie had some good aspects, including Shlesinger mixing parts of her standup act throughout this entire movie with some good acting with the remaining cast including Margaret Cho and Ryan Hanson. The problem with this idea however is that in the end, there was nothing new here, not enough comedy and eventually the whole story degraded into a revenge film. This movie would have been much better with more humor from Shlesinger both with her standup act and within the story and some new ideas that we have not seen before.

The critics are wrong ranking this film as only 50%, my rating is in the 65% range but I cannot recommend it, with the possible exception of big fans of Shlesinger’s standup act.

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