Girl Most Likely Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		3.5

Girl Most Likely Blu-ray Movie Review

More likely than not.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman October 30, 2013

Scott Foundas, one of Variety’s film critics, just wrote a long riposte taking his fellow critics as well as audiences to task for not understanding why Ridley Scott’s latest effort, The Counselor, is actually one of Scott’s best films. Taking a page from Foundas’ approach, I’d like to cautiously suggest that the Kristen Wiig comedy Girl Most Likely is not the low level failure many made it out to be during its brief and uneventful theatrical release. Is it perfect? No (and more about that in a moment). Is this Bridesmaids redux? Absolutely not—and therein may lie at least one major problem that Girl Most Likely encountered upon its initial release. This somewhat quieter (though still occasionally raucous) film is much more character driven, less outrageous and certainly less bawdy than the Paul Feig outing. But it is very funny at times, albeit with a rather melancholic subtext running through its story of an erstwhile wunderkind who has found out that her adult life hasn’t exactly panned out the way she planned, and who after a “fake” suicide attempt (more about that later), is consigned to spend 72 hours under supposed house arrest with her completely dysfunctional mother and brother. Wiig portrays Imogene (evidently the original title of the film), a once promising playwright who has taken a drudge filled job describing touring Broadway shows (and getting in trouble for instead offering critiques of said shows) while attempting to navigate her “soul bonding” with boyfriend Peter (Brian Petsos). We’ve actually first met Imogene as a young girl portraying Dorothy in a school production of The Wizard of Oz, involved in a bit of a contretemps with her teacher over the appropriateness of Dorothy’s iconic “There’s no place like home” line. It’s therefore obvious that Imogene is a bit of a pain in the derriere, a persnickety type who is prone to disparaging others while perhaps not being fully aware of her own shortcomings, and one who obviously has a few issues with home being where the heart is.

Things quickly go from bad to worse—and then even worse than that—for Imogene as the film trundles through an admittedly unlikely series of quirky vignettes. At a swanky Manhattan evening out, she’s initially stood up by Peter, and when he does finally arrive, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out he isn’t much interested in Imogene anymore. Unfortunately, Imogene is not a rocket scientist, and she is completely taken by surprise when Peter announces he wants to break up while the two are riding home after the party. Imogene is inconsolable and in a moment of panic, decides to stage her own suicide in order to get Peter’s sympathy. Waiting for him to arrive, she decides to pop one of the sleeping pills she has artfully spread across her bed, so that when her supposed BFF Dara (June Diane Raphael) shows up to check on her, it does indeed appear that Imogene has done the deed. That quickly consigns Imogene to a so-called “5150 hold” for psychiatric reasons at the local hospital. Unfortunately, the hospital is overcrowded, and so Imogene’s estranged mother Zelda (Annette Bening) is recruited to come pick Imogene up and monitor her behavior for the following 72 hours.

That then forces Imogene to go home again, which as any student of Thomas Wolfe will know, is supposedly impossible. Zelda, a former stripper who still nurses an unhealthy gambling fixation, lives in a dilapidated house on the beach in Ocean City, New Jersey, with Imogene’s sweet but perhaps slightly mentally disabled brother Ralph (Christopher Fitzgerald), a man-child who is obsessed with mollusks. (The film never really addresses what’s going on with Ralph, and while he seems to be “slow”, as an old euphemism used to go, at one point he spouts off a series of very smart sounding technical data about one of his inventions, so perhaps the implication is that he suffers from something like Asperger Syndrome.) Imogene is appalled to find out that her childhood room has been rented to a local lothario named Lee (Darren Criss), and that her widowed mother has been shacking up with a patently bizarre guy named George Bouche (think about it), played by Matt Dillon. Bouche claims (at various times) to be a C.I.A. agent, a ninja and, just for good measure, a samurai.

An uncharacteristic slip of the tongue on George’s part suddenly alerts Imogene to the fact that her supposedly long deceased father is in fact not dead, which only further sends the poor hapless woman into an emotional tailspin. She sets off on a quixotic quest to track him down, especially once she discovers he’s evidently a very successful author living in Manhattan. Ultimately Lee and Ralph join in on the hunt, though the ultimate denouement, once again echoing that warning from Thomas Wolfe, is not all that Imogene had hoped for.

Girl Most Likely is a rather bittersweet affair, and it admittedly loses quite a bit of steam in its second half, when an increasingly improbable set of dominoes starts to cascade in wildly ridiculous ways (culminating in an all too predictable showdown involving George and a bizarre metal “shell” Ralph has invented so that humans can experience what being completely protected, mollusk style, is like). And there’s also no denying that the film aims for a Little Miss Sunshine-esque quirkiness without being able to maintain that film’s general level of finely balanced humor and pathos. But there is a lot to like—maybe even love—about Girl Most Likely. Wiig is of course charming and wonderfully vulnerable throughout the film, and Richardson and Criss both turn in fantastically winning performances. Dillon is a hoot in an intentionally completely ridiculous role, but Annette Bening may take the cake here. Her Zelda is a surprisingly layered affair, one part defiant harridan, one part aggravated, worn down aging nymph.

Married co-directors Shari Springer Bergman and Robert Pulcini were Oscar nominated for co-writing the criminally underappreciated American Splendor, the quasi-biographical film about Harvey Pekar which starred Paul Giamatti. Working here with a screenplay by actress-writer Michelle Morgan, the two deliver a well modulated, if occasionally bumpy, ride that sees Imogene coming to terms with who she is, not who she dreamt she’d be. The film is a bit too sanguine in its closing moments, especially after such a comedically dour first two acts, but the film does manage to impart an obvious but still heartfelt message that it may indeed be impossible to permanently go home again —but visiting is always an option.

Girl Most Likely Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Girl Most Likely is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. One step forward— two steps back: I was just on record the other day in another review mentioning how much I tended to love features shot with the Arri Alexa system, which to my eyes replicates the depth and density of film more impressively than some other digital products. According to the usually reliable IMDb, Girl Most Likely was shot with the Arri Alexa, but the results here, while certainly not horrible by any stretch of the imagination, are curiously lackluster. Look, for example, at the pallid, almost brown flesh tones in the first screencapture, or the slightly problematic contrast in screenshot 14. The image is always nicely sharp and well detailed, and fine detail even pops magnificently in close-ups (take a look at Wiig's ribbed shirt and the nice precision of the shelled creature crawling across her in the third screenshot), but overall this is a much less sharp and especially colorful outing than I personally have come to expect from this technology. Even though this is relegated to a BD-25, there are no real compression issues to report.

Girl Most Likely Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Girl Most Likely's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 is fine as far as it goes, though it tends to only spring vividly to life during scenes that feature source cues or in scenes like Lee's "Backstreet Boys" performance or the club scene which follows it. Otherwise, this tends to play out in much smaller scale dialogue scenes, which the DTS track supports effortlessly even if surround channels aren't consistently engaged. Fidelity is excellent throughout this track, though dynamic range is relatively negligible other than the few noisier moments alluded to above.

Girl Most Likely Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Gag Reel (1080p; 2:29)


• Life in the Human Shell (1080p; 3:14) follows someone (seen only from the rear, so it's unclear whether it's really Ralph) wearing the shell invention and traipsing around Manhattan. I don't know what's funnier, the fact that some people stare incredulously or others walk by without a second glance.


• Making Most Likely (1080p; 8:44) is standard EPK fare.


• Deleted Scenes (1080p; 2:39)

Girl Most Likely Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I'm frankly not even sure Girl Most Likely ever screened theatrically in my market, and if it did, it must have disappeared almost instantaneously, for I really had little foreknowledge of it when it hit my review queue. After having watched it, I was frankly kind of surprised at the viscerally negative reaction it apparently got when it was released. The film has some issues, especially in its second half, when things tend to get too gimmicky for their own good, but there's a really nice, pitch black humor running throughout the film, and the performances are generally quite winning. Wiig fans will probably love this outing despite its flaws, but I'd also suggest that Bening fans give it a shot, as for my money, she delivers a fantastically nuanced performance in what is oftentimes a cartoon like environment. This Blu-ray's video is kind of "blah" looking, but (though I may be in the distinct minority here) the film itself comes Recommended.