Directed By Lawrence Lamont

Starring – Keke Palmer, SZA, Vanessa Bell Calloway

The Plot – When best friends and roommates Dreux (Palmer) and Alyssa (SZA) discover Alyssa’s boyfriend has blown their rent money, the duo finds themselves going to extremes in a race against the clock to avoid eviction and keep their friendship intact.

Rated R for adult language throughout, sexual material and brief drug use.

ONE OF THEM DAYS – Official Trailer (HD)

POSITIVES

Ever since the Friday franchise closed shop, with its third installment more than 22-years-ago, there has been a noticeable void among black comedies that have greatly diminished the value of their cultural significance towards the subgenre, but “One of Them Days” feels like the strongest successor to that throne, with a lot of the same advantageous qualities from that iconic trilogy, without deliberately ripping off its frenetic formula. It begins and essentially hinges on the dynamic duo of Keke Palpmer and SZA, who each inscribe an abundance of radiant charisma and lived-in chemistry to the outline of their respective portrayals, with a faithful commitment to vulnerability in ways that maximizes the potential of the various off-the wall predicaments and untimely shenanigans that plague the girls on this wildly unpredictable day. Palmer has always been able to show her dramatic depth and heart to her history of tortured protagonists, but here it’s the spontaneity of her reactions as the movie’s straight man set up to SZA that makes their impacts all the more resonating, with her character forced to endure the unforeseen developments that often get the better of her, all with Keke’s impeccable timing eliciting all of the shock and despair of her character’s inability to get ahead. SZA is also a breath of intoxicating fresh air, with enough knowledgeable insight at the camera placements at all time to elicit the biggest reaction from her selling, especially during moments with her as the unknowing eyes and ears of the audience in scenes where she’s isolated slightly out of focus, giving a relatable conscience during physicality between characters that smoothly paves the way for our own interpretations at the situations. There are also some highly impactful cameos from Kat Williams, Lil Rel Howery, and a scene-stealing Maude Apatow to give the duo plenty of emotionally eclectic characters to bounce frivolously off of, with just enough emphasis of impact, without weighing down the integrity of the pacing to the 92-minute run time, which maintains consistency throughout the duration of the engagement. Beyond the film’s leading ladies and extensive ensemble, the humor is also more successfully effective than not, primarily during the first half of the movie, where anything can and often does materialize for laughs before our very eyes. There are many kinds of humor that the script attempts, but the most ambitious is definitely in the physicality for slapstick that resulted in more than a few hearty laughs for my engagement, without sacrificing the integrity and legitimacy of the film’s conflict, which constantly feels urgent in a film spanning eight hours. In addition, the humor also cleverly taps into some not so subtle spoofing for social commentary in everything from racial inferiorities to credit unions in ways that not only have plenty to say about the state of the world, but also emphasize why our characters are unable to casually get ahead on a conflict that should be easily resolvable. It’s obviously slightly exaggerated circumstances, like one involving an APR rate on a lone being over a thousand percent on the borrower, but meaningful gags only require increments of truth to be successfully effective on the realities of the audience, and I found their unearthed illustrations to be just as unfiltered as they were hilarious to my own personal memories dealing with them. The feature length debut from Lawrence Lamont is also a stylistically invigorating success, with a lucidly sleek and entertainingly stimulating presentation that proves no shortage of personality behind the lens. On-site photography of this story based in and around Los Angeles certainly goes a long way in making it feel authentically endearing to anyone with familiarity to the city of angels, but Lamont’s spectacle splendor with the lens, with cinematographer Ava Berkofsky in tow, beckons a blossoming of sunbaked photography that radiates gorgeously over the backdrops of so many colorfully rich and architecturally diverse institutions that bring out the beauty of the hood in ways that very few films set there can accommodate. Likewise, the emotional diversity of the soundtrack selections seamlessly tap into various psychologies within the depicted characters, with softly gentle R&B played during scenes of romantic intimacy and longing, while gangster rap registers during scenes of urgency and physical confrontation. It’s certainly not an original take, as more movies are frequently using music as a means to tap into the subconscious of its characters, but it does allude to the idea of feelings persisting within these various characters, even when the dialogue doesn’t dig deeper, granting us a deeper sense of their interests and focus, privately, in ways that enhance the aforementioned comedic spectrum.

NEGATIVES

While the first half of “One of Them Days” is nearly flawless in its execution of off-beat shenanigans, the second half is noticeably inferior, as a result of a creatively diminishing script that takes some conventional chances that more times than not error on the side of caution to a story enveloped with spontaneity. Once the time-honored tradition of third act distancing takes shape for the girls, with a cause that could easily be resolved with a simple conversation of understanding between Dreux and Alyssa, the film shifts towards feeling overly dramatic, sacrificing almost the entirety of its aforementioned comedic muscle for a third act that feels like it starts from scratch with a conflict that suddenly realizes that it has built little in terms of long-term storytelling for the narrative. During this section, the film quickly resolves one conflict for another, with this newfound antagonist quite literally popping out of thin air with about a half hour left in the film, and between his arrival dramatically shifting the focus of the narrative from the simplicity of an intimately small but relatable conflict to a fight for survival, it feels like an unnecessary shift pertaining to the production not having enough faith in itself to leave a lasting memory, with newly defined stakes that don’t feel like they belong from this movie. Beyond this, my other significant problem with the film does stem from the structural integrity of the gags themselves, as they feel episodic from one set piece to the next, with a majority of them adding nothing significant but a lesson of humility to the girls. The fact that the gags are more successfully effective than not takes some of the pressure away from so many temporary instances that never amount to anything important or vital to the screenplay, but considering they take so much time away from the focus and development of the primary conflict that can be summarized into fifteen minutes of screen time, it does start to feel a bit repetitively derivative and stale, the longer that it persists, with some gags even venturing on a bit longer than needed, in order to stretch their unsettling impacts. Following this, the characters themselves do make the occasional stupid decision to set the motions of the conflict in order, especially one instance involving Alyssa contacting her ex to brag, when she knows that he has spent all day with a woman who wants to beatdown Alyssa. What happens? What you would expect, in that the overzealous juggernaut catches up to Alyssa and pounds her into the ground, and it stands as one of two significant actions from these protagonists that proves the screenwriter didn’t take time to tap into the mentality of the leading ladies, as they’re either suffering from short term memory loss, or the two dumbest protagonists that movies can capably conjure.

OVERALL
“One of Them Days” is an infectiously energetic and radiantly warm buddy comedy that brings legitimacy back to black comedies of the millennial age that clued audiences into the daily struggles of a misunderstood culture with many of the same wants and needs for survival as anyone. Keke Palmer and SZA shine with impeccable chemistry and comedic timing that summon one of the more synthetically believable dynamic duos in recent memory, and though the film loses a step in the imbalanced quality of its two halves subscribing to underdeveloped character actions and one-off set pieces, director Lawrence Lamont appraises enough stylistic flare and humanistic substance to the proceedings to always keep things interesting, with a rampantly unpredictable but sincere sense of togetherness within community that highlights life always being what you make of it.

My Grade: 7.5 or B