Movie Review: “Good on Paper” is not bad on screen 

It all starts innocently enough, with you taking a chance on somebody or something new. 

Then, before you know it, you’ve been robbed of your smile and possessions as well as the proprietary rights which come with having both.

“Good on Paper” is a movie which captures this sense of loss while reminding you that a sucker is born every minute. And that “sucker” could easily be you. 

After auditioning for a part in television show she doesn’t get, standup comedian Andrea Singer (Iliza Shlesinger, 2008 winner of NBC's Last Comic Standing) is not having a good day at all. 

As she laments about her day over the phone, her mocking wit makes her appear like a fortress of fomented feelings. 

That is until she bumps into Dennis Kelley (Ryan Hansen, best known for the series Veronica Mars). 

Dennis is besuited, bespectacled and besotted with her in the way the nerd falls for the butter blonde cheerleader. 

Andrea is not there yet, however. Physically, she compares his looks to those of “an accountant who loves missionary.”

The two sit next to each on a plane from Los Angeles and get along very well. They’re as well-suited as a nod and a wink, something which should’ve set off alarm bells. 

Still, Andrea, so perceptive in her comedy, oddly doesn’t see Dennis as the parade of red flags he turns out to be.  

Even when Dennis, a hedge fund manager, relates how he lives in West Hollywood and Beverly Hills, in the very same house at the very same time! 

He also lets Andrea know he went to Yale University, so he’s Ivy League and has unlimited access to the splurge money of the rich and infamous. 

Well, so he says. 

Not only that, he lets it be known that he’s dating a model too.

Talk about being too good to be good. 

Andrea and Dennis quickly become inseparable, despite Andrea’s best friend Margot (Margaret Cho) pointing out the serious flaws in Dennis’s character. 

If you don’t know Margaret Cho, you should watch her first HBO Comedy Half-Hour. 

In it, she muses about trying to get laid after two years of abstaining from sex: she plans to lure men by covering her vagina with leaves and hoping somebody falls in!!

The “dick widow,” as she once called herself, injects a zany proportionality to this movie.

“Good on Paper”, written by Shlesinger, is “mostly” based on a true story, which is based on a lie. 

The lie is “cattfishing” (or the process of luring someone into a relationship by means of a fictional persona). 

It happens to us all, especially due to the filters and photo-shopping shaping the virtual landscape we inhabit. 

We basically can’t tell fact from fable as the two become one like a cheap imitation of a Spice Girls song title. 

Throughout the movie, Andrea punctuates this experience with a calm voiceover that has the effect of distancing her current self from her past self. Since this movie is based on Schlesinger’s former life. 

To further enrich her story, Andrea uses several different monologues to accompany several different scenes. These stand-up sets recall what Jerry Seinfeld used to do in his hit television show Seinfeld.  

Andrea, like Seinfeld, is funny as a social commentator. 

There are a number of good one-liners here which may not make you laugh out loud, but will surely leave you nodding your head as you say “clever, very clever”. 

Margot has some good lines too, but she mostly plays second fiddle Andrea. 

Basically, this movie is about a bad dating story which escalates to a very bad dating story before stopping short of being truly tragic. 

At one point, you’ll think that something sinister is going to happen to Andrea. But just as you begin to gasp; her last breath is deferred for yet another episode of crazy. 

So have a watch, it is worth your 1 hour and 32 minutes.