Rating: 
Summary: Who knew Aniston had chops?
Review: ...Aniston plays Justine Last, a clerk at a discount store, whose life is the picture of tedium. Justine has spent her life in this small Texas town, avoiding college for fear that it would cost her her husband working at the same dreary job for years... The two enter into an elicit affair that stretches the boundaries of what Justine thought her life was about and causes her to reevaluate everything she holds dear. This movie works, but it's not on the strength of the writing...film bills itself as a comedy, but for the most part is far more dramatic. Most of the really funny moments all seem to come at the hands of Zooey Deschanel who plays a cynical worker at the department store who has fun with the public address system and with unsuspecting cosmetics customers. Which brings us to where this movie does work -- the performances. Deschanel is great in her cynical voice, with impeccable comedic timing. Gyllenhall is also good as the young man who wants to be J.D. Salinger so badly he's already planning to disappear after writing one novel. Reilly, as Aniston's husband, takes a character that could very easily have been a stereotypical tank-top wearing, wife-beating husband and injects some real humanity. You get the impression that Phil Last is a man who genuinely cares about his wife and would do anything for her, he's just too stupid to realize there's a problem. Nelson, who's almost always good, compliments Reilly's bumbling good-hearted character well. Aniston, however, really shines in this film. Her accent seems quite natural -- the only times it ever feels out of place is when you remind yourself how long she's played the spoiled rich girl on Thursday nights and compare the two voices. She is convincing as someone who has painted her entire life into a corner and doesn't know how to escape. Director Miguel Arteta uses a very understated style that works for the movie -- it's never too flashy, never too loud. The movie knows its pace and keeps it well. Only the script by Mike White keeps it from being a truly great work... Although you can see the end of the movie coming a mile away, the performances of "The Good Girl" make it worth checking out. Perhaps for the first time in her career, Aniston has proven she can play a good deal more than this particular title would imply.
Rating:
Summary: Subtle Black Humour
Review: Before seeing this movie, I expected more in your face comedy, but what I got was an original flick with more subtle very well acted characters. The story is about a girl who has lived a humdrum life in a boring little town with not much to do or to aspire to become. She works at a drugstore called the Retail Rodeo and leads a hardly alive day to day existence as a retail clerk and a wife to a husband who is a couch potato/pothead who spends most of his time with his sidekick, the most hilarious actor, whose name I do not remember. The girl is of course Jennifer Aniston, named Justine in the movie. She meets up with another clerk who appears to have a certain mystery to him, an allure, who has renamed himself Holden after "Catcher in the Rye". He turns out to be some goofball and after time Justine figures it out. Her life starts to change and she has to make choices that could really start her on a new path, does she want to take the leap or doesn't she. The movie is totally unique and stands out with great performances and underlying humor. If you are looking for in your face comedy, this is more built in, part of the characterizations rather than blatant jokes! A really sweet gem of a film.
Rating: 
Summary: The Good Girl
Review: Found this movie very disturbing and unrealistic.
Jennifer Anniston is one of the most "Beautiful People" in the entire world. To think that someone as pretty as her would end up hanging out and sharing life with such a loser, such as her husband and his idiot side-kick, disturbs the rotation of the entire universe. Her acting was top notch but this scenario could never happen in the real world. Some of the scenes and some of the decisions she makes in the film were so disturbing and unrealistic, I literally had to leave the movie theater. ...
Rating: 
Summary: Realities of life, Reality of choices made
Review: Excellent film: superbly directed, wonderful acting, emotional *human* story. No Hollywood ending here.
Rating:
Summary: Thought-provoking
Review: Jennifer Aniston, best known as Rachel on "Friends," has also done a number of films, but in most of these, she is simply Rachel by a different name. In "The Good Girl," she has an opportunity to play a completely dissimilar character. In this movie, Aniston plays an unhappily married make-up-counter clerk who is bored and disappointed with her life. Her means of escape is to have an affair with a much younger co-worker. Complications, of course, ensue. There is a distinct irony in the title, as she is not a good girl, but rather an amoral one, essentially self-absorbed and willing to do whatever it takes to not face the consequences of her actions. As a result, she makes others around her suffer more. In less capable hands, this might make an unpleasant movie, but Aniston is clearly able to handle this role excellently, making her antiheroic role sympathetic. This movie succeeds because of Aniston, who is in every scene. A good supporting cast helps out, and this one has such a cast. Although it has comic moments, this is not a comedy and should not be viewed if you're expecting a light movie. If you want good drama, however, a movie that depends more on writing and acting than pure action, this is a good choice.
Rating:
Summary: One Thing Leads to Another....
Review: ...in this movie about a frustrated 30-year-old Retail Rodeo clerk who feels trapped at her job and trapped in her marriage. Justine hates just about everything in her life, and then one day develops an interest in the bored young new cashier, Holden. He's only 22 and appears dark and interesting. It doesn't take long for her to forsake talking to her other clerk friend and concentrate solely on Holden, and for this to ripen into a full-fledged affair. But things get out of hand shockingly fast, and before long Justine is lying, sleeping with another man to buy his silence, and ultimately disappointing just about everyone in her life before things come to an even more shocking climax. I thought "The Good Girl" was particularly well cast, and just about all the performances are strong. I particularly like how the young lover starts out as a together-seeming person, but in the end, is just an immature, somewhat nauseating kid. Bubba, the painter friend of Justine's cuckolded husband, is also very good. My one criticism would concern the voiceover narration Justine (Jennifer Aniston) provides. I think it is too literate, given the woman we're presented with. There's no other indication that she would say such things employing some of the imagery she does. Not every person weary of their life is a genius, you know. Got any "Good Girls" in your life? Check out this movie and begin to wonder about them.
Rating:
Summary: good story about bad decisions
Review: This film would have been good with any actress, and while I think Jennifer Aniston did a good job, I don't see this as a breakout role for her. The film did well in depicting the glum downtrodden world of working in a store like "Retail Rodeo" (as a former "K-Martian", it brought back a lot of memories I was trying to suppress.) Aniston's character, Justine "Teeny" Last (her name just says it all), is supposed to be depressed, in a funk, but Aniston's eyebrows are a little too groomed and her skin a little too tan and clear for a small-town girl who has given up on life. She basically looks like Rachel wearing flannel. The other characters around her are sufficiently pasty and ordinary, and look like they should be depressed even when they aren't. But I guess Aniston's agent wouldn't hear of them uglifying his/her client. The storyline is good -- Justin meets Holden, a 22-year-old cashier who believes he is the main character of "Catcher in the Rye" and sees him as her "last best chance." She is 30 and has been married for 7 years to Phil, a pothead painter who messes up her house with his best friend Bubba. She is trying to get pregnant by him but it's not happening. She meets Holden and starts an affair and seems a little more alive. Holden, meanwhile, seems a little more crazy. What is amazing is how all these men seem proprietal about Teeny, especially her body. Phil, Holden, Bubba, even the security guard at Retail Rodeo who keeps bugging her to come to Bible study (who says she'll have many nights of fire and brimstone -- just kidding.) What's equally amazing is how one poor decision spirals into other poor decisions and irretrievable regret.
Rating:
Summary: an offbeat gem
Review: Jennifer Anniston gives a beautiful, heartfelt performance in "The Good Girl," a film totally in tune with the rhythms of everyday life. Anniston' Justine Last is just one of the many people inhabiting this Deep South, Bible Belt town who find themselves leading lives of quiet desperation, imprisoned by the dreary sameness of their daily routines. Justine works at one of those generic five-and-dime drug stores that so define the culture of Middle America. Yet, Justine's job and work environment are not the only sources of her frustration. She is also married to a well-meaning but dull blue collar worker who would rather spend the evening sitting on the sofa getting stoned with his partner than engage in any meaningful relationship-building with his wife. At the age of 30 then, Justine is ripe for some kind of life-changing experience when in walks Holden Worther, an introverted, obviously disturbed young co-worker who sees in Justine the very soul mate he has been searching for all his life, a person who will understand him and share his hatred for the life they are both leading. "The Good Girl" is really about the contrast between what we would like our lives to be and what they really are. Justine knows that the "easy" choice would be to pull up stakes and simply run away with Holden, abandoning a town, a marriage and a husband she has come lately to both abhor and despise. Yet, something keeps Justine rooted to the spot, something that makes her understand that any decision she makes will end up hurting someone in the end besides herself. Perhaps she sticks around because she realizes that, for all his faults, her husband is, in reality, a pretty decent guy overall and that he really does love her. Perhaps she also realizes that Holden is more mentally disturbed than she is willing to admit and that whatever life she might have with him would only mean exchanging one set of troubles for another. Credit the Mike White screenplay with exploring the complex nature of the film's characters and relationships. We never quite know where the story is headed or how all the issues will get resolved - if at all. As in real life, the story here keeps bumping up against new and ever more challenging complications and, because we can identify with the messiness, we are eager to go along with it wherever it chooses to take us. The film also does a fine job showing how life takes wholly unexpected turns at times, such as when a fairly major character dies unexpectedly. The casual suddenness of the death throws us for a loop since we so rarely see death portrayed that way in the movies. Miguel Arteta's deadpan, matter-of-fact directorial style brings out the black comedy richness inherent in the material. Amid all the pain and sadness, there are a surprising number of genuine laughs in the film as we see our own lives reflected in the people and incidents there on the screen. Actually, the film reminds us a bit - in its music, its use of voiceover narration and its unromanticized view of rural life - of Terrance Malick's great 1973 film, "Badlands," a landmark in independent American filmmaking. Anniston, who is probably in every scene in the film, carries the picture with her rich and highly empathetic performance. Even though her character is a woman slowly becoming deadened to the world around her, she still retains that spark of life and that absurd hope for the future that make her worthy to be the centerpiece of an intimate drama such as this one. Jake Gyllenhaal makes Holden both strangely appealing and a little frightening, so that, as Justine does, we come to admire his "uniqueness" of spirit (he has adopted his name from the main character of his favorite book "Catcher in the Rye") yet fear his increasing possessiveness. John C. Reilly as Justine's husband, Phil, and Deborah Rush as Gwen Jackson, Justine's sometime confidante at the store, also provide memorable, telling performances. In fact, there is nothing less than a superb performance in the entire film. The question of whether or not Justine is really "a good girl" is, as it should be, left up to the individual viewer to answer. Some may feel she is; others may feel she's not. What really matters, though, is that "The Good Girl" doesn't try to impress us with the slickness that generally defines mainstream commercial filmmaking. Instead it lets its drama unfold in an unforced, believable manner, so that even its moments of greatest absurdity seem somehow strangely real and lifelike. It is a film that, in its own quiet, subtle way, manages to get under your skin - and keeps you thinking for a long time after you leave the theater.
Rating: 
Summary: Much Better Than Expected.
Review: I've never been a fan of Friends or the forays it's cast has made into filmmaking. Usually when you see Jennifer Aniston you think of cutesy, illogical but predictable emotional dreck.
This movie however was not a preditable romantic comedy or a too artistic art film. It manages to be an entertaining and amusing character study.
As a character study it almost suceeds, we still don't feel like we know Justine's character as well as we should after watching her the whole movie. I feel I should also point out that the character of Holden isn't really depressed or mentally ill, but rather "fashionably depressed". The character of Justine's husband we probably feel we know the most about. The filmmakers and the actor tell us alot about him without too giving him to much screentime.
The movie isn't too predictable and the characters are clearly human.It doesn't quite answer all the questions it raises, which is much better than if it had tried too.
This movie was very funny and entertaining, but it seems to be the type that's wouldn't be quite as funny or entertaining a second time.
One thing, you may notice that the nothing ever seems to be in focus, the whole screen looks fuzzy. I believe that this film was shot in digital so if you're not watching it on a digital projector it's going to look muddy.
Rating:
Summary: Will provoke discussion
Review: In the ironically titled The Good Girl, Justine Last feels trapped by a too-early marriage and a dead-end minimum wage job. She's disgusted by her pot-smoking painter husband. But is her trap real, or in her mind? Pal and fellow employee Gwen thinks Justine would be less bored if she got busy and did something constructive. Instead Justine manufactures a little excitement by locking onto the self-pitying cashier "Holden," an angry young man who fancies himself a fiction writer. But Justine's impulsive actions have consequences not only for herself, but for Holden, her husband, and even for Gwen. Justine finds herself in such a spiraling whirlpool of "excitement" that she's going to have a very tough time getting out of it. This deliciously black little movie is a very Darwinian exploration of every human primate's tendency to value one's own good over every other consideration. Justine is a "good" girl only in the sense that she always does what at the moment she thinks is good for her! (As does every other character; as do we all.) The end, which some have claimed is a cop-out, is actually a perfect expression of the ultimate outcome of such tactics: Justine gets to use the fertile sperm of her lover, while virtually assuring his death, and gets to keep her "good father" husband whom she repeatedly assures as to the baby's paternity! Wow, the ultimate useful female reproductive strategy! All the performances are terrific here. And every character is rounded and sympathetic, even when they do the most terrible things--this screenplay is the very essence of good writing. Audiences will argue about whether the ending is positive or negative, but it is neither. It is fitting for this character.
What, you were hoping Justine was going to leave her husband and go to junior college with a baby carrier on her back? Get real.
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