A Simple Favor was a riddddddddddde

oh boy...

sorry girl but this ain't your angle

A Simple Favor is basically what you'd get if you mixed a low-rent version of Gone Girl with a normal-rent Pretty Little Liars. It was the "sexy" suburban thriller for moms that I expected it to be and I can's say I'm mad. I like to think that A Simple Favor was a sort of parody of your Gone Girl, Girl on the Train, The Woman in the Kitchen (I made that last one up, but you get the gist). The film contained all of the usual tropes of the mom thriller genre but on crack. It had twins, cheating, life insurance policies, arsonnnnnnnn. Maybe I'm being naive and this film's not a parody and is actually really dumb, but I trust that Mr. Paul Feig was being smart and knew what he was doing when he sat down to make this movie. Even though I usually don't care for movies like this, I thought it was really fun and I somehow enjoyed it. Now I should probably mention that the viewing experience I had may be the reason I liked this movie and not because of the actual film itself. My friend and I went to go see A Simple Favor at our school's theater last week, and what an experience we had. We made it about 45 minutes into the 2 hour movie before the project punched it's time card and checked the fuck out. Instead of seeing Blake and Anna do shit, we were treated to an hour and 15 minutes of the screen strobing between black and blue, with a few brief flashes of the actual film. Though I can't officially say it was one of the most memorable films I've watched, I can say it was one of the most memorable films I've listened to while trying not to seizure out from looking at the screen.

uh oh, Serena's back

Because I was only able to listen to most of the movie, and because the plot was way too batshit to not be able to actually see, I will first be describing the plot as I experienced it and then describing it via Americas #1 accredited source, wikipedia. Also, Spoiler Alert in affect because it's not like you were gonna watch this anyway!!!!

A Simple Favor as Heard by Lily:

I'll start with a basic rundown of the 45 minutes I was fortunate enough to lay my eyes on. So Stephanie (a) it's Anna Kendrick, and b) who under the age of 40 is named Stephanie?) is a single mom, and mom blogger, who's son befriends Emily's (Blake " can pull of a pantsuit" Lively) kid. Stephanie is annoying as hell and Emily is weird as hell, so they're a match made in heaven. Emily is super rich, has a posh ass job, and a dreamy husband (the crazy rich Asian himself, Henry Golding). The two bond over martinis at Emily's mansion while their sons have playdates, and the two quickly become "friends". Idk if Emily felt the same way, but Stephanie seemed to think they were full on bff's, which is weird because they only hung out a few times, but go off Stephanie. After their 10 minutes of screen-time friendship, Emily skips town and leaves her kid with Steph who doesn't think to call Emily's husband until 4 days have gone by. Through her blog, Stephanie asks her followers to help her find Emily, and they eventually do by tracking her rental car to a lake in Michigan. But uh oh, guess who else is in the lake. It's Emily's corpse!!! yay!!!! After her funeral, Steph and Emily's man get together and immediately after the projector cut out, so this is where it gets dicey. A few days after her funeral, Emily's kid tells Steph and his dad that Emily came to see his at school. Everyone's like "lol you're just in mourning, let's get you to a therapist", but then Steph gets a mysterious phone call from what sound's like Emily. On their way home from school, the kid hands Steph an envelope that he says is from his mom. I should mention that at this point the screen hadn't completely given up yet so we were still getting some distorted flashes of action. I was fortunate enough to see Steph open up the envelope and gasp, and then the screen cut out so IDK what she saw. After that I really have no clue what happened except that Emily's name was actually Hope and that she had an identical twin named Faith (they also had another twin named Charity who died. Pretty sure she died from having to be named Charity). The sisters went their separate ways after arsoning their home and killing their dad. Hope turned into Emily and Faith ended up as a "junkie bitch". Emily show's back up at her house and accuses Stephanie of stealing her husband. A gun was shot. Stephanie was recording the whole thing on her blog. And that's all I know. Now I'll hand it over to wikipedia to fill in the gaps.

Wiki's take:

I'm just gonna list off all the questions I had and let the internet answer them.

--What was in the envelope? So for this we're gonna need a little background info. When Steph was 16 her dad died and at his funeral her half brother Chris showed up, and let's just say they had a nice time getting to know each other. A Flower's in the Attic, House of Yes style time together. The envelope contained some sort of "lol bitch you got an incest kid" message from Emily, hence the gasp. After this Stephanie realizes that her husband might have figured it out and purposely caused the crash that killed him and Chris. *gasp*

--If Emily's corpse was in the lake, then why is she still alive and fucking shit up? The twin duh. Now what I missed in my viewing was that our Emily drowned "Junkie Bitch" Emily in the lake. My experience was just a lot of water noise, which is a very unsettling to have to listen to.

--What is this life insurance meshugga you mentioned before? So Emily's husband (who's apparently named Sean?) took out a $4 million policy right before shit went down (Gone Girl anyone?). Turns out it was Emily that did it, because they were apparently broke or some shit and she wanted to pay off their debt. IDK what she thought was gonna happen after she "died", because it's not like she was planning on framing (or killing) Sean.

--Who got shot? Sean. I've read the wikipedia summary about 15 times and I still have no clue what happened after this, so I'm gonna let y'all find that out for yourself.

--Was there a closing title that happened to mention what went down after the movie ended? Why yes there was, thanks for asking. My friend got super impatient towards the end of the film and went ahead and read the summary. She then proceeded to fall into a fit of laughter and tell me that "if you think this is batshit then just wait". I assume this was what I was supposed to "just wait" for, and boy is it a doozy. So apparently Emily was sentenced to 20 years for the arson, Sean (who's a down on his luck writer, how original) writes his second novel and becomes a professor at Berkeley, and Stephanie hits 1 million subscribers on the blog and ends up getting her own morning show. She also became a part-time detective after the whole Emily situation, so like, what the fuck.

what in the bootleg-youtube-hell is this shit Stephanie?

Every time the projector would cut out there'd be groans from the audience and a group of people would get up and leave. My friend and I somehow didn't notice that we were the only one's who'd actually stuck it out and stayed until the lights came on at the end. I believe a round of applause is deserved for our immense display of perseverance and courage in times of tragedy. Thank you. That being said, I think I still would have enjoyed this movie regardless of whether I got to watch it or not. It was definitely OTT, but that made for some entertaining shit. I'll probably have to watch it again at some point so I can see what I missed, but what I did get to see was dumb fun shit, and I liked it.

A Simple Favor gets 3/5 OK's

...(I'm feeling generous, sue me)