Girl Walks into a Bar

Girl Walks Into a Bar sounds pretty awesome from its title alone. The intrigue and mystery is enough to raise interest, even if we aren’t entirely sure what the film is about. Fortunately for viewers the film is able to sustain some of the anonymity, but loses something each time it fades to black.

In Los Angeles, things get started after the sun sets. Told over the course of one night, a group of apparent strangers visit ten bars throughout the city.  At the end of the eighty-minute film, we get to see that our characters aren’t quite the strangers we thought they were as their stories become interwoven with one another.

Girl Walks into a Bar was actually released on YouTube the same night that it premiered at the SXSW Film Festival.  Watching it on the internet is certainly better than seeing it in a movie theater as Girl Walks Into a Bar is told in vignettes, short scenes that tell one particular story. At the end of one of these scenes, the film fades out and then reopens to a new scene. This style of storytelling is much more appreciated on the web, so it makes sense that it was touted as “the first feature film with notable stars made expressly for the internet.”

A lot of the dialogue was sharp so the film moved at an even pace. Some of the plot points died off without any clear reason, while others seemed out of place.  With so much to explore, I felt the film had tons of room to grow, but never reached its full potential.

Don’t get me wrong; I thought that for the most part the film was good, as was most of the acting.  But Girl Walks into a Bar began to feel gimmicky after awhile with a new celebrity popping up in each scene. It was fun at first, until it got a bit mundane and wasn’t.