{"id":939809,"date":"2025-01-22T13:03:36","date_gmt":"2025-01-22T10:03:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=939809"},"modified":"2025-01-22T13:03:36","modified_gmt":"2025-01-22T10:03:36","slug":"one-of-them-days-review-sza-and-keke-palmer-aim-to-join-the-buddy-comedy-canon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=939809","title":{"rendered":"*One of Them Days* Review: SZA and Keke Palmer Aim to Join the Buddy-Comedy Canon"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Columns<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

One of Them Days<\/em> Review: SZA and Keke Palmer Aim to Join the Buddy-Comedy Canon<\/h1>\n
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One of Them Days<\/em>, directed by Lawrence Lamont and co-produced by Issa Rae, is a beat-for-beat update of the Ice Cube and Chris Tucker classic Friday<\/em>. It\u2019s a lot to live up to.<\/div>\n
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By <\/span>Alphonse Pierre<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

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Photos \u00a9 TriStar Pictures \/ Courtesy Everett Collection. Image by Chris Panicker.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<\/div>\n
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What Pusha T is to cocaine crime sagas, what Cash Cobain is to lustful odes to women with donks, SZA is to gut-wrenchingly realistic stories of ungrateful, cheating, boneheaded exes so self-involved they don\u2019t even realize they\u2019re the supervillains. I think of the dude on \u201cKill Bill,\u201d having a jolly day at the farmers\u2019 market with his new girl while SZA is ready to take Death Wish<\/em> levels of revenge on his ass. (I get it; giddily buying a fresh bunch of cilantro while having a burned ex out there is bold as fuck.) That\u2019s the kind of boy who sets in motion the plot of One of Them Days<\/em>, a lighthearted and sometimes fun buddy comedy starring Keke Palmer and SZA, with the music superstar in her feature-film debut.<\/p>\n

Keke Palmer is Dreux, and SZA is Alyssa, best friends and roommates in West Los Angeles who are barely getting by and dream of financial stability. Dreux is the anxious friend with a low-paying job at a fast-casual restaurant chain, but she\u2019s on track for a promotion that will ease her stress; Alyssa is ditzy and well-meaning, hoping to get the bag off her paintings. It\u2019s rent day. Dreux gives the cash to Alyssa to give to their eviction-thirstry landlord who wants to turn their apartment complex into a white gentrifier paradise. Alyssa delegates the chore down to her fake-spiritual loser boyfriend Keshawn (Joshua David Neal), whom she doesn\u2019t realize is a fake-spiritual loser because he\u2019s hung. Of course, he runs off with the money, and the girls have to hunt him down before they\u2019re thrown out on the street.<\/p>\n

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Written by Syreeta Singleton, a longtime member of the Issa Rae braintrust, One of Them Days<\/em>, co-produced by Rae, feels deeply connected to the gender wars classic Insecure<\/em> and the gone-too-soon Rap Sh!t<\/em>, both city-specific comedies about female friendship and reaching new life stages. And, if you told me it was a TV pilot, I would believe you, which is to say that it doesn\u2019t have the cinematic excess I like out of my big studio comedies. Their L.A. seems empty and restricted to a few locations that feel like they could all be on the same studio lot, instead of a living, breathing city where the possibilities are endless and you never know what\u2019s around the corner. Director Lawrence Lamont throws a Band-Aid on that issue by using music to give the city a more lived-in feel: You might catch snippets of a Mustard beat, and the movie opens with a sound bite from Big Boy\u2019s Neighborhood<\/em> playing over the radio.<\/p>\n

At its core, One of Them Days<\/em>, is basically a beat-for-beat update of Friday<\/em>. In the 1995 F. Gary Gray touchstone, Ice Cube and Chris Tucker are thick-skulled stoners in South Central who smoke the weed they were supposed to sell and have to pay back neighborhood kingpin Big Worm or face death. In their quest to get the money, they stumble into The Ghettos Tryin to Kill Me!<\/em> hi-jinks, but most of the comedy comes from their slacking off and bullshitting conversations about nothing. Unfortunately, the jokes in One of Them Days<\/em> come less from Palmer\u2019s Dreux and SZA\u2019s Alyssa hanging out and more from bits that come from a revolving door of famous comedians (Janelle James, Lil Rel Howery, Katt Williams) who pull up to do PG-13-approved versions of their thing. And, even more unfortunately, the conversations that Dreux and Alyssa have are not exactly knee-slappers. Dreux, with a lot of comedic jumpiness, voices her problems, as Alyssa responds with short quips or animated facial expressions. SZA is likable but limited, not charismatic enough to play off a scaled-back Keke Palmer. And, to be real, Friday<\/em> only works because Chris Tucker is on a bender. There\u2019s a reason all the sequels, which don\u2019t have Tucker, resort to the kind of shock humor you get from comedies running on fumes. It\u2019s hard to say there needs to be Another One of Them Days<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The funnier stuff in One of Them Days<\/em> comes from Singleton\u2019s script, detailing the petty inconveniences of the hood that can turn a bad day into a disaster: a hairdresser playing games on the afternoon of Dreux\u2019s big interview, interactions with a predatory loan shark (Keyla Monterroso Mejia, always hilarious), a biscuit thief that jacks their free meal. The mood is kept playful, even as the stakes escalate. The other good moments come from the drama between Alyssa and Keshawn, whom they find sleeping cozily in the bed of another woman, Berniece (Aziza Scott). Berniece has a bad temper and twerks like she\u2019s in the \u201cTip Drill\u201d video, and, with that ass used like a weapon, becomes the thorn in the side of Dreux and Alyssa like Deebo was to Smokey and Craig.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The greatest compliment I can give One of Them Days<\/em>, though, is that it makes me nostalgic for a time in movie history when buddy comedies, especially Black ones, were getting made on the regular. When rap and R&B stars leading major studio fare wasn\u2019t unusual. Sure, most of them turned out closer to Bow Wow\u2019s Lottery Ticket<\/em> than Friday<\/em>, but, nowadays, it\u2019s cool that they even exist. Just stars doing shit on screen! Issa Rae and company are betting that we miss those days, that all we want to see is SZA fool around in a movie that doesn\u2019t carry the weight her music now does as one of the greatest R&B songwriters of her generation. They\u2019re right.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n

Source URL: https:\/\/pitchfork.com\/thepitch\/one-of-them-days-review-sza-and-keke-palmer\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Columns One of Them Days Review: SZA and Keke Palmer Aim to Join the Buddy-Comedy Canon One of Them Days, directed by Lawrence Lamont and co-produced by Issa Rae, is a beat-for-beat update of the Ice Cube and Chris Tucker classic Friday. It\u2019s a lot to live up to. By Alphonse Pierre January 22, 2025 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":939810,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[54],"class_list":["post-939809","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-pitchfork-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/939809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=939809"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/939809\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/939810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=939809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=939809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=939809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}