Honestly this movie is hilarious and has so many great elements. It feels like a throwback but also fresh at the same time. It's a shame Betsy isn't given more prominent roles more often because she is one of the funniest people out there. Whoever was involved with this movie needs to keep making movies and more people need to see them.

Studiously inoffensive... Golden Arm is vaguely like a church skit or a mid-tier 90s sitcom like Dharma and Greg. The movie has no point of view, no target, nothing brave, surprising, or sincere to say. The characters and jokes are all borrowed from better and very familiar movies and TV shows. The production design and photography, and the acting, for that matter, are "professional," meaning that the movie looks like a TV commercial and has the safe "zany" humor of a TV commercial. But Golden Arm also has a clear "act structure," of course, as required by screenwriting classes.

It's amazing that the filmmakers didn't understand that a movie about an arm-wrestling truck driver might try to be, you know, a funny parody. This was conceived as an Over the Top parody, right? No? Why is it shot and paced like a Sundance movie? Why does it try to tug at the viewer's heartstrings? Why does it use the bad-indie-movie algorithm to "humanize" its uninteresting and unsympathetic wealthy bakery-owner protagonist, and render her "relatable?" Why does the Melissa McCarthy imitator keep doing local-improv-theater-caliber mugging?

I feel more and more that art is over. Literary fiction has been worthless for 15 years. Theater is 50% jukebox musicals and 50% stage versions of Disney cartoons. Popular music is either pornography for children (like WAP) or plastic K-Pop (although, to be fair, there are still brilliant pop musicians like Laura Groves and Brothertiger working in obscurity). And comedians now behave as if they'll have to face the human resources department after the show; cancellation looms as a punishment if the comedy becomes transgressive or entertaining. Movies are either 1) soul-killing interchangeable wisecrack-and-CGI-filled comic-book adaptations, 2) soul-killing humorless long-take dramas about social issues, made by trust-fund kids who possess no wisdom; or 3) soul-killing public-arts-grant-supported comedies that exist to be given favorable reviews by easily offended bloggers.

The "blossoming romance" scenes between the bakery owner and her nonentity of a love interest are death. The shot-on-digital look of this movie is death. The way the filmmakers steal characters and conceits from Bridesmaids ("Hold On" by Wilson Phillips is replaced, this time, by "These Dreams" by Heart) is death.

When I saw Damsel, I thought: how could a comedy starting Robert Pattinson as a cowboy delivering a miniature horse be so depressing? After Golden Arm, I'm wondering how a buddy comedy about competitive arm wrestling could possibly be so depressing.

But then, it's 2021.

I actually saw this. It's about a down and out girl who got divorced, ran into an old friend who convinces her to have sex and become an arm wrestler because diversity is our strength or something.

Not kidding! That's the plot. No comedy, at least to me. It has a crude lady truck driver who is the fat trouble maker, the main character is the straight laced serious, need to get laid 2020 lady, who is being held down by the man.

Yep. Is there comedy? Not to me.

Is there propaganda? Oh, yes...aplenty.

Skip this, unless you have a girlfriend and simply need to watch something, pretend to be entertained, so you can get laid.

3 out of 10.