In her first feature as writer and director, Lake Bell plays Carol Solomon, a struggling Hollywood vocal coach (she teaches Eva Longoria to do a Cockney accent) who wants to break into the lucrative, male-dominated field of trailer voiceovers. Her egotist dad doesn’t want her infringing on his boys’ club. With the support of a smitten sound engineer, Carol gets a shot at voicing the promos for a post-apocalyptic girl-power quadrilogy called The Amazon Games. The guys in her field hate her for it, of course.
Bell’s script, which won a deserved writing award at Sundance, inserts a subplot about Dani, Carol’s older sister, and Dani’s husband Moe that’s not as irrelevant as it first seems. In fact, Bell knows how to set a savvy trap, making us see Carol’s world as a microcosm for the world every working woman lives in. That she does it with subtlety, humour and touching gravity marks Bell as a filmmaker to watch.
– Peter Travers, Rolling Stone
