don e.
This movie was awesome. Good concept and well played. I enjoyed some of the humor presented in the movie. I liked how the movie played out from beginning,middle, and end. It was a clever way to mix all the confrontation between the actors and actresses to make it a all around good time film. Althoughh i thought that there should have been more use of the other big time actors and actresses only to help the movie reach its full potential. There could've been more use for some of the other stars. David did a nice job with this one along with the others. The humor could have expanded more along with the entertainment but over all i think it was a great movie with a greate plot.
jharberson
The best romantic comedies (Pretty Woman, As Good As It Gets, Bull Durham, Knocked Up) often remind us that, not only do we need other people, but that they also better us. Miss Dial, David Steinberg's newest film, charmingly succeeds at doing the same. Steinberg, a master of raunchy, gross-out comedy (he wrote or co-wrote several of the American Pie films and the hilariously bawdy coming-of-age novel Last Stop This Town), has created a subtle, engaging, and relentlessly funny character study about the profitable, if painful, self-improvement occurring when the right person enters one's life. Miss Dial is Erica (an outstanding Robinne Lee), a home-based consumer products customer service rep who (with a smiling, repressed contempt) fields calls from morons and weirdos befuddled by her company's usually self-explanatory products. After one moron too many, Erica takes a break from her caller queue and, attempting to call a friend, misdials an Afghanistan War vet in North Carolina. An engrossing conversation ensues, prompting Erica to keep dialing random numbers to talk to strangers, most of whom provide the honest, unscripted human contact she didn't know she needed. Her last "misdial" brings her to Kyle (an excellent Sam Jaeger), with whom she develops an increasingly romantic rapport. Kyle goads Erica, however charmingly, towards a self-understanding prompting reconsideration of her relationships, personal and professional.Miss Dial also meditates upon what, as another reviewer observed, is perhaps the great irony of our age: technology has made us at once intimate and estranged. People increasingly prefer social networks, texts, and telephones to real, human contact. Resultantly, one may know a person's favorite books, music, and foods and not really know him or her. Couple that with the perma-smiling personae workplaces oblige employees to adopt (as Erica does with flagging success throughout the story) to handle a cretinous, consuming public and one realizes how we can interact with others constantly and yet learn nothing about them or ourselves. Technically speaking, Steinberg's writing and direction are right on. His plotting is a textbook example of screenwriter William Goldman's demand: "Give the audience what they want, just not in the way they expect it." And the spare, split-screen rendering of the characters' phone conversations captures the sense of phony intimacy technology allows while focusing attention upon the actors' masterful performances. Mr. Steinberg has done a mitzvah in creating Miss Dial. It deserves the widest possible audience.
ife-arteaga
This was a very enjoyable and laughter filled film. There were many scenes that kept me laughing especially when the lead actress Eric would make calls for her job. The concept of the "Miss Dial" in which Erica would call a random person and just talk with them was a very original idea to me. It really made me think about how, despite all these social networks, are disconnected from people outside the people we see everyday. Less and less people are breaking out of their comfort zone to meet new people and more and they are stuck behind a computer screen. Although I really enjoyed this film the ending was no much to my liking as it ended up like any other love story with the man and women meeting and having a happily ever after.
John Kilbourne
Miss Dial is another one of those movies that you wanna see for other reasons than the plot itself. The film seemed interesting because of the director's approach to it. What made me curious was that the film was supposed to be shot so that no two characters would be filmed together. Although the idea seemed awesome, the execution of it was honestly just disappointing. The movie started off well, but quickly turned from average to almost unbearable. The acting seemed a bit forced, and sometimes it actually looked like some of the stars were reading their lines off of the wall in front of them when they were faced with a longer part. The story began to just be weird at a certain point, and it seemed like the characters didn't seem to ever face any consequence for the choices they made. Through the middle of the movie the events that take place start to get repetitive and predictable; Take a call, Call a stranger, Get a non intimidating call from your boss about work ethic, repeat. After a while, a new step is added to the circle of events when she calls a volunteer EMT named Kyle who swept Erica off of her feet with his good looks and monogamous principals. The end of the movie was extremely rushed, and extremely predictable. Erica and Kyle both hear a siren outside, and it's finally revealed that Kyle just so happened to move right next to her. Overall this movie is pretty bad, and basically seemed to me like a day in the life of a woman who uses her contradicting relationship with telephones to build a strong connection with a man who should have realized that he lived a block away when he creepily scoured through her Facebook page in the very beginning of the movie.
