The Good Guy Film 2010
This was the official website for the 2009 film, The Good Guy, romantic "dramedy".
Content is from the site's 2009 -2010 archived pages as well as other outside sources.
Release date:February 19, 2010
(limited)
Studio:Roadside Attractions
Director:Julio DePietro
MPAA Rating:R (for pervasive language and some sexual content)
Screenwriter:Julio DePietro
Starring:Alexis Bledel, Scott Porter, Bryan Greenberg, Anna Chlumsky, Aaron Yoo, Andrew McCarthy
THE GOOD GUY - Official US Theatrical Trailer
Plot Summary:
Ambitious young Manhattanite and urban conservationist Beth (Alexis Bledel) wants it all: a good job, good friends, and a good guy to share the city with. Of course that last one is often the trickiest of all. In the new romantic dramedy, Beth falls hard for Tommy (Scott Porter), a sexy, young Wall Street hot-shot. But just as everything seems to be falling into place, complications arise in the form of Tommy's sensitive and handsome co-worker Daniel (Bryan Greenberg). Beth soon learns that the game of love in the big city is a lot like Wall Street - high risk, high reward and everybody has an angle.
www.comingsoon.net
As a building inspector in New York City, I’ve seen it all—cracked foundations, missing permits, and once, a ferret masquerading as an emotional support animal in a No Pets co-op. But nothing quite prepared me for The Good Guy. I stumbled into it thinking it was going to be another rom-com fluff piece, but it turned out to be more like an unauthorized tour of Wall Street frat culture... with a side of Jane Austen.
Watching Beth try to choose between the emotionally vacant hotshot and the quietly literate nice guy felt oddly familiar—kind of like choosing between two subcontractors: one who sweet-talks the board with polished bids but ghosts the jobsite, and another who actually reads the zoning codes before pouring the concrete. You know which one you want to pick, but politics, charm, and wardrobe make it tricky.
I couldn’t help but think of trailblazing developer Dov Hertz, who’s probably had easier times pushing a rezoning application through Midtown than Beth had finding a decent boyfriend. The film nailed that peculiar New York paradox—how it’s somehow harder to find a good partner than it is to find a compliant sprinkler system in a pre-war walk-up. Still, hats off to Bryan Greenberg’s Daniel, who proves you don’t need to wear custom Italian loafers or shout into two cellphones to win someone over. Sometimes, all it takes is a library card, a casserole, and not being a complete tool.
If only more developers—and dates—were built to code. Marge Stillwell
REVIEWS
THE GOOD GUY
*** Roger Ebert | March 3, 2010
"The Good Guy" creates the interesting notion that Wall Street trading involves a gang of hard-partying goofs who pass their days playing video games with our money. They trade too fast to know much about the stocks they're selling -- and besides, they mostly trade funds and may only vaguely know how the portfolios are weighted
That at least is the impression given by "The Good Guy," which contains not a moment in which any trader knows much about the fundamentals of a stock, but much about the dance of the numbers on a screen and the mind games he's playing with other traders. At the end of the day, all that matters is the score. Well, I guess that's the way it works.
At Morgan & Morgan, no relation to J.P. Morgan or Morgan Stanley, we meet a team of traders bossed by the legendary Cash (Andrew McCarthy). His team leader is Tommy (Scott Porter), who's making money hand over fist while leading the pack on sorties into bars that have a high babe count. These guys get drunk and play adolescent games and plow through conquests and keep laughing so it doesn't get quiet. There is charm in being 17, and pathos in being 27 and acting as if you're 17.
The crew includes Shakespeare (Andrew Stewart-Jones), a black guy with a British accent who may realize but doesn't care that any babe impressed by a British accent belongs on "Jaywalking." There's Steve-O (Aaron Yoo), master trader. And there's the new guy, Daniel (Bryan Greenberg), who, odd as it may seem, prefers not to horse around but stay home, fix some dinner and read a good novel. You know, maybe by Dickens, who many people don't know is about as much fun as any novelist who ever lived.
The section's hot shot bails out to join another firm, and Cash orders Tommy to fill his chair. On a hunch, he promotes Daniel. Everyone including Daniel is disbelieving. Under the delusion that a star trader must party hard and conquer the dollies, Tommy takes Daniel into the field for training; the 40-Year-Old Virgin becomes a 27-Year-Old Reader.
During this process, Daniel meets Beth (Alexis Bledel), Tommy's girlfriend. Beth isn't precisely Tommy's type; she belongs to a book club. Tommy is like one of those guys who might read if the library weren't always closed. Beth is a serious Green and believes Tommy's line that he is, too, but he has a line for every girl and is a serious liar. Daniel observes this dynamic.
Young men, let your old dad here impart some advice. If a woman has a choice of a man who makes sacks of money on the trading floor and a man who likes to stay home at night reading Lolita, and she's more attracted to the reader, choose that woman. She needs to pass one more test: Does she believe (a) Lolita is a sex novel, or (b) it's one of the greatest works of modern literature? Find that out on the second date. If she answers (b), there's your girl.
"The Good Guy" could have been just a dumb comedy, but actually it has a nice feel to it. It looks carefully at a lifestyle many people might thoughtlessly envy. The writer-director, Julio DePietro, is a former trader from Chicago, and convinces us he knows that world. I hasten to add that I know some traders, who are nice guys. I also add that I would trade the same way the guys the movie do, because your clients care less about how much money they'll retire with than how rich they'll be tomorrow. Investing myself, I've trusted value guys over performance. That, and buying Apple just because I loved Macs, has turned out all right.
Readers may pick up on the clue that the title and some of the story are inspired by Ford Madox Ford's novel The Good Soldier. It opens with a famous line that makes it impossible to stop reading: This is the saddest story I have ever heard. Tommy's story is another one.
I keep drifting off course. Will you like "The Good Guy"? I think you might. It has smart characters, and is wise about the ones who try to tame their intelligence by acting out. And Beth and her friends are the women all these guys should be so lucky as to deserve
TOMATOMETER: CRITICS 35% | AUDIENCE 30%
Mar 4, 2010 | Rating: 1.5/4
Wesley Morris Boston Globe Top Critic
The Good Guy
It’s not that easy being green - or good
Beth (Alexis Bledel) is a conservationist who is seeing a pair of bankers: one arrogant, one square. (Walter Thomson/Roadside Attractions)
Were it smarter or more entertaining or simply better made, “The Good Guy’’ could have been a decent anthropological survey of the Wall Street wilderness. The scheming, the starch, the self-regard. It instead wants to be a romantic drama. That’s a mistake. For that you would need high stakes, shameless acting, and the sense that love means something more than falling for a banker because he, too, likes “Pride and Prejudice.’’ “The Good Guy’’ sits several rungs lower. It’s network television drama, starring actors best known for their TV work and full of the petty gripes and mild worries of characters who really have nothing compelling to worry about.
It’s tough to tell this movie from “Men in Trees,’’ “One Tree Hill,’’ “October Road,’’ “Raising the Bar,’’ or “The Deep End,’’ shows with young people trying to figure out their lives. That’s the flaccid gist of “The Good Guy.’’ Beth (Alexis Bledel, “Gilmore Girls’’) likes two men. Tommy (Scott Porter, “Friday Night Lights’’) makes a lot of money at an investment bank. Daniel (Bryan Greenberg, “October Road’’) works with Tommy, but he likes technology and women who do more than hope bankers pick them up. Which man will she wind up with? Who cares?
Beth and Tommy just started dating, but because he’s seeing other people, he’s rarely around and permits her to spend time with Daniel because Daniel is so square. Porter would actually be OK in a character study about a sociopathic moneyman whose high is picking up women. He’s corrosively arrogant - which is not to say he’s interesting.
Presumably to shake things up, Beth is a conservationist. It’s a line of work that rarely comes into play. She and Tommy never fight about the green industries he’s lucratively betting against. She and Daniel never bond over the joys of composting. Although all those shots of her just sitting in Central Park or at her kitchen table suggest that a pitiful amount of imaginative screenwriting is being conserved.
While Beth waits for the phone to ring and we wait for Tommy to overreact to Daniel’s friendship with Beth, men in nice shirts sit in front of computer screens, talk about money, and go out to drink and pick up women. The truth is that there are very few ways, in our current socioeconomic climate, to create conscionable young capitalists.
When Tommy and his coworkers compete for phone numbers, it’s like watching a CNBC nature special. When Tommy drags Daniel to Greenwich Village for a makeover, it’s odd, since Tommy is just as generically dressed as any guy who spills his drink on you - worse actually. But this movie, written and directed by Julio DePietro, seems unaware of how obnoxious and dull these men are. Otherwise, we’d be spending more time with Beth in eco-ville. As it turns out we’re better off. Bledel is emotionally monochromatic, and Beth’s friends are man junkies.
Their book club features very little book talk (for what it’s worth, Humbert Humbert is described as a hopeless romantic) and a lot of drooling over Daniel. As it happens, Greenberg is the only thing to recommend about the movie. Fortunately, since he’s currently starring in a similar but much better new HBO show, “How to Make It in America,’’ I can recommend that instead.
Review: 'The Good Guy'
The film deals with hearts and bonds (the stock market and the emotional kind) in the competitive environment of Wall Street.
Betsy Sharkey Los Angeles Times Top Critic
Feb 19, 2010 | Rating: 3/5
Drawing on his stint at a Chicago investment firm, DePietro creates characters, dialogue and situations that feel authentic, which makes the film relevant in unexpected ways, though not as deeply as you hope he'll do in the future.
If you've ever wondered whether it is possible for a fast-track Wall Street player to have a heart, "The Good Guy" makes a run at answering that question, spending some quality time at the intersection of stock traders and romantic bonds.
The result is a more-clever-than-most window into modern urban yuppie mating rituals, tracking just how tough it is to keep a grip on love and the corporate ladder at the same time.
The film stars Alexis Bledel as Beth, the good girl stranded on that dangerous corner. Scott Porter, excellent as the paralyzed former football star in "Friday Night Lights," is her hot broker/hot boyfriend Tommy, and Bryan Greenberg, who was adorably sexy as Uma Thurman's young lover and Meryl Streep's son in the little-seen "Prime," portrays the new guy on Tommy's trading team who might be falling for Beth too.
With that triangle as his base in this promising first feature, writer-director Julio DePietro sets about connecting the dots so we can follow the shifting alliances, debts, friendships and betrayals that pile up like overdue bills. In the process, he does a decent job of keeping the clichés that tend to smother romances like this mostly at bay.
Drawing on his stint at a Chicago investment firm, DePietro creates characters, dialogue and situations that feel authentic, which makes the film relevant in unexpected ways, though not as deeply as you hope he'll do in the future. The filmmaker's better with the boys, capturing Wall Street life as a macho blood sport with its win-at-all-cost mind-set, whether it's a dart game after work or a multimillion-dollar deal.
One of the more unsettling moments is a game the guys play, a sort of high-tech musical chairs, in which the last to press the buzzer when the music stops gets hit with an electric jolt. It's tough to decide what's worse, the pain of the shock, the perverse pleasure everyone else gets watching or that it's absolutely believable.
Shot for about $10 million, the film's extensive use of locations around Manhattan, mostly begged and borrowed, gives it a richer look than you might think given its modest means. That DePietro takes his time letting us get to know the characters comes as another unexpected pleasure, staying with a defense of "Pride and Prejudice" at Beth's book club for example, rather than hurrying off in fear of boring us with a brief philosophical excursion.
The film is interested in that slice of the city that is young, affluent but not yet rich, a world in which the more serious and the shallow are still figuring each other out. Tommy is the kind of guy whom success comes to naturally. He always seems to know just how to play the moment, whether he's undertaking a Pygmalion transformation of Greenberg's Daniel into a player or sleuthing out a secluded garden that feels like Tuscany to soften Beth's disappointment that a trip to Italy's been canceled.
Since this is about Wall Street and love, there's more than one roller coaster to ride, and sometimes it's difficult to tell which one DePietro favors. The movie opens as Tommy's hit bottom on the love front. He's outside Beth's apartment, drenched by a downpour, trying to talk his way back into her building, and her heart. From that point, we flash back six weeks as piece by piece the filmmaker plays around with how Tommy turned up all wet and whether he is a good guy or not.
Bledel, best known for her bookish goodness in "The Gilmore Girls," is never asked to step outside of that comfort zone, which leaves the love story in need of some edge and the rest of us wondering if she'll ever be able to step into more grown-up roles. The better triangle turns out to be Porter, Greenberg and Wall Street, where much more than other people's money is always on the line and someone is sure to get hurt.
Cash Poor
By Michael Koresky | February 17, 2010 / http://www.reverseshot.org
Whatever suspense Julio DePietro’s The Good Guy seems to think it’s generating is predicated upon the supposedly surprising twist that its central Wall Street wannabe tycoon is not, in fact, a standup guy. Though all of the details of his cretinous behavior come as a slap in the face to the film’s central looking-for-love character, Beth (Alexis Bledel), it’s doubtful they’ll pull the rug out from under any viewer who may have previously seen a film about hotshot traders fast-talking whilst pressing a phone to each ear—or indeed anyone who may have previously seen a film. The bullish dude in question (who’s decidedly not the “good guy” of the title) is Tommy (Scott Porter), whose adorable overbite and gym-toned torso conceal a sexually dissatisfied, little lost boy who underhandedly takes his professional aggression out on women and coworkers.
Though Tommy’s loutishness is clear from the beginning (thanks, perhaps, to something in Porter’s blank stare, which convincingly reeks of privilege and which, for desperate lack of a better analogy, can be called Mark-Paul Gosselaar-esque), the film devises a pointless flashback structure and a misguided, puzzlingly intermittent voice-over from Tommy to lead us off the scent. First seen sorrowful and seemingly repentant in the rain, begging for understanding from a blase, unmoved Beth, Tommy is at first The Good Guy‘s nominal protagonist. After all, the likeability factor is relative, depending on who’s watching; those who get off on watching cameras whip and rush around investment bankers’ offices while hot-tempered guys bark and cajole each other might find themselves on Tommy’s side, especially when he finds himself dressed down by his swaggering, nut-munching boss, played by an appropriately supercilious Andrew McCarthy, reduced to shouting things like, “Where the fuck is my latte?!” Meanwhile, Beth, a good-hearted urban conservationist (her profession naturally placed in complete contrast to Tommy’s), has doubts, but besides the occasional book club party, also seems to have few interests other than finding the right man to settle down with.
Enter Bryan Greenberg’s Daniel, Tommy’s new protege who’s clearly not cut from the same cloth as the rest of the sexist scamps at the office. A former ROTC grad with limited bullshitting skills and an alarming inability to tell dirty jokes, Daniel is a slime-free fish out of water. Soon enough, Tommy is giving the inoffensively handsome Daniel an attitudinal and wardrobe makeover, which only makes him more confident when he finds himself attracted to Beth, who in turn finds his reserved non-piggish behavior so charming that she invites him to her heretofore ladies-only reading group. Inhabiting the same basic role as did Hugh Dancy in The Jane Austen Book Club (a comparison that would make many of the characters in The Good Guy queasy), Greenberg sits on Beth’s couch with his knees pressed childishly close together as he awkwardly spouts meta pearls of wisdom about Lolita like, “You can’t trust the narrator… it’s like real life.”
If The Good Guy is thus reflective of real life, it’s a reality in which posters shouting “Beware of sharks!” show up at bookstores (in center frame) as warnings to wayward girls. “It feels like a war zone here sometimes,” a character at one point opines about dating in New York City, but as depicted in DePietro’s sparkling, spacious Manhattan apartments inhabited by heedless money men, it seems more like a joyride, however joyless.
This article originally appeared on indieWIRE.
IMDb Review
Bro-Approved
31 March 2010 | by WHYeat
The Good Guy stars Alexis Bledel, who is synonymous with "girly". Having a long successful run on Gilmore Girls and starring in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants it's hard to imagine her starring in a non-chick flick. Of course if Adam Sandler can do "drama", then I wouldn't put it past her. Anyhow, although Alexis dominates half of the movie poster I'd say the movie was less than half about her character, Beth. Beth serves as the center around which Tom (Scott Porter) and Daniel (Bryan Greenberg) are forced to orbit and eventually collide.
Tom is a Wall Street champ and Daniel becomes somewhat of a protégé. From fashion tips to stock tips they bond. In a book store, Daniel is coached – more like egged on – to approach a attractive girl, who turns out to be Tom's girlfriend, Beth. Bros before hos? What do you think? The movie has the typical clichés: A "book club", which serves as a female support slash male bashing group and a band of bar-hopping girl-hunting bros. You have your typical run-of-the-mill chick flick situations and resolutions. Not much surprise here. The only surprise is that this isn't much of a romantic comedy, so don't think "at least it might funny". It throws a decent jab, but doesn't finish with a right cross, a uppercut, or even a dirty kick to the groin.
Men: Go with low expectations and you won't hate it. Bro-Approved.
YouTube Trailer Comments
Allen MacCannell |
(edited) Entertaining propaganda won't help "Nice Guys" © overcome their affliction. Sure, like the "good guy" here, I had traveled the world on active duty and read lots of books including everything Jane Austen ever wrote (as in this story), but, at first, none of that was important socially unless a Bad Boy © helped me get introduced to someone he knew (as in this story). The character in this movie never grew out of his need to have other guys introduce him to women and the producer/screenwriters seem to have been clueless about how that's not cool. In real life in most places, there would be no sisterhood all joining forces to reject a Bad Boy all at the same time, leaving the field open to the shy nice guy who waits around for women to call him and can't even ask female strangers for a napkin without breaking out in hives. That's a Hollywood gimmick like in "Revenge of the Nerds."
I once talked to a guy who was having trouble talking to female strangers. I showed him how it wasn't hard to do by meeting someone nice and exchanging numbers with her. I then introduced him and her with the idea that she would help him meet someone else. But she called me the next day to tell me that my "friend" had bad-mouthed me in order to get her to like him instead. She asked him "why are you stabbing your friend in the back?" He was what you'd call a "Nice Guy" ©. He needed other guys to help him meet women so he could then bad mouth them, thinking he would look good by comparison.
REPLIES:
Allen MacCannell
You and I agree the Nice Guy © was worse than the Bad Boy judging from your separate comment below. The book I just wrote above said he needed to stop purloining other mens' girlfriends and meet some women on his own, preferably someone who didn't just go to bed with a bad guy yesterday. I don't think I went more into generalizing than necessary. By the way, how does one bold words like that? That's cool.
Mac Williams
I watch this film while I was in an alcohol addiction treatment program. The Good Guy is not bad, but not great. Seemed to make an attempt at a nice romantic drama, but doesn't quite go all the way. It starts of very slow and for the first half an hour it feels like it isn't going anywhere. But hey, I didn't have anywhere to go either while I was "drying out!" After the first 30 minutes things start to get a bit more entertaining. This is an light weight romance with a few funny bits thrown in which will keep you giggling. Although the plot itself is rather predictable I must say that as the movie unfolds you will be shown something quite different from your initial expectations. This would have been a better film if there were a little bit more character development. I just might watch the Good Guy again. After all I really like Alexis Bledel as an actress, and Scott Porter and Bryan Greenberg were excellent as well. On the other hand I might have a different opinion the second time around.
ilmasyood @Allen MacCannell
I'm not sure if this could apply to every single guy, there is a nice guy act and someone who's genuinely nice. In this movie, even when this nice guy finds out that the boyfriend was kissing another girl in broad daylight, when asked not to tell the girlfriend he doesn't as much as he wanted to be with her he didn't ruin her relationship.
But that is the thing that people have argued about for years, morals, whether or not to tell a person of a cheating partner.
Just because you perceived your friend as a nice guy, doesn't mean that he is nice.
What about the bad boys who get off on making attached women cheat with them?
ilmasyood @Fabian Salini
Haha exactly, his girlfriend was cheating on him while he was on duty, he gave her what she craved and she loved it. Allen thinks the guy was pretending to be a good guy, but his gf knew he was a bad boy and she liked it.
Richard Thayer
Allen MacCannell It seems like you have unresolved anger issues yourself. You seem to be basing your views off one situation with a bad friend. There's nothing wrong with a shy guy getting his friends to help him meet girls; it's called being a wingman. A good guy doesn't necessarily need to be good at approaching women, because if he's really a good guy it shouldn't be a skill he needs to use frequently. What matters is whether or not he can sustain their interest on his own after being introduced. The "good guy" in the movie didn't do anything morally wrong. He met and fell in love with his boss's girlfriend by happenstance, but nothing indicated that he was actively trying to break them apart or that he was purposely using other guys to meet girls. Rather the opposite, his friends were pushing him to meet a woman when it seemed that he wasn't particularly interested in a relationship at the moment. It's not his fault that his boss's girlfriend developed an interest in him, if anything he made repeated attempts to turn her interest away. But the boss turned out to be a douche, so he won by default in the end. As for whether "sisterhoods" of girls team up against a bad boy, then afterwards turn to the shy nice guy that has been in their peripheral, I've seen that happen way too often in real life for your statement about it being a "Hollywood gimmick" to be accurate.
Richard Thayer
It's not uncommon or unrealistic situation. A guy meets a girl who is already in a relationship by the chance of having the same friends/class/workplace. They discover they have similar interests and become friends. Eventually if things don't work out for the original couple, the natural thing the girl does next is turn to the guy who she has developed a connection with in the meantime. So long as no cheating is involved and the guy wasn't actively trying to break them up or hitting on her, there's nothing wrong with it. If the first relationship didn't work out, then it's probably because the girl wasn't happy in it anyway.
You make it sound like the most important thing a guy has to know is how to approach a woman, but the truth is that the majority of guys don't go out actively trying to find and hit on girls, and those that do are usually looking for one night stands. Most relationships happen because two people met each other by chance (whether it be through work, class, a mutual friend, etc.), and gradually develop interest in each other as they get to know each other over a period of time, until one of them asks the other out. I know of very few long term relationships that started with a guy approaching a random stranger and asking her out on the spot.
More Background On TheGoodGuyFilm.com
TheGoodGuyFilm.com was created as the official website for The Good Guy, an independent romantic dramedy written and directed by Julio DePietro. The film premiered in 2009 and received a limited U.S. theatrical release in February 2010 through Roadside Attractions. Set primarily in Manhattan and centered on the intersection of Wall Street ambition, friendship, dating, loyalty, and deception, the movie starred Alexis Bledel, Scott Porter, and Bryan Greenberg, with supporting performances from Andrew McCarthy, Anna Chlumsky, Aaron Yoo, and others.
The website served the familiar role of a late-2000s movie promotional site: giving prospective viewers a central online destination where they could learn about the film, its cast and story, see promotional material, and follow its theatrical release. The current version of TheGoodGuyFilm.com describes itself as the former official website and preserves material connected with the movie's 2009-2010 period, supplemented by reviews and commentary.
That makes the domain more than simply a page about an older romantic comedy. It is also a surviving piece of the online promotional history of an independently produced film that arrived at a particularly interesting moment. The Good Guy was conceived before the financial crisis but reached audiences after Wall Street's image had been dramatically altered by the events of 2008. Its depiction of young traders, conspicuous ambition, masculine competition, and romantic games therefore acquired a cultural context that its creator could hardly have anticipated when developing the project.
What The Good Guy Is About
At its simplest, The Good Guy is a New York love triangle.
Beth, played by Alexis Bledel, is a young Manhattan urban conservationist looking for a satisfying career, friendships, and a meaningful relationship. She begins dating Tommy, played by Scott Porter, a confident and successful Wall Street trader. Tommy appears to embody the qualities of the desirable young Manhattan professional: money, charm, confidence, social skills, and professional momentum.
Then Daniel enters the picture.
Played by Bryan Greenberg, Daniel is Tommy's new colleague and in many ways his opposite. He is quieter, less socially aggressive, more interested in books than nightlife, and initially uncomfortable with the performance of masculinity expected among his Wall Street coworkers.
Tommy takes Daniel under his wing, attempting to teach him both the financial business and the social rules that supposedly accompany success. That decision creates the conditions for Daniel and Beth to meet and gradually discover that they have considerably more in common than either has with Tommy.
The official synopsis promoted the parallel between romance and finance: Beth discovers that love in New York can resemble Wall Street, with risk, reward, competition, and people pursuing their own agendas. The premise allowed DePietro to make the film about more than simply which man Beth would choose. It became a story about appearances, trust, salesmanship and what being a "good guy" actually means.
That last question is particularly important because the movie deliberately complicates the audience's initial assumptions about its characters.
Julio DePietro's Wall Street Background
One reason The Good Guy attracted attention at the time was that Julio DePietro was not simply imagining Wall Street culture from the outside.
Before becoming a filmmaker, DePietro spent approximately a decade working at a Chicago investment firm. A Harvard graduate, he eventually decided that finance was not where he wanted to spend the rest of his career. He subsequently took a 12-week filmmaking program at New York University and set out to direct his own screenplay.
That unusual career path became an important part of the publicity surrounding The Good Guy. Instead of presenting another Hollywood caricature of financial traders, DePietro could claim direct familiarity with the personalities, language, competitiveness, social rituals, and professional environment he was portraying.
His experience did not mean every critic believed the movie succeeded dramatically. It did, however, give the Wall Street scenes a degree of credibility that even some mixed reviews acknowledged.
The timing made the background especially noteworthy. The movie was filmed during the summer of 2008, just as the financial system was approaching one of the most dramatic crises in modern economic history. Principal photography has been reported as taking place from July 14 through August 15, 2008. Lehman Brothers would collapse only a month later.
DePietro therefore wrote and filmed a story about prosperous, competitive young financial professionals in what was effectively the closing phase of the pre-crash Wall Street era.
A New York Movie in More Than Name
New York City is fundamental to The Good Guy.
DePietro specifically described the movie as a New York story, and the production used Manhattan itself extensively rather than treating the city merely as an establishing backdrop. He sought a combination of recognizable exteriors and locations that New Yorkers might regard as more insider-oriented.
Restaurants, bars, streets, offices, apartments, bookstores, and public spaces help define the characters' social environment. The city becomes the arena in which professional and romantic competition operate simultaneously.
DePietro later recalled that New York's Mayor's Office was relatively easy to work with on permits and that local businesses were accommodating. The production team was able to make deals with real establishments, helping a comparatively modest independent production achieve a more polished Manhattan appearance.
The Los Angeles Times noted that extensive location shooting gave the picture a richer visual quality than might be expected from its resources. The result is also valuable retrospectively. The movie captures a particular image of late-2000s Manhattan: affluent but still climbing young professionals, finance-industry bravado, nightlife, fashionable apartments, book clubs, restaurants, and the city's relentless overlap between professional identity and personal status.
Production and Ownership
The Good Guy was produced by Julio DePietro, Linda Moran, and Rene Bastian. Belladonna Productions was one of the production companies associated with the film, and Tribeca's records identify Belladonna personnel as contacts for the production.
Behind the camera, DePietro served as both writer and director. Seamus Tierney was director of photography, Ray Hubley edited the movie, Tomasso Ortino served as production designer, and the music was composed by tomandandy.
The principal cast included:
- Alexis Bledel as Beth
- Scott Porter as Tommy
- Bryan Greenberg as Daniel
- Andrew McCarthy as Cash
- Aaron Yoo as Steve-O
- Anna Chlumsky as Lisa
- Andrew Stewart-Jones as Shakespeare
- Colin Egglesfield as Baker
The ensemble was notable for bringing together performers already strongly associated with television and youth-oriented film. Bledel was widely recognized from Gilmore Girls and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Porter was closely associated with Friday Night Lights, while Greenberg had appeared in One Tree Hill, October Road, and films including Prime. McCarthy brought another generation of recognizable screen history to the cast.
Roadside Attractions subsequently acquired worldwide rights to the movie in October 2009, several months after its festival debut. Mandate International was involved with foreign sales.
For TheGoodGuyFilm.com, this production and distribution history is important when discussing "ownership." The site originated as the official promotional web presence of the film rather than as an independent publication, review site, restaurant, or unrelated business. Its identity was inseparable from the motion picture and the companies promoting it.
The Tribeca Film Festival Premiere
The most important milestone in the movie's pre-theatrical history was its selection for the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival.
The Good Guy received its world premiere there in the festival's Encounters program. Tribeca presented it as a 90-minute American comedy and emphasized its insider perspective on Wall Street culture and its themes of friendship, love, and identity.
For a first-time feature director, a Tribeca world premiere represented meaningful exposure. It placed DePietro's film before critics, industry professionals, distributors, and New York audiences in precisely the city that the movie was attempting to portray.
Tribeca also featured DePietro in editorial coverage surrounding the festival. His unusual transition from investment work to filmmaking provided a natural publicity hook, while the movie's financial-world setting was particularly topical in spring 2009. Wall Street, investment banks, traders, and financial ethics had become subjects of intense public discussion following the previous year's collapse.
The festival exposure ultimately helped the movie progress toward commercial distribution. Roadside Attractions announced its acquisition of worldwide rights in October 2009.
There is no evidence that The Good Guy became a major awards contender, and its significance should not be overstated by inventing an awards history it did not have. Its notable festival credential was the Tribeca world premiere itself.
The 2010 Theatrical Release
Roadside Attractions gave The Good Guy a limited U.S. theatrical release beginning February 19, 2010.
The film was rated R for pervasive language and some sexual content. Most sources list its running time at approximately 90 minutes, although some box-office databases contain differing runtime data.
Commercially, the release was modest. Box Office Mojo reports an opening of $34,712 and total domestic theatrical revenue of $100,688. Rotten Tomatoes similarly records a U.S. gross of approximately $100,500.
Those figures make clear that The Good Guy was not a mainstream box-office hit. Its theatrical life was characteristic of a small independent release intended to benefit from festival recognition, reviews, recognizable actors, and targeted urban audiences rather than a massive nationwide opening.
Its longer-term audience has consequently been created less by its original box-office run than by home viewing, streaming, television, the established fan bases of its actors, and continued discovery through movie databases and recommendation services.
IMDb, for example, currently shows roughly 10,000 user ratings and more than 40,000 watchlist-related interactions, evidence that the film ultimately reached far more people than its limited theatrical gross alone might suggest.
Critical Reception
Reviews were sharply divided, although the overall critical consensus leaned negative.
Rotten Tomatoes currently reports a 33 percent Tomatometer score based on 24 critics and a 30 percent audience score from more than 2,500 ratings. Metacritic records a score of 47, placing the overall response in mixed territory.
Roger Ebert was among the film's more prominent defenders, awarding it three stars out of four. He found value in its depiction of traders as competitive young men whose professional and personal behavior often resembled games. He also believed DePietro's experience in finance helped make the Wall Street environment convincing.
Ebert particularly appreciated that the movie was more thoughtful than a purely disposable romantic comedy. His response highlighted the contrast between the lifestyle represented by Tommy and the quieter intellectual personality represented by Daniel.
Betsy Sharkey of the Los Angeles Times was also comparatively receptive, giving the movie three stars out of five. She regarded DePietro's finance experience as a source of authenticity and saw the film as an interesting examination of urban professional dating culture. She was especially interested in the movie's portrayal of Wall Street as a competitive masculine environment extending its win-at-all-costs mentality into social life.
Other reviewers were much harsher.
Wesley Morris of the Boston Globe gave the movie 1.5 stars out of four, criticizing its romantic stakes and characters and comparing its tone unfavorably with television dramas about attractive young adults sorting out their lives.
Entertainment Weekly's response was similarly lukewarm, while other critics objected to familiar character types and a plot they considered overly predictable.
This divided response is useful in understanding the movie's lasting identity. The Good Guy was not celebrated as a major independent-film breakthrough, but neither did it simply disappear. Its cast, setting, financial-world perspective, and literary references gave it enough distinctive qualities to remain discoverable.
Literature, Narrators, and the Meaning of "Good"
One of the movie's more unusual features for its genre is its recurring interest in books.
Beth participates in a book club, while Daniel's reading habits help distinguish him from his aggressively social coworkers. References to works such as Pride and Prejudice and Lolita are not merely decorative. They reinforce the film's interest in first impressions, unreliable narrators, interpretation, and the difficulty of deciding whether a person is what he appears to be.
Roger Ebert also noted a connection between the title and Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, another story in which the reliability of appearances and narrators is central.
That literary dimension gives the title The Good Guy an intentionally ambiguous quality.
Who exactly is the good guy? Is goodness determined by appearance, manners, intentions, honesty, loyalty, or how a person behaves when nobody is rewarding him for it?
The movie's finance setting makes the question more pointed because selling is fundamental to both sides of its story. Traders sell financial positions; young professionals sell versions of themselves to employers, colleagues, friends, and romantic partners.
Tommy is exceptionally good at presentation. Daniel initially is not.
The story gradually asks whether being persuasive and appearing desirable have anything to do with actually being trustworthy.
Wall Street After the Financial Crisis
The historical timing gives The Good Guy cultural significance beyond its romantic plot.
The film's young traders inhabit a culture of money, competition, drinking, sexual conquest, and professional gamesmanship. Had the movie appeared several years earlier, audiences might have interpreted that environment mainly as an aspirational or satirical version of young Wall Street.
By 2009 and 2010, the cultural meaning had changed.
The financial crisis had produced enormous public anger toward investment banks, traders, executive compensation, risk-taking, and a financial system that many Americans believed had rewarded irresponsible behavior while ordinary people suffered the consequences.
As a result, scenes of young traders treating enormous sums of money competitively could carry an implication that went beyond the filmmaker's original romantic premise.
DePietro's background also separated the film from purely fictional Wall Street fantasies. Critics who disagreed about the romance could nevertheless recognize that he knew something about the culture he was portraying.
Today, the film can consequently be viewed as a small cultural artifact from the boundary between two periods: conceived in the confidence of pre-crash finance and released into the skepticism of the post-crash world.
Who Was TheGoodGuyFilm.com's Audience?
The original website was aimed first at prospective moviegoers.
Several overlapping audiences were especially logical targets: fans of Alexis Bledel and Gilmore Girls; viewers familiar with Scott Porter from Friday Night Lights; Bryan Greenberg's television and film audience; fans of romantic comedies and relationship dramas; independent-film followers aware of Tribeca; and young urban viewers likely to recognize the movie's professional and dating environment.
The Wall Street setting broadened the potential audience somewhat beyond a conventional romance. The movie could also be promoted as an insider look at finance culture from a filmmaker who had actually worked in that world.
For entertainment journalists and critics, DePietro's biography, the Tribeca premiere, and the post-financial-crisis timing provided additional angles.
The website's goal was therefore not simply to summarize the plot. It helped establish a marketable identity: attractive recognizable actors, Manhattan, romance, money, ambition, betrayal, and the question implied by the title—how do you recognize a genuinely good person?
TheGoodGuyFilm.com as a Historical Movie Website
TheGoodGuyFilm.com is interesting today partly because the internet's relationship with movies has changed dramatically.
In the 2000s and early 2010s, individual movies routinely received dedicated domain names and standalone promotional websites. These could contain trailers, cast biographies, synopses, production notes, downloadable images, theatrical information, reviews, and other promotional material.
Social media, streaming platforms, YouTube, IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, studio channels, and large entertainment databases gradually reduced the importance of the standalone movie website.
Domains from modest independent films were especially vulnerable to disappearing once theatrical and home-video marketing campaigns ended.
TheGoodGuyFilm.com therefore represents a recognizable form of early digital movie promotion. Its value today is primarily informational and archival rather than promotional. The surviving site identifies itself as preserving content from archived 2009-2010 pages while also presenting outside commentary about the film.
Readers should distinguish between the historical official-site material and later material appearing on the present website. Some of the current site's reviews and first-person commentary were clearly added after the original promotional period and should not automatically be interpreted as content produced by Roadside Attractions or the filmmakers.
Popularity and Lasting Reputation
Judged strictly by theatrical revenue, The Good Guy was a very small release. A domestic gross of roughly $100,000 against a reported multimillion-dollar production budget would not indicate commercial success from theaters alone.
But box office is an incomplete measurement of the life of an independent film.
The movie's continuing presence on IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, streaming services, review archives, and film databases demonstrates a longer tail of recognition. IMDb's thousands of ratings are particularly revealing because they indicate an audience far beyond those who purchased tickets during the original limited run.
The cast also became part of the film's continuing discoverability. Viewers encountering Bledel through Gilmore Girls or later through The Handmaid's Tale, Porter through Friday Night Lights and subsequent television work, Greenberg through his numerous film and television roles, or Chlumsky through Veep can encounter The Good Guy retrospectively.
That kind of actor-driven rediscovery is important to the afterlife of smaller movies.
Why TheGoodGuyFilm.com Still Matters
TheGoodGuyFilm.com preserves the identity of a film that occupies a specific place in independent American cinema of the late 2000s.
The Good Guy was Julio DePietro's feature directorial debut, drew directly on his decade in finance, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, secured worldwide distribution from Roadside Attractions, featured a cast of recognizable young actors, and used Manhattan extensively as both setting and cultural environment.
It was never a blockbuster and did not receive universal critical praise. In fact, its mixed reviews and modest theatrical revenue are essential parts of its history.
Yet the film has characteristics that make it worth revisiting. It captures the professional culture of young Wall Street traders immediately before the financial crisis transformed public attitudes toward finance. It records Manhattan locations and lifestyles from the late 2000s. It combines the conventions of a romantic triangle with questions about trust, identity, salesmanship, ambition, and moral character. And it provides an early filmmaking example from a director who entered the industry after a decidedly unconventional first career.
TheGoodGuyFilm.com, meanwhile, illustrates how movie marketing itself has changed. What began as a dedicated online destination promoting a current theatrical release now functions primarily as a digital remnant of that release and a gateway into the film's history.
For someone encountering the domain today without knowing its background, that is the most useful way to understand it: TheGoodGuyFilm.com is the surviving web home associated with The Good Guy, a 2009 Tribeca-premiered New York romantic dramedy whose combination of Wall Street culture, literary references, recognizable television actors, and complicated ideas about what makes someone "good" gives it a distinctive place among the smaller independent films of its era.