Freelancers Anonymous

This film is appearing in the Reeling Film Festival in Chicago. http://reelingfilmfestival.org/

This film is appearing in Out On Film in Atlanta. http://http://www.outonfilm.org/

Billie (Lisa Cordileone), the main character of "Freelancers Anonymous," is trapped in an office job that she hates and is only staying on with because she is marrying her girlfriend Gayle (Natasha Negovanlis) in three months. However, when her boss overloads her with work and cuts both her working hours and benefits, she leaves, determined to find her "own thing," whatever that means.�

When she comes across a ragtag bunch of women (and one silent man) hanging around a church hall every day on the pretext of networking for freelance work, she thinks she has found her calling. She convinces these somewhat reluctant people that if they pool their talents they could control their own destinies by creating an app that would link prospective employers with freelance workers. It's not actually a new idea, but Billie persuades them that they could create an app that would have an edge in the marketplace.

Meanwhile, Gayle - who spends her working days online promoting her own "Life Is A Cabernet" wine, and also making audio tapes of soft porn novels - is steaming ahead, with Patty, their wedding planner, arranging a potentially very expensive wedding, despite a lack of funds to pay for it.

Here, the storyline gets a tad messy. Billie pretends that the new start-up company is paying her a wage when, in fact, she is fact using funds entrusted to her by one of the girls for a launch party of the app. When her "borrowing" is discovered, Billie still persuades the other girls to continue with the project, and suggests that, to save money, the launch will be at the church hall on the same day as her wedding.�All she has to do to make the scheme work is keep this new development away from Gayle's ears, and spend her wedding day dashing between the ceremony and the investors' meeting for the app.

This is the sophomore feature from Spanish Filmmaker�Sonia Sebasti�n (who delighted audiences with her hysterical lesbian farce "Girl Gets Girl"), and she has filled with her cast with an impressive array of extremely talented actors. The movie reeks of good intentions, but that, however, is not enough to get any real laughs from the labored script by Cordileone and�Amy Dellagiarinon. They rely far too heavily on clich�d stereotypes to form most of the characters and their very contrived plot.

This is an amusing film that will hopefully find an audience. But there are no real laugh-out-loud funny moments. It simply is not a comedy in any true sense of the word.