Good Fortune is a cinephile’s comedy, patchworked from the likes of It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Trading Places (1983), and Wings of Desire (1987). It’s more pleasant than it is funny. Its director, Aziz Ansari, has offered us less of the honest, personal insight that allowed Master of None, the Netflix series he co-created with Alan Yang, to sit so comfortably alongside its Criterion Collection closet full of references (In the Mood for Love, Bicycle Thieves, Manhattan, and so on).
In Good Fortune, Ansari writes and stars as Arj, an LA-based editor currently living in his car, and stuck in the endless loop of freelance odd jobs for the app TaskSergeant. One client demands he wait hours in line to pick up an order at “There Will Be Buns” – one for the Paul Thomas Anderson fans, there.
