As of April 4, 2025, I have seen One of the Days, starring Keke Palmer and SZA, three times.
I am not a person who watches a movie repeatedly—well unless I really like it—and this movie was one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time. Did the movie have a super believable plotline? No. Did the movie have Oscar winning performances? Eh, no. But they all did their thing. Did the movie leave you with compelling and thought provoking questions about life? No, but that was not what the movie was meant to do. Yet people keep trying to make it a movie that deserves critique it was not built for and it feels like people, including other Black women, don’t always want to see Black women win.
If you have not seen the movie yet but plan on watching it, there are spoiler alerts in this article, but they aren’t that bad, cause you can’t really spoil something so fresh *wink.*
The movie is a modern-day spin to the classic film Friday, released in 1995. There are obvious similarities, down to the title. Both movies take place on a singular day and are about two friends surviving a gauntlet of mishaps, while trying to evade two different bullies who wish them harm and get a specified amount of money that will save them from certain peril. They both feature one of the protagonists burglarizing a home and trying to steal from a post-coital man, a necessary breakup and a new love connection. They both also take place in southern Los Angeles and showcase Black joy, even under stress, and yet some people seem too stressed to find the joy in One of Them Days.
Granted, the movies are filmed 30 years apart, but and with the advent of social media, how we engage with entertainment has also changed. Yet, when Friday came out, there were not people critiquing the characters’ character flaws, or the plot holes or the fact that it was not award-winning cinema. While most viewers really enjoyed the film, there were still some whose critique of the film felt like they wanted more than what the movie advertised.
The trailer for the movie was true to the entirety of the film; it was two best friends and their hijinks in a crazy-ass day, and beyond critiquing Alyssa’s (SZA’s character) ain’t-shitness, (I can’t talk cause I too have made bad decisions for good dick), there was nothing more that the film advertised that it would provide. When it came to comedy and a movie that you could watch enough to learn the script, it was absolutely that. The movie was not meant to be thought of as a true story. Hell, she went to a job interview in a bright green stripper’s outfit, because it was meant to be ridiculous, funny and over the top—and that’s exactly what it was.
Black women don’t have to be serious all the time, we don’t have to have all our shit together, either. We should be allowed to be goofy and unserious and dick (or clit)matized. Not everything deserves a dissection or a thinkpiece.
Sometimes it’s okay to light one up, laugh hysterically, while enjoying a Hot Cheeto Margarita and relaxing after having one of them days.
