Movie Review Isn't She Great (2000)

Isn't She Great (2000) 

Directed by Andrew Bergman 

Written by Paul Rudnick 

Starring Bette Midler. Nathan Lane, Stockard Channing, David Hyde Pierce 

Release Date January 28th, 2000 

Published September 20th, 2022 

I went into to watching Isn't She Great with a bad attitude. I've read a number of other critics who despised this movie. They decried what they claimed are numerous inaccuracies, they called Bette Midler's performance overly broad and cartoonish, and they barely mentioned the sweet romance at the heart of the movie. I was fully prepared to write a negative review of Isn't She Great and then I watched the movie and I was unexpectedly charmed. Perhaps its because I don't know much about the real Jacqueline Susann, or maybe I am just feeling generous, but I genuinely enjoyed most of Isn't She Great. 

Jaqueline Susann was a striver. Living in New York City, she felt that stardom was her birthright. When she failed to achieve fame by any means necessary, she dramatically walked into a lake ala Virginia Woolf only to find the water was barely knee deep. It's here where she meets the man who who would help make her dreams come through. Show business lifer, agent Irving Mansfield fell in love at first sight with Jacqueline Susann and after witnessing her quite funny and failing attempt at a dramatic death, he rescues her with promises of stardom. 

Their partnership got off to a slow start. Irving got her on television and got her gigs on commercials but Jacqueline's strength was her off the cuff wit, something she could not highlight on overly serious game shows or the confines of a live commercial advertisement. Finding little success on TV, Irving launches a new plan, a book. With support from Jacqueline's best friend, Florence Maybelle,. played by a brilliant, scene stealing Stockard Channing, Irving pitches Jacqueline the idea to write a novel. 

Jacqueline is immediately opposed to the idea, she claims that she doesn't have anything to say in a novel. Then Irving points out her incredible true stories about the dark side of Hollywood and Jacqueline is intrigued. Indeed, she's got thousands of darkly funny stories about Hollywood from her own experience and the experiences of her vast network of friends. It will require her to tell stories that her friends might prefer she did not tell, but what does she have to lose. 

Famously, Susann's dark comic story of the Hollywood underbelly, filled with truths and half truths about barely disguised Hollywood figures became the bestseller, Beyond The Valley of the Dolls. The book was an immediate sensation and soon, thanks to Irving, Jacqueline has the love and celebrity that she's always dreamed of. Naturally, this still being a movie, there is a false crisis that will divide our central couple before we get to our based on a true story ending, and that convenionalism does hold the movie back a little, it's not a death knell. 

Bette Midler and Nathan Lane make a surprisingly adorable couple in Isn't She Great. The chemistry between Midler and lane is lovely, platonically friendly growing into a chaste romance. It's charming watching Irving pine for Jackie and then try to move heaven and earth to achieve her dreams. By the same token, Midler is great at being first oblivious to Irving before seeing him as useful and then growing to rely on him, appreciate him and then love him. That's wonderfully complicated road to character growth and I really enjoyed that. 

Isn't She Lovely isn't written or directed with a great deal of innovation. The film holds to a rather strict biopic structure. That said, the film is rather breezy and doesn't drag at all. The film is brisk thanks to the performance of Bette Midler who plays Jacqueline Susann as the oversized personality one might assume she was from her brazen, barely veiled novels. It's a blowsy, blowhard performance by Midler with dramatic flourishes that I found humorous and endearing rather than merely hammy. The character, as essayed by Midler, is supposed to be hammy. That's a feature and not a bug in my estimation. 

Read my complete review of Isn't She Great on Geeks.Media. 

Movie Review: The Stepford Wives

The Stepford Wives (2004) 

Directed by Frank Oz 

Written by Paul Rudnick 

Starring Nicole Kidman, Matthew Broderick, Bette Midler, Roger Bart, Glenn Close, Christopher Walken

Release Date June 11th, 2004

Published June 12th, 2004 

The troubles of a troubled movie project tend to go public long before the movie itself. Such is the case with the remake of the 1975 domestic horror movie The Stepford Wives. The signs of trouble began with gossip about onset bickering between the stars and director Frank Oz. Then, when the film ballooned from a three-month shoot to a six-month shoot, the gossip turned to outright fact. Finally, there was the kiss of death, the announcement of reshoots to change the ending.

Whatever chance the film had of reaching blockbuster status went out the window when the reshoots were announced. Now the best that the producers can hope for is that the editing, which when added to the time spent shooting brought the project to more than a year's worth of work, could salvage something salable, or even moderately watchable. That they did a little better than that is a miracle.

Nicole Kidman and Matthew Broderick star as Joanna and Walter, a married couple who also work together at a television network. Well, Joanna works, she's the head of the network, Walter works for her. However after an incident with a crazed reality show contestant, Joanna is fired and Walter quits out of sympathy. After Joanna recovers from a minor nervous breakdown, the couple take their kids and move to a gated community in Connecticut called Stepford.

Right off the bat, the place is weird. It's too neat, too orderly, too...clean. Not just clean but frighteningly clean. There is more weirdness as the family meets the Stepford welcoming committee in the form of Mrs. Claire Wellington (Glenn Close). Picture Martha Stewart on a serious caffeine bender. While Walter is shuttled off to the Stepford men's club, Joanna joins Claire at the Stepford day spa where the women of Stepford work out, though not in a way any normal woman works out.

Though her husband takes quickly to Stepford's ‘50s country club feel, Joanna is not completely alone in her alienation. Also new to the neighborhood are another pair of transplanted New Yorkers, Bobbie (Bette Midler) a cynical, slovenly, Jewish writer and Roger (Roger Bart) an outré fashion conscious gay man and well-known architect. Bobbie came to Stepford with her schlubby househusband Dave (Jon Lovitz) and Roger with his barely out of the closet lawyer Jerry (David Marshall Grant).

Being the only three normal people in all of Stepford, they commiserate over the oddity of the woman in Stepford. They all dress like housewives from 50's TV ads. They bake like it were their only job in the world. And strangest of all, these gorgeous woman are all having amazing sex with their doughy, dopey husbands, as the three accidentally witness on an uninvited visit.

Things only grow weirder though when both Roger and Bobbie disappear and then reappear in the Stepford mold with all of their personality sucked out. All of this oddness has something to do with the Stepford men's club and especially it's founder Mike Wellington (Christopher Walken), also Claire's husband. Though most of you know the film’s secret, I don't want to ruin it for the uninitiated. Needless to say, the film comes down to a battle between Joanna, the men's club, and indeed her own husband.

The biggest surprise about this film is not it's twist ending but rather how good the film is until that twist. There are a number of funny moments in Stepford Wives and most come from Kidman, Midler and Roger Bart whose biting comments about the woman of Stepford are very funny. The best scene in the film is when the three attend the Stepford woman's book club where the book of the week is all about Christmas ornaments.

Glenn Close turns in a performance that rivals her turn in Fatal Attraction for it's over the top lunacy. It almost goes without saying that Christopher Walken is good. Yet again, Walken has another of those speeches that only he could deliver. It's not as good as his tooth fairy bit in The Rundown or his masterpiece of death speech in Man on Fire, but for sheer Walken inspired lunacy it's a real highlight.

So what went wrong? Up until maybe the last 15 to 20 minutes Stepford Wives was a pretty funny comedy and then it flew completely off the rails. In his effort to distance this film from the original director Frank Oz makes a decision that is such a complete departure from the original film it's mind-blowing. The twist ending of the original film was what made it so memorable, it's why the film existed, for that one moment of shock. Obviously, that shock isn't going to be as good a second time, but the change made is so radical and so obviously tacked on that it ruins the entire picture.

Nothing of the first 50 or so minutes of the film’s run time makes any sense at all once the twist is introduced. This is a horribly misconceived change that I can't tell you how bad it is, you really have to see it for yourself to see what a garish and obvious mistake it is. So bad you wonder how a major studio and a professional director could make such a mistake.

The original Stepford Wives is a pretty good horror film. It's also very of its time. It's a social satire that drew from the burgeoning women's rights movement and the societal changes that were happening so quickly in the 1970's. When you look back on it this is not a film that should inspire a remake. The new Stepford Wives is not just filled with mistakes in its creation and final product. The idea to make it was probably the biggest mistake of them all.

Movie Review Marcy X

Marci X (2003) 

Directed by Richard Benjamin 

Written by Paul Rudnick 

Starring Lisa Kudrow, Damon Wayans, Christine Baranski, Richard Benjamin

Release Date August 22nd, 2003 

Published August 21st, 2003 

An Open Letter to Hollywood

After sitting through the Gigli's, the Kangaroo Jack's and the Lara Croft Tomb Raider's it's clear you don't care about the American filmgoer. You have made it clear that you have no respect for our intelligence, no respect for our taste, no respect period. I understand that but I still must ask one favor, if you listen to us, the American filmgoer just one time please listen to this plea. Never allow director Richard Benjamin to make another film as long as he lives. His latest effort Marci X is clearly the worst that you in Hollywood could possibly ever make, and if it's not God help us all.

Normally this is the part of the review where I give a synopsis of the plot but unfortunately, I couldn't find one. Somewhere buried beneath a series of witless skits and musical interludes is something about a rapper played by Damon Wayans and a rap record that has drawn the ire of a conservative congresswoman played by Christine Baranski. Lisa Kudrow plays the daughter of the owner of the record company who is forced to take over the company when her father has a heart attack.

That is the setup but the execution, oh if only I were using execution literally, is a horrendous satire of rappers and rap culture that is inane, offensive and tremendously unfunny. References to rappers such as Tupac Shakur, Snoop Dogg and Eminem are tossed in alongside characters that stand in for people such as Puff Daddy, Jennifer Lopez and Suge Knight. God help Richard Benjamin if Suge Knight sees this film, although that might not be a bad thing. Can you sue someone for just referring to you because the rappers whose names and images are dragged through this film deserve restitution.

It comes as no surprise that Marci X has the stink of two years on a studio shelf, only Satan himself could be responsible for this film ever making it to theaters. The film's jokes certainly show the film's age, despite an overdubbed reference to Martha Stewart's legal troubles, one scene is a sendup of Puffy and J.Lo's nightclub incident. Of course the whole thing is a horribly misconceived take on Ice T's Cop Killer crossed with the Two Live Crew censorship case both of which happened over ten years ago.

Not that a more up to date script could help this mess. Benjamin's direction is so amazingly witless that he manages to not merely embarrass Kudrow, Wayans and Baranski, but humiliate them. The stars were complicit in their humiliation but it's hard to believe three such talented performers could have ever imagined that what they were making was this bad. Proof of that is that Kudrow and Wayans actually manage to spark some chemistry when they are short-circuited by the film falling apart around them.

Roger Ebert has a line that I have cribbed a number of times to describe just how bad a film is. Ebert said of a film called Mad Dog Time that it did not improve upon the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time. Marci X is actually an insult to the very screen it's projected on. I beg Hollywood, please do not allow Richard Benjamin to inflict any further damage on the film-going public. Not many will see Marci X but for the brave fools who do, you owe it to them to make sure Mr. Benjamin never makes another film.