Z/Web

Did this do well in the theatres? I saw the previews and thought it looked fun, but it seemed to disappear quickly. I don’t know why: I liked it a lot. It’s about a mother-daughter team of con artists. The mother marries rich men, the daughter seduces them and manages to get caught in the act, and then the mother divorces for a nice settlement. As the mom, Sigourney Weaver’s good, but her character’s too immoral for us to really like her. But we love Jennifer Love Hewitt, who’s quirky, silly, arrogant, and drop-dead gorgeous. She really holds the movie, somehow managing to be an innocent sexy seductress. She’s desperate to leave her mother and strike out on her own, but her mother won’t let her go, to the point of conning her own daughter to trick her into staying. Best scene? When JLH, dressed to thrill, goes into a bar following a rich mark, a guy walks up and asks her if she’d like a drink. “Is that the best you can do?” she asks, scorning his offer. She then delivers a blistering speech on the stupidity of the guy and men in general. Finally, she stops to catch her breath. “So why’d you offer me a drink?” He smiles. “Because I’m the bartender.” Wow, there’s nothing more satisfying than a beautiful woman full of herself getting shot down! Of course, she and the bartender (who it turns out owns the bar) are such opposites they become romantically involved.

The film’s comedy comes from outrageous characters and from putting the grifters in awkward situations, like when Weaver, pretending to be a Russian immigrant, is forced on stage at a Russian restaurant and told to sing a Russian song. You’re fascinated, wondering how she’d going to get out of it, but somehow she does, all without her mark suspecting she’s a phony. Most of the time the film moves at a rapid pace, providing us with interesting things to see. Unfortunately, it begins to fade after 90 minutes of excellency. The plot become complicated and takes off in a new direction, bringing back the ex-husband Weaver had divorced at the start of the film, and while I was expecting several “conning the con artists” twists, these were mediocre and too predictable. (I kept hoping the daughter would finally put one over her mother.) Still, the ending was appropriately pleasant, and the mother-daughter relationship was extremely convincing (Sigourney and JLH have great chemistry). The bottom line: a fun, sexy, and pleasant film that’s just 20 minutes too long. (What’s frightening is that the DVD includes over 20 minutes of deleted footage! Most of these explain plot things that are inferred anyway and are thus unnecessary, but a few are funny bits trimmed for time.)

Author: Robin Cook

This is an older (1985) Cook book (ha ha) about the evils of businesses invading medicine. Instead of concentrating on just that, however, Cook throws in a few other gimmicks: the evil business is brainwashing doctors into increasing the number of unnecessary abortion so that the company’s labs have plenty of fetal tissue to use in their fetology research. Well, that’s a lot of stuff going on, and the mess it makes is, well, a mess. Worse, Cook’s main characters are so stiff and artificial and he forces conflict with such a blunt pen it’s aggravating. He has the hero husband fighting with his wife for no logical reason. He’s a medical student and doesn’t trust his wife’s doctor (who it turns out is controlled by the evil business), so she promptly leaves him and goes home to mama! Their relationship strains credibility and makes one wonder why they were together in the first place. The idiot guy stubbornly refuses financial help from her parents, preferring to drop out of medical school instead, and his own parents are barely on speaking terms with him — get this — because his older brother died in Vietnam (somehow they blame him). All this character assassination is done to force the plot: that the young man takes a job with a drug company whose parent happens to be the company controlling all the doctors and stealing fetal material. Of course, he discovers this and investigates. And thus we begin a race between him and his wife: can he find proof of the company’s illegal activities before his wife can abort the baby he doesn’t even want? Still, you’re reading this absurd mess hoping something exciting’s coming, and boy does it ever! (That’s sarcasm, for the clueless.) The hero figures out the company’s brainwashing methods: a combination of drugs and surgery, performed on doctors when they take medical seminar cruises sponsored by the evil corporation. Even better: these doctors have chips planted in their heads so they can be controlled by remote control! Even more absurd, these doctors are being remote controlled to make them order drugs made by the evil company! Absolutely ludicrous, though I suspect more than a few drug companies would love the concept. In the end, of course, the hero wins, gets back with his wife (who doesn’t have the abortion), and even makes up with his dad. That all happens in the final three pages. Despite this being a quick read, I can’t recommend this book at all: it’s lame all the way around, though I did manage to finish it. I just wish I hadn’t wasted the time. There is good news, though: this book has totally gotten me over my fear of writing a bad novel. If a book like this is a best seller, I have nothing to worry about.