Isn't She Great [VHS]
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VHS Movie Reviews of Isn't She Great [VHS]
Movie Review: Company well worth spending a couple of hours with...
Summary: 4 Stars
Loose biopic of the life of Jacqueline Susann, author of "Valley of the Dolls". Susann died of cancer in 1974, Good work by Bette Midler in the title role. Nathan Lane, of course, was great as Irving Mansfield, her agent and doting husband. And what an amazing collection of neckties! Nice supporting work by David Hyde Pierce, Stockard Channing and John Cleese. I'm giving this film 4 stars mostly for its design elements, and the fact it was partly shot in Montreal. :) It's a nice little movie.Movie Review: It aint so great...but it aint so bad!
Summary: 3 Stars
Look...every review I have read of this movie bags it. I bought it because I bought the Bacharach soundtrack and the music is fab. This film wasnt released in Australia and having read so many bad reviews I had to buy it and see for myself.
I liked it. Its not an epic, its a bit dizzy, a bit syrupy, a bit camp and there arent any special effects or car chases...but it was NICE. Just nice. Great actors, good sets and cinematography. The script is weak but makes its point and for those who know anything about or have an interest in Miss Sussann a worthwhile look.
Movie Review: Why Was The Cast Shuffled?
Summary: 1 Stars
Many reviewers are confused as to why this film had a competent cast yet ended up as such a stinker, but the answer seems rather obvious:
The Casting Director of this bomb was an idiot.
I've seen this kind of thing happen before, where certain talent is chosen to play certain roles, but then later on in the development process the Casting Director has a "brain storm" about how to make it "better," as it were. Very rarely does this strategy ever work.
It seems that this was why you had Stockard Channing (a Jackie double, no less!) on board in the first place, because she seems to have been first cast as Jackie. Take some of the blame off the CD by guessing that Midler's agent later demanded that his client play Jackie instead of her friend? Possible.
But at any rate, the result was a dud, and the CD still should never have allowed it. (It could also be argued that Cleese and Pierce's parts may have been switched, but we need no further reason to call it a day on this one.)
That's because the real mixup is that Channing would have played a much better Jackie, that's all. Heck, even fellow cast member Amanda Peet would've played a better Jackie!
And as for Midler doing these lame bios, enough, already! She's already done a crappy Gypsy remake, playing Gypsy Rose Lee's mom, a crappy Janice Joplin ripoff (The Rose), a crappy Francis Langford USO gal thing (For The Boys). And now this piece of junk on Jackie.
Just remember this, Bette - and I DO love ya, gal - while you ARE and always will be the Divine Miss M., you are NOT and never will be the divine-anyone-else!
Movie Review: Funny, delightful, & entertaining!
Summary: 5 Stars
I found "Isn't She Great" to be an excellent movie; while, I didn't agree with the book that Jacqueline Susann actually wrote, I do admire her tenacity to refuse to give up and remain focused on her goal!
Bette Midler is an excellent actress, who has great quips to everything!
For instance, when the character on the game show scene says, "I'm an optometrist too, I always look on the bright side," then Bette Midler's response is something like, "I'm surprised you can even see the bright side!"
Without the profanity and the vulgarity being said, the movie is a tear jerker.
I recommend this movie to adults (18+) due to the profanity and vulgarity mentioned in the film.
Movie Review: No She Isn't Actually . . .
Summary: 2 Stars
The title comes from the phrase that Jacqueline Susann's husband, Irving Mansfield, uttered about his wife at every possible turn. The story is based, rather vaguely, on an article by writer and editor Michael Korda titled "Wasn't She Great?" (His final assessment? Not really, but she was certainly, er, colorful). Korda had been Susann's editor for her second novel THE LOVE MACHINE, and an aghast-yet-fascinated witness to the publicity juggernaut that the writer and her husband launched to sell the book (much as they had for her previous effort, VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, only now they had a pink jet to cart them around).
In short, there is material for an interesting movie here, but although the movie is a harmless time-passer, it's not something you have to see, either. To begin with, the tense, angry Susann, the human equivalent of an overloaded watch spring, is played by a jolly and rather-too-zaftig Bette Midler (not too zaftig to be seen mind you, just to be playing a woman who seemed to live on booze, tobacco, and mood-altering prescription drugs). The real Susann, who arrived in New York with a high-school diploma, a pot habit, a complicated relationship with her father, and a burning desire to Be Famous, spent most of her life chasing the fame at the cost of a happy and productive life; she did bit parts in plays, became a married, but faithless, nightclub showgirl, knocked around in television. And by her late forties was at about the same place as she had been over 20 years earlier. The anger and frustration of those years was apparently drained into her names-changed showbiz potboilers, full of unhappy, promiscuous people who hop from bed to bed when they aren't too stoned on pills and booze to walk in a straight line (mind you, I haven't actually read any of the books--the closest I've come is a spoofy review that Calvin Trillin did of one of the novels and sitting through the last half hour of the movie version of VALLEY, appropriately while stoned on pain-killers and nursing a broken ankle--as I remember, Sharon Tate was pretty and very touching and Patty Duke yelled a LOT).
It's rather hard to reconcile such bile with this movie (written by Paul Rudnick) about a nice Jewish lady who writes a naughty little novel and helps everybody, including her up-tight WASP-y editor (David Hyde-Pierce) to overcome their sexual hangups, fitting all of this in between weeping over the fate of her autistic son and popping by Central Park to chat with God (Susann did have an autistic son and she did have the odd chat with the Deity, but if you want the lowdown of how they fit into her rather dark life story, better to check out Barbara Seaman's LOVELY ME, one of the best biographies I've ever read about a writer I have no interest in reading). That lady, as I've mentioned before, is played very agreeably by Bette Midler, and Nathan Lane is just as affable playing her husband. Hyde-Pierce is basically doing a re-mix of Niles Crane, but he is such an assured and appealing actor that you really don't care. There are also amusing turns by Stockard Channing as an actress friend of Midler's and John Cleese as an eccentric publisher. Also, some nice music by Burt Bacharach (even a Bacharach/David song sung by Dionne Warwick), pretty photography, nice costumes YAWN, YAWN . . .