Nothing new about it

Place Sex and the City in the Disneyland of incest that is Hollywood, replace one of the four forever-lunching women with a gay man, increase the average age of the actors by a few divorces - and you have the retro flick that's Hollywood Wives, complete with its ironic subtitle of The New Generation.

Hollywood Wives
Eagle Home
Rs 199
Rating: *

HT Image

Place Sex and the City in the Disneyland of incest that is Hollywood, replace one of the four forever-lunching women with a gay man, increase the average age of the actors by a few divorces - and you have the retro flick that's Hollywood Wives, complete with its ironic subtitle of The New Generation.

Made as a telefilm in 2003 and bafflingly released after Sex and the City 2 here, the filmmakers would have us believe that Farrah Fawcett, Robin Givens and Melissa Gilbert could represent, even seven years ago, what's new in Hollywood.

And therein lies another juicy irony.

Director Joyce Chopra is respected as a 'feminist filmmaker', having made a 1974 short titled Joyce at 32, which portrayed how motherhood affected her career. But this wannabe-glossy just pays lip service to women's issues with bumper-sticker quotes such as "Had Clint Eastwood been a woman he'd have been out of work 40 years ago".

If there's a storyline, it briefly sputters to life when a stalker kidnaps self-obsessed A-list actor Lissa Roman's (a jowly Fawcett) about-to-be-married daughter Nikki. It comes at the time she's deciding on marrying her philandering fiancé or his brother.

But the wind goes out of the plot when bodyguard Michael Scorsinni (a Warren Beatty-ish Jack Scalia) gets back the daughter with just a few screeches of tyre, a couple of gunshots and two miserable punches.

The film is a belated attempt to reprise Jackie Collins's 1980s' pulp titillater by the same title. No wonder it's made with her money too.