Isn't She Great (2000)

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

Overacted and under-directed, you won't learn anything new (or at all) about Jackie Susann. Brought to you from the same director as Striptease, the movie people confuse with Showgirls, this schlockfest is incredible for its ability to wring the worst performances from a cast of talented actors. Nathan Lane is forced to narrate large portions of the film since the scripted action fails to tell much of a story, but even that can't compensate for the lack of a plot. Yes, it's true: there is no plot. Susann's life was more complicated, messy, and salacious than this thing would otherwise convey, but even Lane's narration of unimportant tangents doesn't come close to rescuing a story so neutered as to be incomprehensible. The camera work, set design, and lighting give a tightly-produced feel that distances the action from any sense of place in reality; scenes shot in Central Park look as if there were actually filmed on a sound stage decorated to look like Central Park. That's quite an achievement.

Oh my God, I've always loved Bette, but not so fond of Nathan Lane. He always sounds constipated. But Bette here is more disastrous than anything I have ever seen her in. Terrible acting, I wouldn't even call it over-acting, it was just plain tragic. Nothing believable about anything here. The most pathetic, however, is Stockard Channing, one of the finest actresses around. How in God's name could any of these actors not seen what a laughable mess this was? They must have been in dire positions financially to stoop this low. I will never watch another Bette film. She should stick to cleaning up New York City. Never liked her as a singer either. She is just overwrought and bad. Like a bad drag queen from the 70s, which is I guess what she modeled her career after anyway. Sad.

Middle-aged women of the world unite -- and watch this movie! The real-life story of Jackie Susann's meteoric and incredibly unlikely rise to fame is much more compelling than any of the sexploitation novels she wrote.Well into her 40s, Susann had three dreadful strikes against her -- her only child was autistic and institutionalized, her acting career had flopped and then she got cancer. She had ground out a novel about the sex-and-drugs peccadilloes of showbiz types, which was considered junk by any and all established literary standards. But Jackie had a shrewd, intuitive sense of what turned ordinary people on, a flamboyant flair for promoting herself plus relentless energy and ambition. She achieved about a decade of glorious success as top best-selling author until she succumbed to a recurrence of cancer in her 50s.If you like this story line, you'll probably like the movie. It's handled in a high-camp manner, with very broad performances by Bette Midler and the rest. Midler and Lane, who plays her kindly and rather pathetic hanger-on of a husband, are wonderfully funny playing a couple with absolutely no class at all. If you were a kid in the 1960s, as I was, you'll probably enjoy Bette wafting around in outrageous outfits and dos.My only criticism is that this very comic style makes the movie play like an extended, patched-together sequence of comedy sketches, rather than a movie. Also, to enjoy the movie, I think it helps if you're a New Yorker. In NYC, eccentricity has traditionally been not just tolerated but encouraged. Many people from other more staid parts of the country come to New York for this reason -- Susann herself was a New York transplant from Philadelphia. Also, NYC attracts lots of wildly ambitious people vying to make it in the worlds of showbiz, the arts, publishing, finance, etc. So,as goofy as Midler's portrait is, it seemed endearingly familiar to me.

ISN'T SHE GREAT (2000) ** Bette Midler, Nathan Lane, Stockard Channing, David Hyde Pierce, John Cleese, Amanda Peet. Before there was Jackie Collins and Amazon.com there was Jacqueline Susann. That is prior to the subgenre of 'trashy romance' novels found in your neighborhood pharmacy and the glut that is now the conglomerate superbookstore –i.e. marketing and focus groups for the masses! – there was Jacqueline Susann, whose bawdy, vulgar and tasteless novels were ultimately candy for the average American reader who gobbled her tomes faster than she could churn them out. In Andrew Bergman's look at the queen of the acquired taste, who else could portray a larger than life figurehead than the estimable Divine Miss M herself, Bette Midler.Midler gives it her all with her trademark ball-breaking brio as the celebrity craven author whose indefatigable image fashioning was only matched by par by her long-suffering but ever devoted husband and business partner Irving Mansfield (touché Lane, making their onscreen presence a once in a lifetime pairing to appreciative audiences), who used all his show biz savvy – no matter how gauche or seemingly stooping manners of barnstorming the country to every podunk backwater stationery store or spreading the word to a busload of school children – to make Susann a giantess among the mortals in the writing field. Based on a reminiscence by New Yorker's Michael Korda, the fact that the real Susann was no sweetheart and a real tough cookie with a few sad hurdles – her ongoing bout with cancer and the institutionalization of her only child who suffered from autism – are casually sugar-coated by Bergman (whose impeccable credits include a plethora of the comic pantheon including 'The In-Laws', 'The Freshman' and 'Blazing Saddles') and the sharply sticky screenplay by scathing scribe Paul Rudnick ('In & Out') wisely overlook her obvious flaws and instead center on the unlikely union of two borderline caricatures of the entertainment field, and their questionable romance. But Midler and Lane surpass the film's shortcomings with their theatrical overplaying, which is arguably suitable, as well as the always welcome Channing, one of our most underrated comic actresses, whose succor in her line readings are a stitch (when Susann belabors she doesn't know how to write a book, Channing says with aplomb, 'Talent isn't everything.'); she's like the salt in a margarita.Also lending able support is Hyde Pierce in another variation of his tv persona from 'Frasier' as Susann's stuffed shirt editor and Cleese as the Nehru jacketed publisher, both in their element here. The one thing that seems to be missing is it seems outdated and quite a lot to compress in a film that has the dubious distinction of telling the story of a woman who wasn't very nice nor well respected, but then again that hasn't been the case of celebrity history in this country, so I'm not even going to argue that!