Available to pre-order from Amazon at £9.98 for it’s July 14th release.

Recently I have been sent a lot of DVD’s to review by various companies, my pile of movies to watch is almost unmanageable but slowly and surely I am going to make my way through them all but it’s movies like this one that exhaust me and makes it feel like a chore.

Now granted the last movie I wanted to watch last night was a strange Michelle Pfeiffer/Paul Rudd comedy which I had never heard of until it arrived at my door but my girlfriend was with me and well it’s easier to get her to see this kind of film than anything else… so here we go with a straight to dvd rom-rom (you should see some of the crap they put in theatres so I admit I was fretting over this one).

The oddly titled I Could Never Be Your Women is the latest movie from Amy Heckerling, the writer/director of CLUELESS and LOOK WHO’S TALKING, and an independent voice in the industry who got her big break helming Cameron Crowe’s brilliant script for FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMOUNT HIGH in the early 80’s. She clearly has at least some pedigree and I admire those who attempt to work outside of the big studio system but Jesus, what was she smoking here?

Her script feels like it’s a very early draft from a first time writer which has been locked in a drawer and should never ever have been seen by anyone. It sees Michelle Pfeiffer play a t.v. writer/producer of a hip/young teenage Nickelodeon esque production “You Go, Girl” (where and I’m not kidding, a 40 year old Stacey Dash attempts to play a teenager!) whose ratings are unsurprisingly declining (the script for the show within the movie is even worse than the movie itself) when during a casting session she comes across Paul Rudd.

His character is the only one who reads her lines the way she wrote them and she quickly hires him and begins to fall in love with his humor, his confidence and laid back style of living, his insatiable charm. She quickly casts him for the part, another adult playing a teenager and the show grows too as he proves to be a big hit.

Rudd and Pfeiffer get closer to each other but the problem is she’s 40 (although in real life nearly 50!) and Rudd’s character is 29 (closer to 39 in real life), not to mention her own daughter from a previous marriage is now growing up and talking about boys. She ain’t got time for no quick lover affair that will mostly likely end up with her getting hurt. Her sassy daughter is played by a now Academy Award nominated actress Saorise Ronan who burst onto the scene with such confidence and stature in Atonement but she feels like she’s trying too hard here.

So from there it’s the cliche situation of a middle aged feminist t.v. producer who is finding it hard dealing with the mostly male studio executives until her show gets canned and her new man and star of her show is being spun-off to his own series. She wasn’t invited alone for the ride either.

It’s the kind of cliche that I thought the movie was trying to deconstruct. There’s a couple of references to shows like Will & Grace here (British funnyman Graham Norton plays a camp designer…. the gorgeous Sarah Alexander from Coupling plays a jealous and conniving secretary) but as you can see from those kinds of roles and the completely unbelievable dialogue, it fails miserably and is too often it’s own worst enemy.

The positives are a nice chemistry between Pfeiffer and Rudd (I deify anyone to try and NOT have chemistry with Rudd, he’s just so laid-back and charming in this kind of role) and you can tell they actually believe the material is funny when it clearly isn’t, which at least makes you take the film a little more seriously. And the relationship between Pfeiffer and her daughter feels like it has a genuine warmth to it, if maybe over-played.

But I could never recommend this title. It’s awkward, the script is so pedestrian and falls too easily into something it is trying to deconstruct and for every scene that works, there’s a bit five that don’t.

It’s most certainly the worst film I have ever seen Michelle Pfeiffer in and it’s so weird seeing her in this after making such a mega comeback with Hairspray and Stardust, this forever being a blot on her CV, her first ever STV title!

The movie was filmed mostly in the U.K. (which explains the massive amount of British character actors who pop in and out of the movie for small supporting roles) to evade tax problems and it makes for only a half convincing L.A. The movie suffered a never ending number of setbacks, including the studio trying to cut the salaries of it’s stars and it eventually wound up with the quiet DVD release it did.

You can read about them HERE but it’s no excuse for what is an awful movie.