CineBad!!!

This film was sort of interesting. It’s about Bessie (McDowell), a housewife who’s married to Johnny (Mortensen) a rogue bush pilot, who for some unexplainable reason calls her Ruby. She discovers that Johnny’s dead one day when she receives a package- her husband’s false teeth. Then things get a little complicated as there are two guys named Hermés and a plot.

Bessie then learns of Johnny’s tremendous debt and travels to some Latin American country where she attends Johnny’s funeral. She meets Fergus Lamb (Neeson), a humanitarian aid worker who has little to do with the plot. (Trivia Question of the Day: In what other film did Liam Neeson play a character with the last name Lamb?) While in Latin America, Bessie decides to poke around her (now ex)husband’s desk in the office of his airplane hangar. And what does she find? His stash of prize baseball cards! He has marked them in an ingeniously clever way that only a wife could understand. They are the key to a whole bunch of bank accounts all over the world, which are kept in the names of his favorite baseball players.

Bessie thinks that of course she was meant to find these cards and they will solve all of her financial woes. She has a big garage sale and sets out for the world, armed with a power of Attorney to collect her late husband’s cash. Meanwhile, the 2 Herméses are on her trail generally being Bad guys.

It’s pretty obvious that her ex husband is a real schmuck, but Bessie still holds onto happy memories. We see happy flashbacks of how Johnny met Bessie, and how he came to get his false teeth. Will she ever get over the memory of him and go onto other men? (Namely Liam Neeson?)

I won’t spoil the, um, surprise ending, but it turns out that some interesting developments occur in Egypt (is it any coincidence that her husband named their 3 little kids after Egyptian things: Alexandria, Cleo, and Niles?) Her husband was involved in some racket involving “ink… for pens.” Fergus Lamb shows up again, and everyone lives happily ever after.

I actually enjoyed this movie, although sometimes I was a bit confused. The whole 2 Hermés thing had me floored for a while. Who can’t resist Andie McDowell muttering to herself and being puzzled with her little southern accent? Oh, and the answer to the trivia question is… Liam Neeson played a character with the last name Lamb in the movie Lamb.