SOAPDISH

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SOAPDISH was sneaked here last night. It's a very sharp satire of soap operas. If you need a silly movie and just want to laugh for 90 minutes, you can't do much better than SOAPDISH. I hadn't laughed so much at a movie in a long time.

In SOAPDISH, Sally Field plays an hyperactive, aging ingenue, Whoopi Goldberg reprises her wise woman from Ghost, Robert Downey Jr. plays a young producer torn in about fifteen different directions, and Cathy Moriarty steals the show as Montana, a vixenish actress who plays a nurse. Garry Marshall (normally the director of movies like Pretty Woman) does an amusing turn as "the man from upstairs," the network executive in charge of daytime programming. There are lots of surprises in this movie, and probably most of them don't hold up to much scrutiny, but what-the-hell. The movie goes to truly ridiculous lengths about how silly soaps are, and how neurotic most people involved with soaps are. You may need to have been a soap fan at one point in your life to truly appreciate this movie, but I suspect if you liked the soap opera stuff in TOOTSIE, you'll enjoy SOAPDISH.

This movie is also a 7 on the movie scale.