Michael Hoffman
1991
97 minutes
This is a very funny film you originally watched as a teenager not long after it came out. It's a bit of a miracle that this crossed your radar since you weren't much into soap operas as a teenage boy (with a few exceptions). Go figure. But you were starting to like things that were a little bit "meta", and the fact that this was a parody of what things were like behind the scenes on a soap set seemed promising to your teenage brain. You're glad to see most of the humor and charm of this as you remembered it still holds up--mostly, with one unfortunate exception. Part of this is due to the stellar cast--Kevin Kline, Sally Field, a very horny dweebish Robert Downey, Jr., Whoopi Goldberg, and Cathy Moriarty as the villain.
Part of the humor of this is that the plot twists happening offscreen with the cast and crew of the soap opera is almost as ridiculous as anything happening on the show-within-a-show soap opera itself. Sally Fields is the star of the soap, but she's starting to age. Cathy Moriarty's scheming villainess is trying to seduce the horny producer, played by RDJ, so that she can replace Sally Fields as the star. She connives to get the script written so that Sally Fields' character does something unspeakably vile to make her character unpopular and write her off the show. However, the actress they bring on to implement this (played by Elisabeth Shue) turns out to be her actual long-lost "niece", which leads to off-script shenanigans.
The confused writers, written into a corner, then have a dilemma. They want to bring back Kevin Kline's character who had previously been very forcefully written off the show. Again, much of the humor here is very "meta". It is well known that soaps use various tricks so that characters can be written off and brought back at will to boost ratings with fickle audiences. KK, however, was such an asshole and burned so many bridges that they not only killed off his character, but they made sure that he was decapitated to boot to prevent such nonsense. In order to bring him back they need to suggest that he had his head sewn back on, which they are glad to do.
Further romantic complications on set and jealousy and scheming amongst the cast and crew leads to more and more ridiculous plot points in the soap opera. This all comes to climax in a ridiculous live episode in which many plot points are revealed and some of the actors rebel and go off-script.
In the now-unfortunate climax, Cathy Moriarty's character is revealed to be a trans-woman (or at the very least a cross-dressing man, as per Dustin Hoffman's Tootsie, an obvious inspiration.) This is handled with all the tact and tastefulness you would expect from a dark comedy in 1991 when this was made and none of what one would expect today. After being outed, Cathy Moriarty's character goes back to her previous name and gender, exiled as Kevin Kline was before and doing dinner theater. Aside from this somewhat cringey misstep of having a horrible person's life ruined for being outed as a trans person, or at least the 90s conception of one, the rest of this is very funny and stupid.
When you were a kid, you never were extremely enthusiastic for very "gendered" activities of any sort. You weren't coerced into liking sports either as a viewer or participant as much as other boys whose fathers were around. Your mother was pretty "butch" and tomboyish, but she was careful you didn't pick up too many feminine habits from her because she didn't want you to get teased at school. As an only child, you ended up being more likely to entertain yourself with books and music. However, at some point you found that you were cut off from some of the more heavily-gendered world of your classmates. So you at least cultivated a passing interest in a few sports teams just to have something to talk about with the jocks if you needed to. And, weirdly, you discovered that it was handy to know a little bit about soap operas (but not too much) so you could talk to some of the girls. So you watched some Days of our Lives occasionally, at least enough to know some of the longest-running characters. These small investments ended up with large payoffs. Knowing some sports made bullying at school slightly less likely, since you could figure out what teams the popular jocks followed and at least be a fellow fan. And, weirdly, knowing and caring just enough about her favorite soap opera made your stepmother slightly more tolerant of you.
Both of these strategies paid off well into adulthood as well. Being able to talk sports with customers when you drove a cab helped you de-escalate a lot of hairy conflicts and on at least one occasion may have literally saved your life, but that's not a story for here. And knowing a little bit about what girls and girly-men are supposed to like has given you common ground with some gay men and straight women as well. And it's even been a contributing factor in getting you laid (by women) a few times. One more thing to keep a conversation going, one more signifier that you're not a meathead. All this just for simply caring a tiny bit about Hope and Bo and Victor Kiriakis when you were a kid.
Time to choose something different: