THE REAL BLONDE (54)

Directed by: Tom DiCillo

Starring: Matthew Modine, Catherine Keener, Maxwell Caulfield, Daryl Hannah

The Pitch: Struggling actors looking for a break in the big city.

Theo Sez: No-one's ever accused DiCillo of profundity, though he can certainly put together a helluva good time (viz. LIVING IN OBLIVION) - which may be why this emptily entertaining comedy puts a complaint about "superficial bullshit" in the mouth of a total bimbo, as if to pre-empt any similar protests from the audience. Yet for a while it seems on the verge of something almost insightful (searching for Truth - a real blonde - in a world of surfaces), set in a satirically vapid milieu of actors, models, make-up artists (who create perfect surfaces) and soap-opera stars, all of them obsessed with beauty and looking good (even a stuffy maitre d' fusses endlessly over the waiters' bow-ties) ; pace is brisk, gags often splendid - my favourite the bit where an entire restaurant of culture-vultures falls to discussing (Michael Campion's, or perhaps Jane Radford's) "Il Piano" - and we also get amusing extras like his'n hers fantasies (oral sex and Empowerment, respectively). Hard to say what goes wrong, exactly - maybe it runs out of ideas, or maybe it's revealed never to have had any - but the promise of a sharp satire remains unfulfilled : the film gradually winds down, starting to repeat itself and waffling on without much purpose. By the time it's implied that people may actually be happier without Truth - our hero's impotent with his Real Blonde, and ends up "killing" her (on his TV show) - the suggestion seems all too appropriate ; as someone says, "looks like everybody's getting stupider and stupider."