The Hot Flashes (Vertical Entertainment, 4K Productions, The Hot Flashes LLO, 2013)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night we watched a quite entertaining and fairly recent (2013) movie called The Hot Flashes, which I had run into on Amazon.com looking for anything that might have featured the 1980’s San Diego-based four-women comedy group I remember from Pride festivals and other community appearances. No such luck, though this cast featured a lot of actresses of “a certain age” proving, both in the film’s plot and in its actual existence, that they can still cut it. Directed by Susan Seidelman from a script by Brad Hennig, The Hot Flashes takes place in the decidedly fictional town of Burning Bush, Texas, whose high-school women’s basketball team, the Armadillos, has just won the state championship. Beth Humphrey (Brooke Shields, who seems to have disappeared from the national radar screen in the 1980’s but turns out in middle age to be an actress of quiet dignity and power – who’d-a thunk it after all those roles in which she was little more than an animate sex doll?) is a local attorney (though she doesn’t seem to work much at it) married to the local postmaster, Lawrence (Eric Roberts), and her daughter Jocelyn (Charlotte Graham) is one of the Armadillos’ key players. Beth used an inheritance from her late friend Tess to underwrite a mobile van to travel around the Texas back country offering free mammograms (Tess died of breast cancer and was convinced she could have lived longer if she’d had the chance to be screened), only the inheritance has run out and Beth screwed up by not realizing she had to re-apply for matching funds from the state government every year.

Desperate to raise the $25,000 the state official she talks to says she’ll need to keep the van service going (and despite the nasty male-chauvinist comments of her husband and most of the other guys in town who derisively call it the “Tittie Truck”), she decides to reassemble the star Burning Bush high-school women’s basketball team she played on and challenge the current Armadillos to a three-game match. The other members are Ginger Peabody (Daryl Hannah), who runs the local auto dealership and has lived for 16 years with a woman she euphemistically calls her “roommate”; Florine Clarkston (Wanda Sykes, considerably easier to take while playing a character than I’ve seen her as guest host of late-night talk shows, where she’s just a bit too edgy for comfort), who has somehow inherited the mayoralty of Burning Bush from a white guy and is running for election in her own right (her inevitable campaign slogan is “Go with the Flo”); Clementine Winks (Virginia Madsen), the town’s “fast” girl who’s burned through four husbands and been reduced to working as a grocery clerk because her last ex, Coach Slaughter (Carl Palmer), totally took her to the cleaners in their divorce; and my favorite of the five, heavy-set Roxie Rosales (Carolyn Manheim), who bakes cakes and pies laced with cannabis and has a rather unassuming husband, Tito (Kenny Alfonso), who looks about half her size. The Hot Flashes suffers from a certain degree of predictability and a preposterous plot premise – one gets the impression that screenwriter Hennig had his old notes from Script Writing 101 out when he wrote this and checked off every plot point (three-act structure? Check. Exciting come-from-behind victories on the court? Check. A villain who tries to stop the big game from happening and whom the heroines have to foil? Check. A personal crisis for Beth that she has to overcome to triumph in the big game? Check) as he included it.

But The Hot Flashes is still a pretty good and quite funny movie – we may know where we’re going but we’re going to have a lot of fun getting there – and Seidelman directs with real energy and verve even though, like Kathryn Bigelow in Zero Dark Thirty and Patty Jenkins in Wonder Woman, she’s in the odd position of being a woman directing a film about female empowerment written by a man. Among the cleverer bits of the movie are making the team’s principal antagonist be the local church lady, Kayla Rash (Andrea Frankie), who gets the school board to cancel the final game and lock the school gym on the grounds that the Hot Flashes swear during games and one of them is a “homosexual” (which gives Ginger the impetus she needs to come out at last); Paul (Mark Povinelli), the little-person character (a disgraced veterinarian who served time – though it’s not clear what for) who en=ds up as the Hot Flashes’ coach (it’s nice to know that there are high-quality little-person actors out there besides Peter Dinklage; indeed I wish the makers of Game of Thrones had been able to write in another little-person character, if only because it would have been fun to see Dinklage and Povinelli confront each other!); and a genuinely moving finale in which Beth catches her husband late at night at the post office screwing another woman (who, in one of Hennig’s nicer touches as a screenwriter, eroticizes post-office jargon as he’s fucking her) and the experience shatters her morale. She tells Lawrence, “If you’re still seeing her, don’t come to the game tonight,” and just when we think we know where this is going – she’ll blow easy shots throughout the first half, he’ll show up at the halftime break (which features a dance performance by the 1980 Burning Bush cheerleaders, who by authorial fiat all happen to be the wives of the school board members who voted at Kayla’s behest to ban the final game, and whom Beth got to reverse their decision by offering their wives a chance to perform at halftime) and she’ll immediately get her game back, literally and figuratively.

Only he doesn’t show until the last three minutes, and after the game is over and the Hot Flashes have (predictably) won – thanks at least in part to Beth’s daughter Jocelyn telling off Kayla’s daughter Millie (Jessica Rothenberg) over her homophobic comments about Ginger and thereby throwing her off her game – and Beth correctly guesses that it’s Lawrence’s paramour who dumped him, not the other way around. That causes her to exit the marriage, though a tag scene shows that six months later she’s making money doing a blog at the Web address “bethwontshutup.com.” (Well, if you can believe a movie in which a bunch of middle-aged women take on a high-school girls’ basketball team and win, you can believe that a middle-aged, recently divorced woman from Nowhere, Texas could be making money hand over fist from a blog.) Though set in Texas, The Hot Flashes was filmed entirely in Louisiana, in and around New Orleans, and I wish Hennig had tweaked his script to have the story take place in Louisiana as well – there are lots of bits of local Louisiana culture he could have incorporated to make his film even more interesting – but as it stands The Hot Flashes is a real charmer that proves its whole point that middle-aged women still have a lot of life in them and shouldn’t be just thrown on the scrap heap by our youth-obsessed culture.