The Hot Flashes (2013)

It is a performances centric movie

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

The Hot Flashes is a movie about a high school basketball team that reunites after a few years to raise money for breast cancer. However, it ends up being a movie about the main protagonist and her struggles with her family, herself and her social background. The performances aren't that bad, but the poor script doesn't help the actors much and, in the end, even the few twists that are thrown here and there are too predictable to surprise the audience. It would have been better, as well, if the movie at least focused only on one character and didn't try to handle too many stories, because it ended up showing only one and just concluding the others at the final sequence. So, 2 out of 10.

''A group of middle aged women play basketball and prove a point.'' And that is, with not many other words, the entire movie. The entire 90 minutes you sit there, there are no other plots, no other events, no other nothing. Just that. 5 middle aged women playing basketball to raise some money for charity. The first half of the movie seems a bit interesting, as the actions happen in different places, the dialogs are varied, but then , in the second half of the movie, things become, let's say, static. It only focuses on the gym where the games are played and that's it. Quite boring for 45 minutes. And even worse, the ending is ridiculously predictable, it doesn't give any thrill. Important is that there are no useless scenes, everything that happens, matters. All in all, if you are just trying to waste the next hour and a half, I am quite sure that you can find something more thrilling than this.

I'm 50 minutes into this movie as I write this review.Other reviews have said that this movie is hit or miss, you're either going to love it or hate it... As I'm watching a middle aged American woman wrestle with a teenage girl on a basketball court, I'm thinking that the target audience has to be really, really heavy women from the South of America.For everybody else, watching Brooke Shields play an aging, hick, do-gooder American woman is just going to be depressing.I'd certainly not bother going to watch this at the theatre, unless you happen to live in the town in which it was filmed, and downloading/renting the DVD is probably not worth your time either.

"Anyone who says menopause isn't the most divine time in a woman's life is a pessimist." Beth Humphrey (Shields) is a mother who is going through an early menopause and is not happy about it. She is trying to figure out what to do with her life when she finds out that the local free breast cancer screening truck is in danger of closing. She decides to get a team of women together to take on the state champs in a basketball game to raise money. I will open by saying that I am not the target audience for this movie. I am mid-thirties male but I will say that I didn't think this was that bad. I did find some of it funny but again the jokes weren't really for me. The message of this movie is inspiring and does leave you feeling good even though the movie is very predictable. The one thing I can say about this is that it would have been very good as a Lifetime movie instead of a direct-to-DVD movie. Overall, better then I expected but I think if you are the audience this is going for you will really like it. I give it a B-.