(Download The Hot Flashes) There is a sharp comic satire buried beneath the cliches and underwhelming effect Susan Seidelman's The Hot Flashes leaves on a viewer.(The Hot Flashes Download) Despite a capable directing effort on her part and the cast's evident enthusiasm for the material, this is a comedy that plays things safely and one that never is funnier than the idea of a basketball team called "The Hot Flashes." There's enough in the film to hold interest but not enough to cordially recommend.

(Download The Hot Flashes) The plot centers around Beth (Brooke Shields), a middle-aged woman currently going through menopause, and her family, made up of her husband (Eric Roberts) and her daughter. When Beth,(Watch The Hot Flashes Online) who is known to take up numerous hobbies, however, not known to carry them out in a meaningful way, realizes that the local mammogram unit will be closing due to lack of financing on her part, she decides to form a basketball team called "The Hot Flashes" with several girls from her quiet Texas town named "Burning Bush." The goal in mind is for the team to play the championship school basketball team and raise $25,000 to save the mammogram unit.

(Download The Hot Flashes) As upsetting as this will be for some people to hear, the thematic idea that "women can do more than men" is hardly as subversive as it was so many years ago. While films should exist that show off a strong central female or more, having a film predicated off that idea and nothing more is beginning to become tiresome. The Hot Flashes even manages to downplay its central premise of menopause, offering little comedic or dramatic points about the inevitable,(Download The Hot Flashes Movie) life-changing stage women must go through, only offering the redundant piece of optimism that despite menopausal setbacks they still have game.

(Download The Hot Flashes) I recently watched a film called Coffee Town, which was a simple, pleasant comedy centered around three characters who spend their days at the local cafe, using it as a free-office with Wi-Fi, coffee, and all the baked goods they need. While a tad vulgar, the film managed to disregard the idea that a film needs to be oppressively raunchy in order to be funny.(Watch The Hot Flashes Online) The Hot Flashes does something similar to Coffee Town, which is make most of the characters possess wholesome morality, or at least a moral compass. Not to mention, their southern drawl is a sweet diversion from the city-slicking bawdiness that has been commonplace in cinema recently. And it's always nice to see a film maturely explore the reality of age as well as the optimistic way of looking at it.

(Download The Hot Flashes) But that doesn't excuse the idea that The Hot Flashes feels like Bridesmaids without a bite and that isn't because of the lack of language, sexual content, or gross-out humor. It's because Bridesmaids manages to try and make its characters come to life, using real-life situations and bittersweet reality. The characters in The Hot Flashes know they're getting older and there's no true reality to face since they're constantly reminding themselves they still have it. Not to mention, it doesn't help that the team itself is composed of the good mother, the sassy black lady, the chubby girl with the foul-mouthed, the town tramp, and the simple cowgirl.

Starring: Brooke Shields, Daryl Hannah, Virginia Madsen, Wanda Sykes, Eric Roberts, Mark Povinelli, and Camryn Manheim. Directed by: Susan Seidelman.

(Download The Hot Flashes) The representation of menopause and its trials and tribulations is scarce in American cinema. Occasionally a film will feature a character undergoing the so-called "change of life": Think of a desperate Samantha in Sex and the City 2, denied her hormonal treatments at the UAE border, turning to moisturizing her skin with yams, or Kathy Bates's Evelyn, who, in Fried Green Tomatoes, channels her midlife-crisis fury into a warrior-woman alter ego named Towanda. From the frank, bold title of her new film, The Hot Flashes, it's unquestionable what Susan Seidelman thinks about this lacking representation in our popular culture.

The Hot Flashes, concerning a middle-aged housewife, Beth (Brooke Shields), who starts a basketball team for women her age to raise money for a mobile mammography unit, is refreshing in its depiction of women's issues and use of raunchy humor. Each team member undergoes a different crisis vaguely tied to the emotional hurdles of menopause and the women's shared insecurity of feeling unwanted by society due to their age. The earnestness with which The Hot Flashes depicts their problems, however, cannot save a film that turns on predictable plot points and features one-dimensional characters.

(Download The Hot Flashes) Seidelman has a history of directing films about underdogs overcoming major obstacles, but too often her quest narratives are so formulaic that they seem to possess near-mathematical precision. In one scene, Beth cannot accomplish one small thing to bring her closer to victory; in the next, the problem has been magically solved. A typical getting-the-team-together sequence begins her mission as she approaches one skeptical woman after another, each of whom gives her a firm "no." Yet they all show up for practice anyway, as if turning Beth down was their way to save face. The exception is Florine (Wanda Sykes), the town's prim and proper mayor, who only needs a touch more guilting before she reluctantly joins.

Once the women are united, it's the rest of the town they must convince that their cause is a worthy one, and that they're capable of playing against the high school's agile basketball champs. Everyone from Beth's daughter to her distant husband, Lawrence (Eric Roberts), is a naysayer. It's a bit of a stretch that nobody, not even Beth's family, is willing to give an ounce of support for what's obviously an important campaign, but in Seidelman's fictional universes everyone is always out to get the little guy. The uncaring, unfriendly universe is a well-known trope typically reserved for solipsistic teenage protagonists or adult men, and it's heartening to see disenfranchised older female characters empowering themselves through friendship in spite of everyone and everything. But in The Hot Flashes the ignorance and disdain woven into the peripheral characters is rampant and one-note, a barrage of negativity that quickly becomes unconvincing.

(Download The Hot Flashes) Seidelman's attempts to provide positive, alternative representations of marginalized people and problems is overly ambitious. Beth's decision to hire Paul (Mark Povinelli), an unlicensed veterinarian, to be their team's coach—a man who has no experience for the job and who is a little person—is a bizarre joke that borders on offensive instead of transgressive. The intentions behind such casting decisions are noble, but given the numerous other issues the film is trying to tackle (namely, the multitude of experiences of menopause), Povinelli's casting feels like an afterthought, and unnecessary.

The Hot Flashes should be appealing enough in its humor and approach to a meaningful, under-appreciated issue that it could become a mainstream hit for an older female audience. Given the vacuum of films about women, let alone ones about hidden issues like menopause, this is hardly surprising, but profoundly depressing.

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