nurse betty

Nurse Betty or Nurse Booby?

From the first shot, this Nurse flick seems to be about a hospital, about life-and-death scenarios, about the grizzly tragedies of the heart that take place when it's splayed open in an operating theatre, the wiry sinews of its aorta attuned to the glinting scalpel of Doctor David Ravell. Instead, Doctor David is attuned to very different matters of the heart, it seems, as Chloe—his busty assistant—reapplies her lipgloss and recounts his escapades.

Pull out and we see squeege-eyed Renee "I'm a simple, ol' housewife" Zellwegger is getting teary eyed, scanning her favorite hospital soap for secret messages to escape her slavish marriage to a tacky car salesman who, it turns out, is messed up in a different kind of Coke than the bottled sort she pours as a small-town waitress.

Soap operas? Coke? This seems like a kooky, crazy comedy that busts out of hollywood conventions like Zellwegger's tits in a nurse outfit! Things get "out of control" when two black men scalp her white husband. Excuse me. One moment.

TWO BLACK MEN SCALP HER WHITE HUSBAND.

Is this...okay?

To get to the shot where bored, wheezing Chris Rock (the highlight of this shitshow) is standing in Betty's kitchen, holding a tuft of hairy scalp, one must traverse grand canyons of Bunuel-esque violence. Oh yeah, and then they go to the Grand Canyon. I really don't know what to say here. This becomes a road trip movie that lands all three of them—Betty & The Black Guys (my new band name)—in the apartment of a stereotypical latino chick who's hard-knock for dates in seedy L.A., where Betty's favorite soap just happens to be filmed. But Betty didn't come here to see it "filmed": She thinks it's real. A dissociative fugue that's more Thelma and Louise than Lost Highway has meshed her real life with that of "A Reason to Love." For example, she thinks she's a nurse, and she's in love with Dr. David Ravell—not the actor, the dude. The dude on the show.

But it's a Cinderella story of the sort not even Oprah could have cooked up! Betty saves a man's life, and becomes a real nurse! She meets Dr. David, they fall in love, and she gets a guest spot on his show! I won't unburden myself of the "plot twist," but, since you shouldn't watch this movie anyway, she squinches up, doesn't say a word, and ends up back at the latina's—where the black guys find out she's been hiding the coke, etc. etc.

HOWEVER, Crispin Glover does play a dorky small-town reporter with the hots for Betty. I hope he rubbed elbows with Rock at craft services. Though I don't know if that's enough to discount the image swimming in my head of a teary-eyed Morgan Freeman kissing a photo of Nursey-wursy as he walks down the stereotypical desert highway from his smoldering Buick. I mean, she's ugly, okay?