Can
a man write an Ann Landers or Dear Abby column
with sensitivity and panache? When the film Good Advice
begins, stockbroker Ryan Turner (played by Charlie Sheen)
provides stock tips to clients around the world, but the advice
is so bad that his boss fires him. Subsequently, he is investigated
for insider trading; although he is not indicted, he loses
his broker's license. Unable to start a new career, he becomes
a boring couch potato while sharing a New York apartment with
Cyndy Styne (played by Denise Richards), whose Chelsea
Times column for the lovelorn is not very successful.
One day Cyndy decides to leave him, with rent and utilities
due, for a hot romance in Brazil. Destitute financially, Ryan
decides to ghostwrite Cyndy's column. At first, his words
are insensitive to women, but in time he becomes compassionate
and clever. Indeed, his column turns out to be so successful
that the nearly bankrupt newspaper begins to turn a profit,
and Cyndy becomes a reclusive media celebrity. To carry out
the deception of writing Cyndy's column, Ryan personally delivers
the column to publisher Page Hensen (played by Angie Harmon)
on the pretext that Cyndy is ill and needs a courier. Soon,
Page and Ryan are romantically involved. Inevitably, Cyndy
returns to New York, furious about the Brazilian scoundrel
but unaware of the success of her ghostwritten column in her
absence. When word spreads that Cyndy is back in town, Donald
Simpson (played by Barry Newman) of the rival New York
Chronicle quickly signs up Cyndy with a fat contract,
whereupon Ryan sees an opportunity for an immense profit on
the stock market: Borrowing $50,000 from a friend and $150,000
from Page's sexy sexagenarian secretary Iris (played by Estelle
Harris), Ryan buys stock in the parent company of the New
York Chronicle in the morning of the day when Simpson
is to announce at a press conference that Cyndy is under contract
with his newspaper. The moment when Simpson hands the microphone
to Cyndy at the press conference, Ryan places a "sell"
order. Then, while Cyndy predictably babbles on about her
brazen Brazilian, the stock plummets, but not before Ryan
and his benefactors make a killing in the market. Meanwhile,
Page and Ryan cement their love affair, and the column is
reborn with Ryan having his own byline. Directed by Steve
Rash, Good Advice is a romantic comedy in which
everyone is ultimately happy but the rapacious Simpson and
the dingbat Cyndy. MH
I
want to comment on this film
