Chaude journée à L.A.

I rented this movie because I saw everything else at the movie store 30 times each. This was a special treat for me. Alyssa Milano is a wonderful young actress. She's so sweet and she's tough at the same time. I really loved her character. I also liked the love story with her and Partick Dempsey. Malcolm MacDowel was hilarious. I like his relationship with Sean Penn. They were funny together. I loved that thing with the shoes. Cathy Moriarty was great as the gambling mother of Alyssa Milano. I enjoyed this movie a lot. I think very highly of it.

This is a little babe of a movie, the kind that comes on at 1 am and you can't turn it off. Very inventive casting. McDowell and Penn are delightful as are Moriority and Milano. Then, you also have Downey, Jr, Dempsey, and Lewis (AND Chuck Barris). A zany cast of "characters"! I was impressed with how handily Milano carried herself and led this cast.

I didn't know much about "Hugo Pool" when I rented it last night. It seemed to be about an interesting collection of quirky characters. What I found out is that it's a collection of quirky characters, all right, but interesting, they're not.

Here's the plot, such as it is. Alyssa Milano plays a pool cleaner. We follow her around for a day as she cleans a few pools and encounters quirky characters, some of whom are family members, others customers.

Ms. Milano is awful in the lead role. This is the caliber of acting you'd expect from the girl playing Laurie in the high school production of "Oklahoma". It's pretty much a one-note performance, as if she were told, "act impatient," so she responded by setting her jaw and stomping through the movie. Drive truck, pour chemicals, act impatient, encounter next customer, scold Mom, act impatient. No higher gear, no lower gear, just the one setting.

Sean Penn and Robert Downey Jr. are terrific actors. Something went wrong here, though. Mr. Downey does some sort of burned-out-Inspector-Clouseau routine, while Mr. Penn does some sort of grown-up-Jeff-Spicoli thing.

Whatever. At no time did I see any of these quirky characters as anything other than actors trying to act quirky.

And I kept thinking about the 44 pools Ms. Milano was supposed to clean in one day. Say 10 minutes per pool, and 10 minutes' drive between pools, and that's nearly a 15-hour day. And she kept saying she was running late. Would you want to have, say, pool #40, and have some bickering pool cleaners in your backyard at 10:00-11:00 at night?

And I got to thinking about the money. Mr. Downey's character was behind on payments, the numbers averaging out to $200 per month. Let's say there are only 44 customers, pools being cleaned once a day. So the pool cleaning company is grossing $105,600 per year. If there are 88 customers, pools being cleaned every other day, the company is grossing $211,200 per year. If pools are cleaned once a week, and the pool company works 5 days per week, the company is grossing over half a million a year.

I don't have a pool and have no idea how often pools are cleaned. But the point is, it was more interesting to sit and do the revenue calculations in my head than to watch the parade of actors acting quirky. Or badly acting.

Alyssa Milano plays "Hugo" an overworked pool cleaning gal, who needs to clean 44 pools in one day. That is the only normal part of this movie. The rest of it has such poor casting choices and plot lines that is is painful to watch.

Along the way she picks up her father, Malcolm McDowell, who is doing the worst Jimmy Durante impression I have ever heard, and who is trying to kick his heroin habit by shooting the heroin into a puppet that he carries around. Retarded.

Jimmy Durante, er, Malcolm, then runs into a gay hitchhiker with blue shoes, played by Sean Penn. How they talked Sean Penn into this role is beyond me. He appears to be trying to be mysterious, but comes across as a whiney gay 12-year-old.

She sends her dad (and the hitchhiker) on a mission to get some water for one of her clients, a bug-eyed jabbering Richard Lewis, who is supposedly a mafioso, but comes off as threatening as a wet paper bag.

She then picks up her mother, a gambling addict. She in turn shanghais one of Hugo's clients, a man with als (Lou Gherig's Disease) and starts carrying him around in the back of a pickup truck (wheelchair and all) so he can be her gambling good luck charm. Ridiculous.

Along the way, they run into Robert Downey Jr as a wacked out film director, but Robert puts on this outrageous fakey French accent and so he comes across like a bad Inspector Clouseau. Obnoxious.

They finally meet up with Hugo's Mom's bookie, played by Chuck "Chuckie-baby" Barris from the old GONG SHOW, who is more interested in a romp in the hay than money. Strange.

The ending is more like a documentary about ALS than a comedy, and has the totally predictable typical heart wrenching ending. That didn't even get any sympathy points from me. Lame.

The only redeming virtue would have been seeing Alyssa in the buff, and that didn't even happen. What was that director thinking? Weak.

My assessment: 2 of 10 Good only for hard-core Alyssa fans.

So it may not be a blockbuster. But quirky does describe it well. Sean Penn and Roddy McDowall have an interesting relationship in this movie, but it's a good thing that Downey Jr. is related to the writer, as his portrayal of Franz is way over the top. But the surprise is that Danilo Perez provided the soundtrack, and while the original music may not live up to the content of his jazz albums, the inclusion of the Thelonious Monk tunes in the soundtrack is an incredible treat!