'Hot Flashes' is heartfelt but not quite a slam dunk (USA News)

USA News __The Hot Flashes * ½ out of four, appraised R, opening Friday in select urban areas) might have the most specific target group of onlookers in Hollywood history: the menopausal moviegoer.

Keeping in mind that demographic is likely excessively thin to make Flashes more than a blip on the artistic scene, this satire merits credit for taking a chose perspective — and conveying an ardent if sometimes misinformed message.

Brooke Shields plays Beth Humphrey, a Texas housewife battling with her menopause while attempting to overlook it. In the wake of discovering that her neighborhood breast malignancy screening project has lost its subsidizing, she organizes a profit diversion between previous secondary school b-ball stars and the present secondary school young ladies' state champs.

She embarks to enlist the old pack: Roxie (Camryn Manheim), known for her pot-bound sweets; town leader Florine Clarkston (Wanda Sykes); Ginger (Daryl Hannah), an auto merchant who's been existing with a lady ("a companion to impart expenditures") for as long as 16 years; and Clementine (Virginia Madsen), a store clerk separated from the detestable mentor of the state champs (Carl Palmer).

Flashes expects to be a Bridesmaids for fiftysomethings. The ladies are indecent and intense, and they abound suitably at the inhumane men who mock bosom malignancy.

Anyway executive Susan Seidelman (Desperately Seeking Susan, She-Devil) is so dead set to wedge the story into a wide satire that the film undercuts its own message. The Southern-seared stresses, sexual allusion and dwarf jokes don't include anything.

Still, its insufficient to toss Flashes totally off its amusement. Yes, the story is foreseeable, and the men are as flatly unfeeling as you'd envision. Anyhow the female throws is breathtaking, and the on-screen characters' joint execution talks volumes in the vicinity of a studio framework that, some way or another, can't find them work.

The young ladies' recreations are energetic and simultaneously shot as games stories about male competitors. What's more its only enjoyable to see the stars, especially Manheim and Sykes, run the court.

All the more vitally, its message about assuming responsibility of your existence and health is solid enough to conquer the comedic falters. During a time when Hollywood appears hesitant to reject or insult a demographic with something as hazardous as a reason, its invigorating to uncover a film embrace one.