What is up with that summary title? you might be thinking. There is a thrift store that sells VHS tapes for $0.25 apiece and this movie was in their collection and now it's in my cheap entertainment collection.The reviews on IMDb for this movie are very polarized: people either seem to really hate it or really love it. For me there were equal parts of things to like and not like about it. Sandra Bullock, who was producing for the first time in her new movie, comes across as aimless and wispy in this. Harry Connick as her former schoolmate and potential love interest comes across as stiff and insincere. At the time there was a push toward getting him more highly visible roles, but he was much better as a supporting player (Will Smith's jet fighter buddy in Independence Day a couple of years before).The musical score really helps the movie. There are very nice musical compositions from Garth Brooks, Trisha Yearwood, Cheryl Crow, Bryan Adams, and others. It turns out that Patrick Swayze choreographed the dancing in this, which shows up in a very nice scene at a Texas dance hall where couples are doing the Texas two-step.Acting-wise, the best thing was Mae Whitman, who was about 10 at the time and is the centerpiece for the movie's most stirring scene, which happens near the end. She has gone on to build an impressive list of credits and at first glance seems to have transitioned from child actress to viable adult performer very well.The set design is also nice and there are pretty images of the Texas countryside in a few scenes. Overall though, the movie is kind of dreary and a good example of one of Sandra Bullock's career growing pains. Forrest Whitaker directed, and he has also gone on to bigger and better things.

This is one of those guilty pleasure type movies I find myself watching just about every time I catch it on TV. Its not perfect, a total chick flick but also completely addictive and pretty great. Sandra Bullock plays Birdee Calvert, a Chicago wife who returns home to her small Texas hometown after her husband reveals on a talk show that he's (been) having an affair with her best friend.Bullock is as always likable and I enjoyed watching her (get drunk) trying to put her life back together again with the help of her eccentric taxidermy loving mother (Gena Rowlands) and a yummy (in an awkward sort of way) Harry Connick Jr. All the performances seem authentic and this doesn't really fall into romantic comedy genre(which may be why I like it). It's more of a family drama complete with all the tears laughter and love that incorporates. The small town atmosphere also really adds to this as her old classmates revel in seeing a former beauty queen taken down a notch.The one standout performance here would have to go to the little girl playing her daughter Bernice, she is just fantastic. That scene towards the end when she runs after her dad crying "you want me" "take me with you" just kills me. Well that and Connick leaning up against his pick-up with a handful of flowers and 'those' Levis'. 12/7/14

I would like to see a movie about the damaging effects on a person who is brought onto a T.V. talk show under false pretenses only to have their spouse reveal that they are having an extramarital affair thereby humiliating them on national television. What does that person go through afterwards? How do they cope? Watching the opening scene of 'Hope Floats' I thought the movie would answer these questions but alas, this is a movie that has a far less original idea in mind.The jilted is Birdie Pruitt (Sandra Bullock) and she is so humiliated that she leaves Chicago to go and live with her mother in Smithville, Texas. After this promising opening, the movie piles on one eccentric character after another and one impossible situation after another until Birdie's public humiliation doesn't seem quite so bad.Birdie's mother is played by the ever dependable Gena Rowlands who lives in a mansion, despite having no apparent source of income. Her annoying daughter Bernice functions in the story only to whine about wanting to move back in with daddy apparently forgetting what he did to mommy. Then comes the character that only exists in the movies, a marlboro man-type of an old boyfriend who is there to be sympathetic and carry Birdie through the inevitable clichés that will carry them to the final soppy romantic moment.Will they have sex? Will they have a fight afterward? Will they seem on the verge of breaking up only to get back together so we can get our money's worth? If you don't know the answer to any of these questions then you obviously haven't been to a movie in the last 80 years. By the end I wasn't surprised that the movie didn't answer my questions about jilted spouses on talk shows. In a movie so eager to fit the requirements of it's formula plot, there isn't much to be surprised about.

As a rule, I really enjoy Sandra Bullock and have often felt that she is a truly underrated actress. Fans would be well-advised to steer far away from Hope Floats, a vapid insufferable morass of chick-flick clichés that storm the camera and bludgeon the viewer into idiocy.Bullock is cast as Birdie Pruitt, a former Texas high school cheerleader and beauty queen whose charmed life as a stay-at-home mom crashes to the ground when her philandering husband Michael Pare and her "best friend" Rosanna Arquette punk her on national TV by announcing their affair and his intention to abandon Birdie and their daughter Mae Whitman. The film is already off to a rocky start with this introduction. It is obvious that the film is stacking the deck with sympathy for Birdie because only complete low-lifes would decide to emotionally annihilate another person unawares in public while trying to pretend it is all for the better, much less to unleash this with the daughter sitting in the studio audience. Untrained and broke, Birdie and her daughter go to live with her mother Gena Rowlands to ostensibly lick her wounds and try to re-assemble her life. Then the chick-flick clichés fly fast and furious. Because Bullock was a former cheerleader in high school, we know that the conclusion is that she also had to be a stuck-up snot who has now received her deserved comeuppance (although the film provides us with no real proof of this). Will there be a legion of jealous former high school rivals who revel in Birdie's misfortune? Check! Will the only people willing to give Birdie a break be those she overlooked in the past? Check. Will Birdie's daughter prove to be a real handful through the whole experience? Check. Will Birdie's mom be wise in that way only on screen mothers are? Check. Will there be one of those painful moments where the women don garish outfits and feather boas to dance around the room lip-synching to a song to cheer someone up? Double-check! Will there be a romantic interest who has been pining for Birdie for years? Of course! Blech! The film is such by-the-numbers schmaltz that you can guess where everything is going just by the synopsis. What you cannot guess is how utterly disagreeable and repellent it is while getting there. Director Forest Whitaker (yes, the actor who eventually won an Oscar) provides schizophrenic direction so that the tone of the film is all over the map. The opening set-up seems lifted from a bad TV sitcom, while the remainder of the film lurches between mawkish, maudlin, depressing and incomprehensibly boring. The relationship between Birdie and her mom is half-baked and that between Birdie and her daughter is excruciating. Whitman has apparently been instructed to play every other scene in full-screech mode giving us an obnoxious, selfish and fairly odious caricature of a spoiled brat. If the film were to omit all of the scenes of Whitman having a tantrum, it would be at least 30 minutes shorter.I would venture to say that three-quarters of the film is devoted to watching Birdie mope. Bullock is an actress of sunny disposition and ebullience - and she shines in roles that allow her to exploit these attributes. This role robs her of those gifts and we are left with a rather deadening characterization. There is only so much that one can take of watching this sad-sack wander aimlessly across the landscape. It is not just that Birdie is a drain, but that she actually seems to actively enjoy her chronic wallows in self-pity. The film should further be charged with criminal neglect for squandering the tremendous talents of Rowlands in a badly written part. When she is forced to don a funky costume and lip-synch, I truly felt for the actress.Perhaps the funniest aspect of the film is that the best performance comes from Harry Connick Jr., who makes a lot out of the normally thankless stock role of the love interest. The entire part is absurd. Birdie is largely a charisma-free character, yet we are supposed to believe that there is an ideal man that has remained single and unattached for years - despite her marriage - in the off chance that Birdie should once again come on the market. The buff and smiling Connick is a veritable wish list of things rebound women are searching for in a tough yet sensitive guy - and he always seems to be photographed in a golden hue. The only thing the film misses at providing with this obvious wish fulfillment character is a gratuitous nude scene, which would only enliven this otherwise dead film. Because Connick is in on the ridiculousness of the role and his character is free to be an antidote to the heroine's unending self-absorption, he pours on the charm and becomes the only spot of life in an otherwise dead film. The fact that it takes our droopy heroine the entire running time to take him up on his romantic advances indicates less a cautious woman than one who is having too much fun wallowing in her misery.In the end, and despite Connick's work, the film is an absolute mess. Bullock has had better days and there are better entries in this genre that fill the bill. Hope may well float as the title suggests, but so does pond scum and this film has more in common with that.