"The Muse" from 1999 is an Albert Brooks film, starring Brooks, Sharon Stone, Andie MacDowell, Bradley Whitford, Mark Feuerstein, Jeff Bridges, and cameos by the likes of Wolfgang Puck, Rob Reiner, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Jennifer Tilly, Lorenzo Lamas, and others.Brooks plays Steven Phillips, a Hollywood screenwriter who has written 17 films. When he goes to a meeting at Paramount, where he has a deal, he's basically told that they want him off the lot by 5 p.m., his deal is cancelled, he's lost his "edge", and his script is terrible. And by the way, so were the last couple of films.Discouraged, and at his wife's (MacDowell's) suggestion, he goes and talks to his best friend Jack (Jeff Bridges) who explains that he used the services of a Muse, Sarah Little (Stone) for inspiration. He calls her for Steven and Steven rushes to see her. Well, this Muse is an earthly pain in the you know what. Anyone who goes to see her has to bring a gift from Tiffany. She wants to be put up at the Four Seasons, have a limo at her disposal, and health foods purchased for her. She spends perhaps five minutes with Steven, who does get an idea for a script. Meanwhile, unable to sleep, she's moved into the guest house/office on his property. She's also turned his wife into the second Mrs. Fields by encouraging her to market her cookies. Very funny comedy with the hapless Brooks nearly driven out of his mind by this woman. And the film has a delightful twist.Someone mentioned the party Wolfgang Puck throws for Steven's wife (Puck is serving her cookies). Steven gets into a conversation with a man who can't understand English and misinterprets everything he says. It is hilarious.This isn't considered Brooks' best, but given for what passes for comedy today, it's practically Pulitzer Prize material. Well worth seeing.

For a hard of hearing french, watching an American movie without subtitle is "mission impossible". I don't understand what people say, so it's like everybody is mute. So, have laughs: here's my debriefing of what I have understood: Mr Brooks is a famous director (or writer?) who gets fired by a studio! Why? I don't know. Desperate, he believes to have an appointment with Spielberg but meets another one. Hopefully, the real Bridges gives him help with the address of his muse. If this muse brings inspiration, she needs a lot of things and attention. He works about of script about fish but it's her wife that benefits much, becoming a successful cookie maker. What does the muse says exactly: I don't know.If the dialogs were hard to follow, the music wasn't and for a Elton John composition, it is really surprising good. But it is used to fill the walks or car errands! Finally, it's a pity to understand so little because it seems to be a good comedy about Hollywood. The cameos are funny even if I think that making a movie about movie lacks of inspiration! Where is the muse?

Albert Brooks, who wrote this and acted in it, is a Hollywood screenwriter who's being rejected with every script he submits. He lives in a mansion with his wife, Andie MacDowell, and is going nuts because he won't be able to support his family. A successful writer friend, Jeff Bridges, puts him in touch with a muse, a Greek spirit known for inspiring artists. The muse is Sharon Stone. And she is some work of art. She not only impinges on the lives of Brooks and his family. She takes them over.She has demanding tastes, grows quickly bored with the suite at the Four Seasons that Brooks is paying for. She has a whim of iron, sending Brooks out for Waldorf salad from Spago in the middle of the night. She's friendly towards Brooks' wife and urges her to begin the commercial cookie-making career that she's discarded over the years. MacDowell follows Stone's advice and finds self-fulfillment before the oven.Meanwhile, Brooks is going nuts. He's spending money and time keeping Sharon Stone satisfied but he's getting very little inspiration out of her. An occasional, off-the-cuff suggestion -- that's all. Brooks develops a script based on her hints but reaches a block at the end of Act II, with his protagonist owning an aquarium and nowhere else to go. He presses her abjectly for an idea and she suggests that, since they must use drilling equipment to build the foundation for the aquarium, why not have them strike oil? Right out of "The Beverley Hillbillies."In the end, Stone turns out to be not a muse but a multiple personality who has escaped from a private psychiatric hospital in Ohio. Last time out, she was Picasso's daughter. Brooks of course is a neural shambles by now, but -- Lo -- Paramount buys his script and everything is fine -- except that the producer at Paramount turns out to be Sharon Stone in another disguise.There are a lot of cameos in the film, some easily recognizable, others not -- from Wolfgang Puck to Martin Scorsese who does a hilarious turn as himself, planning a remake of "Raging Bull," only this time the guy is really THIN. "You see it? Can you see it?" Scorsese speaks faster than a normal person can think.Overall, it's mildly amusing, and that's about it. Nothing wrong with the professional players. Brooks is the anxiety-ridden middle-class character that he's perfected by now. Sharon Stone is seasoned. Andy MacDowell is beguiling. But the script is full of logical holes. This is okay in a comic fantasy, in itself, but there are so many of them here that they become noticeable. We can contrast "The Muse" with a comedy like "Groundhog Day" to illustrate when I mean. In "Groundhog Day," with an equally preposterous premise, one thing follows inexorably from what has happened before, so the film DEVELOPS. That sense of inexorability is lacking here. If Stone is really not a muse at all, but just a psychiatric case with an occasional shopworn notion, then what are people like Scorsese and Ian Cameron and Rob Reiner courting her for? And, shortly after she escapes from the doctors who have come to fetch her back to the institution, how does she suddenly show up as a producer at Paramount? It's good for a laugh but nothing has set the situation up, so it's a shallow chuckle rather than the conclusion of any plot thread. It's like: A man walks along the street, slips on a banana peel, and falls on his bum. Ha ha, but so what? Another instance: When he brings that Waldorf salad back to Stone's suite at night, she's lost interest in it and turns him away. Still holding the big bowl of salad, he backs into another hotel guest and crashes out of sight to the floor. We see the guest's face looking down as he asks, "Are you alright?" Well, we already KNOW what the gag is going to be. But instead of keeping the camera on the guest's face and hearing only a moan from the floor -- or seeing Brooks' salad-covered head very slowly emerge from the bottom of the screen -- there's a cut to Brooks on his back, decorated with salad. Where was the muse when she was most needed? The best feature of the film is Albert Brooks' performance. He's done it before just about perfectly, and here he does it again. It may be that no one in the history of movies has better expressed astonishment mixed with self-righteous indignation. What a terrific whiner he is.

SPOILERS THROUGH: The Muse is an odd sort of comedy, definitely not your run of the mill typical Hollywood comedy. I thought it was OK. They took an unusual premise and made a movie about it, with big name stars. It had some genuinely funny moments and the premise was a good one.The Muse is a likable movie in a lot of ways but does suffer from very slow pacing. There are some really funny moments but also moments when the movie tries to hard. The cast for the most part was good. But I was a bit baffled by the casting of Stone as the muse.The main thing about This movie: The Muse is that, for a movie with such a whimsical storyline, it lacked a certain fanciful quality. I'd have liked this to be more of a fairytale and in that regard, it was hard for me to see stone in the part of Muse. Not because she isn't talented or beautiful which she is, but because she is very intense and there's an edge to her. I'd have liked to see someone softer, more delicate in the role. Likewise, Andy McDowell seems miscast as the wife. I think it would have been better if Andy had played the Muse. She does have a more ethereal quality then Stone. The Muse could have been such a whimsical movie but I did feel the female casting was off even though the movie is above average in general. I'd rate this a 6.5 of 10.