As any good therapist knows, each patient on the couch requires her own tonic. About Beverly WestNancy Peske and Beverly West arefilm fanatics, best friends, identical cousins, and the coauthors of Bibliotherapy: The Girls Guide to Books. Moreover, the authors take for granted a rather uniform, heterosexual taste among female readership. Maybe it’s that Peske and West don’t have much new to say about these films. These are movies that dissolve as sweetly as scented bath beads, but they tend to leave one feeling cheapened.
The humor, though filleted with contemporary references, is somehow reminiscent of the days when Betty Crocker ruled the kitchen and Joan Crawford vamped across the screen. Instead, there’s the occasional bit of tasty trivia arranged in sidebars such as “Hoopskirt Dreams: Dresses-to-Die-for-Movies.” (A recurring sidebar feature is “The Handy Hunk Chart” which debates the merits of Gary Oldman’s pout versus Johnny Depp’s “delicately chiseled planes … and astounded dimples.”) USA Today dubbed Cinematherapy a cultural phenomenon as movie watchers latched on to the six-book Cinematherapy series by Nancy Peske and Bev West that taught them it’s okay to feel your feelings, behave badly now and again, and learn something about what you’re going through. (Still, the authors recognize a shameless ploy like the Julia Roberts vehicle “Pretty Woman” for the tripe that it is.)įoreign films, especially the moving and serious ones that investigate the souls of men and women, are never a real presence in the book’s haphazard canon.
The selections they’ve chosen are mostly mainstream, the sort of films that can easily be located at the local Blockbuster, with some intriguing older Hollywood flicks tossed in for leavening.
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