The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (2003) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

Whoa, Tennessee never tried anything similar to that before!

It was previously made into a film with Warren Beatty, Vivien Leigh, and Lotte Lenya, three people who were custom made for acting in the Tennessee Williams oeuvre.

This time the role of the the fading beauty is played by Helen Mirren, a terrific actress who looks great for her age, but does not look like a middle aged woman who used to be a great and glamorous beauty. She looks like what she is - a middle aged woman who used to be an average looking woman with a great chest.

When it comes to acting skills, Mirren had to carry the entire film.

• The young Gigolo is played by Olivier Martinez, an exquisitely handsome man with minimal skills and no appreciable hint of a personality. Imagine a young Richard Gere, albeit with an outrageous accent. On top of that Gallic Gere, overlay a sense that every word is being pronounced phonetically and with great difficulty. There's Olivier.
• The role of the old Contessa is played by Anne Bancroft. Bancroft seems to specialize in playing the old gypsy crone these days, whether she is supposed to or not. In Dracula, Dead and Loving It, she actually played a character called "old gypsy woman". In Malice, she was supposed to be an old drunk or something, but she still played "old gypsy woman". She played the same character here as well, using the same basic look and accent as in the other films. Unfortunately, she was supposed to be playing an Italian countess. Although Bancroft actually is of Italian ancestry, she isn't able to muster up anything resembling an Italian accent. In fact, Bancroft only has one accent, and that is "vaguely Eastern European, tinted by Mel Brooks". Although Bancroft has actually lived a privileged life, she seems unable to convey the breeding of a woman who either is or is pretending to be a countess. Her personality in this film seems to be that of a burnt-out low-rent scam artist, and she only needs a crystal ball to make her amateurish characterization complete.

In short, the entire production seems like a local dinner theater adaptation of the 1961 movie, which really wasn't that good to begin with. Because the play wasn't actually written by Williams himself, it doesn't even have his sense of flowery high-style decadence (or, depending on your point of view, his inevitable rendering of high period camp with bloated faux-poetic dialogue), leaving only the basic plot and trappings of one of those romance novels with Fabio on the cover.

Skip it.

I can't come up with one reason to see it unless you are a granny. Women over 45 rate it 9.9/10 at IMDb, and women in general rate it 1.6 points higher than men, placing it near the very top of the estrogen pyramid. In comparison, even Beaches only scores 1.3 estrogen points.