Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

From the director of Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho comes a star-studded comedy based on the best-selling novel by Tom Robbins. The cowgirls on the Rubber Rose Ranch are staging a rebellion. Delores Del Ruby (Bracco) is leading the uproarious uprising, but it?s really Sissy Hankshaw (Thurman) who?s providing the spiritual leadership for this rag-tag bunch of female bandits. With her marvelous thumbs and her funky brand of femininity, she shatters all male chauvinist illusions and boldly goes where no woman has gone before.

If someone ever put together a what-were-they-thinking top 10, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues would surely make the list. Based on Tom Robbins's '70s ode to freedom, whooping cranes, and ambisexuality, this Gus Van Sant film sat on the shelf for almost a year before its brief release. More of a curiosity than anything else, it tells the convoluted story of Sissy Hankshaw (Uma Thurman), the world's greatest hitchhiker by virtue of her mammoth, um, thumbs. She falls in with a lesbian collective at a dude ranch and, well, the rest is kind of a mess. Kind of? Let's say it's a monumental mess, one of those films that's like a 25-car pileup on the interstate that you have to stop and look at, just to figure out what people like Keanu Reeves, Roseanne, John Hurt, and Angie Dickinson are doing there. A great score by k.d. lang, by the way. --Marshall Fine