The Beautician and the Beast

Joy Miller (Fran Drescher) is a beautician who teaches an evening course in hairstyling at a Brooklyn community college. When a cigarette dropped on a wig leads to a fire, Joy saves the lab animals kept in the building and achieves 15 minutes of local notoriety. Grushinsky (Ian McNeice), a ...more

Beautician and the Beast is the prototypical example of a style of romantic farce that thrived in the 1990s, even using two particularly well-worn scenarios: "opposites attract" and "outsider cons his/her way into real/metaphorical royalty." But even though the setup is unremarkably ordinary, it's executed with a certain competence, occasionally rising to the level of contagious. Bringing her Nanny shtick to the big screen, but minimizing the nasally laughter to become a more credible romantic ...more