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Nurse Betty has a deft screenplay and a charmingly daffy performance by Renee Zellweger in the lead. A double whammy of good acting in the film pairs Morgan Freeman and Chris Rock as partners in crime. Freeman is terrific as Charlie, a tough guy aiming to make this his last job, quit the low life and find the apple without the worm. Rock as Wesley will have you going with his jerky, loudmouthed performance as the quick-to-boil hit man.Movies like Betty demonstrate what an ambitious craft a big Hollywood film is. Betty comes with a large cast, great locations and a light touch by director Neil LaBute. Architecture fans will definitely want to catch two location scenes filmed in Los Angeles at Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis-Brown house, one of Wright's 1920s textile-block houses that has suffered real-life erosion from L.A. smog. To see this place portrayed with cinematic splendor as the stylish pad of chic Hollywood soap-opera director Lyla (Allison Janney, TV's West Wing) feels like a spritz of stardust from them thar hills.I was pleasantly surprised by this film.
Nurse Betty is Betty Sizemore, a Fair Oaks, Kan., girl married to Buick salesman Del Sizemore (Aaron Eckhart). Betty has worked for six years in the same diner, where she's perfected the trick of pouring a cup of coffee without even glancing away from the TV tuned to her favorite soap opera, A Reason To Love.It's Betty's birthday. Her friends at the diner give her a life-size stand-up portrait of Dr. David Ravell (Greg Kinnear), the sexy heart surgeon who's A Reason To Love's star, along with an envelope of cash to help her pay for nursing school. Meanwhile, Icky Del is busy at the dealership having extracurricular sex with his secretary. Not only that, he refuses to let Betty take a...