Like all of Albert Brooks’s features, this satire of Hollywood’s insularity is funny, with adroit comic performances from Sharon Stone and Jeff Bridges. But it’s difficult not to see it as a coarsening of Brooks’s rare conceptual talent as a chronicler of American mores. As always, his directing is impeccable, and his whiny performance is pretty much what you’d expect, but his script is fairly lazy by his usual standards. The plot concerns a Hollywood screenwriter (Brooks) who hires a muse with expensive tastes (Stone) to get him out of a career crisis, but the main source of humor is basically Hollywood myopia and all it entails. Andie MacDowell plays the hero’s wife, Bridges plays a fellow screenwriter, and there are a good many cameos by Hollywood notables to fill in the cracks. Monica Johnson, Brooks’s usual cowriter, helped with the script. (JR)