I grew up laughing myself silly watching The Muse, and I feared that as a grown-up, I might not like it anymore. I watched it recently and, relieved, laughed myself silly! This silly, cynical, yet strangely not depressing, comedy is perfect for all ages. Although, there's really nothing better than watching it when you're a kid.

Albert Brooks stars as a Hollywood screenwriter in a slump. His best friend, Jeff Bridges, cranks out hit after hit, and when Al comes to him for advice, Jeff confides a secret: he's had a muse-a real muse. Al begs for an introduction, and when he meets Sharon Stone, he's blown away. She has an extremely detailed, expensive list of demands, and as he shuffles along and reluctantly tries to make her happy, the audience is left in stitches. Sharon has to live in a suite at the Four Seasons, she needs all her beautiful clothes dry-cleaned, she has a huge grocery list, she can't be wrong, and she needs to be showered with gifts, preferably from Tiffany's. When Al runs out of money to support her high hotel bill, he puts her up in his guest cottage, where she infiltrates his family life in addition to his professional life.

I know Sharon's famous for her other, less-dressed roles, but I'll always think of her as The Muse. She's so delightful, charming, and irresistible, it's no wonder a stream of directors are seen coming and going from her cottage: Martin Scorsese, Rob Reiner, and my favorite cameo, James Cameron. He presents her with a large box, and Sharon says, "It's not...?" indicating the necklace from Titanic. When James laughs and it isn't, Sharon glares at him and slams the door. Isn't she adorable?

And if one adorable lady isn't enough, Andie MacDowell costars as Albert Brooks's wife. While perfectly contented to be a housewife, once she meets Sharon, she gets inspired to become the next Mrs. Fields. While Sharon drives Albert crazy at work, Andie starts driving him crazy at home, baking incessantly and telling him with her signature grin, "Have a cookie!" whenever he's hungry. Just as The Muse is my favorite Sharon Stone movie, it's also one of my favorite Andie MacDowell movies. You've got to rent it. I know you'll love it.

Steven Phillips (Albert Brooks) is an experienced screenwriter. He has written for the best. He even receives a humanitarian award which is code for lifetime achievement. However, his latest script is rejected. Lifetime achievement seems more like lifetime retirement. He has his wife Laura (Andie MacDowell) and family. He needs to continue writing but his career has hit a wall. His friend Jack Warrick (Jeff Bridges) suggests a muse. She's literally the mythical creature in the form of Sarah Little (Sharon Stone). Steven is taken aback by her constant demands and expected gifts. She inspires Laura to create a booming cookie business and even moves in with them.

This is satire of the Hollywood world. It is a lesser Albert Brooks movie. He is not unlikable but he is usually more adorable than this. There are some good jabs at the movie world and there are plenty of big name cameos. It is not quite funny enough and I expect better from him.

Albert Brooks, who wrote this and acted in it, is a Hollywood screenwriter who's being rejected with every script he submits. He lives in a mansion with his wife, Andie MacDowell, and is going nuts because he won't be able to support his family. A successful writer friend, Jeff Bridges, puts him in touch with a muse, a Greek spirit known for inspiring artists. The muse is Sharon Stone. And she is some work of art. She not only impinges on the lives of Brooks and his family. She takes them over.

She has demanding tastes, grows quickly bored with the suite at the Four Seasons that Brooks is paying for. She has a whim of iron, sending Brooks out for Waldorf salad from Spago in the middle of the night. She's friendly towards Brooks' wife and urges her to begin the commercial cookie-making career that she's discarded over the years. MacDowell follows Stone's advice and finds self-fulfillment before the oven.

Meanwhile, Brooks is going nuts. He's spending money and time keeping Sharon Stone satisfied but he's getting very little inspiration out of her. An occasional, off-the-cuff suggestion -- that's all. Brooks develops a script based on her hints but reaches a block at the end of Act II, with his protagonist owning an aquarium and nowhere else to go. He presses her abjectly for an idea and she suggests that, since they must use drilling equipment to build the foundation for the aquarium, why not have them strike oil? Right out of "The Beverley Hillbillies."

In the end, Stone turns out to be not a muse but a multiple personality who has escaped from a private psychiatric hospital in Ohio. Last time out, she was Picasso's daughter. Brooks of course is a neural shambles by now, but -- Lo -- Paramount buys his script and everything is fine -- except that the producer at Paramount turns out to be Sharon Stone in another disguise.

There are a lot of cameos in the film, some easily recognizable, others not -- from Wolfgang Puck to Martin Scorsese who does a hilarious turn as himself, planning a remake of "Raging Bull," only this time the guy is really THIN. "You see it? Can you see it?" Scorsese speaks faster than a normal person can think.

Overall, it's mildly amusing, and that's about it. Nothing wrong with the professional players. Brooks is the anxiety-ridden middle-class character that he's perfected by now. Sharon Stone is seasoned. Andy MacDowell is beguiling. But the script is full of logical holes. This is okay in a comic fantasy, in itself, but there are so many of them here that they become noticeable. We can contrast "The Muse" with a comedy like "Groundhog Day" to illustrate when I mean. In "Groundhog Day," with an equally preposterous premise, one thing follows inexorably from what has happened before, so the film DEVELOPS. That sense of inexorability is lacking here. If Stone is really not a muse at all, but just a psychiatric case with an occasional shopworn notion, then what are people like Scorsese and Ian Cameron and Rob Reiner courting her for? And, shortly after she escapes from the doctors who have come to fetch her back to the institution, how does she suddenly show up as a producer at Paramount? It's good for a laugh but nothing has set the situation up, so it's a shallow chuckle rather than the conclusion of any plot thread. It's like: A man walks along the street, slips on a banana peel, and falls on his bum. Ha ha, but so what? Another instance: When he brings that Waldorf salad back to Stone's suite at night, she's lost interest in it and turns him away. Still holding the big bowl of salad, he backs into another hotel guest and crashes out of sight to the floor. We see the guest's face looking down as he asks, "Are you alright?" Well, we already KNOW what the gag is going to be. But instead of keeping the camera on the guest's face and hearing only a moan from the floor -- or seeing Brooks' salad-covered head very slowly emerge from the bottom of the screen -- there's a cut to Brooks on his back, decorated with salad. Where was the muse when she was most needed?

The best feature of the film is Albert Brooks' performance. He's done it before just about perfectly, and here he does it again. It may be that no one in the history of movies has better expressed astonishment mixed with self-righteous indignation. What a terrific whiner he is.