Tempers--and libidos!--are bound to flare up when a young handsome first-year resident at a Los Angeles hospital and his practicing M.D. girlfriend go to stay with his promiscuous, pot-smoking record-producer mother who lives up in the Hollywood Hills. Sophomoric direction handicaps an already beleaguered script which sees Los Angeles as Partytown, with no grasp of musical or cultural history behind all its flaccid chatter, nor an intuitiveness about the surroundings (writer-director Lisa Cholodenko seems to have a fetish for California architecture, with mailboxes piled up and buildings zooming by, but she treats it as rustic eye-candy with no subtext, so that the ambiance of the surroundings nearly becomes irrelevant). Frances McDormand gives the film some personality (her straightforward, yet unhurried and unhindered nature does more for the picture than it does for her), but the younger players all look and act like supermodels and the sub-plot about a rock band trying to get their new record in the can is curiously naive. ** from ****