With friends like this ...
As bad as high school cliques can be, they've got nothing on the exclusive coteries that exist among pampered adults. At least, that's the takeaway from "Best Fake Friends" (not rated, playing at the Lagoon), a cautionary soap opera about a group of bored wives in wealthy suburbia. Joy (Lauren Bowles, TV's "True Blood") has moved cross-country to accommodate her executive husband's promotion, leaving behind both her job and her friends. When she frets about how bored she is to her loving-but-workaholic husband as he's heading out the door for another 14-hour day, he tells her, "Just try to fit in." Bad advice — especially when the group she's trying to fit in with has unbending standards about everything from the clothes they wear, to the furniture in their living rooms, to the pills they pop. Victoria Smurfit ("Bulletproof Monk") co-stars as the ringleader of the group, who is conniving, manipulative and without so much as a semblance of a conscience. If Joy wants to be part of this in crowd, it's going to cost her.
Jeff Strickler
