Can a man write an Ann Landers or Dear Abby column with sensitivity and panache? When the film Good Advice begins, stockbroker Ryan Turner (played by Charlie Sheen) provides stock tips to clients around the world, but the advice is so bad that his boss fires him. Subsequently, he is investigated for insider trading; although he is not indicted, he loses his broker’s license. Unable to start a new career, he becomes a boring couch potato while sharing a New York apartment with Cyndy Styne (played by Denise Richards), whose Chelsea Times column for the lovelorn is not very successful. One day Cyndy decides to leave him, with rent and utilities due, for a hot romance in Brazil. Destitute financially, Ryan decides to ghostwrite Cyndy’s column. At first, his words are insensitive to women, but in time he becomes compassionate and clever. Indeed, his column turns out to be so successful that the nearly bankrupt newspaper begins to turn a profit, and Cyndy becomes a reclusive media celebrity. To carry out the deception of writing Cyndy’s column, Ryan personally delivers the column to publisher Page Hensen (played by Angie Harmon) on the pretext that Cyndy is ill and needs a courier. Soon, Page and Ryan are romantically involved. Inevitably, Cyndy returns to New York, furious about the Brazilian scoundrel but unaware of the success of her ghostwritten column in her absence. When word spreads that Cyndy is back in town, Donald Simpson (played by Barry Newman) of the rival New York Chronicle quickly signs up Cyndy with a fat contract, whereupon Ryan sees an opportunity for an immense profit on the stock market: Borrowing $50,000 from a friend and $150,000 from Page’s sexy sexagenarian secretary Iris (played by Estelle Harris), Ryan buys stock in the parent company of the New York Chronicle in the morning of the day when Simpson is to announce at a press conference that Cyndy is under contract with his newspaper. The moment when Simpson hands the microphone to Cyndy at the press conference, Ryan places a “sell” order. Then, while Cyndy predictably babbles on about her brazen Brazilian, the stock plummets, but not before Ryan and his benefactors make a killing in the market. Meanwhile, Page and Ryan cement their love affair, and the column is reborn with Ryan having his own byline. Directed by Steve Rash, Good Advice is a romantic comedy in which everyone is ultimately happy but the rapacious Simpson and the dingbat Cyndy. MH