Amazon.com
The only-in-Hollywood saga of Heidi Fleiss gets a breathless TV-movie workout in Call Me: The Rise and Fall of Heidi Fleiss, a romp through the call-girl follies of America's most famous madam. The Heidi story had enough trashy aspects to sink a garbage scow, and most of them are aired out in this tale of a respectable girl who rose through the ranks to become a successful businesswoman--and the holder of the most explosive little black book in Tinseltown. Experienced TV director Charles MacDougall must have noticed the story's similarities to GoodFellas, because he loads the movie with oodles of Scorsese-like flash and dazzle, complete with hyperactive camera and punchy songs. At least this makes the TV-movies values more fun than usual to look at, and Robert Davi seems to be having a ball as Fleiss's conduit into the sleaze world, director Ivan Nagy. (How Oscar-winner Brenda Fricker got involved in this we'll pass over.) Playing Fleiss is Sopranos co-star Jamie-Lynn DiScala, who certainly conjures up the right note of spoiled vapidity. The unrated DVD has nudity (DiScala's body double, we're talking here), but the movie gets stingy on naming names--as though the identities of actors and filmmakers who turned up in the little black book hadn't leaked out already. --Robert Horton