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| Directed by Michael Patrick Jann; Starring Kristen Dunst, Denise Richards, Kirstie Alley, Ellen Barkin, Allison Janney, Brittany Murphy, Michael McShane, Mindy Sterling, Shannon Nelson, and William Sasso |
I must admit that I was expecting very little from this mockumentary. The trailers for it left it looking terribly unappealing and the cast were of those who have made many mistakes in their careers recently. So saying that Drop Dead Gorgeous simply surprised me would be an understatement. Often hilarious, the film delivers some of the biggest laughs since Election.
The film is the fake documentary on a beauty pageant in a small town that causes all kinds of havoc ranging from the large war between contestants to the multitude of problems found in the judges. The main two contestants are Rebecca (Richards) and Amber (Dunst). Rebecca seems to be the front runner thanks to the fact that the pageant is being run by her mother and previous winner Gladys (Alley), though easily the most hated by those that know her. Amber is the opposite as she is likable and has more aspirations than Rebecca: she yearns to become a Diane Sawyer for her generation.
The film is full of off-beat characters ranging from Amber’s bar-can handed mother (Barkin) to the peppy girl who sees herself unable to meet the expectations of her parents after her brother goes on Broadway (Murphy) to the highly devout and straight laced assistant of Alley’s (Sterling). All of the performances seem to work with the exception of Kirstie Alley (though all the accents seem quite off). I even found Barkin somewhat enjoyable in this (that is quite an achievement). The film is very mean spirited and very macabre at times. The fact that it has a song and dance number involving a anorexic ex-queen being wheeled around in a wheelchair by a nurse and lip-synching to a song should say just how far this film will go (that scene is easily the funniest in the film). The humor is biting and very politically incorrect posing Lutherans as gun freaks and women as stereotypes (the fact that it is written by a woman quite surprised me). I must admit that the type of humor here was in the vain of, say, Election and Rushmore with a bit of There’s Something About Mary and will probably offend most of the country (though it seems that South Park failed to offend anyone beyond Winona Rider, so who knows?). As cruel and mean and just plain evil as Drop Dead Gorgeous was, I still liked it and actually intend on seeing it again.
