I liked the idea of a contestant's dramatic reading being from " Soylent Green." And the way another contestant kills two birds with one stone in the talent section of the contest, by singing "I Love You, Baby" to Jesus. There is, however, a lot of funny stuff in "Drop Dead Gorgeous," and Lona Williams has a future as a comedy writer-maybe in the Dave Barry/Molly Ivins tradition, since her ideas seem more literary than cinematic. I believed that the Holly Hunter character would do what she did for the reasons she had I felt the Kirstie Alley character was generated by a screenplay.
Drop dead gorgeous movie#
The ferocious intensity of the parents is a reminder of "The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom," a made-for-cable movie that's one of the great buried comic treasures of recent years, with a Holly Hunter performance that would have been Oscar material if the movie had opened in theaters.īoth films are savage, but "Cheerleader-Murdering Mom" was rich in human nature, while "Drop Dead Gorgeous" simply manipulates the ideas of satire without connecting to the underlying truth. The idea of devoting your life to running an event at which young women are judged on the basis of their beauty and personality-as evaluated in a game show format-gets creepier the more you think about it.Īs the title of "Drop Dead Gorgeous" suggests, some of the characters turn up dead or injured. I sometimes wonder if anybody involved in beauty pageants at the administrative level is completely without motivations they would rather not discuss. Some of the older men enjoy the proximity to nubile contestants. Some of the daughters are compensating for insecurity they think a crown will affirm their worth. Some of the mothers are using their daughters as surrogate reminders of their own faded beauty. She understands the backstage politics of such events, especially at the local level, where almost everyone has a buried agenda. The movie was written by Lona Williams, who is herself a beauty pageant survivor. Funny as a sight? No, because the concept, not the image, contains the joke. Nevertheless, she's determined to compete in the pageant, and arrives onstage in a wheelchair.
But the image of the charred can embedded in scarred flesh is not funny, and every time it turns up, it casts its little pall.Īnother example: One of the contestants has put herself on a 400-calorie-a-day diet and is a patient at a recovery center for anorexics. You possibly smiled as you read about Annette's hand being fused to a beer can.
Now there's an example of how a mental image can be funnier than a real one-how a screenplay can fail to translate.
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