On D List of Movie Reviews
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Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999)
Rate:
8
Viewed:
12/02, 4/04, 6/24
6/24:
Drop Dead Gorgeous is an impressive mockumentary picture about local girls entering a beauty pageant in
the hopes of making to the nationals.
I'm surprised at the strong cast that the filmmakers managed to collect in one place: Kirstie Alley, Ellen
Barkin, Kirsten Dunst, Denise Richards, Brittany Murphy, Allison Janney, Mindy Sterling (from the
Austin Powers movies), and Amy Adams. It's what
keeps the show going on top of the excellent script. Some of the incidents are funny although in an overboard
way. Allison Janney and Matt Malloy are the standouts.
Beauty pageants have been a joke for a long, long time. It used to be a thing back then with Miss America
being the most prominent of them all. Thankfully, they stopped airing the silly show on either ABC or NBC. Why
anyone would be interested in that crap, I could never understand. However, they used to be an easy avenue
for some women to get noticed before going on to be famous actresses and whatever else.
By the way, the girl who used sign language, I can confirm over 95% of it is either technically or flat-out
wrong. Her fingerspelling is for shit, too. Actually, she knows the letters, but they aren't correct given the
letters of the words in a 1-to-1 correspondence. Ditto for holding her arm in the air when she's supposed to
do it in front of her body. It's a common mistake among beginners as they tend to be overeager, but she can
master the language as long as she's around deaf people who will end up correcting her.
All in all, there aren't many good mockumentaries out there, but Drop Dead Gorgeous ranks one of
the best made.