On D List of Movie Reviews

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Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999)

Rate: 8
Viewed: 12/02, 4/04, 6/24

DDGeorg
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 had 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.