The Rutles begat Spinal Tap begat Man Bites Dog begat Waiting for Guffman begat Forgotten Silver, but if there's yet been a Year of the Mockumentary, 1999 was it. The Blair Witch Project, The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human, and even the year's finest straight documentary, American Movie (q.v.), which plays like Spinal Tap with real-life people (cf. Kurt and Courtney). But while the obscure Mating Habits was no doubt the runt of the year's litter, The Blair Witch Project being the overachieving middle child, eldest born Drop Dead Gorgeous was far and wide written off as the black sheep of the family. Certainly, DDG doesn't follow quite fully in the footsteps of its illustrious forebears. Nonetheless, this prodigal production deserves the second chance its video release gives it.
The mockumented subject here is the teen beauty pageant, the setting, small town Minnesota. This is where the cinematic mathematics comes in. Take the Miss America satire of the brilliant, neglected Smile; the small town showbiz mockumentation of the brilliant, neglected Waiting for Guffman; and and the incessant cartoon dialects of the otherwise brilliant Fargo, and, well, there you go. The whole, unfortunately, doesn't quite add up to its parts, but the discrepancy is on the whole forgivable at the end of the day. Casting helps fill in the difference.
Kirstin Dunst is eminently likeable as the All-American trailer-raised Diane-Sawyer-wannabe underdog. One can't help but root for her. And while I've never quite understood the appeal of Denise Richards, she was impeccable as the ingenue in the laugh-at-loud-trashy (a compliment, in my book) Wild Things, and serves well as the snotty shoe-in here. Perhaps it's the turned up nose, the pretty-girl caricature--to the point of grotesquerie in real life--features. Kirstie Alley is the stereotypically manipulative mother of the popular girl, Ellen Barkin is the stereotypically straight-shooting mother of the working class heroine.
Not that there aren't serious shortcomings. Barkin's hook for a hand and the one-note idiosyncracies of the other contestants, coupled with a homicidal subplot and the largest-scale vomit scene since Monty Python's Meaning of Life, are a bit too indelicately over-the-top. Predictability is, predictably, a problem, and Drop Dead Gorgeous is rewarding in the end only in an inexpensive but nonetheless satisfying way (I might actually have shed a tear myself--of joy, of course). But everybody eats junk food sometime, and nowhere more so than at the movies, or on the couch ...
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