USA,
1999, 95 min
Shown in 1999
CREDITS
- dir
-
Michael Patrick Jann
- prod
-
Judy Hofflund, Gavin Polone
- scr
-
Lona Williams
- cam
-
Mike Spiller
- cast
-
Kirstie Alley, Ellen Barkin, Kirsten Dunst, Denise Richards
- source
-
New Line Cinema, 116 N. Robertson, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, CA 90048. FAX: 310-659-4151
- premiere
-
World Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Michael Patrick Jann in person.
OTHER
In a shock-mockumentary mélange with a dash of Cops tossed in for flavoring and a soupçon of There’s Something About Mary for topping, Drop Dead Gorgeous skewers a teen beauty pageant in the small, sanctimonious and utterly dysfunctional town of Mount Rose, Minnesota. Kirstie Alley and Ellen Barkin are very funny and more than a little scary as the mothers of teenage daughters now competing in the same pageant that Alley trounced Barkin in almost 20 years before. In the wind-up days before the pageant, plucky and thoroughly adorable contestant Amber (Kirsten Dunst, Interview with a Vampire) practices her tap routine for her trailer-trash hairdresser mom (Barkin), as contestant after contestant falls victim to mysterious accidents. In the meantime, voluptuous aging beauty queen turned simpering small-town matriarch Gladys Lemann (Alley) organizes the pageant and cheerfully bulldozes anyone who gets in the way of her daughter Becky’s (Denise Richards, Wild Things) direct trajectory to triumph as this year’s American Teen Princess. There is something to offend just about everyone here, and yet the characters are so broad and outrageous, one has to make a conscious effort to be indignant. Drop Dead Gorgeous is appalling and gross and mean—and awfully, awfully funny.
—Amy Leissner
FACTOID #68
Stanley Mosk, who later became a California state Supreme Court Justice, served as the general chairman at the 1967 Festival.
