BEFORE: With two weeks left in the romance chain, it's time to make some final decisions over how I'm going to wrap this thing up. This means taking a look at what's left over and how that all might fit together for next time - I've got a chain of 21 films, which is not bad, especially a year in advance. BUT I might not be able to add other films to it if I watch too many films now, certain actors (marked in green) are valuable "connectors" that could allow me to add on another small chain of three or five or nine, and then we're really talking about a good-sized chain. This year's chain's going to be about 47 films long when it's all done, and that's only possible because I held back something last year, maybe. So I'm dropping "Best Man Down" because I've done the wedding thing and also it's the only link to a film called "Comet". It's OK, the chain's just going to close up around the empty space, and now TWO people are going to carry over from "Untamed Heart", they are Claudia Wilkens and James Cada. Both films were shot in Minnesota, so this kind of makes sense, they could be local actors?
Now I have to decide about two other films - "17 Again", which is a body-swap film that might have a little problematic romance in it, like "Big" did, and "Life as We Know It" which is another mismatched-pairing romance with a couple of godparents who are thrown together and probably fall in love. These are both potential "drop-ins", they'd be the middle film in a potential group of three, but before including them I want to make sure they're not crucial for next year, and it seems like everything they connect to is part of a larger chain, so watching these two films this year isn't likely to screw anything up for next year. So one film is out, another two are being added, and I'm going to hit St. Patrick's Day right on the button. All settled?
Now the only other issue is whether tonight's film constitutes a "romance" - it doesn't seem like it, but the IMDB has it under 7 or 8 categories, like "black comedy" and "satire" and "thriller", but "romance" is in that mix, so I'm going out on a limb here. In my notes I just have the message to myself that this would seem to be helpful in linking romances together, but it may not actually be one. It's also, however, another film from the 1990's that needs to be dealt with so it's off the list and not taking up space. So I'm going to proceed, the die is cast, God help me.
A quick look at the TCM line-up for Day 23 of "31 Days of Oscar", the theme for Saturday, March 7 will be "Oscar Goes on an Adventure":
4:15 am "Anthony Adverse" (1936)
6:45 am "Mighty Joe Young" (1949)
8:30 am "The Jungle Book" (1942)
10:30 am "Mogambo" (1953)
12:30 pm "The Old Man and the Sea" (1958)
2:15 pm "Born Free" (1966)
4:00 pm "King Solomon's Mines" (1950)
6:00 pm "The Adventures of Robin Hood" (1938)
8:00 pm "The Flight of the Phoenix" (1965)
10:30 pm "Mutiny on the Bounty" (1962)
1:45 am "The Last of the Mohicans" (1936)
3:30 am "The Flame and the Arrow" (1950)
Damn, another case where I've seen the more modern remakes of some of these films, but never went back and watched the originals. Still, I've seen "The Old Man and the Sea", "Born Free", "The Adventures of Robin Hood", "The Flight of the Phoenix" (I've seen both) and "Mutiny on the Bounty" (I've seen all 3). So that's 5 out of 12, not too bad, bringing me to 106 seen out of 258. Still 41%.
That's the end of what TCM was calling "Part 1" of their Oscar programming, I have to stop and find the other PDF for "Part 2", but there should only be 8 days left.
THE PLOT: A small-town beauty pageant turns deadly as it becomes clear that someone will go to any lengths to win.
AFTER: In my color-coding system, I have a bunch of cast lists all typed out in a Word document that I can search through, and some actors are colored green - this is meant to alert me that this person also appears in a romance film, a horror film or a Christmas film. This is done so I can find the intros and outros to those chains very quickly. But if an actor is colored green IN a romance film, that alerts me that they're also in ANOTHER romance film, so when the chains come together, I can quickly see there's another connection within that topic that I can rely on if I need to move things around or shake up a chain. This came in VERY handy last October when there was nearly a break in my horror chain, I could immediately see that there was another path I could follow, and I found four films to replace the four I had to remove, so the green-colored actors showed me an exit ramp off the main highway, plus the entry back on, so it was kind of like I had to drive on the service road for a bit because there had been an accident, which is easier than, say, building a whole new highway. It was just incredibly lucky that there was a four-film chain that fit right into the four-film hole I had to create because of a bad link.
The cast list for "Drop Dead Gorgeous" has a LOT of green in it, which meant it could have fit into the chain in a number of different places, but I saved it for the moment that I had two pieces of romance chain that needed to be spliced together, and then I made a note for myself (in purple) that this film links a lot of romance films, and could come in handy to connect things. I'm so good to myself, leaving myself little notes or tips if I think of something that could make my task easier down the road. I really only recorded this film to fill up a DVD with "Beautiful", another comedy about beauty pageants. The VHS with "Beautiful" on it sat on my workbed in the man-cave for quite some time, because I was waiting for another film with Minnie Driver or Holly Hunter in it, and that just wasn't happening. OK, so another film about pageants, that will do.
But I don't know what the heck this film is supposed to be! It's not funny enough to be a comedy, it's not dramatic enough to be a drama, and it's not thrilling enough to be a thriller. It just wants to live in some kind of in-between space where things don't make any sense. Sure, maybe beauty pageants don't make much sense in this day and age (or the 1990's) but this just goes way over the top. The principle of "reducto ad absurdium" is just applied to a beauty pageant, which is already quite ridiculous, then it's just a matter of asking what could possibly go wrong, with the answer being everything. The contestants wear ridiculous patriotic headgear, costumes are misplaced or stolen, and the "fitness routine" is performed with prop step-stools that were recently painted, so the contestants end up with blue paint all over their hands and their butts.
But really things started a few weeks before that, when one front-runner mysteriously exploded while riding a tractor on her family's farm. Did the girl explode or did the tractor explode, because those are two very different things. Amber Atkins desperately wants to quit the pageant, because she's got a great tap-dancing routine and may have a chance to win, but someone else realizes she's another front-runner, and soon after that, her trailer catches on fire and her mother is seriously (OK, semi-seriously) injured in the fire. But her mother won't let her quit, even after all that. Then during the pageant another contestant wants to swap numbers with her so she can perform sooner, and she winds up with a stage-light falling on her head, killing her. You'd think that a killer targeting these girls would be able to tell them apart, but apparently not.
It's all quite stupid - there's no attempt to hide that the pageant coordinator is the mother of one of the contestants, or that the whole voting process is completely rigged, and none of that is funny. If the audience were to find out about that in some subtle way it COULD be funny, but there's zero subtlety here. If the mother was the one killing all the other contestants who weren't her daughter you might think that was way too obvious, but you would be wrong, it's exactly as obvious as it needed to be. Then to make things even more confusing, the girl who wins, Becky Leeman, daughter of the pageant coordinator, dies the next day in a freak accident that was NOT a murder, but how are we, the audience, supposed to know the difference? So Amber, the girl we've all been rooting for, moves up from 1st runner up to pageant queen, and moves on to the state finals of the American Teen Miss Pageant.
At this point there's only about 10 minutes left in the film, but they manage to hold two more pageants during that time, Amber also wins at the state level because she's the only one who doesn't eat the shellfish from the buffet, and every other contestant gets food poisoning and can't perform because they're all vomiting so hard. And then it's all for naught because the state winners are sent to the national pageant in Alabama, only to find the entire Sarah Rose Cosmetics company, main sponsor of the pageant, has been shut down for tax evasion. So every effort here felt very wasted, both within the storyline and also in the production of a very horrible, pointless film. We've got a contender here for worst film of the year, and that will be reflected in the scoring.
I think what happened here was that someone saw how successful the film "Fargo" was in 1996, and the way that audiences reacted to a black comedy with a number of injuries, the memorable scene with Steve Buscemi's character in the wood-chipper, and tried to copy that exact same style, only they set the film at a beauty pageant and just imagined it as a very violent, cutthroat place full of violence and murder lurking just below the surface. Small town teens enter a beauty pageant, now what can we possibly make go wrong? But it's so ill-intentioned and seems to exist only to make all of the characters suffer, either physically or emotionally. They're not wrong about pageants, but then neither is the resulting situation comical in any way.
There's also a tremendous waste of talent, across the board - we now regard Kirsten Dunst and Allison Janney as great actors, Ellen Barkin and Amy Adams too, it's just a shame they weren't given much to really work with. The screenwriter plays the third pageant judge, the one who never talks and looks sad all the time. That tracks. And then any humor at the expense of perverted contest judges, previous winners with eating disorders or men with learning disabilities working at hardware stores just really didn't age well at all. I'm just going to treat this film as mortar between the bricks and try to forget about it, I suggest you do the same.
Directed by Michael Patrick Jann (writer of "Let's Go to Prison")
Also starring Kirsten Dunst (last seen in "Bachelorette"), Ellen Barkin (last seen in "The Out-Laws"), Allison Janney (last seen in "A Thousand Words"), Denise Richards (last seen in "Love Actually"), Kirstie Alley (last seen in "She's Having a Baby"), Sam McMurray (last heard in "Klaus"), Mindy Sterling (last seen in "Biggest Heist Ever"), Brittany Murphy (last seen in "Riding in Cars with Boys"), Amy Adams (last seen in "Nightbitch"), Laurie A. Sinclair, Shannon Nelson, Tara Redepenning, Sarah Stewart, Alexandra Holden (last seen in "How to Deal"), Brooke Elise Bushman, Matt Malloy (last seen in "The United States of Leland"), Michael McShane (last heard in "A Bug's Life"), Will Sasso (last seen in "Happy Gilmore 2"), Lona Williams, John T. Olson, Casey Garven (last seen in "The Mighty Ducks"), Dale Dunham (ditto), Ashley Dylan Bullard, Jacy King, Nora Dunn (last seen in "Runaway Jury"), Mo Gaffney (last seen in "Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie"), Adam West (last seen in "The Flash"), Mary Gillis (last seen in "Fathers' Day"), Richard Narita (last seen in "Midway" (1976)), Patti Yasutake (last seen in "Clockwatchers"), Seiko Matsuda, Allyson Kearns, Tom Gilshannon, Amanda Detmer (last seen in "Boys and Girls"), Eric D. Howell, Matthew G. Park, Kristin Rudrüd (last seen in "Pleasantville"), Jimmie D. Wright, Peter Aitchison, Richard Ooms (last seen in "Wilson"), Robert-Bruce Brake, Bruce Linser, Samantha Harris (last seen in "Beautiful"), Kari Ann Shiff, Maria Awes, Larissa Lowthorp (last seen in "Grumpier Old Men"), Emily Moore, Jamie Olsen, David William Watts and the voice of Thomas Lennon (last seen in "Monster Trucks").
RATING: 2 out of 10 dessert bars
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