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	flick pick | Drop Dead Gorgeous 1999 Directed by: Michael Patrick Jann Written by: Lona Williams Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Ellen Barkin, Allison Janney, Denise Richards, Kirstie Alley Language: English Look for it at the video store under: comedy Watch it when you’re in the mood for something: darkly comic, true?!?
The verdict: ½/ 5 the rating system explained

Plot synopsis In all-American Mount Rose, Minnesota, it’s time again for the annual beauty pageant. Local pageant chairwoman Gladys Leeman, a winner back in her day, has a lot at stake this year: her daughter Becky is competing for the crown, and Gladys is dead set on making sure her precious little girl gets it. And if that means resorting to drastic criminal measures – a bizarre tractor accident here, falling stage lights and a suspicious trailer fire there – so be it. But sweet golden girl Amber Atkins may just foil Gladys’ nefarious plans. Amber’s pretty, popular and kind-hearted to the point of saintliness, but she’s also extremely determined to follow in the footsteps of her idol Diane Sawyer, a former Junior Miss America. It’s all out war as the town’s beauties and cuties vie for the coveted crown.

Review Drop Dead Gorgeous doesn’t laugh with its beauty pageant-obsessed characters. It laughs at them, long and hard and relentlessly, making pointed jabs at their vapidity, their superficiality, their cattiness, their misplaced determination, their small-town mentality. It’s sometimes so mean-spirited that you feel a twinge of guilt for laughing yourself, and if you’re a person uncomfortable with snobbery and non-political-correctness, be warned: you may well find this movie offensive. So maybe this means I’m not the nicest person in the world, because honestly, there are many moments in Drop Dead Gorgeous that strike me as really rather funny indeed. True, the fake documentary style doesn’t work nearly as well for DDG as it does for a classic mockumentary like This is Spinal Tap, whose brilliance derives from the fact that you’re never quite sure whether these people are real or not. Here, the accents are super-exaggerated fake Minnesotan (Kirstie Alley's is particularly atrocious), and the characters are absurd caricatures of beauty pageant, middle-America stereotypes, rather than plausibly quirky personalities. But what I like about this movie is that it’s not afraid to take a few chances with the outrageous. And while some of the darkly comic jokes don’t work at all (notably a cringe-inducingly not-funny bit involving the previous year’s pageant-winner, an anorexic), others, like the beer can that gets melded to Mrs. Atkins’ hand when her trailer suddenly combusts, and the local Lutheran Sisterhood Gun Club of which Becky is vice-president, border on the inspired. Drop Dead Gorgeous isn’t a smart satire to be sure, but you’re a better person than I am if you can watch this without letting a few guffaws escape. —reviewed by Y. Sun 

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