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GLITTER Send This Review to a Friend
During downtown scenes of New York in "Glitter," starring Mariah Carey, there are two shots of the World Trade Center towers in the background, and both times the preview audience applauded supportively. Those were the only occasions meriting applause. Whatever you think of Carey as a singer, an actress she isn't. She does try hard with the few expressions she can muster to register drama in the cliched story with dialogue to match and awful directorial judgment by Vondie Curtis Hall.
This is supposed to heavy duty emotional stuff, with Carey playing Billie Frank, who goes from abandonment by her mother in childhood to enormous success as a pop singer managed by her lover Dice (Max Beesley). He's in debt to a ruthless producer, and eventually Dice becomes so overbearing that Billie leaves him and seeks refuge with her long-time back-up singer friends. Naturally, on her big Madison Square Garden night there's a tragic climax. But Billie triumphs, cleavage and all.
There are so many clinker lines and situations that audiences are bound to laugh at the most solemn moments. There's one scene in which separated Billie and Dice, each in different locations, are telepathically writing what seems to be the same song expressing their longings for one another. For me the highlight of ridiculous judgment occurs with a cat. The child Billie (Isabel Gomes) takes along a cute kitten to the orphanage. Cut to her adult success days when she leaves Dice, and Billie arrives at the home of her pals holding a huge, fat cat that looks like the kitten grown to Medicare age. The moment is a sure howler; how any director could have left that scene in is beyond belief.
Likewise, when Billie finally meets her long lost mother at a country home, Mariah arrives in a in a clingy, low-cut gown--just the outfit in which to reunite with mom. But her highlighted boobs aren't the only boobs evident. There are also the boobs responsible for this goof of a picture. A 20th Century Fox release.
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