Glitter - Der Glanz eines Stars

So bad it's fabulous. This movie bombed big-time when it opened, I saw it in the theater with an audience of 5 other people and have watched it several times since. So much bad press at the time! There was a rumor that it was originally supposed to be set in the 80's, but that part was cut out, only the wacky costumes remained. That would explain the presence of Ann Magnusona as a press agent for the record company. Mariah is sincerely likable and sings beautifully. The same cannot be said for poor Padma Lakshima. Sort of an R&B version of "A Star Is Born", you will find yourself laughing in all the wrong places. Every cliché in the book and then some. There is a fashion photo shoot with silver body paint, and an evening dress that goes from stage to farm in one day. A classic rags to riches tale that seems to have been written by a teenager.

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I rented Glitter because I'd read it was destined to become a 'so bad it's good' classic, but I was disappointed. This is no Showgirls. What makes Glitter a bad movie is that it's a bland, soulless procession of clichés, exactly like Mariah Carey's songs. And that just makes it boring-bad instead of spectacularly bad. And though Mariah is plenty vacuous in the starring role, she doesn't reach the heights of strenuously bad acting that Elizabeth Berkeley does in Showgirls. The only element of this movie that satisfies my so-bad-it's-good criteria is the character of Mariah's boyfriend. Here you have the whitest man on Earth, saying 'hip' things like "I'm a'ight" and "when you got no food in yo crib". If only the movie had contained more cringe-worthy gems like those!

Some bad movies, such as Showgirls or Mommie Dearest, become camp classics over time as people come to forgive their shortcomings, and just groove on their excesses. That a movie as famously bad as Glitter has not entered this realm of camp, even after fifteen years, is telling. It tells us that Glitter commits a higher sin than being bad. It is boring. And derivative. And staggeringly incompetent. It was assembled by c-list writers and a TV director, none of whom had much idea how to gain a viewer's attention, and less idea how to hold it. Scene composition is flat and dull, evoking memories of bad holiday TV movies, while failing to establish intimacy with the characters or goings on, even in close up. Early scenes feature a hazy or gauzy look, no doubt to recall Hollywood's golden age, but that simply succeeds in making the movie look trite and derivative, rather than classic. It also makes it look as if the set decorator forgot to dust. The club scenes feature a color palette straight out of Blade Runner, just not as cheery. Every creative element in Glitter has the look of something borrowed from another (better) movie. And the less said about the bizarre, almost random editing choices the better. Every scene transition is another wtf moment.

Story and script construction are uniformly terrible. Scenes begin, stuff happens, scenes end... and NOTHING carries over. There is no continuing thread here of any kind - no overall character arc, no central theme, no ongoing visual motifs outside of the movie's hilariously inaccurate 80's fashion sense. Everything that happens seems utterly pointless, just a string of clichés recycled from old movies in which the chorus girl gets her big break. Glitter's brain-dead script gives none of its performers, not even once by accident, anything original or clever to say, nor any awareness of the storyline's utter inanity, making it increasingly difficult for the viewer to connect with the drama. And then we come to the Razzie-winning central 'performance'. La Carey could have been replaced by a Miss Piggy doll and the central role would have had more animation. Mariah's singular expression of vague incomprehension never changes, not even when gangster Terrence Howard grabs her face! To be fair she is not Glitter's only zombie marionette. Outside of Ann Magnusson's over-the-top pr woman, no actor in Glitter's 100 minute running time seems committed to being in any way memorable. A cynical person might suggest that they did this so that they could keep Glitter off their resumes without fear of contradiction. The result is a movie that defies any viewer to keep paying attention to it. You find yourself wanting to make a salad or do your taxes while the movie is playing, anything so that the time spent watching it is not a total waste.

This brings us to the music. Hollywood seems to have forgotten that the most important element in any musical is music, despite the fact that the word is right there in the name of the genre. Grease turns into a pretty bad movie whenever the singing stops and The Bodyguard is only marginally better. Both were huge hits however, and the fact that their soundtracks went multi-platinum was not a coincidence. Purple Rain features some downright cringe inducing 'acting' by Prince and Appolonia, but redeems itself time and time again with great musical performances. Viewers will put up with so-so filler in a musical as long as the songs entertain and remain in the mind after the credits roll. Glitter, unfortunately, features Mariah's worst ever (and worst selling) album at its core. Not only are the musical sequences not entertaining on their own, but they also make it hard for the viewer to swallow the idea that fictional Mariah would become a superstar on the strength of them, since actual established star Mariah could not manage to peddle them in real life. Thus, the fictional Mariah fails to engage as a performer, the actual Mariah fails to cross over into Hollywood despite having great singing talent and only having to play a person with singing talent, and even the spectacle of these failures fails to entertain on the basic level of a train wreck.

Glitter simply cannot provide an adequate reason to exist. Mariah's musical ability has already been showcased in a long succession of music videos, to better effect, and so we don't need Glitter for that. Rags to riches musical biographies have been done to death, so we hardly need another. The Girl in the Gold Boots told substantially the same story to drive-in goers fifty years ago! Heck, 42nd Street wore out this clichéd genre in 1933. If Glitter's only purpose was to act as a 100 minute commercial for its own soundtrack, as the Pokemon cartoons are simply ads for Pokemon toys, it fails there too, since it makes these crummy songs even less palatable in context than they would be standing on their own. So why does Glitter still exist? Was it financed by someone with a grudge against Mariah Carey, and she never caught on that she was being pranked until after its release? As a practical joke played on a gullible and vain pop diva, Glitter is pure malevolent genius. If, however, we were meant to have taken it seriously, then it's just a really, thoroughly worthless movie.

Poll question: Which pop diva embarrassed herself worst? JLo in Gigli, Jessica in The Dukes of Hazzard, Britney in Crossroads, Clarkson in From Justin to Kelly or Mariah in this piece of drek? I vote Mariah in a close race.

I don't know how many of you have ACTUALLY seen this movie but I recently rented it out of morbid curiousty and a sadistic love of BAD cinema (and of course making fun of it)... and I did give it an honest chance. I really did, and no less than 3 minutes into the movie I was convinced it was going to be a bomb... there's too much to complain about here, from the faux artistic shots and film techniques meant to give the film some false "class", to the insane gaping void of chemistry between the main lovebirds, to the comic relief that is not funny and is unnecesary since there was no drama or romance, to the numerous long, long shots of things that either didn't matter or didn't need to be shown for the 700th time... I kid you not this is a really awful movie... only the most inept movie fan or an insanely die hard Mariah Carey fan could ignore the gaping holes in plot, directions, style, and acting that Glitter presents. However if you enjoy watching movies and going all MST3K on them, then by all means rip on this one. It deserves all the insults you can muster.

Okay, for the record, this was a lousy film. But did it deserve the sort of bombastic universal panning it received? It was not nearly in the league of such absolute bombs as Gigli, Black Dog or anything with Rutger Hauer. It was a formulaic, wish-fulfillment movie worthy of being a Lifetime Special or an ABC Movie of the Week. It sucked, but it wasn't the sort of movie that scars one for life. After all the jokes and hype I was disappointed when I saw this movie on cable this weekend. I was expecting Ishtar. To me, this points up a problem with how our culture reviews movies. Every so often critics, (who are cynical bastards anyway) seem to pick out a movie to practice witty cruelty upon as a sort of mental exercise. Poor Glitter, and poor Mariah, who had a nervous breakdown over how this movie was received by the critical establishment!