Glitter

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 La Carey could have been replaced by a Miss Piggy doll and the central role would have had more animation.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.

CURIUOSITY! ...Said to Myself Mariah Carey!?!?!? Hmmmm ..... I wonder if she can act???

So ...Can You GUESS??? Probably pretty easy to imagine...HUH!?!? O. K.... Now, take Your Imagination DOWN a few notches... And just MAYBE You have guessed it more or less for what it is! ...Or in this case.... What it is NOT!

Probably MY BAD! Usually, I avoid bad movies like the PLAGUE! Well... The EXCEPTION PROVES the RULE! The very BEST I can say about this FILM?????? Well.... Some of the MUSICAL NUMBERS were.... NOT SO BAD! And ...as is the Case with almost EVERY rather bloated Budget Hollywood production... ALL Those standard PRODUCTION VALUES.... You know... Cimemaphotography, editing, sets, costumes, recording and sound engineering etc..... as expected... were all.... Well.... ACCEPTABLE!

The storyline, however, was utterly inane. Deciding not to submit myself to anymore CRUEL + UNUSUAL Punishment... I just had to pull the plug about 1/2 way thru! SORRY!

Need I say anymore??? O. K.... I thought You would agree!

FYI... This REVIEW has like 700 or 800 Characters! Much more than 150 MINIMUM.... RIGHT!?!?!?

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!

Seeing 'Glitter' with an open mind, despite its notoriously awful reputation, it is not quite as horrendous to be down there with the worst films of all time, but the problems 'Glitter' has are plentiful and are significant enough to consider it a very bad film still.

The good news is that Mariah Carey does sound absolutely incredible, always have loved her voice with its beautiful tone, emotional connection and uniquely wide range. Also Terrence Howard is quite good and steals scenes.

However, Carey's enviable skills as a singer does not translate in her skills as an actress, it was really strange that an artist with such a huge vocal range (five octaves!) is the complete antithesis in her very one-note and often expressionless acting here, which is devoid of any joy, surprise, sincerity or emotion. The ability to connect emotionally with her songs also doesn't translate in the acting, she looks stiff and bored throughout here.

Unfortunately, the songs here do nothing for her vocal talents either. She sings them very well indeed, but there are far more memorable and emotionally powerful songs from her out there that also display her unique vocal gifts much more. They're not awful, just bland. The rest of the acting is also poor, with Max Beesley being equally lousy and not sounding sure what accent to pull off, while with the characters Carey's is shallow, one-dimensional and very difficult to relate to (which is a huge dividend considering the type of story it is) and the rest are annoying caricatures, a couple even irrelevant to the story.

Even for a film set in the 80s, 'Glitter' does much less than glitter and looks firmly stuck in the 80s. It looks gaudy and too much of the camera work is too gimmicky and amateurish. The structurally wafer-thin script, with clumsy attempts at being hip, embarrassingly unfunny humour and "poignant" moments that come over as emotionally manipulative, sounds even older than that and like an awkwardly written soap-opera rejected at first draft (and should have stayed there).

'Glitter' has very little story, it's very thin and aimless, and padded by the bland and uninspiredly choreographed songs shot like a series of out of date music videos and subplots that come out of nowhere and go very little further than that (i.e. the reappearance of the cat or the reunion with her mother). It starts tedious and loses even more drive as it plods on, and throughout like Carey's performance there's no joy, no emotion and no substance. The direction is decidedly inept.

Overall, not that horrendous but it is no wonder that Carey herself regrets being involved in this. 2/10 Bethany Cox