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Honest, friends, I’m not inordinately biased against big studio productions, but once again the best movie of the week is a relatively small film that didn’t even squeak into the boxoffice top 10 its first weekend in wide release. Using a small-town mockumentary structure similar to Christopher Guest’s hilarious Waiting for Guffman, Drop Dead Gorgeous looks behind the scenes at an annual podunk teen beauty pageant in fictional Mount Rose, “Home of Minnesota’s Oldest Living Lutheran,” where popular girls also vie for presidency of the Lutheran Sisterhood Gun Club (the way Garrison Keillor hated Fargo, this might give him seizures). It looks like the competition to succeed the reigning queen, who’s now in the eating disorders wing of a local hospital, will come down to a two-way battle between the daughters of former winners: Becky (“Melrose Place” denizen Denise Richards), the hyperachieving daughter of a super-bitch mom (Kirstie Alley) and furniture magnate (Sam McMurrary, who was so good on “The Tracey Ullman Show” and in Raising Arizona); and sweet, more-talented Amber (Kirsten Dunst). Much less manor-born, she diligently practices her tap routines while doing hair and makeup on corpses at an afterschool mortuary job, hoping to make her trailer-trash mom (Ellen Barkin) and Mom’s best friend (spectacular comic actress Allison Janney) proud. And as if things weren’t already lively enough, a curious string of near- and fatal accidents occurs while the documentary crew is in town, leading to speculation that somebody is trying to influence the outcome...
Although it runs out of steam near the end, going on for an unnecessary 10 or 15 minutes past the climactic outcome, Drop Dead Gorgeous had me ready to bust a stitch several times with its non-PC, but rarely too crude, humor. It’s an excellent first effort both for freshman director Michael Patrick Jann and screenwriter Lona Williams, who’s a script supervisor for “The Drew Carey Show.” It may also inspire more fear of beauty pageants than Deep Blue Sea does of the water. B
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