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September 8, 2007

Ferdy at the Movies - The Glitter Theory of Movie-Making

by Ferdinand T Cat

Mariah Carey's Glitter is consistently rated as one of the worst films ever. Typical reviews condemn Carey's acting skills, and in fact the movie seriously damaged her career. Even Rifftrax was unable to save it: the kind of lampooning that is hysterically funny for a turkey like Eragon seems cruel when applied to Carey's film.

Nonetheless, there is a very important cinematic lesson to be learned here.

The film industry is notorious for modifying true stories to make them more cinematic. As a seeker of truth, this drives me crazy, but Glitter is a perfect example of why such alterations are a good idea. The movie's failure is not Mariah Carey's acting, but the fact that it's genuinely unpleasant to watch the life story of a human pinball.

Carey's character ostensibly overcomes a poor childhood to find fame and fortune, but none of it is her doing: she meets the right people at the right time, and she has a great voice. She has a troubled love life, but we don't see enough of it to understand what she wins or loses as she moves from man to man. At the beginning of the film she is abandoned by her mother, and at the end of the film she finds her mother again, but the abandonment doesn't have any negative side effects and the work of finding the mother is all done off-screen. Everything that happens on-screen seems pointless.

Glitter would be a perfect case study of the need to juice up the truth when doing a dramatization except for the fact that it is only semi-autobiographical. Though there are parallels between Carey herself and her character in the movie, enough details have been changed to make it a work of fiction whose similarity to real persons and events is completely unintentional. That means the writers had a chance to make Carey's life into an interesting story and decided against it.

God help us all.

So, if you want to see a good movie about the trials and tribulations of a singing career, rent Dreamgirls, but stay away from Glitter. Mariah Carey may be a talented singer, and possibly a good actress, but her life story is something you don't want to know.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat

Trackposted to Perri Nelson's Website, The Virtuous Republic, Rosemary's Thoughts, Right Truth, The Populist, The Uncooperative Radio Show! Aug. 07, 08 and 09, 2007, Shadowscope, Stuck On Stupid, The Amboy Times, third world county, Woman Honor Thyself, 4 Time Father?, Pirate's Cove, Right Voices, Church and State, Blog @ MoreWhat.com, The Random Yak, 123beta, Adam's Blog, Nuke's News & Views, Webloggin, Cao's Blog, Phastidio.net, The Bullwinkle Blog, , Diary of the Mad Pigeon, Faultline USA, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, The World According to Carl, Blue Star Chronicles, Gulf Coast Hurricane Tracker, OTB Sports, and Gone Hollywood, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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Eragon was a terrible movie. It should have been a trilogy.


Posted by: John Kaiser at September 8, 2007 10:32 PM

This sometimes happens. The author of Eragon had very little weight to throw around and therefore his book had only minimal impact on the plot of the movie. The movie did well for one weekend, and then word of mouth killed it.


Posted by: Ferdy [TypeKey Profile Page] at September 9, 2007 6:25 AM

How in the world did they miss Butterfly? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082122/

Pia Zadora brought film making to an all-time low!


Posted by: Omnibus Driver at September 11, 2007 10:28 AM

HTML is not allowed in comments; however, if you put in a raw URL (http://www.somewhere.com/page.html) it will automatically be converted to a link.. Also, it is likely your comment will not appear unless you refresh the page manually after posting it.

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