1999 was a big year for movies. It was the year that The Matrix‘s slow-motion bullet influenced action movies for years to come. It was the year American Beauty won Best Picture at the Academy Awards and Oscar fans have been arguing about it ever since. It was the year Pokémon jumped from Gameboys and TV to the big screen. And worst of all, it was the year that disappointed a generation of Star Wars fans with the release of The Phantom Menace.
To celebrate that landmark year in film’s 20th Anniversary, The Pop Break continues its year-long retrospective of 1999’s most influential (at least to us) films with staff writer, Megan LaBruna, on the best mockumentary about beauty pageants, Drop Dead Gorgeous.
Before Toddlers & Tiaras there was Drop Dead Gorgeous, one of my very first exposures to the inside lives of “beauty queens.” I was 13 years old when this movie first came out and I absolutely loved it. Surprisingly, at the time, Kirsten Dunst wasn’t really the big actress of the movie. She hadn’t yet done Bring it On, which, in my opinion, was the role that made her one of the “it” actresses of the early 2000’s.
Honestly, at the time, the big names of the movie were the parents played by Kirstie Alley and Ellen Barkin. There wasn’t a big draw for a younger audience other than maybe Denise Richards. She would have been hot off of her part in Wild Things, but again, that’s not really an appropriate movie for the demographic Drop Dead Gorgeous was targeting with their PG-13 rating.
So, from what I remember, this film really wasn’t big. I only saw it because at the time, we didn’t have cable and made copious trips to our local Blockbuster Video, where one night my sisters and I stumbled upon this pretty pink cover and thought it looked amusing enough. Ultimately, we were right. It was hysterical.
Drop Dead Gorgeous was one of my first exposures to dark comedy—although I don’t know that my 13-year-old self truly appreciated some of the humor. The fact that literally 5 people are either dead or injured within the first 45 minutes definitely lives up to the title of the movie.
It’s tough at that age seeing Amber (Dunst) hit all these road blocks at every turn when all she is trying to do is make it out of her small town. I think when we’re younger, we tend to see ourselves more in these characters, so it feels more like a personal struggle to watch her potential date be killed in a “duck hunting accident,” her costume stolen, her home burned to the ground, her mom injured and then the pageant gets cancelled and she gets fired at. It’s a lot to take in. But all that aside, my sisters and I loved it enough to rent it a handful of times and introduce our friends to what is now more accurately referred to as the beauty queen cult comedy starring: Kirsten Dunst, Amy Adams, Brittany Murphy, Allison Janney, and that girl who always played the resident b*tch of the 2000’s.
Watching the movie now was more fun than I anticipated. I still laughed at the jokes even though I knew what was going to happen and had a nice surprise when I caught some innuendos that my younger self definitely missed. There are certainly aspects of the film that don’t stand the test of time, however. Within the first five minutes, the town is showing the girls a video ad for the pageant and it is cut short because someone taped their soap opera over the VHS. Kirstie Alley states that it’s “gone forever”. In this day and age, the link would have been emailed to them or could have easily been found on YouTube or some other video platform. Also, the amount of smoking in the film really stood out to me. It doesn’t bother me to see people smoking, but as a society, we are more aware of it now since most modern-day television doesn’t show people smoking (especially after the outcry of the amount of smoking featured in the newest season of Stranger Things).
The plot itself still holds up pretty well in this day and age despite not having any technology at the forefront of the film. Helicopter parents and pageant-type moms have clearly always existed and continue to exist. Small town life and gossip is still around and teenagers of today can still resonate with Amber’s struggle to balance keeping a good GPA, volunteering, working, and participating in after school activities all to help fulfill her dream of making it big one day. If anything, this movie might even fit in better now with its undertones of female empowerment and resilience, which may easily go missed with the whole sabotaging and murdering of fellow female participants, but I promise you, it’s there. At the time, it was a little surprising to have the potential romantic interest immediately removed and not even have a sub-plot of a romance for our main characters. Instead, the film chose to focus on Amber and her dreams of becoming a news anchor like Diane Sawyer and quite frankly, I’m good with that.
So, whether you’ve seen it before or have never even heard of it, grab a group of friends and give Drop Dead Gorgeous a watch. It’s definitely still a good time and is now finally available on a streaming platform (Hulu) for the first time ever!
