Starring Kirsten Dunst, Denise Richards and Kirstie Alley
And if you're like me and were praying for more Minnesota accents and trailer park explosions, then this movie should be considered a religious experience, because there must be a God! A cast of mostly female characters offer up more than enough instances for the writer and director to do everything they ever wanted to to the beauty queen and small town scene at the same time. Blow up a thresher? I think it's in the budget. Shoot one of the only guys in the movie in the head? Hold back the tears because there's some funny stuff right after that little bump in the road.
Taken individually, these road kills on the bad taste interstate would shock and disgust, taking away from any semblance of the movie. But strung together, we get what the critics and genre-definers call a "dark comedy" which means in all likelihood that someone will die in a most peculiar way for the sake of a laugh.
This movie exemplifies the dark comedy with its frequent and wind-taking jabs. The girls who make up the contest all have some weird peculiarities, both God-given and behavior-induced. But the strongest feelings come from our preconceived notions only strengthening with examples. Really, Kirstie Alley, even when playing hatable characters, gets "bad heat": You don't want her characterto die, you want her career to die so that we never see her scrunched up face and whining acting ever again.
And while the strongest characters can't escape the quirky grasp of the writer, they also have a bit of depth that separates them from the cameo players. Dunst plays a trailer park girl with a heart of gold, stuck cleaning dishes at school and applying make-up at the morgue all while honing her tap-dance routine. Her innocence stays intact the whole movie, the only character escaping the wrath of exploding off-color jokes.
Her foils are the mother-daughter team of Alley and Richards, the rich (relatively speaking) snobs who delight in running and winning whatever they want. Alley, a former winner of the local pageant that feeds into the state and national competitions, paves her daughter's way to the title by selecting enforcable rules and probably having something to do with other contestants "misfortunes." You guessed it, they finally made the serial killer/ beauty pageant movie we have been clamouring for. Now the title makes us groan even louder. But if you find that funny, there's seconds, and thirds, and ....
The best laughs aren't the ones that send up the beauty pageant genre, which is so much a farce already that making fun of it seems like challenging the mentally handicapped to a Scrabble tournament. Instead, they are when the lead actors and even the minor characters sling out the one-liners. Richards gets some good material and actually acts well in this movie, which the cynics will argue is made true because she lives her character.
The worst of the worst? A fat mentally challenged adult named Hank that serves to embarrass anyone who's ever been named Hank. And the line of the movie? "They remade my belly with skin from my butt." Sure, it isn't integral to the plot, but in "DDG," it's what's on the outside that matters, and it's a pretty funny exterior.