Glitter: A Shiny Piece of Nothing
J Meritt

If Glitter was supposed to be a comedy, someone forgot to tell Mariah Carey. I don’t like to pick on the mentally ill, but Mariah baby, please go back to the hospital and bring the Fox studio head with you. The movie is a forgettable tale of a girl wanting to succeed as a singer someday to follow in her mothers footstep or to fulfill a dream her mother wasn’t talented enough to fulfil, a theme recently explored in "Drop Dead Gorgeous," "Center Stage," and the babe-fest "Coyote Ugly."

By all accounts this movie tries to make a dead topic fresh and that is as easy as raising Elvis up from the grave. Here, our heroine, Billie (Carey), has an alcoholic lounge singing mother that has to give her up, the first of many annoying side stories. At the orphanage, Billie meets her future friends for life that become her new family, nicely played as adults by hip-hopper Da Brat and Tia Texada. After the basic Hollywood set-up, we discover Billie is now older and has an amazing voice that a no-talent producer uses to cover up the awful voice of the girl he is sleeping with and supposedly turning into a star. While Billie and her best friends sing on stage at a club as backup singers for the previously mentioned no talent singer, Billie is discovered. As the young pompous DJ, named Dice, played by a confused English guy Max Beasley, who is trying to sound like a New Yorker, finds out that the voice on the record and from the stage, belongs to Billie. Her talent immediately overwhelms him and they suddenly become a team. He asks to producer her and she says yes. It is starting to smell like a movie based on the true life of one Ike and Tina thrown into an eighties setting.

Billie gets a record deal, becomes romantically involved with her producer and things though appearing good on the outside, like always, start falling apart. The jealous boyfriend routine comes in big time as the boyfriend-producer DJ Dice gets angry that his vision used to find Billie has been discarded and her life and love for him is being taken away from him faster then he received it. All the star-making scenes are laughable, some on purpose. The music video shoot is the only bright moment in the movie. The signing of the record deal made the record industry look like a bunch of a$$ kissing butlers. As all stories of fame go, there is a roller-coaster ride that tests Billie’s fidelity, will and relationships. The last half-hour is full of cliches of the big music star vehicle- the big concert, the big tragedy and the big recovery all, anyone over the age of six can predict after an hour into the movie. This movie could have been better if the writers chose either cheesy or dramatic because, as displayed here, you can’t mix the two so loosely and have a good movie. Mariah tried hard and was all right for her first real role, besides a bit part in the dreadful "The Bachelor." To give her a movie of her own is like giving a 10-year-old keys to a Jaguar and telling him to take a spin. Both acts are just reckless.

It is better for a musician turned actor/actress to get some acting skills in a bunch of small roles to understand how to be in a movie then to just throw them into being a movie star. I would love for Vondie Curtis-Hall to try something that was not used as a vehicle for fading music stars who thinks they can become great actors. For example: Hall’s last movie, "Trespass" starring the late and infamous Tupac Shukar. The movie would have been better if Carey actually looked in her twenties, but I guess marrying a record label president when you are young enough to be his daughter, makes you age a little faster. Don’t get me wrong. I wanted to like it in a campy way, because I love laughing at the fake diva, but I just ended up feeling sorry for her and the movie studio that decided to let her Glitter in the first place.