Hollywood – it’s quite a place. And it takes some figuring out, with its crazy unwritten rules, and big fat men on phones calling the shots. But one trick that has surfaced over the last few years is that if you’re quite pretty and you want to be taken seriously in a film, you’ve got to demand that your character is hideous to look at. Philip Seymour Hoffman has been pulling this stunt for years.
And, other hotties like Charlize Theron, Halle Berry and Nicole Kidman have picked up on it and become so revolting in movies that the pipe smoking women who vote for the Oscars decided that they had sacrificed enough for a statuette. Now, you can add another unusual name to that list of stunners-gone-ugly – Mariah Carey.
That’s right – Mariah Carey. The same Mariah Carey who probably demands that a professional stylist detousles her hair and powders her face whilst she sleeps took a massive punch from the ugly fist for her role in the widely well-received Oprah Winfrey produced, Precious – the tale of a fat girl growing up in New York, and having a really rotten time of things. Only this weekend, it took the main prize at the Toronto International Film Festival, having previously left the film criticising world totally agog at the Sundance version a few months ago. Carey plays a supporting role as social worker called Mrs Weiss, who wears homely clothes, like woolly jumpers, and normal everyday trousers. Clothes which you might see on yourself where you to look deeply into a mirror, but have been missing from the Carey wardrobe for years.
Even her big pumped-up bosoms miss out on their usual airing beneath a thin film of near-transparent cotton, meaning that she’s really pulled out the stops for this one. And so she should. Her movie career so far has been humiliating at best, and something that she should be rather ashamed of at worst. In particular, her turn in Glitter – a film so awful and flimsy that it made Purple Rain look like Ben Hur – was heart-stoppingly bad, earning her a Razzie for Worst Actress. And since then, any movie with her name in the credits has been avoided, ignored, or has caused infuriated audience members to brick up the cinema in disgust. But no more. She’s unthinkably rancid in this one, hence she could bag a more impressive gong to bookend her vast library of self help manuals with the Razzie at the other end, facing the wall.
According to Lee Daniels, who directed Precious:
“(Precious is) for every person who looked in the mirror and felt unsure of the person looking back.”
A reflective film.
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