kate!🍒🕊⚡️’s review published on Letterboxd:
BEST WRITTEN FEMALE CHARACTERS – 4/10
DROP DEAD GORGEOUS – REBECCA & LESLIE & LORETTA
"Mom gave me this 9mil for my birthday. I'll always remember what she wrote in the card - "Jesus loves winners". That's why, no matter what I do, I aim to win."
Rebecca Ann Leeman, played by Denise Richards, is the prom queen with a tiara in one hand and a shotgun in the other. She’s the modern Disney Princess – loved by the vain and the shallow for the tears in her eyes and the whiteness of her smile, but layered with the kind of seedy underbelly that blindsides a select few.
When watching this film, I can’t help but remember the infamous quote from Richards where she told a paparazzo, “I am truly not one to give advice. I’m divorced and I stole my best friend’s husband,” with an all-American smile on her face. She truly was the perfect pageant queen to fit this role – she kept her friends in a tighter pinky-promise than she did even her enemies, and held up her glossy-haired façade in the process.
Rebecca truly would be the perfect poster girl for Trump today – I say this with total sincerity. Despite this film being twenty years old, she’s the kind of gun-toting, short-skirt-twirling chick I barely need to step out of the realm of Fox News to imagine the President calling her a nine out of ten, if only she voiced her opinions a little less.
Miss Leeman represents to me the flipside of the American Dream: of a desire to work hard only to gain the satisfaction of others, rather than simply to feel whole. Sure, she seems like mommy’s little girl, and the queen bee of the school, but we have to see that there’s something a little sad about the high school princess only dating her boyfriend for his varsity jacket and someone to stand with at the lunch queue, even if he’s there with baited breath for the girl next door who’ll serve him the canteen spaghetti.
“Okay… Hi… I’m Leslie Miller… And I’m signing up ‘cause… Oh… I always watch the pageants on TV and my boyfriend thinks I’ll win!”
Amy Adams’ performance as Leslie Miller – the bubblegum popping cheerleader with a special interest in her boyfriend’s tongue should have won her actress of the century. Forget Karen Smith in Mean Girls, forget Breakfast Club’s princess Claire Standish – this is the dumb girl with one brain cell bouncing around like a loading screen you should be listening to.
There’s something oddly relatable about the bubbly redhead accidentally telling us about her pregnancy when asked about pageantry. Her world is so finite that it reminds me how uncomplicated the world really can be, if only we allow our brains to slow down for a minute. Leslie bounces between cheer and cherry gum, and doesn’t seem to see a bigger picture. The aperture of her mind’s eye reaches to her cheesy boyfriend and no further. University lecturer she is not, but she was born for the role of the perfect extra grin in a family photo, or the bachelorette party you can only dream of.
"Once a carnie, always a carnie.”
I want Loretta to be my loud mouthed, spit-balling helpline of an aunt. We all need a woman like her in our corner. Allison Janney’s sharp face with badly pin curled hair, yelling to the walls of her caravan and flirting like a madman to anyone with half a mustache and a flannel shirt makes the perfect supporting actress – if Janney could win an Oscar for supporting actress in I, Tonya, she should have won a damn dozen of them for this. She may be the only woman in this review who wasn’t a pageant contestant, but she’s the only one to me who is truly Drop Dead Gorgeous.