Aug 29, 2001 02:58 AM
3338 Views
What do you go to the Cinema for?
Me, personally, I go to be entertained – maybe ‘transported’ to other worlds – made to laugh out loud, or even on occasions cry with delight or sadness. Well Sandra Bullock’s latest offering, MISS CONGENIALITY, will do all three of those things to you.
The actress not only stars and in many ways ‘carries’ the film, but also produces it. She is hard nosed FBI Agent Gracie Hart, a bit of a tom-boy/ugly duckling who has never quite grown up and grown into a feminine ‘swan’. Her colleagues – all male – at the bureau, all regard her as ‘one of the boys’ and it’s easy to see why. Our heroine maybe called ‘Grace’ – but she has none! She does not own a dress, she’s forgotten what make up is and her hair looks like…well you get the picture.
All that has to change when the FBI get a message from a serial terrorist who threatens to disrupt the Miss America Pageant. The best way of keeping tabs on things and maybe discovering the terrorist’s ID, is for someone to go undercover – yep, graceless Grace gets the nod.
She is to be ‘Miss New Jersey’ and has 48 hours to be turned from gawky, streetwise cop into a woman of beauty.
<Fanfare of trumpets> Enter our very own Michael Caine as limp-wristed beauty pageant consultant Victor Melling. This will have to be the makeover of the century and in record time! He gets to work, supervising a crack team of FBI beauticians and despite the odd mishap, he manages the impossible. This is where we are transformed to another ‘world’ – that of the ‘Beauty Pageant’ – as Grace – now very much the ‘swan’ - joins the rest of the contestants for the preliminaries.
Here we find, feisty ‘Miss California’, red haired ‘Miss Texas’ - who looks like she could eat you whole! – and ‘Miss Rhode Island’, who Grace (now renamed as Gracie Lou!) befriends. Pretty, prim, proper but dim – when asked “What is your perfect date?”, she replies “April 23rd!”. She also is the source of the title of this review. Gracie Lou asks he about her past – it’s confession time, it seems Miss R.I, once stole a pair of Red panties from a shop because her Ma and Pa thought that coloured undies were the work of the devil – “Satan’s Panties!” Gracie Lou shouts at her, “You stole Satan’s Panties!”….it’s one of many funny, but touching moments in this film.
Without wanting to reveal the whole plot, I’ll introduce a couple more key characters to you. Candice Bergen plays the Pageant director, Kathie Morningside and William Shatner, the has-seen-better-days Pageant compere Stan Fields. They ham it up in typical Beauty Queen style – “This is not a Beauty competition - it’s a Scholarship program”. While all this is going on, Grace’s FBI colleague and team leader Eric Matthews, played by Benjamin Bratt begins – at last – to notice that he has a beautiful woman on his ‘team’. The ‘will they, won’t they’ scenario is maintained throughout the latter part of the film, at one time both end up in the hotel pool way after midnight. Their liaisons and not the usual ‘slushy’ romantic ones, but fun – but will they get together in the end?
So you get the picture. Grace is undercover and uncomfortable. The gunman is on the loose, the FBI are incompetent, Beauty pageants are rigged. The cast looked like they enjoyed making this film and you will enjoy it too. If you want Hamlet – stay away. It’s not a classic by any means, but if want 100 minutes of enjoyable and well paced ‘hokum’ – Don’t MISS Congeniality!
