Slashdot Mirror
Review: Zoolander
In the theater where I saw this movie, the audience was laughing throughout. It's not entirely clear how much of this was the quality of the movie, how much that people obviously needed to laugh.
The premise is great. An evil band of international fashion designers want to kill the prime minister of Malaysia after he announces he's raising the minimum wage of sweatshop workers who make designer clothes for Americans. Apparel prices will skyrocket. They threaten top designer Mugatu (Will Ferrell) with destruction if he doesn't find some vapid, gullible male model to do the deed at the annual fashion show, which the prime minister plans to attend.
"Fabio?" suggests one of the villains? "Too smart," is the decision. The obvious choice for Mugatu is famous, shallow, supermodel Derek Zoolander (Ben Stiller), the four-time Male Model of the Year winner, soon to be embittered and unseated by arch-rival Hansel, played brilliantly by Owen Wilson. Female supermodels have long been the target of satirists, but this is the most head-on assault yet on the men.
Zoolander is likeable, stupid, self-absorbed, and manipulable. He gets absolutely nothing about the world beyond the fact that he is "wonderfully, incredibly good-looking." He has his verbal mannerisms. He's about to get an education in how the world really works. He and Hansel vie for top male model spot, including a hilarious "walk-off" on a basement runway to decide who's on top. Neither has ever turned on a computer.
Zoolander comes from a character Stiller helped create for a sketch he did on the l996 VH1/Vogue Fashion Awards. If any event or industry is ripe for vicious parody, it's this one. Stiller is merciless. There's a terrific scene up front involving Stiller's gorgeous but bubble-headed roommates playing at a gas station in the style of stupid TV ads. They get their just desserts here, though the movie is as good-natured as it is biting.
Derek's agent, Maury Ballstein, is played by Jerry Stiller, Ben's dad, who is great as the crude, pompadoured head of the world's biggest modeling agency.
There are targets, spoofs and cultural references galore in Zoolander, including a play on The Manchurian Candidate spot-on blasts at the way the media worships the glam/celebrity culture, and the way in which pop culture can sometimes patronize the people who worship it. David Duchovny does an uncredited walk-on as a conspiratorial ex-model whose face is never shown, but whose hand -- used in cosmetic ads -- is instantly recognizable to Zoolander from catalogs.
American culture, one of the most powerful forces on the planet, is the big target here, especially its consuming valuelessness. Stiller grasps the cultural irony for many of us. As much as we love pop culture, we also recognize that it is becoming sillier, greedier and less honest and creative by the day. It diminishes us, he suggests, as well as the people who create it. Stiller sees popular culture as corrupt and infanticizing, celebrating trendiness above all. In worshipping the empty and the vapid, he seems to be saying, we can't help but become more empty and vapid ourselves. He's got a point.
This movie is wonderfully weird and funny. Ferrell's over-the-top Mogatu is great, as are the Finnish dwarfs and freakazoid orgy. The movie has a score of cameo appearances from fashion world muck-a-mucks, models and celebrities, but the modeling culture is only a stand-in for the celebrity machine that has engulfed publishing, music, TV, film and the arts.
This is a scathingly wonderful movie, as amusing as it is on target.
I wonder if many other movies will be digitally removing (or in the case of current films be adding) the WTC buildings in the NYC skyline? Anyone know of such movies?
===> An eye for an eye makes everyone blind - MG
Yeah, we all "caught it". Hellen Keller with Alzheimer's in an isolation tank would have "caught it".
We are at war with Eastasia, we are friends with Eurasia. Whe have always been at war with Eastasia, we have always been friends with Eurasia
...if they digitally removed Will Ferrell. I hate him.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
Welcome to the politically correct new world order. Soon for the sake of moral sensitivities, we'll be erasing all references to the WTC from literature as well. It's starting to feel like an Orwell book.
I agree completely.
The other day I saw a movie that took place in California in 1998, and they showed it without any glaciers, and there were no dinosaurs walking around either! How disrespectful to the memories of all the primitive hominid people who were killed by glaciers, and all the dinosaurs who perished in natural cataclysm, that we should just pretend they never existed.
Um, if a movie is set after the towers were destroyed, it doesn't make much sense to show them standing.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
They should replace the towers with two gigantic swirly lollipops. If they're going to be stupid, do it right.