Smile
This beauty pageant's about to get ugly.
Get ready for a "hilarious" (Variety) look at one of America's most beloved institutions-the beauty pageant-in this twisted satire that "deserves a high place among successful film spoofs" (Cue)!
The bleached-blonde town of Santa Rosa, California, is very excited about its annual Young American Miss Pageant. Chief judge Big Bob Freelander (Dern) promises his town a good contest. But the battling bombshells are growing ruthless in their quest for the crown! Can Big Bob make sure that his bevy of beauties remains civil so that audiences don't discover what really lies behind those smiles?!
Member Reviews
Smile - Coco
Smile
Along with his other 70s masterpieces, especially Prime Cut (72) and the recently Richard Linklatterized Bad News Bears (76), Michael Ritchie’s Smile delivers a sweet/caustic backhand to American patriarchy in all its denim-clad grotesquery. The Man, here, is all embodiments of the Capitalist win-at-all-costs ethic. He comes in the form of pyretic little league coaches leveling universal ennui upon the children, good ol’ boys who tidy up business affairs by grinding up the competion in the abattoir, their women kept it the stables, or, in the case of Smile, the Kindermensch of Santa Rosa’s local business elite whose wealth and importance to the community are paid tribute with a gleefully calamitous Young American Miss competition. The tone and structure of Smile are reminiscent of Milos Forman’s Polish films, especially Fireman’s Ball. It shares that film’s depiction of a public event as national microcosm, and its brilliant harmonic ability to sustain social critique with a full-out, warts-and-all sympathy for its all-too-human characters. The film’s gonzo feminism will doubtlessly stick grinding in the throats of the Steinem set, and it certainly doesn’t idealize, presenting its bevy of beauties as an estrogenic infestation, immediately plugging the theater’s pipes with Kotex. Still, it is the strange phallic world of spectacle that encases these women that remains ultimately suspect. Witness the drunken, Masonic gathering where the men of the town don robes, overturn picnic tables and pucker up before the great unwashed posterior of a skinned chicken carcass. A must see American meltdown!
cOcO2
Member Reviews
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Smile - Coco
Smile
Along with his other 70s masterpieces, especially Prime Cut (72) and the recently Richard Linklatterized Bad News Bears (76), Michael Ritchie’s Smile delivers a sweet/caustic backhand to American patriarchy in all its denim-clad grotesquery. The ...