Welcome to Retro Rewind, the TGJ original feature designed to celebrate TV and Film’s glorious past.
Today, we celebrate Mariah Carey’s ‘Glitter‘, the polarising picture that serves as one of the most important moments in the unstoppable icon’s filmography.
Revisit the movie below…
Built on a budget of $22 million, the movie tells the tale of a young lady named Billie Frank who seeks to rise above adversity by pursuing a career in the music industry.
We start the movie and we see little Billie and her mom singing, and we realize there’s a disfunction going on and her mom’s unstable. She gets taken away from her mother and ends up in a foster home. Then, we meet her two friends, Louise and Roxanne, who are played by Da Brat and Tia Texada. They’re her extended family. It’s Billie’s journey to understand why she feels abandoned by her mother. … That’s what drives her to want to sing. She connects with this [DJ] character. His name is Dice. He’s sort of like what the mother is in terms of semi-disfunctional
She soon finds all that glistens isn’t gold.
Critically panned, the movie sped into theatres on September 21st 2001 but saw its box office numbers hurt by the events of September 11th 2001 but went on to pull in $5 million worldwide in its opening week.
The movie magazine ‘Fade In’ had this to say about it…
Intended as a vehicle to break Mariah Carey as a movie star, it instead became a year-long punch line. Carey might have a five-octave voice, but her performance as a burgeoning singer was strictly one-note and garnered her a Razzie for worst actress. Trotting out every hoary cliché about the music business imaginable, Glitter isn’t just one of the worst music-themed films ever made — it’s one of the worst films ever made, period.
Fortunately, reviews like this one did little to harm Carey’s discography and a legacy strengthened by better-received releases.