Gia (Reviewed on March 3/99)
Starring Angelina Jolie, Faye Dunaway
In "Gia", Angelina Jolie plays the titular character, the first so-called supermodel. And right there you have the biggest hurdle this movie had to overcome (in my eyes, anyway). I just don't see how the life of a model is worthy of a two hour film. Despite this, I kept an open mind when I began watching the movie. Sadly, though, my fears were realized. It's just not possible to make an interesting, full-length film about a person who spends their days wearing different clothes.
The movie follows the rise and fall of Gia (no last name), a tumultuous woman who doesn't particularly enjoy the world of fashion. She becomes famous more quickly than she can handle, and finds herself hooked on drugs and on a woman she cannot have. The last hour of the film is just one scene after another of Gia getting high, losing a job, and going into rehab. This formula is repeated several times, and I really got tired of it. In general, I tend to dislike movies featuring heavy drug use. No because it offends me or anything like that; it just bores me. Quite frankly, I don't see the appeal, so when a director shows me a point-of-view shot of a junkie, complete with tipsy camera angles and echoing voices, I am left somewhat unimpressed.
The first hour of the film, though, was actually quite engaging. We see Gia as she is discovered and moves to New York with her boyfriend. These early scenes were interesting. We're shown the fashion world through a newcomers eyes, and it was a perspective I hadn't seen before. The movie begins to go downhill, however, once Gia becomes an established model. >From that point, I lost all interest in the movie and was counting the minutes before it would end. It all seemed so excessive. Fine, so Gia had a drug problem, does this really need to dominate the film? Couldn't the same effect have been had with a five or ten minute montage of scenes featuring Gia experimenting with drugs? Or perhaps this film is meant to be a warning to aspiring models not to get into the drug world. Quite possibly, although since I have no desire to become a model, this warning is lost on me.
As I stated at the beginning of this review, I simply don't see how the life of a model is worthy of a feature-length motion picture. What do they do that warrants a movie? Strut their stuff for thousands of dollars an hour? I suppose the same could be said about making movies about baseball players, for example, but at least somebody like Lou Gehrig led an interesting life. Gia did not. And by the end of the film, all I knew about Gia for sure was that she hated modelling, was bi-sexual, and was heavily into drugs. Not exactly a meaningful contribution to society, as far as I'm concerned.
* out of ****
-- David Nusair http://chat.carleton.ca/~dnusair
"I like your nurses uniform, guy." | "These are O.R. scrubs." | THIS SPACE FOR RENT "Oh, are they?" | --Rushmore-- |
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews