Drag queens are no longer funny just because they're drag queens; we've lost the nervousness about gender that once made us need to laugh at a man in drag.
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10/31/03
Die Mommie Die! (2003)
67
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:57
Fresh:38
Rotten:19
Average Rating:6.1/10
Consensus: This stagy production has enough funny moments to work.
Runtime: 90 mins
Genre: Comedies
Synopsis: Angela Arden (Charles Busch) is a former cabaret singer whose career has long since hit the skids and crashed to an abrupt halt. Her marriage to producer Sol Sussman (Philip Baker Hall) is rapidly... [More]
Starring: Charles Busch, Frances Conroy, Philip Baker Hall, Jason Priestley
Director: Mark Rucker
Reviews for Die Mommie Die!
Top CriticBusch is such a tenaciously subversive entertainer that you appreciate the movie despite Mark Rucker's iffy directorial strategies.
10/31/03
Rucker and Busch try hard to pour on the melodrama and the camp, but the results are too restrained and self-conscious.
10/31/03
For the select audience that likes The Rocky Horror Picture Show and just wishes that it had more of a family story and less singing.
10/31/03
Although the supporting performances are carefully shaded caricatures, Die Mommie Die! is really Mr. Busch's show. Within the cramped limitations of drag, he exudes a genuine screen charisma.
10/30/03
Top CriticBusch's performance is the movie's heart, and like the screen idols whose every gesture he's lovingly absorbed, Busch can pack a world of meaning into an arched eyebrow and a slight crack of the voice.
10/30/03
First-time director Mark Rucker has a nice feel for period detailing but fails to build on his star's rare flashes of high energy.
10/30/03
Die Mommie Die! has great fun demolishing pretense and the facade of respectability while never hitting a false note.
10/30/03
Top CriticAn expertly crafted, loving homage to women's movies of the 1940s and '50s.
10/30/03
Busch is actually pretty great as Arden, but with nothing to hang his wig on, it all gets tiresome rather quickly, inviting unflattering comparisons to John Waters' superior 1980 effort, Polyester.
10/30/03
Busch muffles his drag performance, suffocating the humor, and the cleverness of the plot is given too much responsibility, as if the filmmakers were actually expecting this movie to be appreciated as a thriller.
10/30/03
The movie winds up walking a line between put-on pastiche and kitsch passion, and Jason Priestley is perfect as a brooding lunkhead of Tab Hunter gigolo-osity.
10/29/03
Part tribute, yes, and part genderf**k too, but DIE MOMMIE DIE! is first a surprisingly smart, encyclopedic reimagining of the conventions, themes (and yes, clichés) of cinema's most golden age.
10/28/03
Busch can transcend even the smog, making hazy camp seem fresh.
10/28/03
Die Mommie Die is one of the funniest films of the year! Mind you it sure isn't the usual toilet-trodden road-trip snorfing anti-cerebral crapitini we are force fed...
10/26/03
Charles Busch is a mighty attractive woman.
10/08/03
Tart enough to curl the ends of John Waters' moustache.
09/17/03
Major kudos to Busch for playing this lady as hilariously real, yet over-the-top as possible.
09/12/03
The film's greatest asset is Busch himself in a performance so finely tuned that ultimately one almost forgets he's not the glamorous woman with the ritzy wardrobe that he's portraying -- except for the fact that that's the funniest part.
04/27/03
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03/31/03
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