“Drop Dead Gorgeous” was filmed in 1995. This marked the fiftieth anniversary of the nation’s oldest beauty contest, The Sarah Rose Cosmetics American Teen Princess Pageant. The film shows a documentary in which a film crew was sent to a small town in Minnesota to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary. The film was based in Mount Rose, Minnesota with Gladys Leeman, former pageant winner, as Local Chairman. Her daughter, Rebecca Leeman, competes in this year’s pageant. Amber Atkins was also a pageant contestant this year following her mother, Annette Atkins, former pageant winner, in her footsteps. Throughout the film, Amber Atkins and Rebecca Leeman are the main rivals. The Leemans are the richest family in the town and they do everything they can to make sure Rebecca wins the pageant.
The beginning of all of the nonsense that goes on leading up to the pageant was the death of Tammy Curry, pageant contestant, when her tractor blew up while she was riding it on her farm. A picture of Tammy Curry was put in Amber’s locker with the writing “You’re next,” written on the back. Then, love interest of Amber, Bret, is shot between the eyes and killed. Rebecca Leeman is shown practicing shooting the guns that her mother gave her for their shooting range. To make things even worse, there was a fire in the Atkins trailer and her mother was severely burned and placed in a hospital. Amber wants to quit the pageant at this point, but her mother says she can’t because she sacrificed everything for her and wants her to get out of this town and have a great life. On the night of the dress rehearsal, one of the pageant contestants switches numbers with Amber and while was performing during Amber’s original time, a light fell and hit her on the head. She could not continue in the pageant and was pronounced deaf. During the pageant, Amber’s talent, tap dancing, dress was stolen and she was almost unable to compete, but one of the other contestants dropped out so Amber could wear her costume. In the end, Rebecca took the crown with Amber as runner up.
After the pageant was over, there was a parade in the town for the winners. Rebecca Leeman was riding on a swan float made in Mexico. Her mother, Gladys, lit one of the firework decorations and caused the entire float to blow up and kill her daughter, Rebecca. Gladys started yelling and confessed to all of the crimes committed leading up to and during the pageant and was placed in prison. Amber was then named winner of the Sarah Rose Cosmetics Teen Princess Pageant and went on to compete in State competition. She won by default as State as well when all of the other contestants got food poisoning from the shellfish that was served as their meal. When the State winners got to Nationals, they discovered that Sarah Rose Cosmetics was closed down. Amber Atkins went on to become a news reporter and became famous on television just like she always dreamed of.
“Drop Dead Gorgeous” is in the comedy genre and I believe some parts are funny, but others are quite disturbing. A lot of the scenes such as the ones showing death, blowing up, throwing up, burning to death, getting a concussion as well as others, are much more disgusting than they are funny. On paper they seem like they would be funny, but when you see the scenes, they are not as funny as they were meant to be. I believe that this film should be in the comedy section, but overall it is not very funny. It seems to me to be more of a spoof on beauty pageants, much like the movies that make fun of scary movies, “Scary Movie.”
The director of the film did very well in choosing how to film the movie. Since the movie was supposed to be filmed by a small film crew making a documentary, the filming was a little shaky as if the camera was held instead of very steady professional camera crew. The director also made a good choice in making the crew become seen as if they were a part of the movie instead of just filming it. The film crew interacts with the actors and makes it more believable as a documentary. I also liked the choice of actors and actresses. They all did a great job in portraying their role and looked like normal people and not people acting in a movie. The director did a great job in making great choices for this particular film.
I enjoyed “Drop Dead Gorgeous” and would definitely watch it again. It was not the best film I have seen, but it was amusing and not a typical Hollywood movie. I like the type of movies that you can’t predict what will happen and if you try, something bizarre throws your predictions completely out of where you expected them to go. This movie was so unpredictable and every plot movement seemed to come out of nowhere. “Drop Dead Gorgeous” was a movie with a mind-boggling plot I would never expect simply by knowing the name of the film.

Yay for short readings! I thought this was a great reading. I actually had no idea what an annotated bibliography was before reading this. It was very informative and helpful to me. I liked that it told you exactly what you needed for a good annotated bibliography. I think this will help me research more effectively so I actually know what each of my sources are saying. Also, I find myself getting confused with which source I got my information from. This would help me stay organized and easily know where the information that I need is. I also am a big notecard user, so I'm sure the notecard method described will help me out a lot. I feel like with the research I have already done on my research topic, I have learned a lot, but I know if I take time to summarize what my source is saying, I will be able to get a lot more from it. I will definitely use what I learned from this reading for my research paper.

When I began this reading I thought I would know most of the subjects covered. When I read, I highlight what I think is important and underline words or phrases that I think are the key points or words I don't know. Usually after I highlight and underline, I do not skim the entire reading, but just reread the highlights and learn the words underlined. I'm sure I would learn more and engage more with the readings if I put side notes to summarize what I was reading as I went along. I have read a few books that I borrowed from my sister and she writes all over the margins. When I read those, I feel like I understand the book a little better and look at it in new ways. If I did that myself, I believe it would help me to be a better reader. I like making predictions, but I never write them down to see if they are correct later. This reading made me want to become a more active reader so in the future, it wouldn't be so hard for me to study just from reading a book.

I think this reading would have been a better learning experience if it had been more to the point. There was a lot of repetition and I know when I'm reading, I start to zone out when I feel like I've read the information already. Some parts were interesting and I liked the introduction thoughts and the beer commercial scenario as well. A lot of the examples brought it down to a level so everyone could understand and relate to the scenarios. Some of the passage was informative, while others were just repeating themes over and over.

"There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another."
-Frank Zappa

"There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another."
-Frank Zappa

The reading wasn't terrible. I knew most of the information, I just didn't know the name of it. What helped for me was that they gave a lot of examples throughout the reading. It helped me understand the concepts if I didn't understand fully. I had a general idea of most of the ideas presented, but I didn't know all of the details that they gave. It did, however, seem to be a little redundant and longer than it needed to be to get the point across.

This reading wasn't very worth while to me at all. I understand how to research topics over the internet and how to narrow my search. It went into more detail than any regular internet user should need. I feel like most people in college either own a computer or use one frequently, especially for researching topics. Throughout high school, I used the internet to research many times for various reasons. I have never had trouble finding what I needed over the internet before. Although a few of the topics discussed in the reading could be helpful to some people, I didn't get much out of this reading.

Overall, the reading was enlightening to me. I enjoyed reading of all of the fallacies and the examples for each. For almost every incidence, I could think of a time when I myself, or someone I have known had used one of them for an argument. My favorite is the Tu Quoque type of writing. I use that one often in trying to win arguments with peers or my parents. It's sort of like the blame game! I also use the Bandwagon approach: "Everyone else is doing it." Some of the irrelevant arguments were a bit confusing to me at first, but after thinking about them and putting them into context with examples of my own, they all made sense. When I saw how long the reading was I expected it to be boring and dull, but after reading it, I didn't think it was so bad. It was all interesting to me. I couldn't believe how many argumentative approaches were irrelevant. I will probably laugh to myself the next time I use one of these argumentative approaches on my friends.

At first I didn't really understand the point of the reading. I knew what facts, reasoning, implications, and assumptions were. As I read I realized that I didn't really know everything I thought I did. I didn't realize how much your own opinion of your evidence was crucial to coming up with a good conclusion. If you do not believe that what you say is definitely true, how will other people believe it without question? I never really thought about how I jump to conclusions so easily. When people dress up, I believe they are doing something out of the ordinary, like going out. I always assume, but if I don't ask, I never really know the true reason. Normal things such as sarcasm never have phased me. I am used to it and know when something says something sarcastically, they imply the opposite. But do I know if they're joking? Or if they are serious. You never really know with sarcasm. I thought the end was interesting about the schooling. Everyone usually assumes that schooling is helping us to become successful people, I never thought about it as a sort of weed out for people that aren't middle class or above. The reading was straight forward for the most part, but it seemed to me to be trying to confuse the reader. I couldn't figure out if it was telling us how to reason better, or telling us how stupid reasoning was. Overall, I liked the reading, it was short and to the point and gave me something to think about after I was finished reading.