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Everybody's Famous! | famous_l
WORST IN SHOW ''Famous''' van der Gucht acts out her stage plight
Everybody's Famous: Joe Voets

Credits

Release Date: Jul 27, 2001; Limited Release: Jul 03, 2001; Rated: R; Length: 99 Minutes; Genres: Comedy, Foreign Language; With: Josse De Pauw, Werner De Smedt and Eva van der Gucht
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By Owen Gleiberman
Owen Gleiberman
Owen Gleiberman
Owen Gleiberman is a film critic for EW

It's one thing when a movie tells you to go for your dream. The staggeringly contrived Flemish fairy tale Everybody's Famous! says that to be a star, all you need is to believe in your talent -- even if you don't have any. At amateur variety contests, Marva (Eva van der Gucht), a miserable fat teenager, warbles her way through tone deaf renditions of ''Material Girl.'' But her father (Josse de Pauw), a scalawag prole who wears some of the ugliest shirts ever seen on a movie screen, knows that she's got greatness in her. In a scheme that trashes credibility far more than it does morality, he kidnaps the country's reigning pop diva and arranges for Marva to record a song he ''wrote.''

A movie that aspires to be ''Muriel's Wedding'' and can't muster the proper wacky fraudulence to achieve that goal is a sad spectacle indeed. Sheer awfulness aside, a question lingers: Why would a company like Miramax even release a film in which a talent show contestant performs an Otis Redding impersonation -- in blackface?


Posted Jul 13, 2001
 

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