GLITTER & DOOM - Mark Reviews Movies

Glitter & Doom, Music Box Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 7, 2024

Jukebox musicals can work, of course, and maybe one based on the songs of the Indigo Girls could work, too. Glitter & Doom tries to be that and fails, mainly on its own terms as a narrative but also because one can sense the songs doing too much of the heavy lifting for such slight and unconvincing material.

It's a romance at heart, revolving around the eponymous duo. Glitter (Alex Diaz) is a wannabe clown from a wealthy and privileged family who just wants to go to circus school in Paris. It's tough to sympathize with the young man, partly on account of the that he has everything he could ever want and mostly because the idea of hero whose dream is to attend clown college sounds as if it's straight out of a parody. His mother Ivy (Ming-Na Wen), who wears an eyepatch (It turns out she had cancer, but the choice seems more to make her appear more villainous), just wants her son to do something reasonable with his life, and to be fair, she has a point.

Meanwhile, his counterpart is Doom (Alan Cammish), and yes, those are the characters' actual names in the story, before anyone starts thinking there might be subtlety to the material. As his name suggests (a huge understatement), Doom is a gloomy guy, indeed. He's a struggling singer/songwriter who believes every tune should be dark and/or sad—hence, the "struggling" part of his career ambitions.

His back story has to be heard not to be believed. His father is out of the picture, apparently after murdering or being falsely convicted of killing a woman while the family was out on a camping trip. Actually, that might have been the first of several times Doom's alcoholic mother Robin (Missi Pyle) ended up in prison, but there are a couple issues just in understanding what these characters are saying.

For one thing, the musical score is a near-constant in director Tom Gustafson's movie and overwhelms a lot of the dialogue. For another, neither Cammish nor Diaz seem particularly convinced of what they're meant to recite from Cory Krueckeberg's screenplay, and while both of them are quite competent singers, their performances here leave a lot to be desired. Cammish especially mumbles his way through the material, seeing enunciation as a suggestion that's better ignored for making sure we know Doom is as glum as his name hits squarely on the nose.

The two men meet purely by chance, when a disappointed Doom walks through a shot of Glitter's audition tape for the Parisian clown college. Their eyes meet, and soon enough, they're at a night club where they dance and sing through the night, closing out the bar, moving on to a restaurant where they talk about the idea of making small talk, and apparently falling for each other simply because this is a musical romance.

Gustafson keeps the camera moving, the editing quick, and the stylistic indulgences—words being written on screen, all sorts of fantasy sequences, a backdrop that's so idealistic that the mountains have an infinity pool and even the prison looks idyllic—popping. It's an exercise in overcompensation.

As for the music, those who know the Indigo Girls, who had at least one major hit during the height of their fame through the late 1980s to the '90s, might appreciate that the duo's songs are getting this sort of theoretical attention. Are these overproduced pop variations of those tunes the best reflection of such a folky act, though? The arrangements here are big and loud, transformed into generic anthems and ballads that don't seem to say much of anything when coming from such hollow characters in such a shallow romance.

The members of the duo, Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, appear in small roles in the movie, by the way, but making things unnecessarily confusing, the Indigo Girls also exist in the story's world. The climax has Doom singing one of their songs—their most famous one—as one of his own but follows it up with one he calls a cover as Ray and Saliers' characters watch on, bobbing their heads to the rhythm.

That's a minor oddity in a movie filled with major ones, in which such trivial inconsistencies might be the most interesting thing about it. Glitter & Doom is an appropriate title, at least, in that it's a glitzy and garish void of substance.

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