Miss congeniality - 2000

This was fun ^_^  I love Sandra Bullock, always liked her, so there’s that, but it’s also a funny movie, very nice. Not at all a laughing-out-loud-rolling-on-the-floor funny, but a feeling-good kind of funny. The plot is simple: FBI agent Gracie Hart enters a beauty contest undercover to find a terrorist before he strikes, but the fun is in the details…

but before that, let me tell you that this isn’t one of those cases in which to show a before-after makeover they try their best to make a beautiful actress look ugly. No, she was pretty from the start, she simply never acted or dressed as a lady before…

Also, where do they have beauty contests where the girls can be thirty? Let me rephrase that, where the winners are around thirty? Of course they might let you enter the contest, but thirty++ year olds don’t go very far… anyway, not complaining about the movie, I so don’t like beauty contests for underage people, so I was totally okay with that. 

p.s. Michael Caine was a joy, from start to finish.

so, details:

it starts with a young Gracie at the playground. A boy was being bullied so she stepped up and defended him, and then told him that she liked him, but the boy reacted badly, told her he didn’t like her because now everyone will say that he needs a girl to defend him… so she punched him too, but you can see she was hurt.

Adult  Gracie is an FBI agent who screws up a mission. She believed the suspect was suffocating, so she disobeyed the order to stay put to help him and thus managed to get another agent hurt.

Because of this, her boss McDonald puts her on desk duty.

After this, when there’s another case she’s officially out of it. Apparently The Citizen sent another letter: he’s a terrorist that writes criptic letters that are never understood in time to prevent the attack. This time, though, it’s not too difficult to figure out that the target is the Miss United States contest. Gracie is not part of the team, of course, but she helps them out with words anyway. They realise that they need someone inside the contest, so they start looking for a female agent under 35 with a pretty body (and their computer is able to show them how every agent would look in a bathing suit or a dress… ok, the dress is provided by a child’s game, but the computer knows how their bodies are under the suit/uniform? That’s a perverted program it uses…)

There’s nobody available, so they think of sending Gracie… she does not want to, she thinks it’s totally against feminism and that beauty pageant contestants are all bimbos… (well, to be fair it seems to me like she thinks all pretty girls are dumb… when Eric introduced a girl to her Gracie didn’t give her a chance…).

She eventually agrees, so they call an expert, Victor, to give her a complete makeover and teach her how to act. He’s horrified at first (mostly by her manners, but also her look).

With a whole team at work, she has her hair done, and her teeth, her eyebrow, a complete body wax… but after quite some time, what comes out is a sexbomb. Who doesn’t know how to walk in heels and falls down, every now and then.

Gracie meets Cheryl, who is Miss Rhode Island, and some other girls (of course we only know a few of them). Cheryl is very open and nice, and want to be friends, even if in a way she is what Gracie disliked about pageant contests. 

While showing her talent during the preliminary competition, Gracie sees a man searching for something, and she sees he has a gun so she throws herself at him, but the guy was only looking to light his cigarettes. They’re in Texas after all, everyone is armed, Kathy says.

When Eric shows her photos that Cheryl was at various activists protests, Gracie tries to investigate her a little so she takes the girls out, enticing them with pizza and dancing.

Both the contest hosts, Stan as well as Kathy Morningdale are being fired, and from how much Kathy cares about this contest Gracie now suspects her, but when she tells her colleagues they tell her the investigation is closed and they are to go home. Apparently the Citizen has been caught quite easily, it was rather anticlimatic actually, but Gracie still thinks Kathy is suspicious and wants to stay behind. Everyone else moves to leave, until Victor tells Eric that Kathy has a son, her assistant Frank, who changed his surname due to his various legal troubles.

Eric and Victor come back to help Gracie.

Gracie makes it to the top five (well, that was what Kathy agreed with the Fbi, but I don’t know at this point if that agreement still stands or if she got voted in the top five, after all she did well ^_^)

and then she hears that Frank had the crown… so she guesses the bomb will be in the crown (I didn’t say it before,but it was all Kathy’s plan to get revenge for firing her, she wanted it to be blamed on The Citizen, but she had ready other suspects already with fake threatening letters).

She’s right, but neither Victor nor Eric understand her when she mimes it from the stage (well, what she did looked more like horns than a crown, to be fair), but luckily Eric sees Frank, his suspect, and goes after him so he delays the explosion long enough.

Gracie comes second, and the crown goes to Cheryl, but Gracie needs to get that crown away from her so she starts fighting everyone who gets in her way to get it off Cheryl’s head. Texas’ redhead gets her nose broken, Cheryl cries a river, but Gracie manages to throw the crown away before it explodes.

Kathy is arrested of course, but before Gracie can go away Victor calls her back: the girls have a surprise for her, to thank her for saving them, and they elect her Miss Congeniality.

Gracie is touched. She never had girl friends before, and she liked them a lot.

Of course at the end there’s the start of a possible relationship between Gracie and Eric, they kiss, now he finally noticed that she’s not just one of the tough guys but she’s also a beautiful, smart, funny woman.

To my surprise I liked it a lot when she teased him in a singsong voice : “you think I’m gorgeous”… I really don’t think many other actresses would have made that cute. 

Gracie Hart - Sandra Bullock

Victor - Michael Caine

Eric - Benjamin Bratt

Kathy Morningside - Candice Bergen

Stan - William Shatner

McDonald - Ernie Hudson

Cheryl - Heather Burns

Young Gracie - Mary Ashleigh Green

ITA Miss Detective