This was REALLY, REALLY, REALLY BAD! If I could find a way to uniformly symbolize a negative number of stars, I’d win the Nobel Peace Prize. Infinitesimal? I added this to my watch list as a joke, but wanted to stop watching at the start. The casting of the young Billie is wrong, and the woman playing her mom looks nothing like her. To make it worse, the mom is named Lillie, so you have Lillie and Billie. Jesus... For reasons, Billie ends up in foster care, where she makes friends. They connect with a record producer for an artist who can’t sing and lip-syncs / dubs others voices. The character Sylk (Padma Lakshmi) is so miscast I thought it was a joke- like someone would step out and say, "We’re kidding, here’s the real movie!" Anyway, Billie (now played by Mariah Carey) meets nightclub producer/DJ "Dice (Max Beesley)," and he’s impressed by her voice, so they start working on material. Did I mention the music in this film is awful too? There are competing characters, all nonsensical, all trying to use or hurt Billie. Despite this, she becomes successful, though of course, at a price. The film builds up to a tragic ending, like a pig wearing a hat. It feels like a film that was ruined by either the star’s ego or movie company suits, who know nothing about filmmaking and then also tries to shove in bad music ("because it's a musical!") in instead of focusing on story, drama, tension, or acting. Carey is a terrible lead, though I think she could do well in smaller roles. I remember hearing buzz before its release that she did a great job- yeah, okay. This movie is an anomaly of bad decisions, bad faith, bad everything. It killed director Vondie Curtis-Hall’s career. He directed one more film after this, Waist Deep (2006), which is a ok "bad" film, before returning to acting and directing TV episodes. Curtis-Hall did make one good movie, 1997’s Gridlock’d with Tupac Shakur and Tim Roth. The only person who came out of this unscathed was Terence Howard, though he didn’t need any help tainting his own career.
