Citizen Kane

Glitter" is not "The Mariah Carey Story," but it's tempting to try to read it that way. The movie is based, not on Carey's life, but on a kind of mirror-image, in which she has a black mother and a white father instead of the other way around, and is taken under the wing of a club DJ instead of a record-label executive. Her character, named Billie Frank (after the two great vocalists?), makes all …

…childhood as it is in this movie? Billie searches for her birth mother, and yet there's a scene so confusingly handled that we're not sure if she sees her on the street one night, or not. We're given a triumphant concert on Madison Square Garden, but it's unlikely she could even sing, under the circumstances shown. And above all, the film is lacking in joy. It never seems like it's fun to be Billie Frank.