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Zoolander is a 2001 American comedy film directed, co-produced, co-written by and starring Ben Stiller. A satire on the fashion industry, the film follows Fashion Model Derek Zoolander (Stiller) who is tricked by fashion mogul Jacobim Mugatu (Will Ferrell) into assassinating the Prime Minister of Malaysia, whose progressivism laws on the fashion industry would harm his businesses. The cast also features Owen Wilson, Christine Taylor, Milla Jovovich, Jerry Stiller and Jon Voight.
The film contains elements from a pair of short films directed by Russell Bates and written by Drake Sather and Ben Stiller for the VH1 Fashion Awards television specials in 1996 and 1997. It is the last film from Paramount Pictures with the involvement of Village Roadshow Pictures.
Zoolander was released to theatres on September 28, 2001. It received generally positive reviews and was a box-office success. A sequel, Zoolander 2, was released in February 2016. An animated film follow-up, , was released on Netflix in the UK in August 2016.
Journalist Matilda Jeffries, feeling responsible for Derek's downfall as she wrote a scathing Time article about him, becomes suspicious of Mugatu's offer. She tells her concerns to Derek, but he ignores her. After receiving info through calls from former hand model J.P. Prewett, Matilda and Derek meet him in a cemetery. Prewett reveals that the fashion industry has been behind several of history's political assassinations, including Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, and the brainwashed models are soon killed after they have completed their task. Mugatu's cronies attack the group, forcing Derek and Matilda to flee. They go to Hansel's home, the last place they believe Mugatu will think to look. Derek, Hansel and Matilda bond, the two male models resolving their differences while partaking of Hansel's collection of narcotics and participating in group sex with Matilda and others. Derek and Hansel break into Maury's office to find evidence of the assassination plot, but they cannot operate his computer to find them.
Derek goes to the runway and Mugatu's disc jockey plays a remix version of "Relax". This activates Derek's mental programming, only for it to stop after Hansel breaks into the DJ booth and shuts off the turntable. After Hansel smashes the computer on the floor much to Matilda's dismay (since he took her saying the incriminating files were "in the computer" literally), a guilt-ridden Maury admits to the conspiracy. Mugatu then attempts to kill the Prime Minister himself by throwing a shuriken at him, but Derek stops it by unleashing his ultimate model look, "Magnum". In Derek's rural hometown, his father Larry watches the event on television and proudly acknowledges Derek as his son while Mugatu is arrested. A few years later, Derek, Hansel and Maury start "The Derek Zoolander Center for Kids Who Can't Read Good and Who Wanna Learn to Do Other Stuff Good Too". Derek and Matilda have a son named Derek Zoolander Jr., who has already developed his first modeling look.
David Bowie and Billy Zane made prominent cameos as themselves, with Bowie acting as judge for a "walk-off" and Zane appearing as a friend of Derek. Comedian Godfrey and Taj Crown appear as janitor disguises for Derek and Hansel, respectively. James Marsden appears as John Wilkes Booth. Also making cameos as themselves were Lance Bass, Tyson Beckford, Victoria Beckham, Emma Bunton, Stephen Dorff, Shavo Odadjian, Fred Durst, Tom Ford, Cuba Gooding Jr., Fabio Lanzoni, Theo Kogan, Lukas Haas, Tommy Hilfiger, Paris Hilton, Carmen Kass, Heidi Klum, Lenny Kravitz, Karl Lagerfeld, Lil' Kim, Anne Meara, Natalie Portman, Frankie Rayder, Mark Ronson, Gavin Rossdale, Winona Ryder, Garry Shandling, Christian Slater, Gwen Stefani, Donald Trump, Melania Trump, Donatella Versace, Sandra Bernhard, Amanda Lepore, Veronica Webb, Vikram Chatwal, Irina Pantaeva, Luther Creek, Christiane Amanpour, Malan Breton, and Danielle Stampe.
David Bowie appeared as himself as the judge of the walk-off scene, filming his cameo in September 2000. He later stated, "It was just too funny a script to walk past. An absolute hoot!" With his entrance accompanied by a freeze-frame and a snippet of his song "Let's Dance" (1983), biographer Nicholas Pegg describes Bowie's appearance as "willingly sending up the media's image of him as the ultimate arbiter of cool."
"Derelicte" is the name given to the fashion line designed by Mugatu and is a parody of a real fashion line created by John Galliano in 2000. It is described by Mugatu in the film as "a fashion, a way of life inspired by the very homeless, the vagrants, the that make this wonderful city so unique." The fashion line in the film consists of clothing made from everyday objects that could be found on the streets of New York. Galliano used clothing worn by the destitute as an inspiration for a real-life fashion line in 2000.
During the scene in which David Duchovny, as J.P. Prewett, explains the conspiracy to Derek, he finishes answering Derek's original question "Why male models?" only for Stiller, in character, to ask again, "But why male models?" Stiller ad libitum this line because he had forgotten what he was actually supposed to say, but Duchovny allowed it, replying in character, "You serious? I just... I just told you that a moment ago."
The original ending to the film would have entailed Derek getting fatally struck by a train and ascending to heaven, but the idea was scrapped as the producers feared they could not fit it into the film's original budget.
In the Asian release, all references to the country of Malaysia were changed to Micronesia, the subregion which Hansel mistook for Malaysia at one point in the western version.
In the United States, since the film was released on September 28, 2001 (about two weeks after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center), Stiller made the executive decision to digitally remove the twin towers from any background shots that originally contained them. Stiller defended his decision to erase images of New York's World Trade Center Towers from the film, saying he did what he thought was appropriate at the time. The Twin Towers were later restored for the 2016 Blu-ray release.
Reviews appreciated Zoolander as an escapist, upbeat satire on New York fashion. BBC Online film critic Nev Pierce labeled it "sharply observed", specifically with its parody magazine covers and dialogue.
Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter felt the film mostly achieved the difficult goal of being "silly and smart" at the same time. Its humor, however, was generally considered hit-and-miss. Honeycutt wrote it had both predictable "low-grade gags" and "weirdly hip and even witty ones". Pierce thought "the frenetic buffoonery does score several big laughs" but could take time for some viewers to adapt to, such as in the first hour, "where several jokes fail to click and Ferrell's camp villainy simply grates".
Some reviews criticized the incorporation of child labor law themes; Roger Ebert criticized the portrayal as insensitive. McCarthy, while finding the assassin subplot clever, also found it too serious for the comical vibe.
Todd McCarthy of Variety Magazine praised the performances and highlighted its many cameos. He called Stiller's performance "constantly amusing" if overplaying his "look" a little, but stated "the character's intentional superficiality wears a little thin at feature length". The journalist exclaimed Wilson "gets far more comic mileage than one could have imagined possible overlaying ruthless careerism with an affably vacant grunge/Eastern veneer". Pierce wrote how the actors contributed to the film's style; he argued that Wilson's "impeccable timing in the climax elevates the sometimes bizarre material to moments that border comedy genius" and that the use of cameos "lends an air of authenticity to the idiocy".
Although praising the production design, costumes and choice of pop songs, Todd McCarthy felt the film did not have "truly confident visual stylization" to make comic book-esque villains like Mugatu enjoyable, and that long conversations were not fluidly written and edited. He also went after the removal of the Twin Towers as "disruptive" and offending the audience's intelligence.
Roger Ebert added that "to some degree, Zoolander is a victim of bad timing", referencing the film's release two weeks after September 11, 2001 and the presidential assassination plot point which he found to be in bad taste. He found some parts of the film funny and gave it a rating of one star out of four. According to Stiller, years later in private, Ebert admitted that he had changed his mind and now thought that the film was funny and apologized to him for going "overboard".
The film received votes from two critics at the Sight & Sound's poll of the greatest films of all time in 2012.
Notes
An animated film, , was released on Netflix in August 2016.
Censorship
Zoolander was never shown in Malaysia, as the film depicts an attempted assassination of the Malaysian prime minister. Malaysia's censorship board deemed it "definitely unsuitable". The film was also banned in neighboring Singapore due to "controversial elements" according to the country's Board of Film Censors. It was subsequently made available in Singapore in 2006, with an NC-16 rating. In the United States, the film was originally rated R for its sexual content, profanity and drug references, but was later re-rated PG-13 on appeal.
Accusations of plagiarism
Glamorama, a 1998 satirical novel by Bret Easton Ellis, tells the story of a vacuous male model who becomes involved in a plot concocted by international terrorists who recruit from within the fashion industry. In 2005, Ellis stated that he was aware of the similarities between Zoolander and Glamorama and said that he attempted to take legal action. Ellis was later asked about the similarities in a 2009 BBC interview but said that he is unable to discuss the topic due to an out-of-court settlement.
Reception
Box office
Zoolander earned $15.5 million during its opening weekend, ranking in second place behind Don't Say a Word. It grossed $45.2 million in the U.S. and Canada and $15.6 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $60.8 million against a budget of $28 million.
Critical response
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 64% based on 135 reviews, with an average rating of 5.9/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "A wacky satire on the fashion industry, Zoolander is one of those deliberately dumb comedies that can deliver genuine laughs." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 61 out of 100 based on reviews from 31 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C+" on an A+ to F scale.
Analysis
Fashion journalist Hadley Freeman categorized Zoolander as unique to other mainstream fashion films such as Designing Woman (1957), Funny Face (1957) and The Devil Wears Prada (2006); whereas these films usually employ the same critiques of unintelligent models, silly clothing and insipid business practices, Zoolander is much more surreal in how it puts these cliches together, as shown in its premise of male models being hypnotized to kill a prime minister.
Soundtrack
The soundtrack to Zoolander was released on September 25, 2001.
Sequel
In December 2008, Stiller confirmed that he intended to make a sequel to Zoolander, and by January 2011, a script had been completed. Filming commenced at Cinecittà studios in Rome in early 2015, and on March 10, Stiller and Wilson appeared at the Paris Fashion Week in character as Derek Zoolander and Hansel McDonald. Zoolander 2 was released on February 12, 2016. Unlike its predecessor, it received generally negative reviews.
Legacy
In late 2022, the film went viral on the short-form video hosting service, TikTok. The trend used clips of scenes featuring Stiller and Wilson, creating a renewed interest in the movie.
External links
Categories: 2001 Films, 2001 Action Comedy Films, 2000s American Films, 2000s English-language Films, 2000s Satirical Films, American Action Comedy Films, Films Set In New York City, American Satirical Films, Cultural Depictions Of Donald Trump, English-language Action Comedy Films, Films About Assassinations, Films About Fashion In The United States, Films About Mind Control, Films About Mining, Films About Modeling, Films Directed By Ben Stiller, Films With Screenplays By Ben Stiller, Films Involved In Plagiarism Controversies, Films Produced By Ben Stiller, Films Produced By Scott Rudin, Films Scored By David Arnold, Films Set In New Jersey, Films Shot In California, Films Shot In New Jersey, Films Shot In New York City, Films With Screenplays By John Hamburg, Impact Of The September 11 Attacks On Cinema, Paramount Pictures Films, Red Hour Productions Films, Teen Choice Award Winning Films, Village Roadshow Pictures Films
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