Gia

Angelina Jolie is a natural fit to play Gia Carangi.

Both were rebellious growing up. Gia was a punk teenager in Philadelphia who headed off to New York in the late 1970s and soon became a top fashion model under agent Wilhelmina Cooper (Faye Dunaway.)

Success was swift and in the heady days of the early 1980s. She became a supermodel, was openly lesbian/bisexual, did lots of drugs. Unfortunately she was one of the first famous women to die of Aids in 1986.

Co-writer and director Michael Cristofer gives this movie a docudrama approach. It has talking heads discussing aspects of Gia's life.

Gia was undoubtedly a brash woman, she had relationship issues with a girlfriend and a complex relationship with her mother.

Despite being artily shot, some nudity from Ms Jolie. It comes across as another rise and fall true life movie.

At times it just felt skin deep and a bit camp. Nothing about the pressures of the fashion industry where drug use is regarded as common.

The taboo aspects of Aids in the 1980s is dealt with. It should had been a movie that amounted to something more. Jolie certainly showed why she was regarded as a rising star.

Angelina Jolie has slogged her way through so much mediocre material, I can't even begin to understand how she has kept her love for acting. But it's undeniable... her talent and spirit are bottomless, and she could be a superstar if given the right movie role. 'Foxfire' wasn't it. 'Hackers' was a mess. And 'Gia' is well-intentioned exploitation at best. (I love sex scenes between women as much as the next guy, but the movie goes a little overboard..... there's a fine line between character growth and the Spice Channel, apparently.) A decent biography, I guess, and Jolie does as much as possible with the limited script. But if there's any justice in this world, Jolie will be in the Hollywood elite soon, rather than toiling away on hedonistic HBO works.

This movie turned out to be a very unexpected favorite of mine. Angelina Jolie stars as the late Gia Marie Carangi, an Italian American woman who rose from a humble Philidephian beginning to worldwide fame as the first known "supermodel", and whose short-lived career spanned from the late seventies to the early to mid eighties. Jolie is super-impressive as she portrays the highs and lows of Gia's fame: strutting through a crowd of admirers, the look on her face saying, "I'm GIA, and you're nobody!"; endulging in glamour drug of the moment, cocaine; fiercely proclaiming her love for Linda (Elizabeth Mitchell), right in front of Linda's boyfriend; tearfully begging her visiting mother (Mercedes Ruehl) to stay with her, then hurling obscenities at her while throwing her baggage out of the apartment; and quietly and gracefully accepting the most tragic news about her health, just as she's finally getting her life on track. This movie deals very frankly with Gia's sexuality and there is some nudity and scenes of sexuality, but looking past the sex and the drugs and the tough exterior she displayed (especially when someone took her knife away from her), you see a very lost, fragile person. Gia is almost childlike in her disillusionment about the fashion industry, and you feel it in the way she fantasizes about a "normal" life with children, the way she feels like people regard her as a "piece of meat" with no brains, and the way she is so truly hurt by a fellow model calling her hateful names in a jealous rage. I think this movie is something that should be seen by people of all ages, regardless of its sexual content, because it carries a strong anti-drug message as well as a touching story we can all identify with even if a lot of us are not blessed with the kind of glorious physical beauty Gia was blessed with.

I was kinda surprised how good and interesting this movie turned out to be.

The first thing that quite blew my mind was Jolie's performance. Maybe because i only associate her with cheesy flat actions or Lara Croft , which are not ... that good movies, but because of that i was surprised of how good her acting here is. From the crazy rebel-like start, to the mental unstable behaviour that pops up later on... It's a biopic movie, and afaik some things are not exactly true, it seems to be true to the spirit of the events. They managed to deliver the feeling at fullest.

The only negative i can say about this movie is the cinematography. Most of the times the cinematography is ok or even good. It's quite chaotic at times, but that actually fits the scenes, mood and topic perfectly. Even the weird angles are perfectly fine here. Buuuuuut the ugly repetitive shots (repetitive either with slightly altered camera angle, or slightly altered movements) are supid. I hate when they use this "trick" , it never looks good. They just stay cheap. Luckily - only 2-3 scenes have that, so it's not a big deal.

Good movie, good but tragic story, and the best Jolie performance i have seen. Which gives me the though of checking out other movies with her.

This movie is your typical "How deviant sex and drugs ruined a successful person's life" films we typically get out of television (shades of the Hayes office!). However, Angelina manages to do what many actors fail to do: take a basically unsympathetic character and make you feel sorry for her. I think the role of Mercedes Rhuel has also not been emphasized enough. Throughout the entire film she presented a highly sympathetic, charismatic persona as the mother who could not quick kick her gosling out of the nest. Gia was not a product of the times--she and others like her were the times.