Strutting the catwalk to a shower of rotten tomatoes, Robert Altman's notoriously maligned Ready To Wear was attacked for sending up a fashion industry that regularly crosses into self-parody. But Altman's comedy looks like a paragon of Swiftian wit compared to Canadian director Denys Arcand's excruciatingly awful Stardom, which rehashes the same points as part of a wide-ranging assault on obvious media targets. In the film, MTV, Access Hollywood, and Jerry Springer now serve as the sole arbiters of taste, and celebrity worship has become so extreme that the local news cuts away from 400 slain Algerians to cover a supermodel hospitalized with minor injuries. For their 15 minutes of fame, people are treated like Frankenstein monsters, created by a fickle and exploitative media, then cruelly deposited into obscurity and ruin. Through this predictable gauntlet runs Liv Tyler lookalike Jessica Paré, a Quebecois innocent who's discovered at a hockey rink and embarks on a modeling career, attracting the attention of Montreal's hottest fashion photographer (Charles Berling). Soon enough, her visage is plastered all over the city and every aspect of her life becomes grist for prying cameras, including one operated by a documentarian (Robert Lapage) who follows her around. After some struggles to break into the international scene, Paré achieves supermodel status, but the intense scrutiny wreaks havoc on her personal life, leading her into self-destructive relationships with older men, including wealthy restaurateur Dan Aykroyd and U.N. ambassador Frank Langella. Arcand aims for a ground-zero look at the hollow business of manufacturing celebrities, but his fusillade of loud-mouthed reporters, sleazy talk-show hosts, and pretentious scenesters is at least as loud and empty as the world he's satirizing. No doubt he intended to make Paré's behavior frustratingly inscrutable—is she a cipher, a good-hearted naïf, a moody brat, or all three?—but there's little gained but a choppy, frenetic pace and a heroine who's impossible to like. Stardom unfolds like a thesis statement that should be old news to even the least media-savvy viewer.