Since she's currently riding a healthy wave of career resurgence, it's easy to forget that Mariah almost lost it all on Glitter, the 2001 kinda-sorta biopic that all but stripped her of her throne as the queen of pop-funk-lite-R&B.

Never mind that Ms. Carey was then and is now is the best-selling female solo artist of all time; she got kinda loopy on TRL and starred in a crappy movie about disco, and that was all it took for darn near everybody to write her off For shame, America.

If you haven't seen Glitter, you probably know it best as "the second worst movie of all time, behind Gigli." But it, much like Gigli, is not so much a poor film as a victim of circumstance. We were sick of hearing about Ben and Jen, so we, en masse, refused to see their movie, a film objectively superior to both Enough and Reindeer Games.

With Glitter, though, we'd just been through the greatest national tragedy since slavery 10 days before its September 2001 debut, and I guess we just didn't feel much like partying.

And that's what Glitter is, more than anything: a big fat party. Sure, we meet our hero Billie as she's pulled from the arms of her drug-addled, torch-singing mother, but we quickly learn her time in the orphanage wasn't for naught; it's there that Billie meets Louise and Roxanne, her soon-to-be BFFs, and the party really gets moving. Flash forward an indeterminate number of years, and we find Billie and the girls singing backup for the white-hot, talent-free disco diva Sylk. Sylk sucks, but Billie's got more than a bit of her mama in her, and through a twist of fate and some studio magic, she ends up crooning Sylk's brand new hit Milli Vanilli style.

It is here that we meet one of the great characters in our modern culture, Young Master Julian "Dice" Black. Dice is a DJ, an up-and-coming record producer and, most of all, a bottomless font of cliché. It is Dice, I suspect, with whom most people take such offense when they think of Glitter, although I find his rat-like, b-boy style to comprise perhaps the most refreshingly ludicrous personage in film, rivaled only by Jon Voight's ragin' Cajun in Anaconda. Dice has an ear for Billie's talent and buys her, her friends and Sylk from a very menacing, note-perfect Terrence Howard. Dice drops Sylk like a bad habit, puts the beauteous Billie behind the mic, and magic -- however predictably -- happens. Oh yeah, and they fall in love, too.

Your standard rags-to-riches story? Dang right it is! You don't give Mariah My Left Foot her first time out (although I'd pay to see that); you Mad Libs a narrative and hope for the best. Billie blows up quick, and Dice gets jealous, mean and drunk, so they part ways. But with a love so strong as to transcend the boundaries of space and time, they end up writing the exact same song at the exact same moment, literally just blocks apart. This scene conjures up that feeling where your heart is warmed and your gag reflex is activated. No, I don't mean heartburn.

I'll go to my grave mumbling that Glitter's got an unwarranted bad rap in the annals of movie history.

Mariah's truly not a bad actress; she's painfully soft-spoken, perhaps, but never awkward or overzealous like, oh, Ashanti when she reads the Bard.

Dice is awful, but fun to watch, and Terrence Howard is the man, giving a sinister preview of his star-making turn as Hustle and Flow's DJay. The production values are out of sight, triple-washing the grimy last days of disco into a Pleasure Island-style funfest.

And the music is jammin'; "All My Life" could've been a hit in 1981, and it sure as heck should've been two decades on, and "Didn't Mean to Turn You On" is fantastic, too, if entirely cribbed from Tom Tom Club's "Genius of Love."

It ain't Casablanca, but for an easy-to-swallow blast of pure cinematic bliss, Glitter's got a leg up on a lot of other crap.