Director: P. J. Hogan
Actors I know in it: Isla Fisher
Rating: Four stars
The reason it did not get five stars is because the film is so worldly and unbelievably goofy. It's meant to be fun and funny. But in real life, if someone is that in debt, it is neither fun nor funny. And nobody is that laissez-faire about life. Well, at least not me. She just hides in the clothes rack and steals her letter back? Come on, she could probably be arrested for that. But nothing bad happens in happy, feel-good chick-flicks. At least there's no bad scenes that I can remember. I only watched it out of the corner of my eye, since I had already seen it on an airplane before.
Oddly, this movie seems to promote shopaholic-ism. At least in me. It makes me want to put on a fancy outfit and go shopping.
A big inconsistency for me was how the best friend is supposed to help the main girl out with her outfits and style, but then she has the worst style ever in her own bride's maid's dresses. Yeah...sure...
Another thing, if you were an alien and this was the one film you had to inform you about the ways of humankind, the message you'd get is that everybody's lives revolve around beauty and fashion. It was a huge let down for me when it turns out the guy is into that world, too. The only non-NY-glitzy-pretty people are the parents, and the film mostly mocks their lifestyle. This one-dimensional attitude about beauty that all the characters share leaves you to wonder how long after the end of the film will the main girl go back to her credit-racking ways.
But it's a clean, fun, feel-good chick flick. I promised never to make my husband endure it, but I will probably seek it out to watch again in a few years. Makes me want to read the series, actually.
The series kind of sucks. If you read the first book, you really don't need to read the rest of the books because they all follow the same sort of plot: She wants to buy stuff, she rationalizes her purchases and spends too much, she avoids thinking about her debt by shopping more, she gets into deep trouble and almost loses her boyfriend, and then she finds a miraculous way out of it.
ReplyDeleteI found them very anxiety provoking to read, since she kept being so stupid (not just with money, but socially too). I kept thinking "You MORON!!" but at the same time I worried about how she was going to get herself out of the messes she made. But not in an excited, omg-what's-gonna-happen-next way, but an irritated, nobody-is-this-stupid-and-she-is-in-so-much-trouble-that-I-don't-want-to-even-finish-reading-this-book way. Mehn. You should at least start the first one and see what you think, if you have the time and inclination. Definitely get a library copy, not a store bought one. I doubt you'll want to own it.