Anyway, in case you missed it in my previous writer's note, I did watch a lot of recent movies as of late, and I wanted to review those while they were still fresh in my mind.
I hope you'll indulge me for the time being, and we'll get back to the older stuff soon enough, as I know that gets more hits from you all than my newer reviews. But, you know, I watch other stuff, too! 😏
This was a tricky one to approach reviewing, given the current political climate out there. Be too nice, and you risk people bitching that you're playing it too liberal, and be too mean and people accuse you of being misogynistic or what have you. So, much like the movie itself, I opted for something more middle of the road.
I actually watched this with my mom, who is NOT, I might add, a big Amy Schumer fan. She thinks Schumer is too crass and trashy, and doesn't find her funny at all- a sentiment shared by more than a few people out there, I imagine.
I like Schumer well enough. I was watching when she did that Last Comic Standing show and followed her to her own show, the Peabody-winning Inside Amy Schumer, which featured trenchant, often-surprisingly poignant comedy that wasn't afraid to be confrontational or political. (The show's female gamer sketch was easily one of the best things I've seen of its kind that wasn't on SNL.)
I've seen several of her stand-up shows, read her book, and watched all of her major movies to date, including Trainwreck and Snatched, both of which I had mixed feelings about. (To offer up a variant viewpoint, my mom hated the former, and tolerated the latter, mostly because of Goldie Hawn, who is more her type of humor.)
So, while male, I'm kind of Schumer's target audience, in that I like edgier, confrontational humor more often than not. I'm not as thin-skinned as some liberals, nor as humorless as most conservatives. I'm basically right in the middle, but left-leaning- a centrist, I suppose you'd call it.
To put it in more socio-political terms, I get why Al Franken was asked to step down, but kind of wished he hadn't, as he was doing good work in his former capacity. What he did wasn't great, but was it a capital crime? Debatable. Trump does worse when he opens his mouth at any given time.
Likewise, I was appalled by what James Gunn said in those past, off-color tweets, but I hate that he won't be doing the next Guardians of the Galaxy, as I really enjoyed them. I get why he was fired, and his "jokes" weren't funny- after all, he's not really a comedian, he's a filmmaker- but it's not like he actually IS a pedo or rapist or whatever. He just made bad jokes about it.
Not great, to be sure, but should he be ostracized from the industry for it? I don't think so. Losing a cushy job working for Disney is bad enough, I think. It's a slap on the wrist and he'll recover. He should be allowed to come back, after a little soul-searching. Lest we forget, those tweets are a good decade old. He should have known better...but I digress.
Amy Schumer has made her fair share of provocative jokes over the years, and she might not be able to get away with it as much these days. Hence the "softening" of her image. Trainwreck tweaked it just enough to fit it into the oft-stifling confines of a rom-com, albeit a left-of-center, edgy rom-com. Snatched added Goldie to help Schumer bridge the generational gap.
Now, with I Feel Pretty, we come full circle. This film is Schumer scrubbed clean for the masses. It's not bad, per se, but it's not exactly edgy, either. Much like myself, it's more middle of the road, except even as a bit of a centrist, I kind of prefer my comedy more on the edgy side. If anything, I think conservatives are bigger snowflakes than liberals will ever be- in that they can't take a joke to save their lives. I can.
I Feel Pretty plays it safe- too safe- for my tastes. It also tries too hard to have its cake and eat it, too. Here's the premise: a "normal" woman falls off her SoulCycle in aerobics class and hits her head. When she comes to, she thinks she's hot- as in breathtakingly beautiful- which, on some level, she knows is magical thinking, but she goes all in on it. If you can dream it, you can be it. (Just in case you didn’t get it, the film hits you over the head with it with a clip of Big to drive it home.)
As such, she starts acting differently, the way she thinks hot people go through life- with everyone bending over backwards to please them. She owns it, in other words. The "joke" is that she's not hot- she's just a "normal" girl, and most of the people she interacts with act accordingly to this- like, "Who does this chick think she is?"
Somewhere along the way, her attitude manages to both affect her life positively: she gets her dream job, lands an adoring, down-to-earth boyfriend- and negatively: her friends don't know what to make of the "new" her and distance themselves from her, a hunky model-type puts the moves on her, endangering her relationship with the nice guy.
By the end of the film- mild spoiler that probably won't surprise anyone who's seen a single film like this- she comes to realize that beauty was in her all along, and all she really needed was to believe in herself. You know the drill.
In a way, the problem with this approach can be best expressed in my mom's reaction to it. All through the movie she kept saying, in variations of the same types of statements, in reaction to Schumer's appearance: "But she's not really overweight. She's not ugly. She's just a normal girl." Exactly.
Schumer is often intentionally slovenly- it's part of her shtick. She's not afraid to be "ugly" for a part, but even at her worst, it's still kind of an in-joke, with the joke being that she's not that bad, really. Sure, put her next to an Emily Ratajkowski or a Michelle Williams, and she looks comparatively troll-ish, but those girls are a model and just plain beautiful, respectively.
Schumer once joked of her friendship with Jennifer Lawrence, that when they went out, they looked like a living "before and after" photograph, and it's a funny joke because, on a certain level, it's true. All of us are just a few too many hamburgers or milkshakes or whatever away from being just a little too overweight for our own good. It happens. Schumer just looks like someone who enjoys a good meal instead of starving herself all the time. You could do a lot worse.
Also, having dated girls that do starve themselves all the time, I can tell you from experience- they aren't a lot of fun to be around most of the time. In my case, they were dancers who smoked a lot and ate many, many salads. They were not happy people and often a bit of a chore to date. Hot, yes- fun, not so much.
Not saying that's true of all beautiful women, certainly- there are those rare unicorns that eat what they want and still look fabulous and are actually happy, even though a lot of people actively hate them; but good luck trying to land one of those girls.
I'm the first to admit men have it a lot easier. We can generally eat what we want, and with at least a modicum of exercise, stay in decent shape- good enough to date, at least. Most girls don't mind a man with a few extra pounds. Granted, things have changed a little- some women want a six-pack, admittedly, and I don't mean of beer, lol.
But I don't tend to date those kinds of women, so I'm good. Or, at the very least, I stopped trying to date those sorts of women, because it was too much to deal with. I refuse to be made as miserable as the person I'm dating, just because she's hot. Been there, done that, hard pass. Take me as I am or don't take me at all. (Put another way, to quote a famous movie: I'm too old for this shit.)
But I'll do the same for you. For, you see, I don't mind a few extra pounds myself. Most men don't mind a few curves, contrary to what a lot of women seem to think. Granted, we've come a long way. Nowadays, women are actually having plastic surgery to give themselves big asses. That's progress... I guess?
I Feel Pretty is at its best when it leans in to Schumer being Schumer, which is to say, the acting equivalent of dancing like no one's watching. When she competes in a bikini contest with a bunch of scantily-clad hotties and goes for broke, pouring water on herself and whipping around like a chick auditioning for a Kid Rock video, it's hilarious.
But whenever she has to kowtow to rom-com clichés, the film stops dead in its tracks. It's like Schumer's one of those floppy-armed, floppy-bodied inflatable creatures at the local used car lot that was suddenly deflated. Factor in the dreaded post-Apatow, bloated running-time effect of a comedy that clocks in at just under two hours, and that becomes a problem.
If the film were a good twenty minutes shorter and cut out the extra flab, as it were, it would have been that much more effective. After all, it's not as if the story being told here is anything radical. Like I said, the basic moral of the story is that beauty is only skin deep and often in the eye of the beholder. We don't need a two-hour movie to impart that known wisdom.
What we do need is a good laugh, especially these days. And I Am Pretty provides it to a decent degree, but oddly, often at the expense of its star, which is to say, the supporting cast is just as amusing, if not more so at times.
For instance, Schumer's character's love interest, played by Rory Scovel, has an easy-going charm that goes a long way. He's not often lol funny, but he's likable and amusing in an endearing way, and a lot of it is pure reaction to Schumer's over-the-top antics, which says a lot about him. In other words, he doesn't have to work so hard for you to like him.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have Michelle Williams, doing her best send-up of a combination of GOOP-era Gwyenth Paltrow and one of those annoying baby-voiced people famous for being famous, i.e. the Kardashians. She's just this side of intolerable, which is to say, she totally nails it. Listening to her talk is like listening to nails on a chalkboard, and in this rare case, I mean that as a compliment.
Williams' IRL bestie Busy Philipps (they were both on Dawson's Creek together) and Aidy Bryant do the best friend thing to Schumer's character, with limited success, simply because the characters are under-written. But then, you could say that about the whole movie, which is odd, since, in many ways, it's actually OVER-written, and not just because it's entirely too long.
Another thing you might ask yourself is: doesn't this movie sort of shoot itself in the foot, in that its premise inherently implies that only hot people truly have it easy? Well, it ret-cons some of that at the last minute, by way of Ratajkowski's character (with a name like that, she almost HAS to be a supermodel, am I right?).
Out of nowhere, there's a scene in which R's character bursts out crying at the place she and Schumer's character work out. (The two are pseudo-friends from interacting in the locker room/bathroom.) She tells Schumer she's just been dumped, and Schumer is incredulous. "Someone dumped you?"
The idea is that, you know, hot people have feelings, too, and yes, they even have a hard time in life sometimes. Duh. By tossing that in at the last minute- Williams has a similar type scene as well- it's kind of condescending, as if to say, okay, we acknowledged THAT, can we move on now? A more well-rounded movie would have incorporated that sort of thing much earlier on.
Of course, the film is written and directed by stalwart rom-com purveyors Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein, who also inflicted us with the likes of He's Just Not That Into You and Valentine's Day, so I guess if you like those movies, you'll like this.
They did at least attempt something novel with How to Be Single, which chronicled a woman's non-romantic life, essentially beginning where most of these movies end, with a happily-ever-after, but one that actually didn't end well, leading to a period of the woman "finding" herself, a la Eat Pray Love, only as more of a rom-com. Unfortunately, that woman was Dakota Johnson, so... yeah, the less said about that, the better.
However, the pair also did Never Been Kissed, which I did enjoy, and this film recaptures some of that mojo, which was only seen in the fringes of HTBS, with the supporting cast. As with NBK's Drew Barrymore, here we also have a likable, relatable actress front and center, with a solid enough premise that could have been an incisive portrait of modern beauty and what that means.
Alas, in trying too hard to iron out the messy edges of Schumer's persona, the movie basically de-fangs her for the most part, and that's the last thing you want with a comedian like Schumer. It was disheartening enough to seen it happen to a certain degree in Trainwreck and Snatched, but it's even more pronounced here.
Don't get me wrong, I Feel Pretty has its moments- I just wish there were more of them, and at nearly two hours long, I think I had every right to expect them. After all, if you're going to run long, at least justify it. This film doesn't, and as a direct result, it falls flat more often than it should. On the other hand, my mom liked it just fine, so there's that.
Check it out, I guess- but lower your expectations if you're a Schumer fan, and expect typical rom-com shenanigans if you're not. 😐
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