Amy Schumer’s “I feel Pretty” arrived on the scene, last month! And, there are tons of reviews out there.
Plot: A woman struggling with insecurity wakes from a fall believing she is the most beautiful and capable woman on the planet. Her new confidence empowers her to live fearlessly, but what happens when she realizes her appearance never changed? To be honest, it reads a lot like a reverse “Shallow Hal,” and that movie was a bit of a chauvinistic mess. We saw it and were less than impressed, despite an amazing cast of Schumer, Aidy Bryant, Michelle, Williams, etc. It received two stars on IMDB.com.
From The New York Times
“Amy Schumer puts out so much energy in “I Feel Pretty” that it’s hard not to feel charged up, too. The movie is seriously suboptimal, but she is such a force for good — for comedy, for women — and the laughs land often enough that you can go, if somewhat begrudgingly, with the messy flow. But dear lord she needs to work with better material, with funnier, sharper, far smarter scripts and with directors who can do something, anything, with the camera. There’s more cinematic intelligence in the best bits on her Comedy Central show “Inside Amy Schumer” than in her three starring vehicles.”
“he most radical shot in the new Amy Schumer comedy, I Feel Pretty, is a mid-thirties woman staring at herself. In close-up, the star’s face fills the frame: no glamour lighting, no genetically blessed cheekbones, no modern day digital retouching smoothing out the creases. It’s what most people see when they look in the mirror, yet Hollywood rarely reflects it back unless the female character is a comic punchline hurled at a recoiling Zach Galifianakis.
Schumer’s Renee Bennett, an online service rep for a luxury make-up brand, is fixated on beauty. She’s a true believer who spends hours painting another face over her face. I Feel Pretty isn’t a slob-to-chic makeover movie: From the beginning, her hair is perfectly curled, her Spanx hoisted, her outfits stylishly chosen, her nights spent studying YouTube cosmetics tutorials. There’s a false gag when Renee panics about visiting the corporate office carrying a purse that’s a Bed Bath & Beyond shopping bag – c’mon, she wears heels to send emails in a basement! – which works against Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein’s point that this is a woman doing everything she can to look good.
And it’s still not enough. The problem with being plain is that people won’t tell you, like walking around with spinach tattooed on your teeth. Culturally, we’re supposed to pretend that if we asked a hundred strangers to pick between Schumer and Gigi Hadid, it’d be a toss-up. Quietly, women like Renee know the ugly truth. Evasion is crazy-making, which is why we see New Yorkers treating our heroine normally yet she interprets everything as an insult. Even a crying baby hates her face – extreme paranoia from a woman so insecure, she lies about her shoe size. The movie doesn’t back her up, except to agree that inside her head, things look awful.”
So, basically, Renee gets conked on the head and wakes up believing she’s beautiful. “A Kardashian!” she beams. To us, she looks exactly the same, and the handsome idea is that self-confidence makes her beautiful. The lady nearly wins a bikini contest out of moxie. But the film’s attitude toward her shifts. Now, when Renee struts into a room, we see people shudder. A girl in an elevator is so repulsed by having to share four cubic feet of air with her, she rolls her eyes. Her tepid, but charming first date does a spit-take every time Renee brags about being hot. Beauty makes her ugly, vapid, obnoxious. The movie becomes cruel, spliced with bracingly glorious scenes where Schumer, the opposite of every screenplay girl who’s “beautiful but doesn’t know it,” pronounces herself “perfect.”
Why can’t a movie just be about someone who is plus or curvy or plain or red or blue or one legged, waking up every day and saying they are beautiful? How about a big girl being the lead of a romantic comedy that isn’t about weight? What do you think? Sound off below!
