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Canberra Today 22°/27° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Review / ‘I Feel Pretty’ (M) ** and a half

THIS one-joke movie is about a bigly-built woman convinced, after an accidental knock on the head, that she has suddenly become pretty.

Writers/directors Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein may well have directed the continuity girl to check that, in every shot, Amy Schumer was wearing the neck-chain carrying the name Renee without which filmgoers might forget the name of the character she’s playing.

It’s one of those movies.

Schumer belongs to that small select group of actresses such as Rebel Wilson and Melissa McCarthy who use generous body measurements to make us laugh at their pratfalls.

Kohn and Silverstein use that asset to contrast with the reed-slim young women who swan about in the Fifth Avenue office of Lily LeClair cosmetics where Renee works hard in her new job as receptionist. There, for some reason, she catches the eye of Lily’s (Lauren Hutton) grandson Grant (Tom Hopper). She gets offside with Grant’s sister Avery (Michelle Williams trying to reprise Marilyn Monroe but not exactly succeeding). Ethan (Rory Scovel) whom Renee met by chance is a better prospect than Grant.

“I Feel Pretty” is a chick-flick with a message. There are industries out there eager to drain the wallets of the myriad young women who yearn to look pretty but on their best days will probably never look more than merely pleasant.

Kohn and Silverstein persist in inflicting that unhappy reality right down to the last reel when, addressing the launch of a new, low-priced LeClair label, Renee, her self-awareness at last restored, declares every woman’s right to look as good as she is, whichever product she uses to improve whatever cards nature has dealt her. But spending 110 minutes waiting for that inevitability is a bit tedious. It also offers crumbs of wisdom to men who might otherwise judge books by their covers, so to speak.

At Dendy, Capitol 6 and Hoyts

 

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Dougal Macdonald

Dougal Macdonald

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