Pretty thin premise
I FEEL PRETTY
Starring: Amy Schumer, Michelle Williams, Busy Philipps, Rory Scovel, Emily Ratajkowski.
Looks can be deceiving ... and often not that funny WHEN the trailer dropped for I Feel Pretty a few months ago, things got ugly pretty quickly.
Amy Schumer, the star of what most had assumed would be a kind of dopey, harmless comedy, took a lot of the heat.
On social media, you could hear the pitchforks jabbing the air while Schumer was accused of being a fat- shaming, pro-beauty-myth traitor to her gender.
I Feel Pretty is, for the most part, kind of dopey and rather harmless as far as comedies go.
But the problem with the trailer is still there in the fim’s feature-length incarnation.
It is all to do with an ideologically shonky premise, seemingly celebrating the healing power of hotness.
Schumer plays Renee, a woman in her mid-30s carrying around dangerously high levels of low self-esteem until — wait for it — she falls off an exercise bike and hits her head. It triggers a selective form of amnesia that allows Renee to forget all about thinking so little of herself.
Now when she looks in a mirror, she no longer loathes what she sees. Instead, the reflection she cannot stop gazing at is the most irresistible beauty in the whole of Boston.
I Feel Pretty never reaches the state of evil, body-negative denial that the first outcry on social media predicted. More than anything, it is guilty of merely being not all that funny, or properly thought out.