Another thing the movie seemed to imply was that all “ugly” women are so starved for affection that they will gladly go out with Jack Black. In real life, a randomly-chosen “ugly” woman is just as likely to be attracted to (or repulsed by) a given guy as is a randomly-chosen pretty woman is. I mean, the pretty woman might have a slightly lower chance of being available (although most of the “less attractive” women I’ve known seemed to have no trouble finding dates), but her chances of being attracted to him are exactly the same. If anything, shyness will kill a woman’s dating chances far more effectively than being “bad looking” will.
It does hurt the premise that Shallow Hal himself is so extremely undesirable. Maybe that’s because I’ve seen him playing a drunken slacker loser in a few movies, or maybe he really is that repulsive–I can’t tell anymore.
I watched the little making-of show on comedy central, in which one of the makers says “He’s trying to date 11’s, and he’s, like, a 5.” A five!? He’s a two AT MOST.
However bad the movie might be, the premise is very interesting.
When the two “shallow” guys are played by Jack Black and Jason Alexander, the entire premise is undermined. These two guys are overweight and unattractive themselves. The kind of superfcially beautiful women they lust ever would never give them the time of day! For guys as unattractive as them, shallowness would carry its own punishment: they’d NEVER get dates, they’d NEVER score, and they’d be doomed to life alone.
In short, these guys wouldn’t NEED comeuppance! They’re already losers!
The joke would have worked a lot better if their roles had gone to conventionally handsome guys.
The advertising and the movie are two different things. The only person who views the hypnosis as a bad thing is Jason Alexander, and his perspective is somewhat suspect from the beginning. Even he comes around at the end.
You asked. You’re wrong. The premise is that Has has been pschologically traumatised by his drug addled, dying father as a boy, which creates the obsession we see in the adult Hal. Then when Hal sees someone’s inner beauty in a physical way, it meets the stereotype you describe. The story is told from his POV. He sees what he wants to see, and we see what he sees.
And it isn’t just about how Hal judges people based on looks. Everyone in this movie is guilty of judging based on looks at one time or another. Hal’s next door neighbor (Brooke Burke) rejects him partly based on his looks. Later, when she realizes he’s a nice guy, she’s willing to give him a second chance. Jason Alexander rejects a strikingly beautiful young woman who has tickets to a one-time-only Beatles reunion concert with Eric Clapton sitting in for John, solely because she has a long second toe. Rosemary herself rejected her only serious boyfriend based on looks–she has a speech the begins “he’s a nice guy, but . . .” following which she goes to describe his physical flaws in great detail, but never lists one personality flaw.
And it isn’t just a simplistic fat=ugly stereotype. There is a host of people whose inner beauty / ugliness we see. Some of the women are fat, others skinny, buck-toothed, etc. Of the two guys who get magic makeovers one’s a big guy, the other skinny. I find it interesting that inner ugliness is never portrayed as fat.
Except for his obsession with beautiful women, he’s presented as a pretty nice guy, and more than a little charming with both of the girls we see him with and a group of hospitalized children. Once the hypnosis is lifted, and he is able to see them physically, he still treats the people he met before with respect and dignity.
I do find it interesting, though, that in a thread criticising a movie about judging based on looks, so many people find it acceptable to take shots at Black and Alexander.
I’m paraphrasing here, but Anthony Robbins says, as best I can remember, “From now on, whenever you meet someone, you’ll see their true selves.” He had already met Alexander, his next door neighbor (Brooke Burke), and his boss, so the magic wouldn’t have worked on them. Had it, his boss, whose a decent fellow, would likely have appeared more like Mel Gibson.
Last hijack:
Carnie Wilson is the daughter of Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. That was an OLD picture. She recently lost a ton of weight and looks more like Kate Winslet now. Not that that matters.
Well, Jason Alexander could use a little more sod on the fairway. <rimshot>
But seriously, folks …
I love this movie. I mean, I love it. I wanna marry it. My only major disappointment was that when they finally showed “fat Rosemary” in all her glory, it was not the real body-double for Gwyneth Paltrow, but Gwyneth Paltrow herself in a fat-woman suit. But other than that, and Rosemary’s description of the “kissing game” with those kids which makes me really squeamish, I love this movie.
You see, on those extremely rare occasions when I have somehow managed to get a girlfriend, there are a whole slew of emotions I feel at first, and not all of them are positive emotions. There is anxiety (“Oh God, I’m nervous!”). There is unsureness (“Is she really what I want?”). There is worry (“Am I going to screw it up again?”). Of course, there’s giddiness and relief and excitement and other positive emotions, too, but it’s only with the mix of positive and negative emotions that it feels real. Once in my life, thanks to an, um, lap dance I got in Tijuana, I managed to “trick” myself into having all these feelings at once again. It was almost like getting a new, real, honest-to-goodness girlfriend. The feelings were gone by morning, but for a brief time, it was almost as good as the real thing.
And in that scene where Rosemary told Hal that she felt uncomfortable about him telling her that she was beautiful when she knew she wasn’t, I had the very same panoply of feelings go through me again!! It was like really being there, on a real date, with a real woman who expressed a real concern because she really wanted to keep things going. And more importantly, later, as the movie wore on, it became obvious that … that … that snifshe really cared for him!!SOB! It feels like an eternity since anyone felt that way for me, and I needed to see it again, if only vicariously through a dumb old supernatural romantic-comedy movie.
Oh, and Guin – has Carnie also lost that ski-jump upward curve at the end of her hair?
I have to say that I have always thought of Tony Robbins as a real cheese dog. But I thought he was good in this movie. I mean, big stretch and all, playing himself, but he was genuine and his reactions to the other actors seemed “right.”
It helps that he got the hip facial hair and haircut. Last time I saw him he had a real “do.”
Number Six, your observation was very apt. Rating Jack Black as a five or a two? There goes the point.
Why is it that every character in a romantic comedy is single? I mean, the exchange at the very end of Shallow Hal went something like this:
JASON ALEXANDER: Do you like puppy dogs?
WOMAN: Yeah! Anything to do with dogs and I just melt.
JASON ALEXANDER: Wanna go out back and hump like rabbits?
WOMAN: Okay!
… whereas in real life, the conversation would probably go more like this:
JASON ALEXANDER: Do you like puppy dogs?
WOMAN: Yeah! My husband and I have three dogs.
JASON ALEXANDER: Husband? D’OH!
(Or at least, that’s what always seems to happen when I go after a woman.)
And Tony Robbins is a cheese dog. With banana hands.
In the film, Hal isn’t rejected by the beautiful women simply because of his appearance, a lot has to do with how he obviously goes after women solely because of their appearance, which is about his only serious character flaw. Take the case of his hot neighbor. She’s not portrayed as a bad person, she’s actually fairly considerate, she turns down Hal’s advances fairly politely until he pushes the issue. She just wasn’t attracted to him (though she did go out with him once) and she explains later she was put off of him because he seemed so shallow (because he chose women solely based on their looks). When Hal is hypnotized, he still sees her as beautiful, it’s just that he’s in love with someone else. When his neighbor sees his post-hypnosis behavior and decides she was wrong about him being shallow, she really likes him and actively pursues him. This shows that if it wasn’t for his fixation on physical beauty some beautiful women would be attracted to him because of his otherwise nice personality - his lack of dates was not so much because he aimed too high, but because his character flaw made him unattractive to women who were all too used to being hit on by guys simply because of their looks.
When I (and others pointed out that Jack Black and Jason Alexander are both overweight, and that neither is handsome, my point was not to insult those men. Heck, I’m not exactly stunning myself.
No, the point is, in the real world, guys who look like Black or Alexander (or Astorian, for that matter) don’t have the luxury of blowing off women who aren’t the epitome of ideal beauty!
A guy who’s either extremely rich or extremely handsome can treat women like dirt an get away with it. But a guy like George Costanza can’t- and if he IS shallow enough to demand physical perfection, he’s destined to end up a VERY lonely bachelor.
I disagree, I’ve known many guys far more unattractive than Jason Alexander or Jack Black who had NO problem getting very attractive women. It’s all about confidence and knowing what to say. I’d say that there are just as many attractive women who place personality over looks as there are unattractive women who do so (I’ve also known ugly girls who were very picky about how their men appeared).
FTR, Carnie Wilson didn’t simply “lose a lot of weight.” She had a gastric bypass surgery to reduce the size of her stomach. Her previous weight – more than 300 pounds – was becoming life-threatening, and the surgery was about the only chance she had of being able to lose weight and survive.
This page shows before and after pictures of Carnie. I thought she was an attractive woman before, and I think she’s attractive now. Hell, if Wilson Phillips got back together, they’d be the most attractive group in music, IMO.
I started to form a whole slew of opinions about this film, then I realized I was looking for sensitivity and carefully thought out social commentary from the guys who made Dumb and Dumber.
Acutally, everybody Hal met prior to being stuck in the elevator with Tony Robbins looks exactly the same to Hal. Tony Robbins only said that from then on, when he meets someone new, Hal will only see their Inner Beauty[TM].
(And I can’t believe I mis-typed “spoilers” in the topic line of this thread! D’OH!)
Hrm … some of those “before” pictures look like they’ve been deliberately stretched in Photoshop, to make her look fatter than she actually was. (Particularly the picture on the 2nd page of Carnie in a red blazer. It looks like someone took a pile-driver to the top of her head.)
Ah, that explains a lot…well, the neighbor is still presented as a pretty nice person and she changes her mind about Hal after thinking he wasn’t fixated on looks, so I think the point still stands.
Yeah, and even during Hal’s hypnosis, the guy with spina bifida who walks on all fours still looks like Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper.
It seems as though, in this movie, “inner beauty” always equates with doing volunteer work.
The “herd of stampeding buffallo” (as Jason Alexander called them) who looked like “hotties” to Hal did volunteer work helping blind people. The “Pretty Boy” who in reality looked dorky and had psoriasis, along with his svelte-in-Hal’s-eyes-but-chunky-in-real-life Hawaiian compatriot, were both in the Peace Corps. And Rosemary, of course, was both in the Peace Corps and volunteering down at the pediatric burn ward.
Not quite all. The woman he shares a cab with is visiting a sick grandmother. Mrs. Shanahan is quite a looker through inner-vision. We don’t know about the trio he dances with. The kids in the hospital, particularly Cadence (what a cool name–it’s on the list) are unlikely to be volunteers. But I get your point.
