I’m on board with the OP; I saw the trailer last weekend and was appalled. There’s no way around it, the theme of the movie and the source of its humor is “Haw haw! He doesn’t realize he’s dating a gross fat chick!”
But besides that, here’s another way it fails: when we see the row of women at the bar, first as Jack Black sees them (inner beauty) and then as everyone else sees them (physical beauty), all of the “pretty” women become “ugly” and vice-versa.
As if to say that women with “inner beauty” cannot have “outer beauty,” and the reverse.
The Farrelly Brothers have done this. The chief target of the jokes in “Kingpin” is a man who has lost one of his hands and had it replaced with a rubber hand.
Corsets allowed a woman to conform to a particular shape, but that shape wasn’t necessarily Twiggy. Ever hear of a bustle? It was used to make the derriere look bigger.
Good point. With the notable exception of Jennifer Lopez, prominent hips and backside are out of fashion. The ideal shape for the time seemed to be an exaggerated hourglass shape: large bosom, tiny waist, broad hips. Large breasts and a tiny waist seem to be the Hollywood ideal nowdays, which is part of the problem, as these two traits don’t often occur together naturally.
Well I like big heavy girls,
good thing there is no law
against that.
My buddies don’t see anything
wrong with that, only one
“friend” I lost, but he was
not really a friend anyway
was he, nope just a stupid old
poopyhole.
Just for the record, this is not true – neither in the movie nor in the scene you saw in the trailer.
While “beautiful” is, indeed, always portrayed as slender in Shallow Hal, “ugly” is not always portrayed as fat. In the scene you described, of the three “ugly” women the camera panned back to, only the first was overweight. The other two were thin, but “ugly” for other reasons.
And incidentally, the “pan back” which showed these 3 women as “ugly” was intended to be the superficial real world portrayal of what these 3 women actually looked like, not what they looked like to Hal’s magical “inner beauty” vision. It was the first shot of these 3 women, as gorgeous supermodels, that was supposed to be Hal’s perception of them (they had oodles of Inner Beauty, you see).
In fact, only one woman in the entire movie was portrayed as having “inner ugliness,” and that was the bitchy nurse Tanya Peeler. And I should menthion, her inner ugliness was portrayed as an old, dried-up, scrawny woman.