Movie Review I Feel Pretty

I Feel Pretty (2018) 

Directed by Abby Cohn, Marc Silverstein

Written by Abby Kohn, Marc Silverstein

Starring Amy Schumer, Rory Scovell, Michelle Williams

Release Date April 20th, 2018

Published July 17th, 2018

I Feel Pretty stars Amy Schumer as Renee Bennett, an attractive and funny woman who doesn’t find herself attractive. Renee’s low self esteem has hindered both her personal and professional life where she works for a famed makeup company but works in the I.T department in a basement office, well away from the glamor and fashion that the company is known for. Though she longs to be in the big office, she lacks the confidence to go for what she wants.

Things change when Renee takes a spin class and proceeds to tumble off of her bike. Having hit her head hard, Renee’s concussion changes her life and personality. Suddenly, post head injury, Renee is super-confident and believes she is the best looking woman in any room she’s in. This causes a rift with her friends, Aidy Bryant and Busy Phillips, but it does help her climb the corporate ladder as she lands a gig working in the big building at the makeup company owned by Avery LeClaire (Michelle Williams) and her grandmother Lily (Lauren Hutton).

Renee’s personal life also takes a positive turn as her confidence attracts a boyfriend, Ethan (Rory Scovell) and the attention of Avery’s stunningly handsome, playboy brother Grant (Tom Hopper). Ethan is a perfectly down to earth guy while Grant is a dreamboat and when Renee finds herself the object of both of their affections, even her newfound confidence can’t contain her nervous excitement.

I Feel Pretty requires a bit of unpacking in your emotional response to it. For me, I’ve always found Amy Schumer attractive, dating back to before her popular Comedy Central series, Inside Amy Schumer, to her time as a stand-up comic on the rise. It was hard to accept the gags that intended to show Renee as being unattractive as I did find her attractive. The key however, is to remember that this is Renee’s perspective of herself and not an objective take.

Here, the inexperience of the writing and directing team of Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein shines through. A more experienced filmmaker would have found a way to let audiences in on the idea that we are seeing the movie not from our objective position but completely from Renee’s subjective perspective, how she sees the world and assumes the world sees her. From that perspective the story of I Feel Pretty makes more sense.

It’s not that the direction failed to communicate the perspective, it’s rather that it was clumsy in communicating that idea and thus it’s easy to misunderstand the story as an objective idea of how the world sees Renee. If taken the wrong way, it can seem as if Renee is the butt of all of the jokes, as if the movie is making fun of her for seeing herself as attractive. Once you look at it subjectively and recognize that the film is entirely Renee’s unreliable, biased perspective, it makes the film easier to understand and enjoy.

Rory Scovell, in his first leading man role is quite good at reacting to Schumer’s bawdy antics. A scene, well-featured in the film’s trailer, has the two of them visit a bar that happens to be hosting a wet t-shirt contest. Watching Scovell’s shocked reactions to Schumer first wanting to go on stage and then what happens when she actually is on stage is very funny, and the scene immediately after that has a nice romantic undercurrent that I wish the film had been better at presenting in other scenes.

It's odd to call Michelle Williams a scene-stealer as she is a well known, Academy Award nominated actress but indeed, scene-stealer is her role here. As Renee's boss and idol, Williams plays Avery As confident, assured and comically disconnected with the world beyond her bubble of rich excess. The baby voice that Williams affects in the movie is a terrific device to show how everyone has something they are insecure about no matter how rich or confident they appear. In another, lesser comedy with a lesser actress that voice would be the extent of the character. 

Amy Schumer is a terrific comedian with a great sense of timing and the jokes in the movie are terrific. Yes, some of the gags are a little forced and Schumer is put in the position of using broad physicality to sell some of the lesser material but there are plenty of well-timed and quite funny moments in I Feel Pretty. At the very least, there are enough good jokes for me to recommend the movie on Blu-Ray, DVD and On Demand on Tuesday, July 17th.

Movie Review He's Just Not That Into You

He's Just Not That Into You (2009) 

Directed by Ken Kwapis 

Written by Abby Kohn, Marc Silverstein 

Starring Ben Affleck, Jennifer Aniston, Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Connelly Bradley Cooper, Justin Long 

Release Date February 6th, 2009 

Published February 5th, 2009

A book based on a line of dialogue from a TV show goes on to become a massive bestseller and adapted into a major motion picture. Shouldn't the TV writer get the credit? After all, Michael Patrick King, the Sex and the City writer and his staff, were the ones who came up with this bit of mini insight. Comedian 

Greg Behrendt merely filled in the margins around that line with banal generalizations, a few John Gray Mars and Venus cribs, and humor aimed at the lifeless Lifetime TV movie crowd. It was that episode of Sex and the City about Berger telling Miranda what men really think that had the 'He's Just Not That Into You' epiphany.

And let's be real here. There was more insight into relationships in that one 22 minute Sex and the City episode than there are in the 300 some pages of Greg Behrendt's book and the nearly 2 hour movie based on it. Skip the movie and the book, let's watch Sex and the City. Unfortunately, I had to see the movie and what a chore it is. Despite one of the most impressive casts this side of a Love Boat-Fantasy Island crossover episode, He's Just Not That Into is a brutal exercise in monotonous, whiny neuroses. If I wanted that I would tape my therapy sessions.

Ginnifer Goodwin is the ostensible lead of He's Just Not That Into You and the poor girl makes a sad, sad spectacle of herself as Gigi the whiniest and most neurotic of a cast full of whiny neurotics. Her Gigi can barely read street signs, forget the subtle signals of human interaction. When she goes out on a semi-decent date with Conor (Kevin Connelly) she seems normal, just a little clueless about the signs that he isn't really that into her. Later, as she waits for him to call for another date she spends endless, ear splitting minutes detailing exactly why she is certain he will call again, including a mind numbing dissertation on the banal phrase 'Nice meeting you'.

Needless to say, Conor doesn't call back. That however may or may not have anything to do with the supremely needy vibe that Gigi puts out, but because he is obsessed with Anna (Scarlett Johansson) a girl he slept with once and now hangs out with while not getting any anymore. He cannot understand why they aren't sleeping together anymore even though they still hang out. Anyone else want to wack this guy with a baseball bat? With his pal Alex (Justin Long) he rehashes a brief conversation he had with Anna over the phone, who he called right after his date with Gigi, and how she said she would call him right back but didn't.

Anna, you see, was at a grocery store and struck up a flirtation with Ben (Bradley Cooper) just as Conor was calling. She jumped off the phone with Conor despite the wedding ring on Ben's finger. Further, despite that ring, she pushes the flirting, getting his card ostensibly so he can pass it along to an agent friend of his, she's a singer. Ben is able to control himself for a little while though he and his wife Janine (Jennifer Connelly) have been arguing throughout the massive redecoration of their new home. She wants to talk tile patterns and whether he has actually quit smoking and he just wants to have sex with Anna.

All of these various troubled relationships are presented in the most general fashion with little character development and no really interesting dialogue. Director Ken Kwapis and writers Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein definitely do justice to Greg Behrendt's book but in so doing, they are left with the same lackluster, limp dating advice that populates that absurdly popular book. Kwapis is a terrific television director, he's done some fine work with The Office but in features, yeesh. His resume includes Beautician and the Beast and, ugh, License To Wed.

Then again, he also directed the original Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants which is a movie of great warmth, humor and empathy, all of which is absent from He's Just Not That Into You. Then again, Sisterhood is based on a much better book than He's Just Not That Into You. Not that I have read Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, I have read He's Just Not That Into You and I feel very comfortable making the assumption. Ken Kwapis has some talent, how he has made such terrible films, and one pretty good one, remains a mystery to me.

Ben Affleck, Jennifer Aniston and Drew Barrymore round out the all star cast of He's Just Not That Into You and they seem like they may be in entirely different movies. Affleck and Aniston actually escape the dreary humor free children mincing their way through this abyss of stupidity that is He's Just Not That Into You. As a couple who've been together for seven years without getting married they are saddled with the same mindless problems of the rest of the cast but they are onscreen so little and neither allows for any real whining about their problems, they miss out on the sad fates of the rest of the cast.

Poor Drew Barrymore arguably gets it the worst of anyone in arguably the smallest role in the movie. Shoehorned into the plot as Anna's best friend, Drew has a technology problem. With her MySpace page, her cellphone, her home phone, her work phone, her home email, her work email, she has to check every one every few minutes to get updates on her latest relationship. It's exhausting to be rejected in so many forms and she longs for the days of an answering machine. Ugh! Can someone just get this girl a blackberry? An IPhone? Something! Honestly, if modern tech is this hard for you, just give up. Go live in a cave somewhere.

And Drew's role is minuscule compared to Ginnifer Goodwin's Gigi who, if she were a real person, would likely have died from forgetting how to breathe. This is one of the most dull witted characters ever brought to the screen. I like Goodwin, she's an attractive girl who I know is not this mentally challenged. The character she is saddled with in He's Just Not That Into You is a flibbertigibbet moron who could barely read traffic signals, forget body language or even a direct answer from a guy telling her he is never going to call her.

Ladies, this movie is meant for you and the people who made it think that Gigi represents you. They think all of these ludicrous, brain-dead morons stand in for a type that you can relate to. This is what Hollywood thinks of you. If that is not a massive insult I don't know what is. Granted, the men in this movie don't get off easy, Kevin Connelly's Conor is pathetic beyond words, Bradley Cooper's Ben is pathetic and a jerk and Justin Long's Alex is arguably more clueless than anyone else in the film, likely because he is the stand in for Author Behrendt, as the advice giver of the group.

It is Alex who advises Gigi, regarding Conor, that 'He's Just Not That Into You' and fails to communicate that to her because he wasn't writing it on a brick and clubbing her with it repeatedly. His banal generalities about why men do what they do and why women don't get it are the thesis statement of He's Just Not That Into You and they boil down to nothing more insightful than that simpleminded title.