Shallow Hal
I watched this movie on cable a couple of years ago and I didn't really like it then, mainly for Jason Alexander's character. Now, after watching it again I noticed more things that bothered me. For example, the jokes that were used in the movie were stereotypical and the personalities of the characters generalized. Not all fat people have good personalities/beautiful inner bodies, and not all skinny/"beautiful" people have ugly personalities. In addition, I thought it was bizarre how those average looking men were expecting to date supermodel women. Neither men appear to skip too many meals or spend much time at the gym, yet Hal and Mauricio wouldn't give a second glance to a woman who is less than perfect.
In the article, "Weighing in on Hal" Emme (a plus-sized model) said that "fat is the last acceptable prejudice. People still think they can talk openly about fat people in a derogatory sense." Carnie Wilson responded that "right—can you imagine if it was a black woman and there were racial jokes throughout the movie and her inner beauty was white? Then they said, 'Okay, you're not hypnotized anymore. Black is beautiful.' It would be shocking, wouldn't it? Well, this movie is shocking to me." I thought it was interesting that Jennifer Holiday didn't make any response to Elle's comment. Both Carnie and Jennifer have undergone surgery to loose weight, but Jennifer Holiday has painful memories of when she was 400 lbs and she seems to block out that part of her live, which is unhealthy because she should embrace her past, and not shun it. I agree with Emme's comment that fat is the last prejudice, and it was evident in this film. The Farrelly brothers played off of stereotypes of obese and ugly people by making a lot of crude jokes at the expense of the obese or ugly. For example, the chairs and booths braking in the restaurants, or the cannon ball into the swimming pool. I thought that the movie just kept repeating the same jokes, and they tried to milk it for all it was worth, however it just got old. I thought it was too far when they ran the jokes up until the final scene, the car tilting was unnecessary, we already know Rosie is fat, there is no need to continually make her the brunt of the jokes. I think that if they would have toned down the humor and let Rosie's true image be considered beautiful, and the fact that Hal knows Rosie's inner beauty be the reason why he came back to her in the end. He was disgusted by the idea of her as 300 lbs and didn't want to ruin the image of her as the tiny Gwenyth Paltrow, the only reason he went to her going away party was because she was a good person, not because he thought she would still be beautiful. And also when he got to the party he could not even recognize her and started making out with the maid, this lumps all fat people into an indistinguishable group. The movie could have been more progressive if they would have allowed Rosie's physical appearance to be accepted as beautiful, and help to redefine society's standards of what beautiful is.
Although this film had obvious flaws, I thought that it was made with good intentions, because the Farrelly brothers were actually satirizing people who focus only on physical appearances.