“COMEDIAN” Amy Schumer has a new movie out this week but the film’s storyline has upset some women, who think it’s insulting.
AMY Schumer’s new movie, I Feel Pretty, out this Thursday in Australia, sounds like a sure bet: a deeply insecure, average-looking young woman (played by Schumer) wakes up from a head injury thinking she’s a supermodel.
Suddenly, she’s dressing hotter, strutting harder and dreaming bigger than she ever dared to before — until, in the end, she realises it wasn’t her looks that changed; it was her attitude.
Yet despite its you-go-girl ethos, social-media users have slammed the trailer as “fat-phobic,” complaining that Schumer is too thin, too pretty, too blonde and too “abled” to portray someone so ostensibly oafish. (Never mind that the script — written by Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein — probably appealed to Schumer because she’s routinely called too “fat” and “ugly” by internet trolls to be in movies at all.)
Perhaps all the brouhaha will just add to the movie’s hype, perhaps the film will make buckets of cash, perhaps it is just an innocuous comedy. But, regardless, I Feel Pretty and its swift backlash spells trouble for one of cinema’s most reliable and enduring tropes: Women are turning away from the makeover movie.