Day 7: Confessions of a Shopaholic

Adorable Isla Fisher has my heart! And she’s telling my life story (accept mine isn’t a huge debt due to clothes but experiences – which is even harder to sell back, so I’m just stuck with my debt unlike her). I heard the book is even better but I think that might be too painful for me to endure. Seriously, I started having a mild panic attack once this movie began because at the bottom of my office drawer is a huge pile of bills I can’t pay this month and like the girl in the green scarf it is ALL MY FAULT. Or maybe its not: as a friend once told me “Credit Cards aren’t REAL money!” And besides as John Goodman points out in the movie, “If the country can be billions in debt, why can’t my daughter”. Oh who am I kidding, I’m in trouble and this movie just pointed it out to me all over again!

But we’re not here to talk about my many flaws; we’re here to talk about the wonderful world of escapism through Romantic Comedies! And escape I do! In luscious colors of clothes and settings, sexy male leads with British Accents (good God I just get weak in the knees when I hear a brit man speak- my best gal friend Swoose is damn lucky she gets to wake up to that accent every morning), and something that I have debated putting on the check list: Great Embarrassing Moments. As a girl who is no stranger to embarrassing moments having inherited a foot in mouth disease from her mother, been attacked by a tree, and locked herself in her own trunk, I take a certain comfort in seeing a female lead in a film go through a few of her own. And this movie, for all its uncomfortable feelings it gives me also gives me great comfort. Here is how Confessions of a Shopaholic add up to my list:

• Giddy: We have Giddy! Yummy Hugh Dancy is enough alone, but you also have some great lines like “She’s not my girlfriend, she’s not you” and “Nothing defines me except you and your mother”. And all those lovely embarrassing moments! But the quintessential Giddy moment comes from the SLOW CLAP! Ahhhh, the slow clap, used across the board to enhance a moment of achievement in lots of great films. I didn’t put this on my check list because sometimes it really irritates me, it is not always a winner in my book. But here, in this movie, I like it – maybe because it is done with mannequins
• Lie: The big lie in this movie is that she is in the worst personal financial situation and she is working for a money magazine giving advice on finances. She is also trying to work her way up to work for a fashion magazine. Not to mention all the many lies she tells her debt collector. We have lots in this movie! Yay!
• Big Emotional Outburst: Yes, we have a bunch of those too!
• Dance Sequence: YES! YES! YES! And it is awesome! The fan is hilarious and so is her dancing.
• Wedding: We have one of the tackiest weddings here, the ugliest dresses, the made of honor doesn’t show up till the last minute and they leave right after the ceremony which means there wasn’t a reception? Wha? But we have a wedding and that’s what counts!
• Rewatchable: Yes! I will be watching this one again – perhaps after I win the lottery and can sit back and laugh laugh laugh at the days when I used to worry about money too.
• Love: Oh that wonderfully inappropriate I’m-in–love-with-my-boss kind of love. Of course I still haven’t figured out why he was bidding with himself over the green scarf.
• Fantasy: The apartment isn’t one of the fantasies in this NYC RC surprisingly… but the love life, the ease of a job, the shopping, the mannequins, the male lead, the fashion, and the great embarrassing moments are.
• Journey of the Main Character: She does what I fear to do- takes that hard look at her life, how it spun out of control and grabs the courage to set it straight. She also discovers that the relationship high far outweighs the shopping high.
• Body Count: erg… no.
• Music Montages: Yes! We have some nice ones, and I like the songs.
• Strong Female: Yes, I’d say so – see journey of the main character checked above.