Movie Review - Confessions of a Shopaholic (2009)

Starring Isla Fisher, Hugh Dancy, Joan Cusack, John Goodman, and Kristin Scott Thomas
Written by Tracey Jackson and Tim Firth
Directed by P.J. Hogan

I'll never understand women and fashion. Does owning a pair of shoes really make you feel better about yourself? Does purchasing some shitty looking green scarf make you think other people will like you more? Put on some clothes and go out, for Christ's sakes.

Isla Fisher is Rebecca who is in complete denial of the fact that she can't stop shopping. She's maxed out all of her credit cards, is unable to pay the rent to her roommate, and is constantly hiding from debt collectors. It doesn't help that she's lost her job as a writer at a gardening magazine. Through a twist of fate, she ends up working at a money magazine. How she gets hired there, I don't know. It's one of those typical movie moves where the character gets a job via false pretenses, then the lie is revealed and the person who was fibbed to gets angry, but all ends up fine in the end because the liar is so darn cute and nice and the deceitfulness wasn't that bad to begin with, right? Ugh.

This comment isn't all that important, but it really bugged me -- The film was filled with incredibly weird musical interludes (for example, Rebecca's dad pulls some ugly-looking camper up to his house to the tune of some crappy dance song that stops immediately when he stops the camper...the music was not playing in the camper, either). How clever is it that when she gets sent to group therapy, Amy Winehouse's "Rehab" plays (and they do that joke twice!)? Who woulda thunk of that? And what chick flick would be complete without a dance scene? Ladies love dancing, so let's throw that in there, please! But make sure we have one of the characters say something along the lines of "I don't know how to dance" and then dance amazingly well or super funny or both!

I must admit that Isla Fisher, who I've only seen in Wedding Crashers, is quite charming. It's a shame that she's burdened with such a lousy character in this. While she makes the most of it, it's tough to rise above this character who really never learns her lesson and who is stuck with a typical film romance where there's no way two people would fall in love, but end up swooning over each other in the end. And the character that Rebecca falls in love with is your typical emotionless robotic automaton who we've seen in tons of rom-coms. Still, without Fisher in the role, the movie would've been nearly unwatchable, so there's something to be said for that.

There were two things that were incredibly aggravating to me (and spoiler alert here). Apparently, the "bad guy" in this movie is the debt collector. Since he's doing his job, I don't understand why he's set up as this evil man. Rebecca owes a ton of money, why shouldn't she be hounded by this guy instead of buying the pair of knee-high Prada boots? Secondly, Rebecca makes her money back by having a sale of all her clothing. She's essentially coddling others (who are banging down doors in order to get into this sale) into becoming shopaholics to cure her "disease." I didn't get it at all. It's okay for you to fall apart as long as I'm getting better.

The RyMickey Rating: D