Shallow Hal (2001)
Directed by Peter Farrelly
After taking his dying father's advice, Hal dates only the embodiments of female physical perfection. But that all changes after Hal has an unexpected run-in with self-help guru Tony Robbins. Intrigued by Hal's shallowness, Robbins hypnotizes him into seeing the beauty that exists even in the least physically appealing women. Hal soon falls for Rosemary, but he doesn't realize that his gorgeous girlfriend is actually a 300-pound-not-so-hottie.
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What critics compared Shallow Hal to
Unlike say the Farrelly Brothers movie “Shallow Hal,” which cast Gwyneth Paltrow as the inner beauty of a 300-pound woman that her shallow paramour (Jack Black) sees after being hypnotized, Kohn and Silverstein never allow us to see what Renee glimpses when she stares at her reflection.
We don’t see what Renee thinks she sees (presumably to avoid the pitfalls of something like Shallow Hal), but whatever it is, it gives her the confidence that’s long eluded her – to go for the guys she likes and the job she wants and to be her best self, etc.
I Feel Pretty—it has nothing to do with the West Side Story number of that name—is a high-concept comedy, that could be called a more inward-facing semi-remake of the Jack Black comedy Shallow Hal.
This conceit, a mish-mash/role reversal of the plot from the equally problematic 2001 comedy Shallow Hal, is rife with holes.
I Feel Pretty uses that entry point for its Shallow Hal-like premise: after wishing that she could be pretty on a stormy night, Renee falls off her SoulCycle bike and wakes up to see the supermodel version of herself staring back at her.
The confident directorial debuts of screenwriters Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein (2016's " How to Be Single "), the film takes a wish-fulfillment fantasythink "Big" (which this film rather wonderfully references) crossed with an inverted "Shallow Hal"and wisely sidesteps all of the potentially hypocritical traps and misguided double standards into which it easily could have fallen.
With its emphasis on judging people by their inner beauty instead of by physical appearance, Shallow Hal reminded me of a 1945 romantic fantasy entitled The Enchanted Cottage.
In a subgenre so obsessed with image, Song has not only slowly stripped away the character's defenses, but has crafted a story that is explicitly designed to challenge social norms without resorting to the crassness or triteness of a "Shallow Hal" or "She's All That."
Now that that’s off my chest, let me tell you about a crowd-pleasing odd-couple comedy directed by Peter Farrelly, who usually works with his brother Bobby on movies such as Shallow Hal, There's Something About Mary, and Dumb and Dumber To. Green Book stars Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali in a story about a trip through the American South taken by Ali’s Dr. Don Shirley, an accomplished pianist, and Mortensen's Tony Vallelunga, a Bronx-based Italian-American with racial attitudes rooted in the 1950s.
Yet I’d venture Green Book is far more endearing, precise, and tricky than this characterization might lead you to expect—and for that matter, what you might expect of a prestige project from one of the directors of Shallow Hal, Kingpin, and more recently the remake of The Three Stooges.
After breaking out in the ’90s with comedy favorites Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary, Peter Farrelly (and his brother and collaborator, Bobby Farrelly) had middling success in the 2000s with duds like Shallow Hal and a broad, unfunny remake of Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid.
Directed by Peter Farrelly (yes, one of the brothers that gave us Shallow Hal) and co-written by Farrelly and a bunch of other white dudes, this reverse Driving Miss Daisy tackles racism with the sensitivity and subtlety you’d expect from the guy who thought putting Gwyneth Paltrow in a fat suit was a wise idea.
62-year-old director Peter Farrelly has made some wonderful comedies over the past three decades including Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin, There’s Something About Mary and Shallow Hal.
From one of the dudes that brought you There’s Something About Mary, Shallow Hal and Dumb & Dumber comes . . .
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Meanwhile, Joe Viterelli ("See Spot Run," "Analyze This") - who's normally cast as a mob figure - gets some mileage out of an Irish brogue, but Susan Ward ("The In Crowd") can't do much with her "Now I'm interested in him" across-the-hall neighbor character.
Norbit is supposed to be a comedy with heart, but it makes the Farrelly brothers' exercise in obesity and prosthetics, Shallow Hal, look like Schindler's List.
While it trawls the depths of bad taste, it also maintains at its core something humane and universally identifiable (even if it is corny) that puts it in the special league of films that are at once nasty and nice (see "There's Something About Mary" and "Shallow Hal"), and for that reason it's brighter than it seems on the surface.