Confessions of a Shopaholic (Wednesday, July 15, 2009) (91)

There's a line near the beginning of this film about how 'cost and worth are very different things'. Renting this film was a negligible cost for me through Netflix, but it was worth an hour and 45 minutes of my life that I'll never get back.

This is a terrible, unfunny, sexist, trite and dull movie. I've liked Isla Fisher in the past (she was good enough in The Wedding Crashers and good in The Lookout), but here she takes a few steps back to shitiness. But she's really not the problem with this movie.

The story in a nutshell has a so-called 'shopaholic' (of just a girl with no sense of her credit limit and an over-inflated idea of designer label clothes) who is something like $10,000 in credit card debt (seriously - that's all?!) who is laid off from her job as a journalist at one magazine. She then takes a job at a business magazine partly because the editor is hot and partly because she hopes that it will lead to another job at another magazine - some Vogue sort of thing. I don't know - from there she writes, uh, one column about investing in fashion or something and turns into a media superstar. Then she goes on TV and is outed for being in debt (again, she's in $10,000 of credit card debt, which somehow is a big amount of debt).

I couldn't figure out if the writers/director/producers thought that it was just Fisher's character was an idiot whose idea of journalism is to google the topic and copy from a For Dummies book, or if they felt that all women were idiots and would align with Fisher's character and waste their money on this piece of trash.

One of the worst things about this is for a movie about a clothes horse, Fisher didn't have a good fashion eye at all. Not a single outfit looked good on her. I couldn't figure out if they did this on purpose, but if they did, I didn't understand what kind of point they were making. Also - if your making a movie about being in credit card debt, you have to use a bigger number than $10,000. It seems to me that a real shopaholic could spend that much in one spree. Shouldn't she be, like, $100,000 in debt or more?

Whatever. Writing any more about this garbage is a waste of my time. This is a movie with absolutely no redeeming qualities. The acting is bad, the writing is terrible - even the directing is dull (if I have to see another 'Going to Miami' sequence in a movie begin with a helicopter shot over the Biscayne Bay, I might die).

Stars: None of 4