Shop Till You Drop
Written: Apr 27 '09
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Product Rating:
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| Bang For The Buck |
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Pros: Well dressed cast.
Cons: Some crude humor in Finnish with subtitles.
The Bottom Line: A gay frolic that will make you laugh till it hurts.
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| topreviewerman's Full Review: Confessions of a Shopaholic |
If, as they say, confession is good for the soul, then Confessions of a Shopaholic will be cathartic for anyone caught up in debt. I had the good fortune to see King of Kings the day before I saw "Confessions …," with the elaborately shot Sermon on the Mount still fresh in my mind when I saw Rebecca Bloomwood (Isla Fisher) mercilessly battling other shoppers for bargains. When the equally merciless bill collector Derek Smeath (Robert Stanton) closed in on her, and she had to auction all her possessions to survive, it raised my hopes to see her offer merciful bargains. (Matt. 5:7) "Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy." Maybe there is hope.
The best example of mercy in "Confessions …" is Luke Brandon (Hugh Dancy) editor of Successful Savings magazine who was giving job interviews in the same building as Alette fashion magazine where Rebecca is heading for her own dream-job interview—so she can pay her debts—but on the way decides to make one last purchase of a green scarf—to make her eyes look big—and stops at a hot dog stand to get $20 cash back to complete the purchase. The hot dog vendor is prepared to take advantage of her, to make her buy his whole stock, when Luke in line hands her a twenty. The merciful man. He gets his hot dog, and she gets her scarf. Unfortunately, Alette has hired in-house, so Rebecca tries interviewing for the other magazine … of the guy who bought her the scarf. Yes, it's a screwball comedy, and we're hardly done laughing at one funny sequence before we're thrown another.
Rebecca is so clueless about finances, we wonder, why bother? but she's come this far. Do you remember the movie Mrs. Doubtfire? In it a man decides the only way to spend time with his kids is to get hired in disguise by his ex to be their nanny. He responds by telephone to her ad, and she throws him an unexpected question: "What's your name?" Quick thinking, he looks at the newspaper headline: Police Doubt Fire …and so is born his new identity. Rebecca uses the same technique which is not really recommended for job interviews. She ends up fleeing in embarrassment.
On to plan B which she hatches with her friend and roommate Suzy (Krysten Ritter) over a few drinks, a few too many drinks. She writes two letters. The letter to the fashion magazine editor is a story about women's shoes which illustrates her knowledge of fashion and a justification for hiring her. The letter to Hugh at Successful Savings contains a twenty dollar bill, a suggestion that he buy himself some decent clothes, and a line telling him he can take his job and shove it. That's plan B.
And it works, sort of. Next day her phone rings. It's not the bill collector but Hugh telling her he loved her metaphor using women's shoes to represent the current financial problems, and he wants her to come by, presumably to hire her. You know what that means, don't you? She'd switched letters. The one demeaning the job went to the fashion magazine. She has to get it back, a whole nother comedy routine.
The metaphor about women's shoes. You don't have to understand metaphors to appreciate "Confessions of a Shopaholic," but it wouldn't hurt. Her first assignment is to write a 500 word essay on the economy. She copies it directly from "Money for Dummies". Hugh rejects it because it looked like it was copied directly from "Money for Dummies." That's called an analogy, when something is like something else. It literally was that something else, and that's called humor. But when one speaks of something as if it were literal but it's only similar, that's a metaphor. Have I confused you? Sorry. Let me give an example.
From the book of Revelations in the Bible: (Rev. 5:3) "And no man in heaven, nor in earth, neither under the earth, was able to open the book, neither to look thereon." That means we're all dummies; we can't figure it out. (Rev. 5:5) "… the Lion of the tribe of Juda, the Root of David, hath prevailed to open the book, and to loose the seven seals thereof." Lucky us; somebody can explain it. (Rev. 6:5-6) "And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand. And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine." That's talking about money, that there has to be a balance between goods purchased and price paid, and furthermore there must be conservation of resources. Oh, but that's money for dummies. Yes, and that's a metaphor. If I read Revelations 6:5-6 and say I've just read "Money for Dummies," I've used a metaphor. I've literally read my Bible, but it's so similar to what I'd read in "Money for Dummies" that I can say I read it in the latter, and my reader will understand what I meant, if he understands metaphor.
The metaphor about women's shoes is part of the plot, but what makes it doubly important is that a scene about girls' shoes was used in the opening to explain how Rebecca got to be a shopaholic. If the movie intended that as a metaphor, and if we can work out the meaning, then we've gained a whole new depth of understanding. We see all these privileged girls trying on what appear to be stylish tennis shoes. Little Rebecca, her parents came here from Finland and still retain Old World values of economy and thrift. Does she get some stylish tennis shoes? No, she gets these herky clodhoppers which she calls "brown things." And while the tennis shoes will wear out in ten weeks just in time to buy the new style, her "brown things" last almost indefinitely.
The important question, then, is what do the "brown things" represent (if anything)? Well, remember the movie Forrest Gump where he is present at the historic occasion of a school integration, and he asks the other boys what the hubbub is all about, and they tell him they're about to let some coons into school? Forrest is duly shocked that they'd let raccoons in school, and then he helps a colored miss with her dropped books. That's funny because coon was meant as a metaphor, not literally as Forrest took it. Suppose "brown things" was a metaphor for the same thing as "coon" was. Then it wouldn't be an ordinary metaphor, but a pun, of a type with similar meanings. That is, both it and shoes are "brown things." Such a pun is useful in an extended metaphor called an allegory. But we still have to develop it. Finland would represent Africa, and poverty would represent slavery and its aftermath. But as Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and I could be all wet, but we'll see.
Have you read Martin Luther King's Letter From Birmingham Jail? He respects the right of some ministers of the Gospel (I'm one too) to question his confrontational methods—like marching without a parade permit—and undertakes to justify himself. He rejects their advice to wait for things to improve on their own, and he ends up touting "the fierce urgency of NOW." To me it's a perfectly good analogy of shoes that take too long to wear out and a people whose condition takes too long to change.
People are more familiar with his "I Have a Dream" speech, talking about a "sacred obligation" to cash a "promissory note" to America's "citizens of color" for equality, but which "came back marked 'insufficient funds'." This was covered somewhat in my review of Eagle Eye." Confessions of a Shopaholic" takes up from there where little Rebecca observing adults shopping, notes that they don't even need money, because they use "magic cards" [credit cards]. The great dream, no money worries. "We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check"—MLK.
Rebecca grows up. Civil Rights legislation gets passed. In order for America to dish out opportunity from her "great vaults," banks are required by law to make home loans to people they would otherwise consider too risky. And we've got "community organizers" to make sure the banks comply. But it's magic. Houses get flipped, and we hum along, even though according to "Money for Dummies" one should only purchase a house his work lets him afford, and the extras. (Prov. 24:27) "Prepare thy work without, and make it fit for thyself in the field; and afterwards build thine house."
Rebecca's debt load builds up, and finally she adds the straw that's like to break the camel's back: a green scarf for her interview. According to a WHITE mannequin, she needs the green scarf because it defines her, offsets her eyes, makes them look bigger. According to her roommate Suzy, she's "advising people about debt, and you're up to your eyeballs in it," but no matter, she has to have that scarf. Out comes the magic card. It gets declined. Try it again. It comes back "REALLY DECLINED." Yes, there is a banking crisis. Insufficient funds. I mean, really insufficient funds.
So it's off to the hot dog stand to get cash back from a check, a big check being the only way. Up steps Hugh with a … you guessed it, bailout. Twenty dollars covers what she needs. It's a lot to pay for a hot dog, but the alternative is worse. Hugh explains there's a difference between cost and worth, which is probably as good an explanation as any for a bailout.
The movie to me looks like a pretty good illustration of something from the gospel of Luke. (Luke 12:13-15) "And one of the company said unto him, Master, speak to my brother, that he divide the inheritance with me. And he said unto him, Man, who made me a judge or a divider over you? And he said unto them, Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth." A minister giving "I have a dream" speeches might be neglecting something of more fundamental value. At any rate it seems every white mannequin in town wants Rebecca to define herself by the abundance of her possessions. I'm not going to take this analogy any further, because that would be inflammatory, but it does seem to me that for all the speeches heard on the third Monday in January, my celebration of Robert E. Lee Day is awfully lonely.
It's only when Rebecca can (Col. 3:5) "Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; … covetousness, which is idolatry:" that all the BLACK mannequins in town cheer for her. In fact the movie did such a good job of portraying covetousness as idolatry that we will all cheer for her when free.
Along the way we are treated to a lot of laughs. Her sage advice under her nom de plume the Lady in the Green Scarf comes across as sage as did that of Chance the gardener in "Being There." Besides a lot of great physical humor, there was the play on Black stereotypes: her sexual mystique—"Men like you are the reason I left Finland!"—, turning a rumba into a lively juba, and the big-name Black athlete in her recovery group. The roots of her dance went back to her parents and their hand-body co-ordination, somewhat along the lines mentioned in David Dalton, Been Here and Gone: A Memoire of the Blues, (USA: HarperCollins, 1st. ed., 2000) p. 46.
¶"The slave been dragged from his village, couldn't bring nothin with him.
Bring with him just one thing, his body—that's all them slavers wanted. That's
where the plantation dance come outta, the juba dance, see? Stampin your feet, slappin your body
across with your hands—that's how they took the drummin over with them. And that drum gonna
shake the world, chile, 'cause we know how to make dumb things talk. Back up in the hills the old
folks was educatin chairs and bottles and tables long before they got theirselves guitars. Anything
they can rap on, they'd make it talk. Teach a milk bottle to preach, a pair of shoes to sing the blues.
Rebecca sure made that fan part of her dance routine. It was something to behold!
There were a lot of valuable economic lessons thrown in along the way, from simplifying one's life, to taking a job waiting tables. There's one I'm not sure of, but I'll mention anyway. I don't know what Alette means, but it sounds French, and if we allow a pun—similar sounds—, allaiter [pronounced alete] means (breast-)feed, suckle. That office being on a floor below "Successful Savings," it could be part of that extended metaphor showing how to better manage money, saving successfully rather than suckling from the public teat.
At any rate, I think that "Confessions of a Shopaholic" was funny and good for the soul. I like what Dalton had to say in his Bibliography: "The pervasive influence of the blues on rock, soul, rap, and country music seems a fitting fulfillment of the promises made in the Sermon on the Mount: the poorest, most abused people in America have created the most potent music on earth." Whether one gets any of the metaphors or not, I think he'll still end up feeling it's better to be defined by the Sermon than by possessions. And the movie's funny enough in its own right without any deep thought. The cast did a good job and they were dressed to the nines.
Recommended:
Yes
Movie Mood: Funny Movie
Viewing Method: Other
Film Completeness: Looked complete to me.
Worst Part of this Film: Nothing
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topreviewerman
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Member: Earl Gosnell
Location: Eugene, OR
Reviews written: 84
Trusted by: 2 members
About Me:
BSEE, U. of Cincinnati. Ordained minister, United Congregation of Friends. Poet Laureate, Longfellow, Colorado.
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