boredandtwitchy
Seoul, South Korea
I was expecting to not like this movie, and I was right. However, my reasons for disliking 200 Pounds Beauty were different from what I had anticipated.
I'm always a bit weary of movies that play with the whole fat-to-skinny dynamic since they tend to lazily default to tasteless jokes around how disgusting and lazy overweight people are. To this movie's credit, apart from one awkward joke in the beginning, it navigated around that tension well, finding humor in both Hanna's post and pre-surgery appearance and focusing more on the absurd reactions of those around her as opposed to making her the butt of the jokes. Well done, film.
Where this movie lost me was in the writing and the characterization. The plot barely has such a haphazard framework that the scenes seemed to be just random occurrences with barely any connection between them. Worse, the characters were extremely 2-D. The main antagonist barely has any screen time, and her machinations occur off screen so tension never really develops between her and our heroine. In fact, she's not even the catalyst for the movie's climax: why have an antagonist at all? As for the main love interest... Well, don't watch this if you're looking for a love story. His flat performance and inability to garner any sympathy would have ruined it for you anyway.
The exception to the above is main actress Kim Ah Jung, who perfectly captured the artificiality and fragility of "plastic" women that I found myself wincing and worrying that her nose would just pop off mid-line. Her singing voice is also beautiful and saved the terrible Korean covers of various English songs from being too torturous to my ears. I expected better from a movie set in the music world. Unfortunately, Kim Jung Ah could not escape the terrible script, and her character also suffers from 2-dimensionality. I had no idea that she was suffering an identity crisis until the climax, and because of that, the ending seemed forced, insincere, and just plain cheesy. Once again, honest words and tears smooths over all problems, believability be darned.
I do think 200 Pounds Beauty had the potential to be a good film if it had more weight to it. There were laugh out loud moments, but there could have been more, especially given the unexpected dark turn the movie took toward the end. A drama adaptation, in which characters and back stories are explored in more depth, would be more than welcomed on my part in the perhaps misguided hope that this story can be done justice.
I'm always a bit weary of movies that play with the whole fat-to-skinny dynamic since they tend to lazily default to tasteless jokes around how disgusting and lazy overweight people are. To this movie's credit, apart from one awkward joke in the beginning, it navigated around that tension well, finding humor in both Hanna's post and pre-surgery appearance and focusing more on the absurd reactions of those around her as opposed to making her the butt of the jokes. Well done, film.
Where this movie lost me was in the writing and the characterization. The plot barely has such a haphazard framework that the scenes seemed to be just random occurrences with barely any connection between them. Worse, the characters were extremely 2-D. The main antagonist barely has any screen time, and her machinations occur off screen so tension never really develops between her and our heroine. In fact, she's not even the catalyst for the movie's climax: why have an antagonist at all? As for the main love interest... Well, don't watch this if you're looking for a love story. His flat performance and inability to garner any sympathy would have ruined it for you anyway.
The exception to the above is main actress Kim Ah Jung, who perfectly captured the artificiality and fragility of "plastic" women that I found myself wincing and worrying that her nose would just pop off mid-line. Her singing voice is also beautiful and saved the terrible Korean covers of various English songs from being too torturous to my ears. I expected better from a movie set in the music world. Unfortunately, Kim Jung Ah could not escape the terrible script, and her character also suffers from 2-dimensionality. I had no idea that she was suffering an identity crisis until the climax, and because of that, the ending seemed forced, insincere, and just plain cheesy. Once again, honest words and tears smooths over all problems, believability be darned.
I do think 200 Pounds Beauty had the potential to be a good film if it had more weight to it. There were laugh out loud moments, but there could have been more, especially given the unexpected dark turn the movie took toward the end. A drama adaptation, in which characters and back stories are explored in more depth, would be more than welcomed on my part in the perhaps misguided hope that this story can be done justice.
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