Schumer explains that she feels a lot of the feedback about the trailer is a projection of the audience filling in their own assumptions about the type of “pretty” Schumer’s character Renee feels about herself. I don’t think it quite figured out how to pull it off, but I like what it’s trying to do. I was, ‘We need a couple of changes.’ They were like, straight up, ‘No.’ I was like, ‘I’m going to dance and it’s going to be insane.’ And now it seems it’s one of the favorite scenes. It feels nice, I feel settled with him, he is my partner, no question.
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I Feel Pretty rarely addresses these modern-day image issues in an intelligent or even hilarious way.
Those middle scenes are more enjoyably empowering than flat-out amusing, but they get their laughs, with Renee smooth-talking a genial stranger (Rory Scovel) into a date and eventually bed, sassing her way into a receptionist job at LeClaire, and impressing her new bosses with no-nonsense thoughts on marketing to “regular women”. “But that’s not what it is”. OK, but the movie is using that as a vehicle to show how low self-esteem clouds our vision of ourselves.
At the Los Angeles premiere for comedy “I Feel Pretty” starring Amy Schumer, the directors and cast addressed the negative reaction the trailer generated after the film’s message was perceived to be that confidence stems exclusively from body image. During a class in Soho, Renee gets caught up in the sweaty frenzy of positivity, falls off her bike and hits her head. Still, the actress is plenty believable as an average-looking, Spanx-wearing woman who aspires to look more like the Amazonian supermodels she runs into at SoulCycle, and at the cosmetics company where she works, relegated to an offsite basement in Chinatown.
Amy Schumer’s very R-rated film breakthrough Trainwreck was a hit with critics and audiences looking for the kind of edgy material that made the self-confident and raunchily amusing comic a success before Hollywood came calling.
“It’s a metaphor for how much you want to be able to communicate to the people you love that you think are gorgeous, that you wish they could see themselves the way you see them”, Schumer said.
The film depicts that people from all walks of life have their own issues and insecurities, including handsome and successful individuals.
This sort of passive-aggressiveness should come as no surprise from a film as lazy as I Feel Pretty.
“I have become a rich and famous person, and I am no happier now than I was when I was waiting tables”. But earlier this year, the promo for seemingly innocuous Amy Schumer flick I Feel Pretty did just that.
There are a few moments wherein Schumer has a chance to successfully deploy the brash, take-me-as-I-am persona she has cultivated on stage and in her starring debut, Trainwreck, but mostly the script shows signs of having been awkwardly retrofitted to accommodate the star and her brand. But the I-don’t-see-what-you-see shtick, and interaction with snooty beauty queens, wears thin in places, in part because a slim conceit that should have run a crisp 90 minutes or so drags on close to two hours. I’m awed by her bravery as a comedian and her insight as a social commentator. It all changes at one fateful Spin class when a malfunctioning bike dumps Renee onto her head, implanting the delusion that she is the most attractive girl in the world. “If anything, that sounds like a more voluptuous woman to me”.
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Each act in I Feel Pretty drags on longer than it should. Watch the trailer below.
