This issue has, in fact, only gotten worse. In this movie the character, Andy, is a young and inexperienced woman who lands a job as a high fashion magazine editor’s assistant. (Yes, good for you, Andy. Having career ambitions and excelling in a career is great.) However, throughout the dialogue she is constantly criticized for being a size six. Towards the end of the movie she is finally toasted for losing enough weight to fit into a size four. And, what a surprise, the announcement is made at the moment in the movie where she finally achieves career success.

I am so tired of the message, via movies, that opportunity, success, and happiness only come to a package that displays a tiny waistline and zero thigh! That package being an imperially “perfect” woman of the Hollywood cloth.

Hollywood is not, REAL. It markets the superficial. I want them to stop feeding us their toxic perspective on beauty. Until we and they stop making movies like this “Oscar worthy” this toxic perspective will never end.
-Joanne Wilde

We watched it the other day partly to see if we agreed with your comments. I think it is like one of those magazines that say they will make you feel better about yourself, but depend on making you feel rubbish so you buy the next issue.

Messages included that as a woman you can’t be successful and have an exciting job without giving up love and family. Also there was the message that ‘good’ women shoudn’t compete with one another (her taking the place of her ‘friend’ in Paris was akin to worshiping the devil).

And it was another of those transformation movies - where the ugly woman turns out to be beautiful once she’s wearing stiletto heels (which she still had on at the end).

If you make a movie that has to use unhelpful stereotypes & conventions to get across a message that is potentially helpful - unfortunately the unhelpful stereotypes win the day.

I recommend NOT watching this. I really like your idea of rating films in this way - but don’t be afraid to have really high standards. 3 ’stars’ should mean the film is reasonably helpful, 0 should mean neutral. 5 should be the best we can possibly imagine.