Day 180: Pretty Ugly People (2008)

R, 1 hr. 38 min.  Directed by: Tate Taylor.  Release Date: April 12, 2008.  DVD Release Date: January 12, 2010.

Two years ago, I made a trip to California.  It’s where I’m from, and I hadn’t lived in the state since 2002.  It still feels like home, which was a part of the reason I went.  Most of the reason for my trip was I was curious.  I was curious to see what’s going on in the lives of the people who meant so much to me in my high school and college days, curious to see if I still recognized them.  To give you an idea, my graduation years are '95 (Archbishop Mitty High) and '99 (University of the Pacific).  I figured after the better part of fifteen years, it was time to SEE my friends, not just type at them.  Facebook helps keep in touch on an irregular basis, but it wasn’t quite the same.  What I learned is that MOST of my friends are pretty much the same as I remember them.  Some were a bit heavier, some a bit lighter, some show a remarkable sense of self-security and responsibility that they'd lacked when I knew them, a few were wearing new emotional or physical scars, one or two had come out of the closet, one or two were still firmly in the closet, but they’re all pretty much recognizable as the people I loved back in the day. I was fortunate that a few of my fraternity brothers and our little sisters were able to get together for a few hours, which ended up being one of the highlights of a truly awesome trip.

This movie had some of the same ideas behind it, except that it was like the ideas went in to Bizzaroworld. Here, a woman reaches out to her college friends after gastrointestinal bypass and a massive weight loss, excited at the prospect of being as “pretty” as they were in college… only to find out most of her friends were as ugly on the inside as she had always felt.  It was kind of sad seeing how the pressures of being an adult wrecked almost all of these people, and how their relationships were suffering as a result. It was sad that it took me almost forty minutes, approximately half the movie, to figure out that there wasn’t going to be that part of the movie where it “got” funny.

In fact, I realized about ten minutes later that this was not truly intended to be a comedy… or someone’s sense of humor is pretty seriously whack.  I don’t know what to say about this movie.  Pretty Ugly People was billed as a comedy, and somehow that doesn’t feel right, despite the fact that the only three people I recognized from the cast all tend to do comedies., mostly of the Indie milieu, which hasn't been synonymous with suck for a few years now.  Granted, none of those three had ever been in a good comedy, mind you, but still, they knew how a comedy should look.  So I was pretty disappointed.

Despite all the nonsense, I realized I liked the main character’s journey to self discovery.  I guess it’s never a bad time to learn not to judge a book by its cover, although it might be a little sad that she waited until she was close to 40 before she figured that simple truth out.  I also liked how the friends seemed to fall back into their old roles, as if nothing really had changed them, even though I don't think that's even a little realistic.  I even like when the conflict started, but I thought it was odd how two spouses were included in this “friends weekend.”  In my recent fraternity reunion, it seemed to be a general, if unspoken agreement that spouses weren’t invited, and only two of us brought dates… and one of those dates had gone to school with us.  It kept this movie from being a total failure in my book, as did the scenery, which was beautiful.  

There are some days that I’ll take interest in lieu of entertainment, and this was apparently one of those days.