The Saturdays - Just Can't Get Enough

I can't decide if the video for the Saturdays' Comic Relief single is chic, stylish and ironic, or appalling sexist and entirely inappropriate for a charity single? Possibly both. I will keep checking feminist blogs for help with this problem.

New angles on “Confessions of a Shopaholic”

Isla fisher proves herself to be a wonderful comic actress in this fun movie. It’s full of eye candy (Hugh Dancy, the purple and orange checked cape etc.), but it’s also bubbling under with meaning if you dare to look for it.

The credit crunch personified
With perfect timing, here is a movie about Becky Bloomwood’s own personal credit crunch. Her life is changed when her debts catch up with her, just as the world has changed over the past months. Isla Fisher hacking away at a block of ice with a stiletto heel to get at the credit card trapped inside is an iconic image of our time.

Madness
The scenes where Bloomwood is tempted to buy certainly tap into something which lies deep in the soul of every woman with a passion for fashion – this is a perfectly crafted work of art. My life will be better if I own something this magnificent. When Becky admires a very expensive green scarf at the beginning of the movie her decisions to buy is reached through conversing with mannequins. This stylistic psychosis hints at a major theme of the movie – mental illness. There’s been much controversy in the media over the last few years about what constitutes an addiction. Drugs, alcohol – yes. But sex, computer games and.... shopping? Becky repeatedly talks about shopping as a drug-like experience. She craves new purchases, she’s unsuccessfully tried to give up her habit many times, she loses her friends and the man she loves because of shopping – it ruins her life. All hallmarks of an addiction. So should shopaholics be in the DSM?

The anti-feminist Working Girl
The film in reminiscient of the 1980s classic “Working Girl”, both being about young women who decieve their way into a great career. Both films also feature Joan Cusack. Working Girl was driven by the capitalist/feminist mantra “I make it happen”. Melanie Griffith’s Tess McGill is an ambitious, smart heroine who claws her way to the top through cunning, hard work, and gall. 20 years later, Isla Fisher’s Becky Bloomwood is an incompetent who secures a great job that she doesn’t even really want though pure luck. Most of the comedy arises from her incompetence. But are we laughing at a dumb woman, as always, or are we finally allowing attractive women to be funny? The ending of the film is unsatisfactory. Becky’s happy ending is getting, and working for, her man - with disregard for her job satisfaction. Worst of all it forces her to give up her passion. People will dismiss this film for being about the joy of something as superficial as fashion but, as I hope this review has shown you, things are only ever as superficial as you want them to be.