In Her Skeleton

So... let me preface this by saying that I enjoyed In Her Shoes and generally speaking I adore Toni Collette. But how exactly is she fat? Or ugly? And why does Hollywood keep wanting me to view her this way? To me she is on the thin side of being a normal sized woman. And she is pretty. Maybe not model/generic pretty but undeniably attractive. So, no matter how good of an actress she is...It's a major narrative stumbling block for me while watching In Her Shoes to feel/understand/believe that she is ugly and fat. Because... she. is. not.

Oh sure there are a couple of scenes where it seems like she was a tiny bit heavier than usual and a couple of unflattering outfits early on. And, of course, she is brunette and wears glasses which is still Hollywood's stupidly sexist and anti-intellectual shorthand to help an audience understand that the woman they're watching is sexually undesirable. The film is constantly referring to her unattractiveness... and her appetite. Even after she starts wearing more flattering (and in some cases really beautiful) outfits, we are reminded that she is not pretty.

If we are to accept that Hollywood thinks that Toni Collette is a huge heifer, than it indirectly stands to reason that people like Linday Lohan and Renée Zellweger will continue to get uglier. I had already given up on Renée, who used to be cute, radiant, and pretty (particularly in Nurse Betty and Bridget Jones) but I had hoped that Lindsay Lohan would gain back the weight she recently lost which took her from Mean Girls bewitching to her current skeletal fugliness. Sigh...