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[originally posted August 5, 2009]

Why wasn’t the movie called Girl in the Green Scarf? “Confessions of” is a title-trend that seems to have run its course. Sorry, St. Augustine. I guess the word “shopaholic” was a keyword to attract the right demographic (30-something co-workers on their ladies’ night out; dewy-faced college sophomores with a flimsy understanding of credit cards; or, in my case, smug 25-year-olds with a one-movie plan on Netflix). And the “confessions,” in this case, served the purpose of an indulgent little apology, like a giggle behind a hand with shell-pink nails and a Hello Kitty ring: Oh, I’m so bad! So the title is actually totally apt, even though the Girl in the Green Scarf pops up automatically in Google once you get past the first few letters of “green,” so it apparently stuckaround in the akashic record or whatever.

As an undergraduate I minored in Film, a decision almost as impractical, coyly naive, and self-satisfied as a major in English. But at least I’ve gone through several rounds of Film History 101, which is why I know that back in the Great Depression, women flocked to the theaters in record numbers to watch frou-frou fluff pieces that featured very little plot and long, luxe montages of expensive fashions.

“The girl who leaves school and gets a dead-end job can still look like a fashion-plate for a pittance. You may have pennies in your pocket and not a prospect in the world, and only the corner of a leaky bedroom to go home to; but in your new clothes, you can stand on the street corner, indulging in a private daydream of yourself as Marlene Dietrich…” - George Orwell

Confessions of a Shopaholic, 2009, directed by P.J. Hogan and starring Isla Fisher, is about as close as I assume we’ll get to a revival of this type of unabashed escapism. I mean we’ve had this sort of movie for long before the RECESSION (ooh, look, I dated myself!) snuck up on us and gave us an international wet willy, and we’ll have them long after, assuming the world doesn’t end in 2012, which is about the only thing that could scare Sandra Bullock off the big screen. (Ha ha! Kidding, Sandra! I love it when Nicole Kidman tickles your nose!) Anyway, I’m not familiar with the books that inspired this unapologetic chick-flick, and I didn’t know what to expect when I added it to my queue.

I think this ended up one of the more confusedly moralistic escapism fantasies I’ve ever watched: the entire time you know everything will end up perfect and dreamy, the friends will reunite with tears and kisses, the protagonist will learn her adorable lesson; people will be totally charmed by her antics, and everything she does will wind up being just what the world needed, but she will ultimately turn down her lifelong dream because she knows it isn’t morally fair (?! … I didn’t even get that part, maybe John Goodman was distracting me) but it’s OK cause she ends up with Hugh Dancy (yeah, that’s not a spoiler, shut up). Watching the movie, you get to feast your eyeballs on buckets and boatloads of trendy sexy clothing, so of-the-minute that it looks pretty questionable by the time you see it, but still decadent and coquettish in this dress-up-doll kind of way. And yet ultimately the whole movie is sort of depressing and odd … the girl is in overwhelming amounts of debt, which doesn’t seem so enchanting to someone filling out a FAFSA, I’m sorry. It’s really more of an endearing, twinkling little finger-wag against credit cards than anything else … which, yeah, is a good lesson for us all. Ignore those creepy living mannequins when they try to strangle you with Dior! It’s all a trap! Comical-looking businessmen with comical names will come and getcha! We should all be so lucky to learn a lesson like this. Sooner the better.

Ultimately I think this movie failed (SURPRISE!) because it couldn’t make up its mind whether to come from a Paris Hilton land of total escapism and vicarious guilt-free indulgence, or from A Child’s Book of Virtues. I never expect to learn valuable lessons from movies based on Sophie Kinsella books, and when they try to teach me something, I feel as if I’m being fed a dog-pill in a spoonful of sugar-free Smucker’s jam. Please, let my brain rot in peace. That’s all I ask.

But I did enjoy Isla Fisher. She has such a cute winsome little face, like a slightly spoiled child, and I like the revitalized trend of the “zany redhead” … Fisher and Amy Adams are two examples, following the chocolaty footsteps of Lucille Ball. Somehow their red hair takes off a condescending edge that comes along with airhead blondes, imbuing them with a wholesomeness and silly earnestness that makes them about as impossible to hate as Cocker Spaniel puppies or buttercups. I personally found the “green scarf” pretty ugly, but then again, I shop at Forever21. This is not the movie for me.