Shallow Hal
I swear: One of these days. One of these days I am going to not only ask for hazard pay but demand it.
The reason: Films and movies the likes of "Shallow Hal".
On one level "Shallow Hal" is "Honeymoon in Vegas" but without a proper sense of comedy and romance.
On another level "Shallow Hal" is predictable fare from the Hollywood Machine: Here we have two brothers--Peter and Bobby Farrelly--who found success previously with such efforts as "Dumb and Dumber"--mindless, simple humor--who have decided recently that they want to make films and movies that do not just entertain but educate.
Unfortunately: On all levels it does not do what it should do or is obviously intended to do.
Understand: There is nothing wrong with making a film or movie that contains a moral, a message. But when that message subverts and overwhelms the original intent of the effort at hand--entertainment--then problems mount quickly.
Which, at its most basic, is what happens to "Shallow Hal" and goes to explain why it will fail at the box office.
Hal--as in 'Shallow Hal'--is given advice by his father, who is on his deathbed: Hot young tail, Hal. He then gets young Hal to promise him he will date only beautiful women and never fall in love.
That, he explains to Hal. Is what happened with your mother and I.
So Hal (Jack Black) grows up and holds true to the promise he made: He dates only beautiful women, he has no meaningful or lasting relationships with women of any stripe, and he is the ultimate male pig.
According to the Political Correctness of the Hollywood Machine, that is.
Now Hal cannot travel through life as he had alone. He has, predictably, a bud, a mate, a pal--Mauricio (Jason Alexander), who is the embodiment of everything Hal's father supposedly loathed; albeit male. (Would someone explain the hair Alexander sports? Is that spray-on, a very flat rat, or the remains of a field mouse coughed up by an owl?)
Mauricio, as such efforts as "Shallow Hal" go, keeps Hal on the straight and narrow: Hal has a life made up of brief encounters, meaningless sex, and pointless sexual banter in bars.
Then one day, all this changes: Hal finds himself trapped in an elevator with the self-help guru Tony Robbins (Tony Robbins), who hypnotizes him, and tells him to look beyond the superficial of women to their inner beauty, their true beauty.
Bing, bang, bong. Hal is freed of the elevator and meets, in time, a nurse, an ex-Peace Corps volunteer named Rosemary.
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