Film Analysis: Lovely and Amazing

Lovely and Amazing Film Review
When we first began watching this film as a class, I wasn’t too sure what to think about it at first. But the further we got into the, the more it began to grow on me. Lovely and Amazing was about a family of women, a mother, three daughters and granddaughters; all fighting their own battles against insecurities and body image issues.
The main idea behind this movie is taking a look at the lives of three women, whom let their individual insecurities affect their lives and how they confront those insecurities. Although each of their personal struggles is different, each one brings to life the problems and anxieties that women of all ages face in today’s society. This brings up the connection between this particular film and the class readings that we have done throughout the semester. The readings that we have been discussing have all been dealing with body image issues that women have to deal with on a day-to-day basis. For example, Jane the mother is struggling with her old age and hates the way she looks. In order to achieve her younger looking self again, she opts for liposuction surgery as a “quick fix” for her insecurities. She feels that once she gets this surgery she will be skinnier and feel younger and finally be happy with her body. Unfortunately, the surgery has a very negative effect on her and causes a life threatening scare. Such effects women don’t think about when they are contemplating about having such surgeries to change their physical appearance. Another related issue that was portrayed in the movie was dealing with the acceptance of being different. The adopted daughter Annie, who is overweight and black has many insecurities that she is dealing with in this film. Throughout the whole movie she was trying to become “more white” like her white family and always trying to gain the attention of her older sisters. It was sad to me that a girl at such a young age was already being faced with such body image issues. Children her age should be more worried about who they are going to the play with than what they look like compared to everyone else. It just shows the shift that American culture has taken concerning body image and the way people see themselves.
The movie overall was very different compared to anything that I had seen as of recent. I feel as if it were a low budget film, thus the scene settings were completely different than other movies of its time. On the other hand, I really enjoyed it. The issues that the writer portrayed through the dialect as well as through the way it is acted out make this movie very true to real life versus the Hollywood version. That is what makes this movie so nice. Real people can relate to the women characters and their issues. Thus, this movie creates a powerful connection between the script and the audience leaving me to believe that this was one of the goals of the writers; to create such a connection. By watching and listening to the script of the film the only real assumption that I gained from it was that they believed that women are very insecure about who they are and how they should look. Not all women in today’s society are like that. But I will agree that the majority of them are. This movie was a very accurate account about how people try to make adjustments to themselves in a world of free floating insecurities and self-involvement.