Warming Up

I hit the jackpot last night. I did my first overnight with Ernie for a while and he slept through til about 4.45am. And as we’d gone to bed stupidly early this maybe gave me seven hours of uninterrupted sleep. I managed to snooze on a little bit longer too. Maybe I should have a separate sleep blog for the parents who will enjoy loving me when I don’t sleep and hating me when I do. But it’s all about sleep now.

I managed a bit of work, but as we are now one week away from the script read throughs for the sitcom, not quite enough. Hopefully I will have three of the four shows up to a non embarrassing level by then. Humiliation (or the avoidance of it) has always been my main motivator when it comes to writing.

We went to Hatfield to see controversial (non-) body swap romcom â€œI Feel Pretty”. At the junction out of the village I thought once, I thought twice, but I didn’t think bike and pulled out as a motorbike was speedily approaching. Luckily he was still far enough away that it wasn’t a life ending moment for him and a life changing moment for me, but I held up my hand to apologise. He was still understandably cross though and flicked the Vs at me as he overtook me (though it was a good forty metres from the junction, which shows you how not-very-close this had been. Or that he’d had time to brake. 

Still I was glad not to have killed anyone. As I am every day. All right every now and again I have to go to bed disappointed with myself for the murder, but that’s happening increasingly rarely.

Amy Schumer has come under fire for this new film about a woman who doesn’t have the stereotypically perfect body, believing she has been in a Big-style magic transformation and turned into a supermodel. She has been criticised and I think apologised for not being a woman of colour (which seems a bit harsh) and not for being overweight enough. It’s true that Schumer is, by any regular fitness standards, a normal looking white woman. But I would say that’s part of the point of the film. She’s insecure about her looks, even though to most people she’s fundamentally attractive, at least in part because of her confidence and her humour. Again, this is what the film is driving at. The character is laid low by her shallow, but very human insecurities, but when she believes she is beautiful, though everyone else is bemused, her confidence leads to her success (after the obligatory section in which she gets too confident and loses her regular friends).

The film is not great - the plot is pretty formulaic (but then, hello rom-com), but it’s entertaining enough and pleasantly amusing and there are lots of great performances in it. My main plus point would be the neat twist that, unlike other films in this Freaky Friday/Nutty Professor genre, she doesn’t actually change her body. It works with the themes of how we perceive ourselves, but it’s also a lot funnier with her thinking no one is going to recognise her etc. I am not sure that in real her confidence would win over a bar full of men who’d come to see a bikini contest (she doesn’t win, but they like her plain stated truths) or (spoilers - though unless you’ve never seen a movie before then there are no surprises in this film) a room full of models by her heartfelt speech about regular women at the end.

But by the standards of the genre, it’s a pretty good crack at it. I’d like to see a film like this that subverts expectations or at least doesn’t make the right and wrong guy/gal quite so right and wrong.

But I stayed awake all the way through. Even though I had had one beer. And that’s the parents’ test for a good film.