some good things, but not as great as everybody says

Rating: Null/10 (4 May 2002)

First, the good things: the funny scenes really are funny, Renée Zellweger is radiant and her English accent is as good as any I have ever heard from an American actor, her list-making and urge to self-improvement almost made me cringe with recognition, Colin Firth is fine (though not as overwhelmingly perfect as some people seem to think!), Hugh Grant is good as the cad, and I wish we could see more of Bridget's "urban family", à la "Notting Hill". Now the bad things: I haven't read the book, but is this really how far we have come? Nothing else in life matters if you haven't got a man? Also, at Bridget's publishing house, dealing with routine sexual harrassment is obviously still a matter of "grin and pretend it's not happening". I just finished watching this movie and "Someone Like You" with Ashley Judd, back to back, so the next item struck me especially forcibly: I heard several times how Zellweger gained *twenty pounds!!!* for this film, and a constant theme is how Bridget needs to lose weight. Also, one reviewer talked about how no rich, uppercrust lawyer like Mark Darcy would realistically be interested in a plain, somewhat overweight woman like Bridget. HAVE WE ALL LOST OUR COLLECTIVE MINDS? Renée Zellweger is gorgeous, and the world is full of women who would kill to have her figure just the way it is in this movie! What she has is the body of a woman rather than a teenaged boy (which, despite her charm and wonderful smile, is just what Ashley Judd has). Has our mass media brainwashing really gone so far that Ashley Judd is considered to have the perfect body, while Renée Zellweger is considered overweight, and plain to boot? By the way, did anyone else notice that Zellweger seems to spend half the movie half-dressed (and I'm not even talking about the so-called "sexy" outfits she wears to the office to seduce her boss). In the final scene where she runs out into the snow after her man, does she not hang her winter coat by the door like most people? If a male actor consistently showed as much skin as she does throughout this film, there would be comments from all sides, but since she's a woman, it's all right. Two more things: everybody in the movie smokes all the time, another throwback to an era I thought we had outgrown, and there are a lot of obscenities, which I personally didn't enjoy, and took away from my pleasure in the story.