Film Review: Lovely & Amazing

Lovely/ Amazing
Lovely/Amazing is a satirical film that follows the life of three women and a young girl as they face the stark realities and life and the perception of how women deal. The film’s premise is about how the three women: mother and two daughters deal with life and how body image plays a large role in how women carry on in daily transactions. The mother in the film is past middle-aged 50-ish year old woman, primarily wealthy, with an adopted young African-American girl, and about to undergo liposuction. The youngest daughter, Elizabeth, is a young beautiful, thin, tall actress who is striving to come into her own in a business where everyone needs to be like everyone else. Michelle, is the eldest daughter who is dealing with identity and mid-life crisis. She finds herself jobless, ambitionless, hopeless, and depressed because from her point of view nothing seems to be looking up. Annie is the adopted daughter and like her older sisters she too is going through an identity crisis as a young African American girl with a white family. The film reminds me of the reading in the Body Outlaws where the young girl wanted to keep her Jewish nose regardless of her mother’s protesting to have surgery—to look like everyone else. She says in the readings:
To me, being a Jew is cultural. But for me it’s a culture tied only marginally—even hypothetically—to religion, and mostly to geography and sensibility/temperament. So the question for me is: What happens when Jewish identity becomes untied from religion? I don’t know for sure. And that means I’ll grab onto anything I need to keep that identity—including my nose (Edut, 1998).
So too the women of Lovely/Amazing are each in the search of some form of identity.
The filming of the movie was done low budget and it seemed in the same light as films like Little Miss Sunshine and Dan In Real Life because the filming highlights the reality of such stories. The stories of these women facing so many pop image influences, body image conflicts, and even worse just plain self-esteem. Lovely/Amazing was a fantastic film for our class because it was filmed and told in a manner that is true to life. I will assume that eighty percent of our class has felt, seen, or faced similar emotions to the characters in the film. The satire in the film allowed for the reality of such true topics to hit home with the audience. Specific parts of the film made the point that no matter what happens we are all lovely and amazing because it’s our life that is the most important not those things that add clutter to life.

Edut, Os. (Ed.). (1998). My Jewish nose. Emeryville, CA: Seal Press.