Line #6 YMMV/ShallowHal


1	* {{Adorkable}}: In her illusory form, Katrina got high fashion model looks and giggles wildly and endearingly at the corniest of jokes.
2	* AlternativeCharacterInterpretation:
3	** After all, which are Jill's feelings for Hal? At the beginning of the film, she rejects him, revealing with brutal sincerity that she is not attracted to him and considers him shallow. Days later, she is surprised to see Hal dancing with unattractive women and shocked to meet his new girlfriend, Rosemary. After catching Rosemary leaving Hal's apartment the next morning after the couple's first night of sex, Jill immediately begins to flirt shamelessly with Hal, even though she knows he's dating seriously. At their date in the third act, Jill says she was wrong about Hal and makes a comment that can be interpreted as malicious, saying that she saw the appearance of Hal's recent girlfriends and realized that he is pathologically un-shallow. So has Jill always been in love with Hal and seeing him having a serious relationship with Rosemary aroused her feelings and made her decide to fight for her love? Or was Jill jealous of seeing Hal happy with a woman who is the exact opposite of her physically and saw Hal more as a trophy?
4	*** Also, Jill when she convinces Hal to go out to dinner together as friends. She passes it off as a change of plans because her girlfriend bailed on her, but one does have to wonder if going out on a date with Hal was her plan all along. We only have her word on it, and the story about his friend may have been a lie to fool Hal.
5	** Rosemary. There's a lot of emphasis on how "sweet" and "kind" she is, but she seems to have some rude and judgmental tendencies of her own, which may be an attempt to deflect her own feelings of inadequacy with being a StepfordSnarker.
6	*** Rosemary's feelings for Hal. She initially thinks he's mocking her, and it's only the morning after the monologue "I know I'm not pretty" that she apologizes, decides to trust him and start dating seriously. The movie makes it clear that Hal is her first serious boyfriend, with her previous relationship being more of a platonic friendship. Did Rosemary really fall in love with Hal or she is so desperate for a boyfriend that she sees him as her only chance to have a serious romantic relationship in her life? Or is it a mixture of the two possibilities?
7	*** The same could be said of Hal himself, as given his reputation, he'd probably be spending a lot of time as a single man even after his CharacterDevelopment if Rosemary left him for good. The film shows all the female characters Hal flirts with rejecting him (or in Jill's case, at least at first), and strongly suggests that Rosemary is the first to accept his flirtations and also his first serious relationship.
8	** Was Hal really brainwashed into becoming a converted ChubbyChaser by the hypnosis or was he a closeted one all along and his shallowness was either his way of projecting his insecurities or avoiding ridicule for pursuing the women he truly finds attractive/who would probably find him attractive? Mind you, he's (a) portrayed by ''Creator/JackBlack'' who isn't exactly a little guy himself and (b) once the love goggles are removed he still thinks Rosemary is beautiful.
9	** Tiffany, the restaurant hostess when Hal loses his hypnosis. Is she truly a transgender woman or is it a corny, low-brow AlternativeJokeInterpretation that Tiffany's true form is so "hideous" that, [[CrossCastRole while a cisgender woman]], she looks and even sounds like a man?
10	* BestKnownForTheFanservice: Many fans remember the movie for the scene with Gwyneth Paltrow in lingerie.
11	* EnsembleDarkHorse: Jill, Hal's neighbor who briefly ends up being part of a love triangle with him and Rosemary, has some fans. Being played by Creator/SusanWard definitely helps.
12	* EsotericHappyEnding: The film shows Hal abandoning his routine, work and friends to stay with Rosemary at the Peace Corps. In turn, Rosemary forgives Hal and the two date again, and will probably marry. The problem is: Rosemary doesn't know about Hal's hypnosis yet, so she'll probably never know that their relationship initially started with a lie. Hal, in turn, may have difficulty adjusting to his new life away from home, and he saw the real Rosemary for just one day. And that doesn't mean that he is now physically attracted to fat people. How long will it be before Hal and Rosemary's marriage becomes strained to issues of low sexual chemistry?
13	* FanficFuel: What if Hal ditched Rosemary for Jill?
14	* HarsherInHindsight: Tony Robbins hypnotizing Hal to see the inner beauty in people can be seen as this after [[https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/janebradley/tony-robbins-self-help-secrets this]] Buzzfeed report reveals that he berated abuse and rape victims and hit on his female subordinates. Considering that, in reality, Hal would have probably seen Robbins considerably differently.
15	* {{Narm}}: Some of Rosemary's dramatic scenes lamenting her obesity and the negative consequences this has had on her love life can be a little silly when you see the lines coming from the mouth of a thin Creator/GwynethPaltrow.
16	* NarmCharm: That said, Creator/GwynethPaltrow really does a nice job with the material she has, which can make up for this problem.
17	* QuestionableCasting:
18	** Creator/JackBlack as Hal. Yes, the intention of the movie is to portray Hal as a {{hypocrite}} because he demands such beauty in women when he himself is far from conventional beauty standards. But still, his contrast to the idealized Rosemary in the movie would be bigger with a more conventional attractive actor.
19	** Creator/GwynethPaltrow as fat Rosemary in a fat suit may also be that for viewers who think it would be better if the filmmakers had cast two different actresses, one for thin Rosemary and the other for fat Rosemary.
20	* SpecialEffectFailure:
21	** The makeup and fat suit to make Creator/GwynethPaltrow an obese woman aren't bad, but they didn't age well either. In the few scenes of fat Rosemary, her full body is almost always covered by her clothes, and the only time she's in a bikini is a stuntwoman. When Hal and Rosemary reconcile at the party at the end and hug each other, pay attention to Rosemary's arms and you can clearly see where the fat suit ends as her hands are perfectly slim.
22	** Towards the end where Rosemary is carrying Hal, you can see that parts of his shirt are fastened to strings.
23	** Rosemary's giant pool splash looks off even if you assume that the hypnosis played with it somewhat. Not only does it happen behind where she actually cannonballs into the water, you can tell for a brief moment that the splash was a combination of three separate water explosions in a triangle formation.
24	* TearJerker:
25	** [[spoiler: During the hypnosis, Hal saw Cadence as a perfectly healthy and beautiful little girl. After it's turned off, he sees her again... with burns all over her face. He looks up, and what does Hal see? [[WhamShot "Pediatric Burn Unit."]]]]
26	** The way Rosemary talks about how she knows she's not pretty and how no man has ever loved her like Hal does will definitely hit home if you are or know a woman who has ever had body image issues.
27	* TheyWastedAPerfectlyGoodCharacter:
28	** Jil, the third person involved in the love triangle involving Hal and Rosemary, has little screentime and her only function in the plot is to give Rosemary a reason to break up with Hal in the third act.
29	** Katrina, the woman Hal meets in the taxi, is quite charismatic, and some fans wish she'd had more screentime and some plot-relevant role beyond just proving to Hal that the hypnosis was real.
30	* TheyWastedAPerfectlyGoodPlot: Jill, Hal's beautiful neighbor, begins to be jealous after seeing him and Rosemary dating, starting to blatantly flirt with Hal. This subplot could have a higher screentime, but is eventually relegated to a few scenes. Rosemary and Jill end up having just one scene together, and the plot of Rosemary suspecting that Hal has an affair with Jill ends without conclusion.
31	* TookTheBadFilmSeriously: The film is largely considered just OK, but Creator/GwynethPaltrow stands out in the cast and does a great job showing Rosemary's many facets, especially her depression over the way obesity has damaged her love life and her happiness alongside Hal.
32	* UnintentionallySympathetic: As abrasive as she might have been in dealing with the situation, Tanya (as the nurse actually responsible for managing that section of the children's hospital ward) had every right to object to a random stranger (Hal) coming in and interacting with the patients. Hal (at only Rosemary's invitation) literally comes in off the street, picking up and hugging random children, and even engages in a "kissing game" with them: while this all alone raises some serious liability issues [[note]]What caregiver in their right mind would let a random stranger start hugging and ''kissing'' minors in their charge, hospital or elsewhere?[[/note]] it is especially egregious with the later reveal that [[spoiler: they are all in a Children's Burn Treatment unit, where infection is especially dangerous)]]. In hindsight, Tanya was ''extremely'' patient in this circumstance!
33	* UnintentionallyUnsympathetic:
34	** Mauricio, Hal's shallow, snarky best friend who is responsible for [[spoiler: Hal's hypnosis spell ending]] just because he wanted him to be superficial again. Even after we learn his FreudianExcuse [[spoiler: that he was born with ''a tail'' that, since it has an artery wrapped around it, can't be surgically removed]], it doesn't garner him much sympathy, mainly due to him spending most of the movie badmouthing Rosemary and how absolutely gross his condition is.
35	** Hal's behavior has not aged well for some modern viewers. In addition to his superficiality, when Hal sees Rosemary on the street (an unknown woman he has never seen before in his life), he simply gets out of the car and follows her to a store, where he addresses her and invites her to a meeting. Today, that would make Hal look like a creepy stalker.
36	* ValuesDissonance:
37	** It's a ''lot'' less acceptable to use fat people and transgender people as comedy than it was when this movie came out. All the jokes surrounding Rosemary's obesity, such as breaking steel chairs and eating nonstop, can be extremely uncomfortable.
38	** Creator/GwynethPaltrow playing both thin and fat Rosemary may be this to many modern viewers who find the fat suit offensive, and believe that a fat actress could have been cast in these scenes.
39	** With a huge chunk of beautiful people being perceived as ugly, it also lends to the unfair "[[BeautyIsBad pretty people are jerks]]" stereotype.
40	** And some find the reverse stereotype "ugly/average looking people are saints" patronizing.
41	* ValuesResonance:
42	** Given the rest of the film, a probably unintentional example: Hal's powers make him see a transwoman's inner self as a beautiful woman. Hal's reaction to her real appearance also appears to be more surprise than transphobia.
43	** Another likely unintentional example, but while Rosemary’s weight is a frequent cause of jokes at her expense, one thing in her portrayal that is refreshingly unique is her eating habits. She is depicted as gluttonous but not greedy, and there is a difference. She’s shown eating a lot and enjoying stuffing herself to bursting, but she’s also shown giving food to poor people and helping take care of children in need, whereas usually a fat person would be depicted as being unwilling to part with any bite of food. When she downs the whole milkshake, she’s not trying to deprive Hal of anything out of spite, she’s just trying to fill herself up. It’s nice to see an obese character not portrayed as an incessant eater obsessed with food who in fact has an entire life outside of her relationship with food.
44	* TheWoobie:
45	** Rosemary, who has been humiliated and rejected by men for so many years that, when Hal starts flirting with her, she takes time to believe him and thinks he's just mocking her. And then she realizes he's telling the truth and they both date seriously, having the best times of her life ... just for Hal to start avoiding her without any explanation. And then she sees Hal having dinner with a beautiful, thin woman, and that totally destroys her.
46	** Also Cadence, along with all the other [[spoiler: burn victims.]]

Context YMMV / ShallowHal