There’s not much to like about Confessions of a Shopaholic; even the possibility of a gauzy guilty pleasure movie that the trailers hint at is quickly dashed once the thing starts.
Fun ought to be the name of the game for a film like this, but it’s about as pleasurable as dealing with thousands of dollars in credit card debt. Its prospects certainly weren’t helped by the global recession it was released into — perhaps folks don’t find financial woe hilarious when they’re in the throes of it.
The bubbly Isla Fisher (Wedding Crashers) stars as fiscally reckless fashion hound Rebecca Bloomwood. It’s too bad her first leading role gets her plunked down into such a stinker of a script, as she seems to have the chops to handle it.
Rebecca’s a writer at a gardening magazine in New York City, but dreams of working for high fashion rag Alette. When a position opens up at an affiliated money publication, she leaps for it, hoping it will be a stepping-stone to the job she really craves.
Trouble is, she’s in no position to be advising anyone on financial matters. Her arsenal of credit cards has been maxed out thanks to a slew of impulse purchases, like a pair of boots she just had to have or a scarf that could transform her entire wardrobe.
Rebecca’s purchases are often spurred on by mannequins that come to life and urge her to buy, buy, buy — an idea that I’m sure someone, somewhere declared as brilliant, but is actually rather creepy.
Her editor Luke (Hugh Dancy, The Jane Austen Book Club) has no reason not to fire her immediately for her inability to even understand the financial terms he wants her to write about, but he ends up giving her a column where she anonymously spouts off advice in layman’s terms.
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