Friday, February 20, 2009

Buying What Confessions of a Shopaholic is Selling

Now I probably would have never seen the movie Confessions of a Shopaholic but my girlfriend wanted to see it on Valentines day so I pretty much had to see it. I went in there hoping that the movie would be slightly entertaining, but as it turns out it is actually quite a good movie with a good message.

The story is about a girl named Rebecca Bloomwood who, as the title says, is addicted to shopping. She lives in a small apartment with her friend, but owns enough high fashion clothing to start her own department store.

Not only is Rebecca addicted to shopping, but she is in debt way over her head. She and her friend calculate all her debts and during this process it is clear she has a serious problem based on her reasoning for some of her purchases.

Rebecca then decides she needs to find a job and attempts to get a job at a high fashion magazine, but when she accidentally sends her letter to a finance magazine, the manager there finds her letter to be quite "metaphorical" to finance.

She ends up writing for the financial magazine using metaphors about shopping and becomes world renowned for her articles. Through her popular articles she ends up meeting the women who runs the fashion magazine she has dreamed about writing for, and puts on a pretty good impression with her.

Throughout this whole process she continues to ,and continues to fall deeper in to debt. She attempts to go to a shopaholics class, but it doesn't appear to affect her shopping decisions.

Rebecca is then outed on national television on a spin off of "Good Morning America" buy a debt collector who has attempted to contact her for months. This leads the financial magazine to cut their ties with her and she is again jobless.

Rebecca jobless, but still having her good impression she set on the women who runs the magazine of her dreams is given an opportunity to write for her dream job. Rebecca is offered the job to write a article in the magazine for "affordable fashion" but realizes the things she is going to be selling aren't affordable at all, and are exactly the same things she has been put into debt with. She then has one of those movie moments where she preaches about how she "doesn't feel good" about doing that, and preaches about how she has changed and so on.

She ends up turning down her dream job because she has cut ties with the idea that she needs material possessions in order to live a happy life. She ends up selling all of her high end clothing to build up enough cash to pay off all her debts.

This is a pretty brief description of what the movie is about. There is a love story in there which of course is resolved in the end and the girl falls in love with the boy, but I believe the message of this movie is a pretty good one.

Being a shopaholic is a very real problem we have in America and this movie actively speaks out against it. They show a women who is absolutely attached to her material possessions give them all up in the end because she realizes that they are not what she needs in the world. They show what is really important are friends, family, and love.

I don't believe this is a very materialistic movie regardless of how many different designers were viewed in this movie. The message is a very positive one that may be help enough for someone who has a shopping problem to get help, or may allow someone who believes they need material possessions to change their views.

I myself don't like when people always need "nice" or "new" things in order to be happy, and if they were given something used they wouldn't be happy at all. But I am buying the message that Confessions of a Shopaholic is selling.

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