I Feel Pretty 
 
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 Starring Amy Schumer, Michelle Williams, Rory Scovel, Emily Ratajkowski, Busy Philipps, Aidy Bryant and Sasheer Zamata. Written and directed by Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein. Opens Friday at GTA theatres. 110 minutes. 14A If the body-image comedy I Feel Pretty were as risky at it pretends to be, it would pursue its Ugly Duckling conceit with someone far less photogenic than Amy Schumer. Instead it upholds the hoary Hollywood tradition of pretending that a woman turns invisible and unlovable if she’s not a candidate for the cover of Vogue or Playboy. 
 
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 This is not to say the movie is unwatchable, even if Schumer’s low-self-esteem character Renee falsely feels at the outset that she’s unable to turn a single head in her direction. It’s better than last year’s wretched buddy comedy Snatched, although not as good as Trainwreck, Schumer’s first and best film laugher as lead player. I Feel Pretty manages to sneak past its dodgy premise by getting past surface details and addressing a fear common to all people, but especially women: that they simply don’t measure up to society’s harsh judgments as to what constitutes beauty. Renee is a regular New Yorker with a dull desk job doing online work for Lily LeClaire, a high-fashion cosmetic firm run by a social X-ray named Avery LeClaire (Michelle Williams). Weighing a few pounds more than her skeletal aspirations, Renee joins the fitness club SoulCycle — where she’s fat-shamed by an employee played by Saturday Night Live alumna Sasheer Zamata — and tries to sweat her way to the smile and shape of her dreams. But in the process, she gets a hard knock to the head and when she comes to, the face and figure she beholds in the mirror are the ones she’s been dreaming of, although only she can actually see them. Everybody else just sees Renee as she’s always been. 
 
 Rory Scovel, left, and Amy Schumer in I Feel Pretty. ( Mark Schäfer / AP ) From left: Aidy Bryant, Busy Philipps, and Amy Schumer in I Feel Pretty. AP/ Mark Schäfer ( Mark Schäfer / AP ) 
 
 Convinced that she’s now a goddess, Renee proceeds to dazzle people — although they’re really impressed by her amazing self-confidence, not her girl-next-door looks. 
 
 Schumer redeems I Feel Pretty by completely and fearlessly buying into the premise, and delivering a few good lines that slice into the shallow idiocy of valuing beauty over brains and celebrities over common folk. “I look Kardashian — one of the Jenner ones!” Renee says, in one of her many compliments to her sassy new self. 
 
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 Writer/directors Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein (Never Been Kissed) wisely don’t make Renee’s imaginary makeover a supernatural feat, as most movies would. They actually send up that movie cliché by showing a brief TV clip of the old Tom Hanks movie Big, where a carnival wizard called Zoltar magically turns a 13-year-old into a 30-year-old. Another early scene in I Feel Pretty finds Renee standing in a rainstorm, beseeching the gods to make her beautiful — but no lightning bolt strikes from the heavens as a deus ex machina for diva wannabes. Nope, it’s just a blow to the brain that makes Renee delusional, which isn’t all that hard to go along with. And while many of the characters in Renee’s circle are sitcom-ish, they’re also endearing. These include her two gal pals (Busy Philipps and Aidy Bryant) and a shy love interest named Ethan (Rory Scovel) who is working through his own issues of self-esteem. And check the wry humour in the choice of Williams as the ditzy Avery, a casting which brings to mind her portrayal of Marilyn Monroe in My Week With Marilyn. That film, like this one, dealt with the pressure of public image vs. personal reality, approaching it from a different direction. Both films come to the same happy conclusion: that physical beauty is something of far less value than the ability to love somebody for who they truly are, not as the mirror flatly declaims them to be. ||||| I sometimes feel a bit sorry for Amy Schumer. Her phenomenally successful career, which includes sellout arena tours, a bestselling book, a Hollywood career and, for many young women, rising feminist-icon status, makes it difficult, admittedly – but I do. 
 
 Why? Because simply by being a woman in the public eye, existing, and having the audacity to do so without the perfect size-zero proportions demanded of the women on our screens, she has been forced to become a spokeswoman on society’s body-image fixation. 
 
 The latest “controversy” is being cast as the lead in the upcoming Barbie movie (she is also, incidentally, working on the script, not that anyone seems interested in this). Apparently she doesn’t have the right figure to play Barbie. (Actually no actor does; a real woman with the conventional Barbie proportions would be unable to lift her head or stand). Having kept shtum during the casting process, Schumer obviously felt she needed to respond to the people criticising her body. “Is it fat-shaming if you know you’re not fat and have zero shame in your game? I don’t think so … When I look in the mirror I know who I am,” she said, continuing: “It’s that kind of response that lets you know something’s wrong with our culture and we all need to work together to change it.” 
 
 You might argue that Schumer would be better off ignoring the trolls and the misogynists. And were such proclamations about which female bodies are fit to enter our lines of vision limited to social media, I would probably say that she should do so. But this body fascism is our culture – it surrounds us, seeping into our minds from the pages of women’s magazines and the garishly coloured humiliation boxes that make up the sidebar of shame, criticism spieling like hateful streamers from the mouths of celebrated people, and our own peers, too. 
 
 Women will be aware how often we direct this at ourselves too; we have our own internal trolls. We learned the script from a very young age. 
 
 Which is why it’s important to think of the girls who see this happening every day, and – no matter how strong they are – absorb it. To have just one woman stand up and say, “I’m not having this” is a much-needed, powerful statement. 
 
 The girls are also the reason why Schumer is perfect for this role. I’ll admit that when I heard she was considering it, I was initially disappointed. That disappointment was nothing to do with her body, and everything to do with my feminist reservations about the Barbie brand (I had forgotten that, a year ago, Mattel diversified its range of dolls to include different body types and ethnicities, with great success). 
 
 The Barbie I grew up knowing was beautiful, saccharine – and dumb: “Math is hard”, declared her automated voice. But then I realised that Schumer was unlikely to kowtow to this vision of femininity, especially not if she is involved in the writing process. Instead, she will be cheeky, and sharp, and funny, and silly. 
 
 Think of any little girl you know. They love nothing more than a bit of silliness, and they don’t get it nearly enough. I am sure that they will love her when the film comes out. Maybe some boys will too. 
 
 The criticism of Schumer’s body is not coming from little girls, though. It is symptomatic of the predictable backlash that certain women in the public eye inevitably face. Now that the media machine has tired of Lena Dunham, the Schumer backlash has kicked into gear. 
 
 It’s not just about these women being successful and refusing to pipe down. Otherwise Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Sarah Silverman, Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson, and Jennifer Lawrence would all be facing similar tidal waves of hate (though it’s worth noting that men found another way to “humiliate” Lawrence; by revealing her naked body to the world). It is about their bodies not looking how women’s bodies are “supposed” to look, and – even worse – the fact that these women are unapologetic about that fact. 
 
 The only way to combat this body-shaming is to continue being unapologetic, which is tiring, sometimes soul-destroying work, and to champion better media diversity until it gets to the point where a woman’s words and talent count for more than the size of her backside. Schumer is doing her level best to help change the culture of body-shaming. It is, sadly, a task of Barbie dreamhouse-sized proportions.
– Amy Schumer has been hit with backlash since the announcement that she'll be playing Barbie in an upcoming movie about the iconic toy, and on Tuesday, she hit back at the haters on Instagram. Next to a picture of herself in a bathing suit, she wrote that it shouldn't really be called "fat shaming" because she knows she's not fat and has "zero shame." "When I look in the mirror I know who I am," she continues. "[I'm] a great friend, sister, daughter and girlfriend. I'm a badass comic headlining arenas all over the world and making tv and movies and writing books." She ends by thanking the trolls, because they actually made it "so evident that I am a great choice" for the role of Barbie: "It's that kind of response that [lets] you know something's wrong with our culture and we all need to work together to change it." There's quite a bit of support for her out there: As the Guardian points out, were the producers to attempt to cast someone with the Barbie toy's actual dimensions, that person "would be unable to lift her head or stand." And, as the Washington Post pointed out before Schumer's Instagram post, the comedian is self-confident, hilarious, smart, successful, and self-made—"who better to recalibrate the image and message of Barbie?"