#shallow hal

The 2001 romcom Shallow Hal stars Jack Black and Gwyneth Paltrow and follows a sexist man named Hal who falls in love with a fat woman after being hypnotised by a life coach in order to learn to appreciate people’s inner beauty. 

While Paltrow wore a fatsuit for in this movie, IMDB trivia tells me that Jack Black had to lose weight for the role which is information that made me go ‘huh’.

The movie had huge success in the box office, earning around $140 million to its budget of $40 million which really tracks considering how often I remember seeing this movie on TV when I was in primary school.

I rewatched this movie for the first time in probably 20 years with one of my friends and about 15 minutes into it, she turned to me and said: “this is a two hour movie”. And it really was that. And we were there for the whole 113 minutes of it.

Shallow Hal was directed by the same guys as There’s Something About Mary which I just discussed earlier and while I wouldn’t say that I’m a huge fan of their style of humour, I do find this movie a little more palatable than the previous one.

The fat jokes are definitely a very on point reflection of early 2000s misogyny and the notion that someone’s inner beauty visualised would be a skinny version of themselves is kinda dumb (like why can’t my inner beauty look like something gnarly like a biblically accurate angel or something) but I guess at least Hal learns his lesson in the end. 

I’m sort of struggling to think of anything else significant to say about this movie cause tbh I watched it a while ago and now reflecting on it, I feel quite indifferent towards it.

Do you remember watching this movie when it first came out? How do you think it has aged?

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