To Be Fat Like Me is one of those overly dramatic 21st century high school movies. Right into the first ten minutes it already doesn't stand up to its story and the actors chosen make it very hard to take seriously. And as with most of these movies, somehow it manages to fit its forced environmentalism propaganda in, despite it having nothing to do with the plot (these students make an anti-pollution movie that is shown briefly in the beginning). I can tell you right now from very recent experience, high school is nothing like it's shown in this movie.
Anyway, the main character is named Alyson; she's a prissy, stuck-up, narcissistic ditz who thinks being pretty and good at sports will get her through life, so she's spending all her time playing softball for a sports scholarship and meanwhile looking down on her "overweight" family in shame and disgust (they're not even that fat!). She never considers that in this world you should expect the worst, not the best, and so she is totally shocked when an accident occurs that makes her unable to play sports (THE HORROR!) and she loses her scholarship. Since her grades are terrible because she never focused on anything but sports and socializing, she has to go to summer school.
Alyson decides to enter a documentary contest and teams up with two closet-geek friends to start a project called "Fat Like Me", where Alyson dresses up in a fat suit and goes to school as an overweight girl, using hidden cameras to record her experiences. The problem is, she makes friends with a misfit emo-type boy named George and his best friend Ramona, an overweight girl. They have no idea that in reality Alyson is a snobby popular girl, and Alyson finds herself getting very attached to them without realizing the harm she's causing.
Fat Like Me has a serious issue with its cast, mainly Alyson's family. Her mother and brother are supposedly obese but neither of them are, they're a little overweight but not the way the story goes on! The movie ends way too abruptly and never explains whether or not Alyson won the documentary contest, whether or not she fixes her relationship with Ramona and what her family thinks of the documentary once it's finished. I think the film company must have some promotional agreement with an electronics corporation or something; every kid in this movie has a computer! The kids where I'm from are mostly from blue-collar coal mining and woodworking families, they have to go to the local library for computer access. And it's highly unrealistic that the Jamie character just had "rich divorced parents to buy her high-tech spy cameras hidden in glasses and purses". The soundtrack was this trashy, horrible pop music and the lines were so fake! Nobody talks that way unless they're from Silicon Valley or something! This movie still manages to get its point across, but it is obviously written by adults with no input from kids today who are actually living the reality of being overweight in high school. Hopefully a better movie with more depth will come out someday to address the situation.
Anyway, the main character is named Alyson; she's a prissy, stuck-up, narcissistic ditz who thinks being pretty and good at sports will get her through life, so she's spending all her time playing softball for a sports scholarship and meanwhile looking down on her "overweight" family in shame and disgust (they're not even that fat!). She never considers that in this world you should expect the worst, not the best, and so she is totally shocked when an accident occurs that makes her unable to play sports (THE HORROR!) and she loses her scholarship. Since her grades are terrible because she never focused on anything but sports and socializing, she has to go to summer school.
Alyson decides to enter a documentary contest and teams up with two closet-geek friends to start a project called "Fat Like Me", where Alyson dresses up in a fat suit and goes to school as an overweight girl, using hidden cameras to record her experiences. The problem is, she makes friends with a misfit emo-type boy named George and his best friend Ramona, an overweight girl. They have no idea that in reality Alyson is a snobby popular girl, and Alyson finds herself getting very attached to them without realizing the harm she's causing.
Fat Like Me has a serious issue with its cast, mainly Alyson's family. Her mother and brother are supposedly obese but neither of them are, they're a little overweight but not the way the story goes on! The movie ends way too abruptly and never explains whether or not Alyson won the documentary contest, whether or not she fixes her relationship with Ramona and what her family thinks of the documentary once it's finished. I think the film company must have some promotional agreement with an electronics corporation or something; every kid in this movie has a computer! The kids where I'm from are mostly from blue-collar coal mining and woodworking families, they have to go to the local library for computer access. And it's highly unrealistic that the Jamie character just had "rich divorced parents to buy her high-tech spy cameras hidden in glasses and purses". The soundtrack was this trashy, horrible pop music and the lines were so fake! Nobody talks that way unless they're from Silicon Valley or something! This movie still manages to get its point across, but it is obviously written by adults with no input from kids today who are actually living the reality of being overweight in high school. Hopefully a better movie with more depth will come out someday to address the situation.