2008 Directed by Darryl Roberts
In a society where "celebutantes" like Paris Hilton dominate newsstands and models who weigh less than 90 pounds die from malnutrition, female body image is one of the more dire problems facing today's society. "America the Beautiful" illuminates the issue by covering every base. Child models, plastic surgery, celebrity worship, airbrushed advertising, dangerous cosmetics - no rock is left unturned.
USAR
USA
Weird byproduct of the post-BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE era, this attempts to ape that model though with far less successful results. The focus - America's beauty-industrial complex - ends up being rather scattershot: sometimes it's about makeup, sometimes it's race, sometimes it's weight and dieting. The real problem, however, is that the film largely starts with its mind made up and then simply selects subjects and situations to bolster its thesis. I suppose you could say the same thing about something like Moore's film, but there's an elegance to the approach there that's missing here - people who have "succumbed" to the beauty industry ideals are trotted out more as sideshow objects, something to be gawked at by the choir being…
Incredibly mixed feelings about this. I appreciate why it was made, I think, and that’s the 1/2 star. But, at the highest level, it unfortunately feels like the film equivalent of men telling women to smile more. Sure, it features a lot of women but take a gander at the biggest credits.
Is America obsessed with beauty? If by beauty you mean a highly commercialized and impossible type of “beauty”...yeah, we know. This film doesn’t really explore that, though it certainly claims to. It’s confused, it’s messy, it’s binary, and it’s not doing what it thinks it is. The women interviewed talk about beauty, the men interviewed talk about women (or products, procedures, etc...for women).
One man interviewed literally says,…
This is another movie that was on my Netflix Queue and it was about to be removed from Instant so I decided to watch it before it was gone. The movie covers a lot of different topics while trying to answer the question 'Why are Americans so obsessed with beauty'? One of the first people that we are introduced to is a very pretty model named Gerren Taylor who is quickly becoming a very popular runway fashion model. But there is one big catch with Gerren, she is only 12 years old. Gerren is one of the more focused aspects of the movie and raises a lot of questions about our society when the embodiment of beauty, at least in…
I tried watching this on Netflix streaming one night thinking it was gonna be about the evolution of beauty standards, or what the industry puts supermodels through, or perhaps about the unfair way our society treats fat people, or the way ads manipulate people into buying beauty products and other junk; but what I got instead was a very poorly made movie blatantly implying that everyone who exercises or watches what they eat hates themselves and has an eating disorder. I've been overweight a lot of my life and I exercise, but I like myself, exercise is not supposed to be a "punishment". Other people don't exercise and that's okay too. Everybody has a different life and things that make…
No, this isn't the latest Tobey Kieth DVD. America the Beautiful is a 2007 documentary the focuses on the way we, the people, are programmed by the media to pursue the impossible dream of the media-created and defined definition of beauty. It focuses on the assault our visual senses receive on a daily basis on what a woman is suppose to look like, dress like and live up to.
Read the rest of the review at...
revronmovies.blogspot.com/2011/11/america-beautiful.html
