Inner beauty movies - Which ones aren't full of crap?

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mattiasflgrtll6's Avatar
The truth is in here
Boy do I hate the trope of turning an "ugly" looking person (Usually a girl for some reason) into someone conventionally attractive that everyone will like. Which is made doubly insulting with them trying to go for the "Real beauty is on the inside" message at the same time.

Penelope is one such offensive example (Although I haven't checked out She's All That or the superinfamous The Hottie And The Nottie). Penelope is born with a pig nose and hopes that some day she'll find someone who can turn into a normal-looking girl instead. But then she finds someone who loves her for who she is, although she's eventually subjected to annoying media attention once she reveals herself publicly.

Spoiler alert though...
WARNING: spoilers below
at the end the spell is magically reversed and she looks completely normal! Christ, what a load of ****. How are people expected to feel confident about themselves if even movies with a supposed "inner beauty" message tells them they will only be accepted if they get an extreme makeover?


There are movies that buck this trend. Shallow Hal flips the entire premise on its head and scrutinizes both Hal and Mauricio (Would actually say that Mauricio is a lot worse given that he channels George Costanza a lot) for their shallow mindsets and ends with Hal realizing he loves Rosemary for her personality first and foremost. Why can't more of them be like this?

Mask and Wonder also do a great job of dealing with this subject matter respectfully, even if Wonder is of course an entirely different type of movie than the others I mentioned.
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A comedy, especially a teen comedy, about inner beauty will typically be the film that grinds your gears.

The tragedy will be more likely to have legit ugly people dealing withe real (i.e., what a tragedy it would be if I were ugly like the elephant man).

Old slasher movies kind of fit in here, because the frumpy not-as-hot good girl makes it all the way through. These films were basically FMK with FK going to the hot girls and the M going to Jamie Lee Curtis. Perhaps we could revive the slasher genre with a killer who is chopping up young people looking for the inner beauty of their organs. "You don't understand Amber, your face is ugly, but your liver... ...is a work of art" (sound of medical saw clicks on after killer says this line). "True beauty lies within."