Saturday, June 28, 2008

Phat Farm

In the last month no less than three films have used fat people and their obesity as the brunt of comment. Make it four if you count the big bone bear in Kung Fu Panda. Stuff like this is only as offensive as you want to make it, yet one wishes that Hollywood could see beyond such stereotypical humor (yeah right).
In Get Smart Maxwell Smart dances with a huge lady to comic effect. Although she displays grace in her movement the momentum reminds one of the hippos dancing in Fantasia. Less complementary is James McAvoy's boss in Wanted. As seen by the film she's a pig, berating her underlings and scarfing down junk food. You want to hate her so vile is her temperament.
In WALL-E humans are blobs kept alive as corpulent vessels by their computer gods. The humans think they are in charge, but really they are the computer's bitches. One of the things that influenced the Pixar film's view of future flab was the fact that bodies engaged in perpetual space travel would lose bone mass. Of course the reality is that space vehicles spin to produce an artificial gravity that prevents similar bone loss, at least in the short run.
All the characters mentioned above are heavier than the title character in Run, Fat Boy Run, which had a bloke (Simon Pegg) concerned about his weight when in reality he had under a 40-inch waist.

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