In Her Shoes

I liked this movie almost in spite of myself. The first half hour is a bit hard to take, as two sisters who share nothing but parents and the same shoe size clash repeatedly. Cameron Diaz is beautiful, lazy, a drunk, a thief, a liar, an illiterate, a slob, and keeps stealing her sister’s shoes. What’s not to like? Toni Collette is a pretty Aussie (though you’d never guess in this movie) with a slightly large ass who keeps playing plain fat girls. She’s the responsible one here. I didn’t like either of them at first. Then the movie gets more detailed, and I ended up liking them both. But only because they’d changed. Shirley MacLaine is the catalyst, and she’s as good as usual.

But what I want to talk about is shoes. Everybody needs them, but only women seem to obsess about them, and I have never understood it. Not only that, they wear shoes that are guaranteed to destroy their feet by the time they’re 30, if not before. Maybe it’s because men don’t have many options (thank god!) in accessorizing. Pick out a tie, and that’s about it. Since I don’t wear a tie, I’m even more baffled. Here, Toni has a closet full of shoes she never wears. She buys them as a treat for herself, shoe-shops when she feels bad about herself. Then Cameron says to her … it’s because it’s the only part of you that doesn’t gain weight. An aha! moment for me! It’s true! Except at the extreme outer limits of morbid obesity, the feet don’t get fat! No matter how your weight may fluctuate, you can always wear your shoes.

That’s probably not the real reason so many women obsess about shoes, but at least it’s one that makes sense.