The tale of Rebecca Bloomwood (Isla Fisher) and her battles to curtail an addiction to clothes that leaves her violent, orgasmic, and $16,000 in the hole makes for an occasionally dumb movie. She walks into glass doors and drops trays of food.
The demand for slapstick is ultimately so high it compromises Rebecca's common sense. Would a fashionista really use a Christian Louboutin shoe as an ice pick? Why would she yank a thread from a bolero jacket that would leave it in tatters? Fantasy here usually comes at reality's expense.
Still, her downward spiral into support groups and running from a particularly relentless debt collector feels a little like the world's downward spiral. If only the rest of us had a screenplay as determined to save us from bottoming out.
Adapted by Tracey Jackson, Tim Firth, and Kayla Alpert from two of Sophie Kinsella's popular "Shopaholic" novels, "Confessions of a Shopaholic" makes salvation from sudden unemployment and being in the red look depressingly easy, particularly from a journalist's perch. When Rebecca's Manhattan-based gardening magazine goes under, she applies for a job at her favorite fashion glossy - Allette - but deigns to accept a gig writing a column for the "People magazine of financial journalism."
Only because Fisher has as a spark of intelligence does it seems as if Rebecca is capable of writing anything longer than her signature. She plagiarizes her first submitted story. She trolls Google for help with a second crack. But somehow her enthusiastic young editor, an Englishman played by Hugh Dancy, sees Something. Write about money in a way that everyone can understand, he instructs, and a magazine sensation is born. Fisher's red hair notwithstanding, this is "Journalistically Blonde."
