You also have movies where if a guy leaves his sexy girlfriend for his new crush, it's okay. But it's not okay for the crush to look like a real person - even she has to be sort of sexy. Just not, you know, too sexy.
This is a pretty succinct summary of She's All That (especially the part where the nerdy girl goes to the beach with the cool guy and his friends and when she appears before the cool kids in her bathing suit everyone's eyes are falling out of their heads because it turns out, OMG, she has a KILLER body! But she's wearing a modest one-piece suit, so she's still a NICE GIRL [TM]). It's really pretty tiresome how so many movies are about "ugly ducklings" who "blossom" when made-over, even though they were really beautiful to begin with (Anne Hathaway in the first Princess Diaries movie, Rachel Leigh Cook in She's All That, etc.). The only times I've seen the "ugly duckling" not be naturally drop-dead gorgeous was in any movie where Janeane Garofolo actually gets the guy--not to say that she's ugly, because she's not (and when she's gotten the guy it was never after an intensive makeover that turned her into an entirely different person). One of the really great things about The Truth About Cats and Dogs was that it wasn't only about JG getting the guy who liked Uma Thurman's looks (a gender-swapped Cyrano, really), it was also about the friendship between two women and how it transcended competition over a man.
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This is a pretty succinct summary of She's All That (especially the part where the nerdy girl goes to the beach with the cool guy and his friends and when she appears before the cool kids in her bathing suit everyone's eyes are falling out of their heads because it turns out, OMG, she has a KILLER body! But she's wearing a modest one-piece suit, so she's still a NICE GIRL [TM]). It's really pretty tiresome how so many movies are about "ugly ducklings" who "blossom" when made-over, even though they were really beautiful to begin with (Anne Hathaway in the first Princess Diaries movie, Rachel Leigh Cook in She's All That, etc.). The only times I've seen the "ugly duckling" not be naturally drop-dead gorgeous was in any movie where Janeane Garofolo actually gets the guy--not to say that she's ugly, because she's not (and when she's gotten the guy it was never after an intensive makeover that turned her into an entirely different person). One of the really great things about The Truth About Cats and Dogs was that it wasn't only about JG getting the guy who liked Uma Thurman's looks (a gender-swapped Cyrano, really), it was also about the friendship between two women and how it transcended competition over a man.