The Princess Diarrhea

I'll make this quick.

I'm a big fan of Isla Fisher. She's gorgeous, funny, she's got that accent, and she's not only engaged to Sacha Baron Cohen but is pulling off a subversive practical joke of Kaufman-esque proportions by agreeing to convert to Judaism for him. That said, I'd never in a millennium allow myself to be dragged to see her new movie, Confessions of a Shopaholic, which opens next week (ironically, opposite the remake of Friday the 13th).

Last April, I wrote a quickie piece dealing with my loathe for the insulting formula behind 94% of the Hollywood movies aimed at female audiences these days. I basically made the argument that "chick flicks" fall into one of two categories: They're either melodramatic, celluloid psychotherapy aimed at dredging up latent mother-daughter issues (bring your Kleenex!), or Prince Charming wedding fantasies designed to fuck women into an orgasmic frenzy of unrealistic expectations.

Needless to say, I caught a lot of crap for this opinion -- and now I'm willing to admit that I was, in fact, wrong.

There's actually a third formula that I completely overlooked -- one that's really nothing more than an offshoot of the Prince Charming fantasy but has become a cynical cash cow in its own right.

Let's call it the Designer Princess premise.

Movies like The Devil Wears Prada, Sex and the City and now, of course, Confessions of a Shopaholic fit into this category. They're stories that suggest to women that independence is something that can be bought and worn like a kind of couture merit badge; that Prada is pride; that superficiality is success. Whereas the Prince Charming fantasy will undermine the relationship (to say nothing of the sanity) of any guy unlucky enough to be involved with a woman who subscribes to it by creating an unachievable emotional standard, the Designer Princess narrative will make the man go both crazy and broke trying to satisfy the materialistic lifestyle which the woman buying into it has come to believe she deserves. What's more, can the label-crazed heroines of these movies (and the novels from which they're adapted) really be idolized and emulated considering the state of the economy? I mean, can you honestly enjoy the fashion-tastic antics of Carrie Bradshaw -- even as escapism -- when your home's about to be foreclosed on and your neighbor's eating Alpo for dinner? Who the hell wants to watch a bunch of self-pampering wanna-be socialites get exactly what they want right now?

The answer: nobody you want to know.

And it's a shock that I can say that about anything involving Isla Fisher.