This charming film, of little interest to men but of considerable interest to women and girls, succeeds because of the charming personality of its star, Poppy Montgomery. She is so impressive in the TV series UNFORGETTABLE that I decided to order a DVD of something else to see what she was like when not being a memory expert. So this arrived, under the film's original title Cinderella PACT (a phrase used throughout the film, and hence the more appropriate title). The story is simple: three women who are close friends are very overweight, one of them being even extremely fat. They all suffer from low self-esteem and are inattentive towards their appearance, especially Poppy, whose mouth gets smeared with the icing when she eats a doughnut, and she doesn't even notice. So they make a pact to lose weight together. All three of the actresses start the film with immense padding around their bodies to simulate being fat. It does not really matter that we can readily see that it is all false padding, because this film is essentially a fairytale, where reality rarely comes into it. Without Poppy Montgomery this film probably would have been a failure. It needed and got a star who is so compulsively watchable that we can ignore the silliness and just watch her reactions and wonder what she is going to say or do next. For those not familiar with her, she is like a much warmer, more affectionate and childlike version of Sandra Bullock. But she can also be entirely convincing as someone of high intelligence. That's it, she's extremely intelligent but never really grew up. The love interest for Poppy was very well cast, with Adam Kaufman. He is good-looking, but his main appeal is that he is so nice. Girls often prefer nice guys to hunks, so Poppy's falling for him is no surprise. The film is a kind of romcom, but with the comedy down-played in favour of girlish angst. Men will be impatient watching all that fussy female obsessing with their appearance, but girls will be girls and we had better just accept it if we can't change it. The film was directed by the Canadian director Gary Harvey, who does a good job. The sub-plot turns out to be the main plot, namely that Poppy has invented an imaginary persona, an agony aunt called Belinda Apple (who gets to the 'core' of problems), and her book of advice to women and girls becomes a potential best-seller but causes the dilemma of Poppy not being able to appear at the press launch because Belinda does not really exist. It's all good fun for those who are either female or enjoy observing females in all of their many neuroses, to see how they cope with what seem to them to be really serious problems but which to us men often appear to be trivial issues. If women only would realize that men do not want them to be waif models and do not want them to become anorexic! But try and tell that to a girl!
