Pajiba

I swear to Xenu, if I see another commercial with a skinny lady who is married to some schlubby, nasty dude...It's just infuriating (and gross). At least we have places to put it when we gain weight!

The belief is that extra weight negatively impacts the lines of the dance and detracts from the uniformity of ensemble work.

Fuck that noise.
Gimmee Ashley Graham in a unitard any day.
Why, today would be a good day. Hell, EVERY day would be a good day.

I was under the impression that the professional dancing/ballerina world was INSANELY competitive...so I could see how being a little overweight could be a really big deal. However, I don't think a movie should be made about it. Not everyone (mainly I'm thinking of the kiddies) are going to understand that context/circumstance.

Kristen Bell wouldn't be "slightly overweight" if she stuffed a frozen Butterball Turkey down her pants.

It's ok Admin, you can dance for me whenever you want honey.

Yeah. I believe the stats show that after jockeys (horse not disc), ballerinas are the most anorexic profession because of the weight requirements. I'm sure that you may have seen some lovely, talented but chubby girls at your daughter's dance recitals but if you weigh much more than 100lbs at 5'6 no way are you doing ballet professionally.

Cindy your comments should be directed at whitey because he’s the one the likes his women to be nothing but skin and bones. Now the brothers, the brothers, they likes them thick and healthy. The brothers want to be able to hold on to what he’s tapping. There’s nothing more disgusting that hitting it from the back and you look down to admire your work and a pronounced vertebrate is staring up back at you.

Hey Pajibans complaining about Bell being cast as overweight, if you read the press release you'll see that she's being cast as the mother of the slightly overweight dancer. So, regardless of everything else, at least one can hope that the film won't promote the stereotype about malnourished starlets being "slightly overweight".

Kristen Bell wouldn't be "slightly overweight" if she stuffed a frozen Butterball Turkey down her pants.

I am ... intrigued.

So considering Kristen Bell is 30, assuming the story isn't going to have her become a mother at 14 or having her made up to be much older than she actually is, it may be extrapolated that the age of the girl to be playing the dancer would have to be under 10 years of age.

Really? We're going there, are we? We're going to make a child in her single digits feel like shit about her appearance? Classy. Nevermind that children at that age really shouldn't be thinking about counting calories or body fat percentage, that's going to be hard enough to face in social circles as one gets older. Now there's going to be a movie made that goes after a child for being "slightly overweight"...but hey all the fat jokes and "aww po' baby" moments will all be forgiven when the 'lil porkchop in a tutu nails her pirouette in the end. All to show that fat children are "...just like normal kids."

Christ who's going to play this poor kid's father, Angus Bethune?

This is no different than Abigail Breslin playing the chubby nontraditional individualist pageant contestant in Little Miss Sunshine. I fail to see why it garners so many WTF responses. It's more worthy of an eye roll.

Fredo, Hollywood and the media have bombarded society with images that says a woman has to be 5’3 109lbs to be considered the holy grail. Then you have young women killing themselves to lose weight just to get noticed and I hate it. Concerning my comments about the brothers, well that’s just Pookie being Pookie.

Damn. Yossarian just beat me to it.

Just because a child is playing overweight doesn't mean that child will have a complex. I bet they put the kid in a fat suit ala Breslin.

No. For a child actor, that complex develops after being told for years they are too fat to play any character they audition for. It doesn't make a difference if no one outside of an audition room would consider the child overweight; the damage is done pretty quickly. For example, I almost always think people are making fun of me if they say I look good in an outfit. If I'm in an audition state of mind, I'm anticipating some "cattle calls aren't literal" barb and can't take a compliment about my appearance. Gotta love a self-esteem shattering industry that's highly addictive.

Well, I am a bit of a thick chick, and I have been SHOCKED to discover that in direct contradiction to all that I had been led to believe, GROWN MEN seem to like my size 12, 5'8", 36DD, bod. Now, this doesn't stop me from wanting it to be a size 10, and it may well be again soon, but I have decided that if you don't like *all of this* then you can keep on truckin' buddy!
And when I starved myself down to 110lbs 17 years ago, all I saw was FAT anyway, even though EVERY bone in my body was visible. So I know it is bullshit thinking anyway.

Pookie, those are lyrics from Sir Mix-A-Lot's opus "Baby Got Back". Nothing meant by it.

I'm often amazed how these kind of projects are aimed primarily at women and made by women writers, producers and directors. And I love how they try to sell them as "unique and different".

I hate to break it to you but little girls are judged by weight long before they get to 10 years old. That peer group can be viscous, along with some horrible parents and whatever passes for culture these days (Bratz or Toddlers & Tiaras).

You're taking offense at a few adjectives in a synopsis but I think your anger is misplaced. At least this film is trying to present a feel-good-be-yourself message. Sure it is going to be lame and ineffectual and cloying and shallow, but at least it doesn't opt for the subtle and much more damaging practice of banishing chubby girls entirely as if they don't even exist.

Thank you, yossarian.

I don't get the hullaballoo about this half-sentence blurb. Firstly, the "slightly overweight" one is not Kristen Bell. And secondly, it's freakin' ballet! It may as well have been about "a slightly retarded girl decided she wants to make it big at the Shanghai Math Olympiad."

To be a professional ballerina, don't you have to be disgustingly strong, thin, and flexible?

I think this movie is sending a dangerous message to women out there, especially those women that are pursuing professional ballerina careers. Women that are interested in dance and may have weight problems are now able to pursue dance careers that are very lucrative and they can even match or surpass the money that professional ballerinas make. With tips and a select clientele what smart dance professional wouldn’t want to leave all that stress and hassle behind?

I know we’ve been in a sort of news drought for awhile but lately there seems to be an aggressive push to be overly contrary on this site, attacking or dismissing things at the slightest provocation, like inexplicably dissing the trailer for Love and Other Drugs yesterday. Granted, the trailer flies low and the tagline is awful, pandering to general rom-com fans, but I thought all the other recent rom-com trailers looked much worse and seemed to draw less flack. Now, this is a post condemning a movie based on one sentence from a short description, a description of something grounded in reality, to boot. We don’t even know how the movie will structure itself around that concept. It doesn’t sound like something I’d see to find out, but I can’t see why people are surprised about the content or getting bent out of shape about it.

Let me offer you a different perspective on this. I have an eight-year-old niece who is horribly obese. She lives in a country (Ireland) where childhood obesity is not YET the norm. She sticks out terribly in her school, she had to have a dress made for her First Communion because nothing in the shops came close to fitting. She has become withdrawn and sulky because of her appearance. Yet my sister, her mother (who caused the problem), refuses to do anything about it "in case she gives her daughter a complex". I don't think there would be anything wrong with getting the child into a good exercise and diet program with an incentive about how nice she would look in a new smaller dress. Otherwise, this poor child is looking at a lifetime of being the enormous left-out obese woman with all the attendant health problems.

Not to get too practical but doesn't the ballerina have to be light so the gay guy can pick her up? So they should lay off the Ben & Jerrys.

There I think I've insulted everyone!

We don’t get film descriptions of the slightly overweight boy who wants to be a dancer.

Maybe not, but if you read a description of a film about a scrawny boy who wanted to play football, or perhaps about a 5'2" boy who wanted to play basketball, you wouldn't bat an eye.

This is not sexism. This is ballet.

(Also, please note that I resisted the temptation to put a period after every word of that last sentence, a la 300.)