My current favorite TV series is "The Big Bang Theory", and one of the characters is the waitress Penny, played by Kaley Cuoco. So, when I saw that she has the lead in this TV movie, I had to watch.
Here she is high school senior Alyson (actually 20 or 21 during filming) who has family issues that may make it difficult for her to go to college. Fortunately she is also a very pretty and popular girl, and a star athlete, so she hopes to get a full ride scholarship. As the season winds down and colleges are evaluating scholarship offers, she suffers a fracture in her leg, and will have to remain inactive for 8 weeks, effectively killing her hopes for an athletic scholarship.
However there is a nationwide competition of a different sort and if she can win it, she will have the funds for college. She has a theory that fat people are miserable from their own doing, and that if they would be happy and friendly they would be accepted socially like anyone else. She decides that she will prove or disprove that theory, with the help of two friends.
She enrolls in summer school at a different school where no one knows her and, dressed in a fat suit and with a micro camera in her eyeglasses, she plunges in.
As we might imagine not everything goes as she hopes it will. She finds out that there really are lots of cruel people who not only look down on overweight people but also make fun of them to their faces.
Overall it is an interesting movie. At the end Cuoco delivers a short "public service" type of announcement to us, the audience, about overweight people. The movie mainly walks the fine line without being overly harsh on either segment of the population. People need to be tolerant and accepting of those who are different, but people also need to take care of their health.
Here she is high school senior Alyson (actually 20 or 21 during filming) who has family issues that may make it difficult for her to go to college. Fortunately she is also a very pretty and popular girl, and a star athlete, so she hopes to get a full ride scholarship. As the season winds down and colleges are evaluating scholarship offers, she suffers a fracture in her leg, and will have to remain inactive for 8 weeks, effectively killing her hopes for an athletic scholarship.
However there is a nationwide competition of a different sort and if she can win it, she will have the funds for college. She has a theory that fat people are miserable from their own doing, and that if they would be happy and friendly they would be accepted socially like anyone else. She decides that she will prove or disprove that theory, with the help of two friends.
She enrolls in summer school at a different school where no one knows her and, dressed in a fat suit and with a micro camera in her eyeglasses, she plunges in.
As we might imagine not everything goes as she hopes it will. She finds out that there really are lots of cruel people who not only look down on overweight people but also make fun of them to their faces.
Overall it is an interesting movie. At the end Cuoco delivers a short "public service" type of announcement to us, the audience, about overweight people. The movie mainly walks the fine line without being overly harsh on either segment of the population. People need to be tolerant and accepting of those who are different, but people also need to take care of their health.