“America the Beautiful,” a hard-hitting documentary about the dangers posed by overemphasis on beauty and cosmetic medicine, is scheduled to have its commercial premiere on Friday after making the rounds of film festivals for more than a year.
Written, directed, produced and narrated by Chicago-based Darryl Roberts, the R-rated film is scheduled to open in New York on Friday, followed by an opening in Los Angeles on Aug. 22 at an as-yet unspecified location. No showings are yet planned in Orange County.
Reviewer Roger Ebert gave the movie three stars, saying:
The film is pulsing with barely suppressed rage, and by the end, I shared it. It’s about a culture “saturated with the perfect,” in which women are taught to seek an impossible physical ideal, and men to worship it.
A college reviewer last year said of the film:
“America the Beautiful” is not for the faint of heart. Many scenes, particularly the ones focusing on plastic surgery, are sickening and difficult to watch. The lengths to which some women will go to become and stay beautiful makes your average crash diet look like child’s play.
Some scenes will infuriate viewers, like the ones in which Roberts exposes doctors who call themselves “plastic surgeons” as mere doctors who have taken a one-day course in plastic surgery and have only practiced procedures on tomatoes. The practice is more common than you think. Of the doctors on the television show “Dr. 90210,” only one was an accredited plastic surgeon. The others were regular doctors or OB-GYNs who had attended a short plastic surgery workshop.
Ebert’s criticism of the movie:
Roberts has a powerful message in “America the Beautiful,” but he includes too much material not really necessary for his story. We could have done without his own experiences on a Web site named beautifulpeople.net, where applicants are rated on a sliding scale to discover if they’re beautiful enough to qualify.
We don’t need still more standard footage of Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and other plastic creatures.
Even more unnecessary is an interview with celebrity-gossip correspondent Ted Casablanca, whose four-letter language earns an R rating for a film that might rescue the lives of some girls age 12 and up.
