Shallow Hal

I was never a Farrelly Brothers fan. Nor was I a fan of Gwyneth Paltrow, nor Jack Black, nor Tenacious D, nor Jason Alexander, nor Laura Kightlinger. And I was certainly not a fan of Tony Robbins.

But by the gods, I am sure as heck a fan of Shallow Hal!

And I can't really say why, for certain. I can't really put it into words. Shallow Hal isn't the kind of movie I'd recommend to anyone else. It's not even a very good movie, and I admit that. What this movie does to me is deeply personal, and I guard the effect it has on me with great jealousy. From its first general release on 9-November-2001, through the end of its theatrical run in the Bay Area on 28-February-2002, I saw Shallow Hal in the theaters 17 separate times. (And on that last time, I waved a fond farewell to its theatrical run as the woman with the little dog at the end waved its paw and said, "Say bye-bye!")  Wow. I love this movie. I want to marry it.

You see, on those extremely rare occasions when I have somehow managed to get a girlfriend, there are a whole slew of emotions I feel at first, and not all of them are positive emotions. There is anxiety ("Oh God, I'm nervous!"). There is unsureness ("Is she really what I want?"). There is worry ("Am I going to screw it up again?"). Of course, there's giddiness and relief and excitement and other positive emotions, too, but it's only with the mix of positive and negative emotions that it feels real. Once in my life, thanks to an, um, lap dance I got in Tijuana, I managed to "trick" myself into having all these feelings at once again. It was almost like getting a new, real, honest-to-goodness girlfriend. The feelings were gone by morning, but for a brief time, it was almost as good as the real thing.

And in that scene where Rosemary told Hal that she felt uncomfortable about him telling her that she was beautiful when she knew she wasn't, I had the very same panoply of feelings go through me again!!  It was like really being there, on a real date, with a real woman who expressed a real concern because she really wanted to keep things going. And more importantly, later, as the movie wore on, it became obvious that . . . that . . . that <snif>  Rosemary has real feelings for Hal. She is in love with him. She cares about him!!  *SOB*!  That's something I experience so rarely that the few memories I have of it actually happening to me seem like a distant dream about somebody else's life. It felt like an eternity since anyone had felt that way for me. (Not that I'm bitter, noooooooo.)  And I really, really needed to experience it again, if only vicariously through a dumb old supernatural romantic-comedy movie.

But the thing that initially drew me to the movie, the thing that first got my attention, was:

The magic spell cast on Hal

Let's face it, the proper subgenre for this film is not merely that of your garden variety "romantic comedy," but one of the more intriguing "supernatural romantic comedy."  It's not just your standard boy-meets-girl, boy-makes-booger-jokes, girl-runs-away-from-booger-jokes, boy-makes-an-incredibly-romantic-booger-joke-that-wins-girl-back-at-the-end plotline. No no no no. There is an extra ingredient here. Supernatural forces are at work, which twist reality into some new, alternate, even-more-romantic version of itself.

In a supernatural romantic comedy, nothing is impossible. Mel Gibson can hear women's thoughts. Nicholas Cage can retroactively be married for 13 years, despite being single. Jack Frost can come back from the dead as a talking snowman. Bette Midler can raise Shelley Long from the dead without even needing a snowman. George Burns can swap bodies with his 18-year-old grandson. Meg Ryan can snatch a perfect gentleman from two centuries in the past. All the major characters, despite their inherent desirability, can be miraculously single at just the right moment. And here, in Shallow Hal, Hal Larson receives a "gift" from the self-promoting, banana-handed Tony Robbins that transcends all known laws of physics.

The "gift" that Tony Robbins bestows on Hal — without Hal's full knowledge — is the ability to see only the Inner Beauty™ in every person he meets in the future from then on.

The very notion filled me with wonder. Wow! Hal could instantly tell, just by looking, who were the good people and who were the "bad" people. What a fantastic superpower! I would love to be able to do that! I could just walk into a room full of available women, and with a single glance know who would be nice — and, for that matter, who would probably make a good mate for me.  Without having to go through the trials and tribulations and heart-wrenching let-downs of getting to know any of these women first.

What I'd really like, though, is a gizmo I could wear on my belt, with a switch that allowed me to turn this Inner Beauty™ vision on and off. I could leave it off for normal interaction with the world, so that I wouldn't accidentally see a wheelchair-bound paraplegic as an Olympic sprinter and mistakenly invite him to walk up the stairs with me, or make a faux-pas as bad as what Hal did the first time he talked to Rosemary. But if I ever had to trust someone I didn't know intimately, or if I was pondering whether I should ask a particular woman out, or even if I was worried that I might be making too many excuses for someone's awfulness because (s)he was good-looking, I could peel back all the layers of that person's persona and see his/her "true" self, iconified into the surface standard of beauty or ugliness, with one flick of a switch.

Of course, I'd have to be careful if I used this trick for mate selection. It would be a mistake simply to switch on the Inner Beauty™ device and go after the woman who then looked the most physically attractive to me. Why? Because, as was obvious in Shallow Hal, the power of Inner Beauty™ vision only displays Inner Beauty™ as the Hollywood standard of beauty. A woman with just oodles of Inner Beauty™ would appear as a supermodel, with the face of a 16-year-old girl and the body of an emaciated annorexic. And I don't go for teen-age annorexics. I like a woman with some meat on her bones and a few more years in her eyes. Whenever my Inner Beauty™ vision was turned on, I would have to keep reminding myself to go after the stereotypically beautiful women, not merely the women that looked like my personal choice for beauty.

Now, of course, there is the problem that Inner Beauty™ vision is, well, bogus. It can't be done. There is nothing in real life that will substitute for the long, painful process of getting to know someone and taking often nasty risks with that person from time to time. People's "souls" do not emit any special Inner Beauty™ radiation that you can detect. Listen to the bogus explanation from the movie dialog as to how this superpower is supposed to work:

Mauricio: "How can he see the inner beauty in these women when he doesn't even know them?"
Tony Robbins: "Inner beauty is the easiest thing in the world to see when you're looking for it."

At least, that's what would happen if Inner Beauty™ really were as easy to see as Tony Robbins makes it out to be. Hmph. I'll bet Tony Robbins's Inner Beauty™ looks like a toothless shrivelled old man with dirty scars all over his face and body.

Then again, I sometimes wonder what my Inner Beauty™ would look like if I switched on the Inner Beauty™ vision device and looked in a mirror. <shudder>

Fat Rosemary

Because love grows
Where my Rosemary goes
And nobody knows
like me!

But that didn't matter when I saw the movie for the first time and peered into the lovely face of Rosemary's real appearance. She was beautiful, just like Hal said she was. Her long, flowing blonde hair caught the golden afternoon sunlight, ringing her face in a soft halo. Even though she wasn't really mine, and was never going to be mine, I revelled in this secret love-affair I was having with this projected image on the screen. She was miiiiiiiine, and no one else would be inclined to horn in on my secret beauty, because she didn't meet everyone else's standards of beauty.

I was crestfallen when I learned, afterward, that all of the shots of Fat Rosemary from the neck up were merely Gwyneth Paltrow in a fat-woman suit.

But now I at least know where to look. There are scenes in the movie of Rosemary from the neck down, or from behind, where it isn't Gwyneth Paltrow playing the role at all. It is her body-double. In a couple of scenes, you can get a fleeting glimpse of her partial profile . . . and it is even more gorgeous than Gwyneth Paltrow's face in the fat-woman suit. That shot of Rosemary from a 3/4 angle behind, when her father is glancing at her in the kitchen while she's leaning over the counter in her shorts, is breathtaking. While the rest of the audience was going, "Ewww!", I was secretly blowing her kisses.

As explained in this Entertainment Tonight article, Paltrow's body double is 22-year-old-at-the-time Ivy Snitzer, who bears no relation to the band "Ivy" credited with the movie's incidental music. From her picture, it seems that she is a natural brunette, which was somewhat of a disappointment for me. (But that photo of her in the blonde wig with Jack Black . . . wow, is she cute!)  And as it turns out, even she had to put on padding to look as fat as the Farrelly brothers wanted her to in some scenes. Since she was only 22, and I was an old geezer of 36 at the time, I feel terribly guilty, because it means that although I can take the moral high ground by being attracted to overweight women, I'm still attracted to young women, which do fit the standard mainstream image of feminine beauty. And, of course, I'm still coming to grips with the fact that I'm attracted to blondes, which are apparently preferred by every other male on the planet, too.

Here are some old links that USED to have pictures of Ivy Snitzer on them, but don't work any more:
http://www.corona.bc.ca/films/details/pictures/SHGwyneth1-closeup.jpg
http://www.corona.bc.ca/films/details/pictures/SHGwyneth2-closeup.jpg
http://www.goblinhead.com/ivy/
http://www.corona.bc.ca/films/details/pictures/shallowhal_tvgrab1.jpg

And here is a link to a picture of Ivy Snitzer that was still working as of 12-May-2010:
http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1804736442/photo/premiere/226486

The Nitpicking section

As I've said, Shallow Hal isn't exactly a perfect bed of roses. There are continuity errors, plot holes, and (in some theaters) visible boom microphones throughout the movie. So, here's where I get to pick it apart and point out all the glitches like a good little fanboy ought to.

• When Mauricio tries to dance with that attractive lithe woman in turquoise and she runs away, we can see a couple dancing behind them. The female member of this couple has black hair with a white headband tied around her forehead, and is wearing a white shirt with a purple design on it. An instant later, without so much as skipping a beat in the background music, we see a blond-haired woman holding on to some rails and dancing with her eyes closed. Behind her, we see the same black-haired, white headbanded, white-with-purple-shirted woman dancing with a totally different guy in a totally different part of the bar. This is what happens when you re-use an extra in the same scene with the same wardrobe.
• When Hal and Jill are talking outside by the fountain, Jill is smiling at one moment. Cut to a different angle on Jill, and suddenly her smile is gone. It's as though her mouth just teleported into another position. (This is the danger of combining footage from more than one take. There is no way all the little details are going to match. And this isn't the only time it happens in this movie.)
• Hal is in his boss's office, and his boss tells him they've made a decision about that wholesaling position. Cut to Hal, who says, "Yes! It's about time, Dave!"  You can then see Hal's boss raising his right hand about a foot off of his desk. Cut back to Hal's boss — who, by the way, bears an uncanny resemblance to John Wayne in his later years — and the arm isn't raised at all. It's as though his arm teleported back to his side.
• When Hal first meets Rosemary, she is wearing high-heeled light-brown open-toed platform shoes. We even get to see Fat Rosemary wearing these shoes when they show her looking at panties from a distance. Rosemary continues to wear these same high-heeled light-brown open-toed platform shoes while she's in the Fuel Stop diner, as shown in the scene where her chair collapses. However, when she's waiting outside and Hal tells the two Mallrats to look at that cute little number on the other side of the glass door, we see Fat Rosemary's legs, wearing dark blue low-heeled closed-toed shoes. When Hal then walks Rosemary to her car, and she climbs into her car, we again see her wearing the high-heeled light-brown open-toed platform shoes she had on before.
• Hal has just told Mauricio that he's "got issues," when he spies Rosemary across the park. Cut to Thin Rosemary, who is holding her purse in her right hand. Cut back to Hal and Mauricio; Hal tells Mauricio that Rosemary is "straight across the field," and Mauricio looks where Hal is pointing. Cut back to Fat Rosemary, who is now holding her purse in her left hand. When Thin Rosemary meets Mauricio a few seconds later, her purse is still in her left hand, which means that it was not Hal's Inner Beauty™ vision that made Rosemary's purse appear to switch hands. (Theoretically, Rosemary could have switched the purse from her right hand to her left hand in the second or two it took Hal to say "Straight across the field" to Mauricio, but this seems unlikely.)
• Artie and Jan come by Hal's office to give him a cake, congratulating him on his promotion. Rosemary leaves and takes a rather substantial "sliver" of the cake with her. As Artie and Jan talk with Hal, we cut back and forth between shots of Hal standing in front of his desk, and shots of Artie and Jan standing there with Artie holding the cake and Jan holding the paper plates. There are at least 3 different cakes in Artie's hands in these various shots.  Furthermore, the knife that Rosemary used for cutting the cake switches orientation from one shot to the next.

  When Rosemary first cuts her giant slab out of it, the slice-shaped hole in the cake reveals it to be a two-layer cake, with dark brown on top and light brown on the bottom. The missing slice also makes about a 120-degree angle in the cake (i.e. the slice is about 1/3 the size of the whole cake), and the knife is lying on its side so that we see it edge-on. Then, we cut away to Hal, and cut back to the cake, and suddenly both the top and bottom layers of the cake are dark brown, and the knife is positioned so that it's "sitting up" with the side of its blade to the camera. Cut away to Hal again, and cut back to Artie, and now the cake is light brown on top and dark brown on the bottom (the reverse of what it was at first), and the missing slice only subtends about a 90-degree angle and would thus be only a mere 1/4 the size of the whole cake — and the knife is lying on its side again.

• Why did Hal, Rosemary, Walt, and Tanya bring bicycles with them to a ski resort?  (In the published shooting script, one of the scenes involved the four of them biking through a mountain town, but this scene never even made it into the Deleted Scenes section of the DVD or the Special Edition VHS video.)
• As with Jill next to the outdoor fountain, when Hal is talking to Tiffany (just after he loses his Inner Beauty™ Vision), Tiffany is shown smiling broadly with "her" teeth showing, and then we cut to a different angle on Tiffany and Hal, and suddenly "her" smile is reduced to a mild, toothless grin. It's as though "her" mouth just teleported shut.
• Hal and Jill go out to dinner at the Capital Grille. Despite the subdued lighting of the restaurant, the boom microphone is clearly visible over Jill's head while she's saying, "I've seen the women you've been going out with over the past few weeks, and now I know appearances mean absolutely nothing to you."  (Note: the boom mike was visible in some of the theaters I saw the movie at, but not on the DVD. Apparently the film prints shown by the theaters have extra junk at the edges of the frames which the projection equipment is supposed to cut off.)
• When Hal comes back to the Children's Hospital to look for Rosemary, he sees Cadence as she really is, with a badly scarred face. As touching as this scene was, the boom microphone once again rears its ugly head, hovering over Cadence while she speaks.
• When Hal asked Walt where Rosemary went to when she left the hospital early on the last day, he shrugged in that way that only a man who walks on all fours can shrug, and replied, "Beats the heck out of me."  Yet at the end, which takes place on that very same day, we see Walt there at Rosemary's going away party, whistling cheerfully at Hal and Rosemary! How did Walt suddenly learn that Rosemary was having a going-away party at her parents' place? Did Rosemary or her parents call him and invite him at the last minute, off-camera? (In the published shooting script, Walt mentions the going-away party for Rosemary when Hal talked to him in the hospital, which made a lot more sense.)

Other stuff in the movie I didn't care for

• Dr. Sayed's brief appearance and short lines had nothing to do with the rest of the movie. They established nothing about Hal or Rosemary, and Dr. Sayed never reappeared. At first, I thought Sayed Badreya was an actual pediatric doctor who wanted some kind of small walk-on role in the movie, but the Internet Movie Database credits him as having been in 7 other movies, including Independence Day.
• Why would Steve Shanahan say that Ralph Owens and Rosemary were back together, and then not even invite Ralph to Rosemary's going away party?  Was he lying to Hal when he said they were back together, in order to get Hal to stop bothering Rosemary? (In the published shooting script, Steve admits in the end that he was trying to make Hal jealous, but this isn't made clear at all in the movie.)
• According to this movie, overweight or unattractive women are so universally starved for affection that any one of them would be thrilled to go out with Jack Black. Of the seriously overweight women I've known in real life, none of them had any difficulty getting boyfriends. Furthermore, although an "ugly" woman might have a better chance of being available at any given moment, she is no more likely to be attracted to a given man than a "pretty" woman is.
• Furthermore, it seems like Moynihan and the Farrelly brothers equate "inner beauty" with volunteer work. Katrina gave up school for a year to help out her sick grandmother. Bella and her Spastic Friends worked at the Foundation Fighting Blindness (which, in real life, used to list a "Sean Moynihan" among its board of trustees — according to this interview, the Sean Moynihan who wrote the Shallow Hal script is legally blind). Rosemary volunteered in the pediatric burn unit of a hospital and was a member of the Peace Corps. Ralph Owens was also in the Peace Corps, and in the published shooting script, he was even a volunteer Big Brother to a mentally challenged guy. Does "good heart" always have to mean self-sacrificing altruism?

JPS Funds

Little is known about Hal's job, or about the company that Hal works for. The scriptwriters apparently felt that the movie would have broader appeal, or that males in the audience could more readily identify with Hal, if his occupation were never addressed. All the references to Hal's job, even when he's at work talking with his bosses, are in the abstract.

Here's what little the movie gives us to go on:

• The logo on the company's building reads "JPS Funds."
• On either side of said logo are engravings of the eye-on-the-pyramid design from the back of the Great Seal of the United States (the one seen on the back of a dollar bill).
• Hal is hoping to be promoted to a wholesaling position.
• Hal's boss tells him they've chosen to give the position to "the gal from Merrill."
• Steve Shanahan is the president of JPS.
• Hal says to Steve, "Only a company with a solid reputation like JPS could ever market this product."  (He never divulges what this "product" is.)
• Hal closes his presentation to Steve's executive committee with, "I believe these measures will help JPS and all of our customers."

In the published shooting script, there was a little more elaboration:

• In the scene where Steve asks Hal for his ideas for the company, Hal says: "Okay, sir, for starters, I think you're kidding yourself if you think you can continue to charge a six per cent load on your funds."
• In the next scene, where Hal is finishing up telling Steve his ideas for the company, Hal says: "... and by networking all the wholesalers, via the Internet, they could download marketing materials, which eliminates printing costs and they're getting more timely information. Timely information, Steve, that's what today's marketplace is all about."

Mirror, mirror

While Hal is under the spell of Tony Robbins's Inner Beauty™ vision, we in the audience get to see the people that Hal meets from Hal's point of view. However, whenever one of these people passes in front of a mirror or other reflective surface, we get a fleeting glimpse of what they actually look like.

Those of you who've seen the movie even once probably remember the scene where Rosemary and Hal are walking along the street toward his apartment building after their first big date, and Rosemary is eating a caramel apple. When they walk in front of a plate glass window, we see Rosemary's reflection at her full, natural weight. But this isn't the only time in the movie they do this trick. They do it again, right before Mauricio breaks the spell on Hal. Look very carefully at the mirror on the wall of the McIntosh lobby, which is showing Tiffany's reflection. Tiffany appears cute and feminine to Hal, but the mirror is showing her true, surface appearance. (We get a much clearer view of Tiffany in all "her" glory a few seconds later, after Mauricio's dreaded spell-breaking cellphone call.)

The music

There were several songs featured prominently in the movie which would be great for the soundtrack album, but which do not appear on the soundtrack album. This is unfortunate, especially considering that the soundtrack album easily had enough room for several more tracks and contained one song that wasn't even in the movie.

Most prominent among the left-out songs was the dance music heard while Hal was dancing with the "pack of stampeding buffallo."  (Who are, according to the credits, more properly known as the "spastic friends.")  Heck, I'd dance to it, if it was playing while I was in a dance bar. Also glaringly obvious was the lack of that "We Are Building a Religion" song heard both while Mauricio, Hal, Li'iBoy, and Ralph are driving like madmen to Rosemary's going away party, and during the end credits. Perhaps there were issues with securing the rights to these two songs for the soundtrack album or something.

But the biggest omission was of all the incidental music composed by Ivy for the film. Where's that "dah, da da dah, da dah dah" theme that gets reiterated over and over and over again, foreshadowings of which can even be heard in the metellophone playing in the very first scene where the doctor is looking over Hal's dying dad? That theme practically defined the movie! And where's the suspenseful music that played when Hal had just had the whammy lifted and was in danger of seeing the real Rosemary at McIntosh's (which, I should mention, has very subtle vocal "dah"s in it just like the main "dah, da da dah, da dah dah" theme!)? I mean, I understand that the soundtrack album was really released as a kind of pop-music song collection album, but still.

The only way to get all the music to listen to, of course, is to buy or rent the DVD. (Or copy the DVD in a DVD burner, or go to one of those bootleg places and get a ripped-off copy, but such activites are a no-no. They're also illegal.)

Some of the music in this movie doesn't really work. Neil Young's strained falsetto in "After the Gold Rush" is annoying as hell, for example. But a good deal of the music really works and works well. "Wall in your Heart," which starts playing near the end of Hal's phone call with Rosemary where you can see her start to cry from behind, and which continues to play while Hal and Mauricio are seen (but not heard) arguing next to the park bench, can bring me right to the edge of despair, and had me blubbering like a baby for a few seconds during my 11th viewing of the movie. "This Is My World" literally brought me to tears the 8th time I saw the film, while Rosemary carried Hal to the VW convertible at the end and raised her arms in triumph. And "Love Grows (Where my Rosemary Goes)"? I'd never heard the song before I saw this movie, and now, that song is this movie. "Where my Rosemary goes" . . . "my Rosemary" . . . sigh

Of all the e-mail I have received about this webpage, almost all of it consists of questions on the order of "What was that song they were playing at thus-and-such part of the movie? It was, like, kewl, and stuff."  Pah. Plebeans. This movie is so much more than just a collection of pop tunes! Can't you see that?! Can't you?!?!!  What do you mean, "No, I can't"?

Oh, all right, you kids. You win. Here's a list of the titles and artists of the most frequently asked-for songs that aren't on the soundtrack album:

• The recurring incidental music that goes "Dah, da da dah, da da daaah" throughout the movie is
  • "Shallow"
  • by Ivy
  • (although someone told me it's not the same "Shallow" as on the Ivy album titled Realistic)
• The "la la la la la la la" music that's playing while Hal and Katrina are in the cab together is
  • "Edge of the Ocean"
  • by Ivy
  • which was heard in a TV commercial that aired in September 2003 for Holland America cruise lines — whose phone number is 1-800-SAIL-HAL. (Coincidence?)
• The dance music heard while Hal was dancing with the "pack of stampeding buffallo" is
  • "Too Young"
  • by Phoenix
• The music playing when Hal first sees Rosemary and talks to her while she's browsing for panties in the department store is
  • "Toxic Girl"
  • by Kings of Convenience
• The background music in Mcintosh's when Rosemary tells Hal that Ralph has asked her to go with his group to Kiribati is
  • "Oxalá"
  • by Pedro Ayres Magalhães
  • performed by Madredeus
• The Peter Gunn-like music playing when Rosemary is knocking on Hal's door and Hal and Mauricio are desperately trying to come up with a way for Hal to avoid seeing her is
  • A song written specifically as part of the incidental music for this movie
  • by Ivy
  • and, no, I don't know if it's available on any albums, so stop asking
• The Hawaiian-sounding song Li'iBoy is playing on his ukelele out in front of the Peace Corps office is
  • "Never Forget Where I'm From"
  • by Justin Kawika Young and Kekama Emmsley
  • performed by Joshua "Li'iBoy" Shintani
• The "We Are Building A Religion" song heard while the 4 are driving at breakneck speed to Rosemary's house (and again during the closing credits) is
  • "Comfort Eagle"
  • by Cake
• The song played during the trailer for the film, which we don't hear in the movie at all, is
  • "Disaster Piece"
  • by Sugar Ray

And Cry Unto Her

And if you love the girl, man, light up a torch,
Blaze a trail to her front porch,
Kiss her 'til your lips are scorched
And the rain comes down in you.

"Rosemary, this is going to sound crazy, but I wouldn't be telling you this if I didn't love you and I didn't want to stay together with you. I'm averting my eyes because I've never seen what you really look like. The day before I first met you, Tony Robbins — yes, that Tony Robbins — he and I were trapped in an elevator together for a couple hours, and he offered to do this little trick for me. What I didn't know at the time, and what I've just found out, was that he hypnotized me. He made it so that with everyone I met from then on, I would only see what kind of person they were on the inside. I actually saw every new person's inner beauty. I didn't see their real appearance. But Mauricio just erased that, and now, I can't even recognize anybody I've met while I was hypnotized. When I said you weighed 110 or 115 pounds, I wasn't just being nice. You really honestly looked like a thin woman. Mauricio has said some awful things about the way you look, and I know you're actually fat, but I won't believe that you're too ugly to look at. I've seen how nice and how wonderful you are, and I love you too damn much to give you up. And I love you too much not to tell you all this, as bad and as cuckoo as it sounds. I want to look at you now. I've never seen you before, not from the outside, and I want to look at you now. Just understand if I gasp or something when I see you for the first time, because I'm scared, really scared."  <deep breath>  "Okay, here I go. I'm going to look at you now. No matter what happens next, remember that I love you, Rosemary."

When he answered her phone call while he was reading, and left her thinking that he'd merely drifted away from her as "Wall in Your Heart" started playing, my heart nearly fell out of my ribcage in anguish. Tell her!  But he couldn't hear me. I was out there in the theater seats, watching a story that had already happened. He was now as alone as I ever was.

In fact, despite the fact that the script made it pretty obvious, it still took me a couple of viewings to really understand why he didn't want to see her: He wanted the real Rosemary, sure, but he still wanted her to look like Gwyneth Paltrow. In other words, he wanted to have his cake and eat it too. (The fact that Rosemary ate about 1/3 of his cake in a single swipe notwithstanding. <rimshot>)

I sometimes wonder if Hal levelled with her at the end, after he'd won her back and driven off with her on their way to Kiribati. What would she think? What would she say? How long would it take her to believe that Tony Robbins's hypnosis was even possible? Would she bring up the fact that she saw him holding hands with Jill at the Capital Grille? I don't need to say that there will never be a Shallow Hal 2 to answer these questions — despite Shallow Hal's box office success, it certainly wasn't the kind of movie for which a sequel would work, and even if such an outlandish thing ever did happen it would probably (A) reduce my personal enjoyment of the first movie, and (B) not bother to answer these niggling little questions anyway.

"Oh my God, you're beautiful!"

Throughout the movie, whenever he's not dressed up in a business suit or swimming trunks, Hal is wearing a casual short-sleeved button-front shirt that isn't tucked in. At the end, when he finally sees Rosemary's true form for the first time, he's wearing one of these shirts along with a regular old casual pair of bluejeans.

Contrast this with Rosemary's outfits, which until the last scene all involve a dress or a skirt of some kind. (Assuming we ingore the deleted "Jack Runs" scene that appears only on the DVD.)  This is what Hal sees the whole time he's hypnotized.

Yet at the end, when he sees her true outer form and declares "Oh my God, you're beautiful," she's wearing a button-front casual shirt that's not tucked in, and blue jeans. In other words, when he can see the "real" her, she's dressed just like him!  (If you don't count the fact that her sleeves are long and his are short, of course, which is a pretty minor difference.)  Clearly, this was meant to show us that they're pretty much the same and therefore really really compatible. No wonder Hal thought her visage was beautiful!

Some personally memorable lines

• The line that made me most feel like this was a real relationship that was actually happening:

  [Rosemary and Hal are walking home together after their first big date]
  Hal: "Don't worry about Mauricio. He's been acting weird lately, especially around really pretty girls."
  Rosemary: "Hal. Do me a favor and stop saying that I'm pretty and that I'm not fat, okay? 'Cause it makes me uncomfortable."

• The line that made me worry about the depth of Rosemary's emotional scars:

  Rosemary: "I like the track."
  Hal: "Ah, so she's a gamblah!"
  Rosemary: "Yeah, well, just the dogs. I hate the ponies, there's too much human involvement, you know? You can't trust people if you're looking for a fair deal."

• The line that made me squirm uncomfortably the most:

  [Rosemary and Hal are in the children's hospital]
  Rosemary: "You guys want to play the kissing game?"
  Kids: "Me!" "Me!" "Me!"
  Hal: "Should I go get a bottle?"
  Rosemary: [chuckles slightly] "No no no. Here's how we play. You wanna get the lipstick? What we do is, we put on the lipstick, and then the kisser kisses as many times as they can until the lipstick comes off."

• The line I never quite made out until I got the DVD and could look at the subtitles:

  [Ralph and Li'iBoy run into Rosemary up at the ski resort]
  Ralph: "Li'iBoy's been stuck in the office for the last 30 days, so we dragged him up here and threw him on the slopes."
  Li'iBoy: "*Whew*  Wasn't pretty."

• The lines that made me groan and roll my eyes:

  Mauricio: "How can he see the inner beauty in these women when he doesn't even know them?"
  Tony Robbins: "Inner beauty is the easiest thing in the world to see when you're looking for it."
  Mauricio: "But how can he not feel them when he's . . ." [makes suggestive gestures] ". . . Eeyugh!"
  Tony Robbins: "The brain sees what the heart wants it to feel."

• The lines that most strongly brought forth the "only you, happily ever after" cliché of romantic-comedies:

  Hal: "Rosemary, I am so sorry that I hurt you. I've been really dumb. I'm immature, I'm unthoughtful, I'm a friggin' idiot. But I love you. You're the only girl I ever loved.  And I just didn't want you to go away without knowing that."
  Rosemary: "You really hurt me."
  Hal: "I know. But if you'll let me, I want to spend the rest of my life making it up to you."

The DVD's out! The DVD's out!

On 2-July-2002, after four months and two days of surviving in a Shallow Hal-less world, after many false starts spurred by seeing an incorrect release date of "4-June-2002" displayed in far too many places, the Shallow Hal DVD finally hit the stores. I knew a local Wal*Mart would be stocking it on this day, so I arrived there only a few minutes after the store opened in the morning. They had an entire cardboard display case devoted to nothing but DVDs of Shallow Hal. My long march through the desert of Shallow Hal deprivation had finally ended at this magnificent oasis.

The DVD features 11 scenes that were cut from the theatrical release, as well as the laserdisc-inspired tradition of letting you select "alternate" audio tracks where the directors talk over the movie, some short Shallow Hal-related clips, and an Easter egg hidden in the Language Selection screen. (There are also Spanish and French audio tracks, but although you can switch to Spanish and French subtitles, these foreign-language subtitles were never implemented beyond a few sparse translations of English-language text that appears on signs or book covers in the film. Also, for some reason, whenever I switch to the French subtitles and then turn subtitles back off, the French subtitles keep showing up anyway — this may be a bug in my DVD player's firmware, though.)  Most of the audio commentary by the Farrelly Brothers deals with which ones of their buddies they let have walk-on roles, but there are a few moments that prove quite enlightening. F'rinstance:

• When the thin Rosemary is taking off her lingerie for Hal and we see her from behind, we're not actually seeing Gwyneth Paltrow — we're seeing a woman whom the Farrellys call her "butt double."
• Rosemary was originally going to be named Kimberly; her name was changed because they wanted to use the song "Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)" in the movie.
• The Farrelly Brothers claimed that the gaffe with the cake wasn't mentioned on the Internet. Since this gaffe did in fact appear on the Internet Movie Database (in the "goofs" section for Shallow Hal) at about the same time as the movie left the theaters, I have to conclude that the audio commentary was recorded before then. Either that, or the Farrellys don't pay close enough attention to the Internet Movie Database.
• "JPS" stands for James Patrick Shay. This apparently corresponds to an Extra which the movie credits among the nightclub goers as Jimmy Shay.
• The scene with Dr. Sayed, as I suspected, was thrown in at the last minute as a favor to the actor.

You may recall reading (or hearing) that Gwyneth Paltrow once wore the fat suit into a cocktail bar, to see how a fat person would be treated in real life, and was stunned by how no one wanted to have anything to do with her. Well, one of the Shallow Hal-related clips on this DVD shows why. It turns out the fat suit she was wearing at the time was not the final version she wore in the movie. It was an earlier version with a much more haggard-looking face. This first draft of Fat Rosemary was a lot homelier than the cute blonde Fat Rosemary we saw at the end of Shallow Hal.

Many, if not most, of the deleted scenes are the kinds of scenes where you can easily understand why they were cut. However, some portions of a few of the deleted scenes added depth to the characters and made my affections for this movie grow even deeper. There was a second scene in the gym that took place after the spell on Hal had been broken, in which Hal sees the "real" Tanya and tells Walt to dump her (because he'd previously seen her Inner Ugliness). The scene with Rosemary and Hal waking up in bed together originally ended with Rosemary's side of the bed collapsing under her weight when she rolled over ("Oops!"), which an oblivious Hal attributed to termites. The voiceless scene in the park with Hal and Mauricio arguing during the "Wall in your Heart" song originally had dialog. Oh, yes, it had dialog, all right. And there was a deleted scene, simply called "scene 11 v.3," where Hal met up with Jan on a park bench, presumably before Tony Robbins hypnotized him, and confided in her that . . . sigh. I can't tell you. Just know that it was one of those scenes that rekindled my feelings for this movie all over again.

A little added bonus on the "Special Edition" VHS

The "Special Edition" VHS version of Shallow Hal is, of course, not nearly as special as the DVD. Due to the lower resolution of VHS, and the historical expectations of VHS viewers, the movie is shown in full frame pan-and-scan. (Although this results in the left and right edges of the frame being cropped off somewhat, it also has the advantage that — at least for this movie — they cropped off less of the original film frames at the bottom, so that you can actually see a little bit more at the bottom of each scene than you can on the DVD. For instance, in the scene in the Capital Grille where Hal throws some money down on the table, you can see the money on the table and you can tell that it's at least 3 bills with a $1 bill at the top of the stack.)  At the end, they tacked on one of the "making of" shows that was also on the DVD, and a paltry 3 deleted scenes.

However:

One of the three deleted scenes isn't on the DVD! It's an alternative version of "Bed Ditch" which, apparently, is available only on the "Special Edition" VHS. In this (short) alternate version of the Bed Ditch scene, Hal and Thin Rosemary are in bed together, Rosemary gets up, and then when Hal rolls over to her side of the bed he falls into a deep Fat-Rosemary-shaped ditch in the mattress.

Miscellany from the published shooting script

The published shooting script for Shallow Hal (ISBN 0-571-21575-0) seems to have been published only in Great Britain, and is pretty hard to get hold of. It contains a more-or-less final script for the movie, with Rosemary actually called Rosemary and Tony Robbins actually called Tony Robbins. (Early drafts of the script reportedly had Rosemary's name as Kimberly, and had a psychic in place of Tony Robbins.)  Here are some of the personally useful tidbits about the movie I've gleaned from reading this published shooting script:

• Rosemary's last name was originally Kocsis, not Shanahan.
• The whole thing with Mauricio's tail doesn't appear in the script at all.
• Nor, for that matter, does Hal's cheap imitation of a cuckoo clock.
• The script also never shows us what Ralph really looks like.
• However, in the scene where Jill dumps Hal, Hal tries to get her to go out with him again "just as friends," saying "Come on, you gotta eat, don't you?" — which forms a nice thematic couplet with Jill making exactly the same proposition to Hal later on when she asks him out to the Capital Grille.
• Hal's father's last words to him were: "Sometime in your life, go to a gay bathhouse. Just to know."
• The restaurant where Hal initially took Rosemary out to lunch was named Johnny Rocket's, not The Fuel Stop.
• Jan and Artie were originally going to be Jen and Ashby, both of whom were women. Ashby apparently became Artie because Jack Black wanted a speaking role for Kyle Gass, his cohort from Tenacious D.
• In the "Sorority" scene in the Deleted Scenes section of the DVD, we don't get to see Hal when he says "Say hello to the birthday boy."  It sounds like he's referring to himself as the birthday boy. However, in the script, Hal was pointing to Mauricio when he said it.
• There's an implication in one part of the script that Rosemary might not be a young gal in her 20s. It occurs when Hal is on his first real date with Rosemary (where he meets her in Freedom Park):

  HAL: You know, I'm breaking my new rule by going out with you.
  ROSEMARY: What rule's that?
  HAL: I promised myself I'd start dating women closer to my age.
  ROSEMARY: Hey, I'm not that much older.
  [Hal smiles.]
  HAL: Yeah, right. So what are you, twenty-three, twenty-four?
  ROSEMARY: Funny. Hey, a woman never has to divulge her age, remember? And I would guess that you are . . . thirty-two?
  HAL: Thirty-four.
  ROSEMARY: Well, let's just say we're within ten years.

  However, in the scene at the Capital Grille where the audience gets their first real look at Fat Rosemary, the script describes her as "a young woman who is about one hundred and fifty pounds overweight and has a harelip."  (Although harelip is another word for a cleft lip, which is a kind of a birth defect, there's a small chance that the scriptwriters may have meant hairlip. It wouldn't be the script's first spelling error.)
• In the "Bed Ditch" scene in the Deleted Scenes section of the DVD (not to be confused with the "Bed Ditch" scene in the Deleted Scenes section of the VHS video, which is an entirely different scene), Hal blames the collapse of his bed under Rosemary's weight on termites. In the script, however, he blames the collapse of his bed under Rosemary's weight on Ikea, which in my never-humble opinion was a lot funnier.
• Katrina was originally going to be from Chicago, not Boston, and Hal was going to meet her on a train, not in a cab, as evidenced by the dialog that occurs when Hal first sees the real Katrina. (However, by the time this script had gone to the printers, the earlier scene where he'd actually met her had been changed so that she was from Boston and they met in a cab.)
• Li'iBoy was originally going to be a mentally challenged young man named Steve, for whom Ralph was a volunteer "Best Buddy."  As with Ralph, the script only shows us Hypnotized Hal's vision of Steve, not what Steve actually looks like.
• In the script, when Hal and Rosemary are in the restaurant just before Hal's spell is broken, the restaurant is called the Bocce Club, instead of McIntosh's. When Rosemary is telling Hal why she's not interested in Ralph, the dialog reads:

  ROSEMARY: And thirdly, yeah, he's a great guy and he does care about me, but he has no sense of humor, and anyway I'm in love with an even greater guy.
  [Hal leans back in his seat, devastated.]
  HAL: Oh beautiful – so there's another one you haven't told me about?
  ROSEMARY (smiling): I'm talking about you.

  In the movie, though, Paltrow looked straight ahead and delivered the "And I'm in love with an even greater guy" line with such intensity that they didn't need to follow it up with a joke. Hal, and everyone in the audience, just knew exactly who she was talking about instantly.
• The dialog where Hal compares the possibility of seeing the real Rosemary to The Crying Game originally occurred in Hal's apartment the night the spell was broken, right before Rosemary knocked on his door — not in the later outdoor scene that made it into the movie where Mauricio was having trouble tracking down Tony Robbins.
• In the "Fight in the Park" scene in the Deleted Scenes section of the DVD, Hal screams at Mauricio, "You don't get it, man! I fell in love with this!" and thumps his chest to indicate the heart. In the script, Mauricio responds to this with, "Her tits?"  <ba-doom, ksssh!>
• The housemaid that Hal mistakes for Rosemary and kisses was originally named Blanca, not Helga.
• At Rosemary's going-away party in the movie, Hal just vaguely says that he wants to "spend the rest of his life making it up to" Rosemary. However, in the script, he's more direct. He actually gets down on one knee and asks her to marry him before her plane leaves.
• A deleted scene shown on the DVD has Mauricio claiming that he found Tony Robbins, and that Tony can re-hypnotize Hal over the phone and even make the spell retroactive this time (so that even outwardly-ugly women Hal already knows will look gorgeous if they're beautiful on the inside). In the script, the movie was originally going to end with Mauricio taking up Tony on his offer and seeing the inner beauty of both Rosemary and a new outwardly-unattractive lady named Ruthie.

Miscellany from an early draft of the script

I am the luckiest man on the planet. I have obtained, through arduous international channels, an early draft of the script to Shallow Hal. It was a late enough draft that the title reads Shallow Hal, not Eye of the Beholder, but it's still from much, much earlier than the published shooting script. Here are some of the things I discovered from reading this early draft script:

• When Hal's father died, Hal was 12 year old, not 9.
• Hal's father was named Harold, and wasn't a Reverend.
• The early draft script contained several instances of the F-word in the dialog. The movie would have had an R rating if it had followed this script. (In a PG-13 movie, you're only allowed to say the F-word once, and it has to be in a non-sexual context. The movie managed to squeak by under a PG-13 rating because its only instance of the F-word was when Steve Shanahan had just promoted Hal and jokingly told him to get out.)
• Hal was age 40, not 34, for the rest of the script.
• The initial scene in the dance bar, including Mauricio's angst over his girlfriend's slightly-too-large second toe, was completely absent from this early draft script.
• Hal's boss was named Charley, not David.
• Hal answers his work phone with "JPS Broker/Dealer services, good afternoon."
• The story is set in Boston, Massachusetts — not Charlotte, North Carolina.
• As reported in the Farrelleys' audio commentary on the DVD, the early draft script does indeed have Hal going to a psychic instead of Tony Robbins. The script describes the psychic as 62 years old, and looking "more like a mobster than a fortune-teller."  His initial performance on Hal is a lousy palm-reading, followed by an offer to grant him a wish and hypnotize him so that he could "attract some of the most beautiful women in the world."  The reason Hal and Mauricio have such trouble tracking him down later, after Hal's spell is broken, is that the psychic is in jail for having hypnotized Miss Massachusetts into being his sex slave.
• As the strange Katrina dialog in the later script hinted at, Hal initially met Katrina on the Boston subway, and Katrina was from Chicago. Instead of making awkward conversation about beantown and musical fruit, Hal made awkward conversation about the Windy City being less windy than Boston.
• Katrina was a Peace Corps volunteer; Rosemary wasn't. The whole Rosemary-shipping-out-with-the-Peace-Corps plot appears nowhere in the early draft script. Neither does the character of Ralph Owen.
• Despite being flushed with victory after having asked out Katrina, Hal does not confide in Mauricio about the fact that he visited a psychic until just before Mauricio hunts down the psychic and asks for the codewords to break the whammy.
• Bella was originally named Laura.
• Hal drags a reluctant Mauricio along on a few double-dates with women whose outer homeliness he's completely oblivious to.
• As reported in the Farrelleys' audio commentary on the DVD, Rosemary was indeed originally named Kimberly. (Her mother calls her Kimmy, but her dad just calls her Kim.)
• The running gag with Rosemary/Kimberly wrecking furniture under her weight was absent from the early draft script.
• Kimberly repeated the urban legend that "OK" came from "Old Kinderhook."
• Kimberly's behavior, prior to Hal asking her out, was described as a "hard-ass act."
• Hal introduces Mauricio to Rosemary/Kimberly at night in the Delux Bar, not during the day in Freedom Park.
• Mauricio's last name was Restrepo, not Wilson.
• Hal convinced Rosemary/Kimberly to come up to his place before she got uncomfortable with Hal.
• Hal's apartment was in university student housing, due to a computer glitch the university made in 1982. Hal couldn't resist the cheap price.
• Rosemary/Kimberly didn't just get uncomfortable with Hal because he kept telling her how good-looking she was, she also suspected that Hal had asked her back to his place because her father was the president of his company.
• Kimberly was 37. She was going to be 38 in May.
• Rosemary/Kimberly invited Hal to the pediatric burn ward after she'd apologized for running off and calling him immature, not before.
• Nurse Tanya Peeler was not in the early draft script at all.
• Hal kissed Kimberly for the first time right after they were done playing with the pediatric burn ward kids. Just before he kissed her, she nervously told him, "Uh Hal ... just ... please be careful."
• There was, in fact, a brief scene at the IHOP, involving Kimberly's equally-homely-but-gorgeous-to-Hal friend Doreen.
• Since Tanya wasn't in the script, Hal had to be shown seeing some other woman with "inner ugliness."  He saw a heavyset woman obnoxiously hogging one of the treadmill machines in the gym, which was exactly how the rest of the world saw her. (This confused the heck out of Mauricio, because Hal described all the other heavyset woman he'd introduced him to as raving beauties.)
• There was nothing special about Rosemary/Kimberly's mother's appearance. She did not turn into a heavyset woman after the spell on Hal had been broken.
• Jill's initial warming up to Hal, where Hal turned her down, was broken up across two scenes — one in which Jill flirtatiously asks Hal whether he's seen her newspaper, and a later scene in which Jill asks Hal if he'd like to come over and watch a video with him.
• When Rosemary/Kimberly awakens next to Hal in his bed after a blissful night of Houdini-like passion, she says, "You always hear people talking about meeting the perfect someone. I guess I believed it could happen. I just never believed it would happen for me."  (Awwwwwwww.)
• Ashby (the one who became Artie in the movie, remember?) refers to Rosemary/Kimberly as "the boss's gigantic daughter."  Hal asks, "What do you mean gigantic?" but his question is ignored.
• Mauricio describes Kimberly's equally-homely-but-gorgeous-to-Hal friend Doreen as having a monster camel toe. (In his own words, "That chick had more crack than Marion Barry.") Why camel toe is considered a bad thing, I have no idea. Heck, people drool over pictures of Britney Spears where such a display is present.
• Despite working at the same hospital as Rosemary/Kimberly, Walt had never run into her, and only found out that she worked there from conversation during their weekend getaway.
• Walt gave Hal a little inkling, before the spell was broken, that things were not all what they seemed. He said that Kimberly and Doreen were fun, but wouldn't agree when Hal pressed him to say that they were great-looking. Walt only reluctantly agreed that "When you go through life looking at things from down here, all you really see is personality. So yeah ... they're beautiful."
• When Mauricio broke the spell on Hal, Hal wasn't at a restaurant with Rosemary/Kimberly, he was in a convenience store. When he turned back, the beautiful cashier had turned into a dwarf.
• Mauricio wasn't there when Hal ran into homely Katrina (on the subway again) and suddenly realized that he had, indeed, been seeing people through inner-beauty-colored glasses.
• Nor was Mauricio there when Hal told Rosemary/Kimberly through the closed door that he had Contageous Conjunctivitis, and smeared his own eyes with Vaseline®.
• The all-time love of Mauricio's life was Daniella Pestova, not Wonder Woman.
• Hal verbalized his reason for not wanting to see Rosemary/Kimberly unhypnotized: "We have something serious happening and I'm afraid ... (guilty sigh) ... I'm afraid if I see the real her it'll ruin everything."
• To avoid seeing Rosemary/Kimberly without giving his predicament away, Hal went with her to a Bruins/Canadiens game but insisted that they both wear paper bags over their heads and long coats. ("It's my way of showing that I'm very displeased with the team's performance.")
• To continue to avoid seeing Rosemary/Kimberly without giving his predicament away, Hal went to lunch with her wearing eye patches over both eyes. ("The doc thinks it might have been some dust from inside the bag that caused the reaction.")
• To avoid having sex with her unhypnotized, Mauricio suggested to Hal that he could find someone else to bang her. ("You know, some stranger — a bum off the street. You could cut the lights, do the old switcheroo.")
• Despite the later script describing Rosemary as having a "harelip," the early draft script described her as having a "hairlip."  Twice. Now I'm totally confused as to whether the scriptwriter meant that her upper lip was slightly deformed, or meant that she had a little moustache.
• There was no hint in the early draft script that the spell on Hal didn't also affect his perception of people he'd already met. This left open the gaping question of why Walt still looked like he walked on all fours, and why Hal never puzzled about people he already knew suddenly looking different.
• Hal mentioned that he really did go to a gay bathhouse once. Although he had no idea why he did so.
• There was no character of Cadence in the early draft script. Hal instead discovered that the kids were burn victims when the information attendant told him that Rosemary/Kimberly worked in the pediatric burn ward.
• Since Rosemary/Kimberly wasn't in the Peace Corps, the big party in her back yard was instead a celebration of her parents' 40th wedding anniversary.
• When Hal was kissing the maid under the mistaken impression that she was Rosemary/Kimberly, the mom called out the maid's name from around the corner and Hal managed to stop kissing her just in time before mom came into view.
• Walt drove Hal to the party on his hand-pedalled bicycle. Mauricio wasn't anywhere to be seen — but Jen and Ashby were.
• Since there was no Ralph in the early draft script, the exchange where Hal finally won back Rosemary/Kimberly went like this:

  HAL: I understand why it's over.
  KIMBERLY: Tell me why you think it's over.
  HAL: Um ... because I blew it?
  KIMBERLY: What, you never heard about forgiveness?

  There was still no hint that Rosemary/Kimberly ever discovered the spell Hal had been under, though.
• Doreen volunteered to come to Hal and Rosemary/Kimberly's elopement as a bridesmaid. Hal recognized her by her enormous camel-toe. She was described as being awkward-looking and having bad skin, but no mention was made about her being overweight. (Despite the extra stack of pancakes she'd eaten at IHOP.)

Shallow Hal 2 ?

As I said above, there probably won't be a Shallow Hal 2. But that won't stop me from dreaming about it. Here's a synopsis I came up with in 2003 for the pulse-pounding, senses-shattering sequel to the Greatest Movie of This Millennium:

Shallow Hal 2: Saving the World in Kiribati

On the plane into Kiribati, Hal and Rosemary are snuggling together. The ring on Rosemary's left middle finger has moved to her left ring finger, indicating that they're newlyweds. Rosemary has a good, hearty laugh about the spell Hal was under, and playfully taunts him about all those times Hal said she wasn't fat. "So, which supermodel did I look like?"  "Well ... not so much a supermodel as, well, you looked more like Gwyneth Paltrow. You know, back before she played that awful goth chick in Royal Tannenbaums."

But soon after they land and begin hauling crates of food and medical supplies, Hal is shocked to see the Thin Rosemary he remembered from his days under hypnosis! Horrified, he hunts for a pay phone — they don't have cell phone service in Kiribati — and calls Mauricio. "That stupid whammy is back! I can't see what people really look like any more!"  "You lucky dog, you get to have your old Rosey back! Who'd you say she looked like again, Gwyneth Paltrow?"  "No no no no, it's a big problem!  I don't recognize anybody any more, even the people I already know!"  "Sigh.  All right. I'll see if I can't track down Tony Robbins for you. Again.  You should put him on Speed Dial at this rate."

As Hal ventures back out into Rosemary and his Peace Corps buddies, he eventually discovers that his Inner Beauty Vision™ is coming and going at random intervals, and he can't control it! He has no idea when he meets someone whether his Inner Beaty Vision™ is on or off at the time. Hilarity ensues.

But the stakes get higher when he meets the new President-elect of Kiribati. The man looks like a disheveled, ratty, deformed hunchback, the ugliest person Hal has ever laid eyes on. But when the rest of his buddies all respond as though he was the most handsome man on the face of the planet, Hal realizes that he's seen what the man really "looks" like on the inside. He's the dirtiest scoundrel on the entire island, and he's fooled everyone into thinking he's a great guy. If he becomes president of Kiribati, the economic meltdown they're in the middle of will seem like a walk in the park compared to where that island-nation will be headed next. Will Hal be able to expose the shocking truth about Carabas's president before it's too late? Will anyone believe him? Will Mauricio be able to find Tony Robbins again, or will Hal have try to get the whammy removed by a local two-bit voodoo hypnotist who doubles as a tour guide?

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