My views: 11
I distinctly remember walking into the room one day when my mom was watching this. I'm not sure what year it was, but it was long before I had ever seen it. She was at the scene in the restaurant when Elle thinks Warner is going to propose, but he breaks up with her instead. I thought it looked like the stupidest movie in the world. I hurried out of the room to do something else, shocked that my mom would be watching some dumb blonde movie. Beyond that, my first impressions further consisted of watching the court room climax at the same mock trial camp where I first watched Newsies, but since I didn't know anything else about the story I just found it confusing.
My mom didn't manage to talk me into watching the whole film until March of 2006. I'm not sure how she finally convinced me, but according to my data I watched it a total of five times in that year alone. Perhaps it was partially due to my low expectations, but I discovered to my immense surprise and delight that this was anything but a dumb blonde movie. It's more like a smart blonde movie. And that's why I love it so much. I know it's cheesy, but I love films about people demonstrating that they're better than everyone expects them to be. This also pointed out to me how judgmental I was being. After watching two seconds of her life, I dismissed Elle Woods as a stereotype, just as Vivian and Warner and lots of other characters do in the movie. But when I finally sat down and got to know her, I realized just how complicated she was, and found that I actually really liked her, right along with Vivian.
I know this sounds kind of ridiculous. Who cares if I'm judging a fictional character? But I think this is extremely applicable in real life. We all like to think of ourselves as accepting and non-judgmental, but let's face it: whenever we meet someone new, we immediately make assumptions about what they're like. It's not like we can help it; the human brain is very good at putting people and things into categories. What we need to do is prevent these first impressions from getting in the way of creating more informed opinions later. So that's just one important lesson that this movie helped teach me. It also helped teach me that Reese Witherspoon is an amazing actress, which I kind of knew already because I'd seen her in other things (so I'm not sure why I was so hesitant to watch this). It also reminded me to take all movie suggestions from my mother seriously. I'm not even kidding: I can't tell you how many of the movies that ended up on this list were ones that my mom had to talk me into watching the first time. Even though she doesn't like Mamma Mia, in general my mom knows how to pick great movies.
YES YES YES!!
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