Shopping

Sex and the City

The Last Holiday

Pretty Woman

Max Dugan Returns

Confessions of a Shopoholic

Jingle All the Way

If you’re like me, now’s about the time you begin to hit the stores. You told yourself you wouldn’t wait to the last minute, but somehow time has slipped away from you and it’s a week before Christmas, so off to the shops you go to find those perfect gifts.

Shopping is a universal activity—whether you do it at a local store or a national store, we all have to shop. Of course, with the internet, you can probably do most of that shopping online. But the department stores aren’t giving up. They believe, and rightly so, that shopping is a shared experience and the sensory nature of customer meeting merchandise is something that can’t be duplicated online.

But movies about shopping? Few and far between. Or maybe that’s as it should be—build an entire film around shopping? It can be a very solitary activity. But there are scenes of shopping in films that everyone remembers.

Take Julia Roberts’s character’s collision with Rodeo Drive in Pretty Woman. She goes shopping in her hooker clothes and the snooty salespeople don’t want to wait on her or even have her in their store. The next day she goes shopping with Richard Gere’s character’s money behind her and it’s all sweetness and light. It’s a standout scene and every woman—and many men—I know remembers it. Why? Well, it’s a kind of fantasy-fulfillment experience—being let loose in a Beverly Hills boutique with an unlimited budget. Sweet.

In The Last Holiday Queen Latifah has a similar scene when she decides to go wild at a fancy store in a fancy European ski town. And Sex and the City films—as well as the TV shows—are absolute monuments to the shopping experience. There’s a scene in the first movie where Carrie’s getting married so she’s cleaning out her closet before moving. And it’s like she’s virtually shopping in her own closet!

Jingle all the Way is a particularly zany look at the shopping experience—no doubt inspired by the craze in the 80s when the Cabbage Patch Doll came out. They hadn’t made enough of the dolls, that were the darling of the Christmas season one year, and actual fights broke out over the dolls when everyone grabbed for them. Jingle All the Way has Arnold Schwarzenegger on the hunt with a rival shopper for a Turbo Man action figure and hilarity ensues.

So what’s the bottom line here? What do these films have in common? One thing: they’re about more than shopping. There’s a romance at the center of the film or a rivalry between people that results in action or humor… in the end, they’re all about relationships.

And guess what, most films are. So I wouldn’t spend a lot of time trying to construct a shopping movie—but go right ahead and give us a character-driven relationship movie that has a memorable shopping scene. Go ahead, have fun!!

Copyright © Diane Lake

17Dec17

Email Diane a question to Diane@DianeLake.com