As a fat person myself, I encounter prejudice every day. Movies are especially bad, because it is still considered okay to make fun of fat people. Most skinny people just assume that we're lazy. They think that we have the potential to be as thin as is considered "normal," but we just are too lazy to do anything about it. That is absolutely false (not that the skinnies would ever buy that, but I can at least try).
Anyway, to get to The Nutty Professor, I found it to be one of the most sympathetic portrayals of fat people ever put on film. The only one that tops it is James Mangold's Heavy, although the protagonist's weight wasn't all that was harming his well-being.
The Nutty Professor did have some physical comedy involving fat that one could take as funny, but I never felt that the jokes were degrading. The main reason that I feel this was so sympathetic was that, though he experienced life as a skinny stud, he did decide to be a fat man at the end. One can chock this up to formulae, but something that Sherrman Klump said at the end really touched me: "I could try to lose weight, but I'm always going to be a fat man, and you're just going to have to live with that." I think that a film where the screenwriters who were bigoted would have said something like, "I'll lose weight without this stupid formula." That's not what happened, though, and I'm glad for that.
Anyway, to get to The Nutty Professor, I found it to be one of the most sympathetic portrayals of fat people ever put on film. The only one that tops it is James Mangold's Heavy, although the protagonist's weight wasn't all that was harming his well-being.
The Nutty Professor did have some physical comedy involving fat that one could take as funny, but I never felt that the jokes were degrading. The main reason that I feel this was so sympathetic was that, though he experienced life as a skinny stud, he did decide to be a fat man at the end. One can chock this up to formulae, but something that Sherrman Klump said at the end really touched me: "I could try to lose weight, but I'm always going to be a fat man, and you're just going to have to live with that." I think that a film where the screenwriters who were bigoted would have said something like, "I'll lose weight without this stupid formula." That's not what happened, though, and I'm glad for that.