There are several things I hold as truths when I go to the movies:

1. I always sit a few rows from the back, in the center of the row.
2. Sour Patch Kids are the ULTIMATE movie food.
3. NO ONE better sit behind me and talk or kick the back of my seat through the whole movie. Oh, and
4. If Hollywood makes a move out of a book I love, it better be true to the original.

Such was not the case, unfortunately, with Twilight and installments or the Harry Potter series, although The Golden Compass was fairly well translated onto the big screen. Then there’s Confessions of a Shopaholic. I’m a total Sophie Kinsella nut (once I discovered her, I devoured, in record time, every book she had in print), so recently I went to see the movie Confessions of a Shopaholic. Was it true to the book? Not so much. But I also wouldn’t label it complete and utter crap.

I saw the film with a friend who had not read any of the books, and she found it to be funny, charming, and entertaining. I agreed. As long as you mentally placed the movie in the category “stand-alone project based on a character and a concept from a really hysterical series,” and not in the category “literal translation of Kinsella’s novel onto the big screen,” it was a film worth seeing.

My main beef with Touchtone Pictures over this movie is that they hired a beautiful, talented British actress (Isla Fisher) to play Rebecca Bloomwood, the lead in a book written by a British author, which is set in London, which is about a British woman-and they totally bastardize it by making it completely and utterly American. Granted, Brit Hugh Dancy was cast in the male lead and was allowed him to keep his accent, but otherwise the setting is New York City. Fisher is forced to adopt an American accent, and much of what made Confessions of a Shopaholic such a hysterical book in the first place is cut out. This leads me to believe that Hollywood thinks we Americans are either too stupid to understand a movie set in the U.K. or too egocentric to care about a movie that doesn’t feature an all-American cast. If so, we, the viewing public, should be given more credit. One of the things I found so funny about Kinsella’s writing was all the British slang- “kit” for outfit, “popping into a shop,” calling everything “lovely,” “jumper” for sweater, “lorry” for truck-and how they solve every problem by making “a nice cup of tea.” After a while of reading Kinsella’s novels, I began to enjoy looking for the cultural differences. You miss all of that in the movie. Another thing that was so hysterical in the book that never made it to the screen was the letters. In her series, Kinsella never prints Becky’s letters to various banks and store credit agencies for the reader to see, but she prints the different institutions’ responses to those letters, and they are my favorite part of the books. For example, this excerpt is in regards to an excuse made about an outstanding balance on a department store credit card: “I was glad to hear that you have found the Lord and accepted Jesus Christ as your savior; unfortunately, this has no bearing on the matter. I look forward to receiving your payment shortly.”

While the movie does manage to convey some of Becky’s mania about shopping and her rationalization of her purchases, it doesn’t really capture Becky’s pattern of spend-and-panic that builds up to the climax in the book. In the movie, Becky nearly misses an important work deadline because she comes across a flyer for a sample sale. While at the sample sale she wrenches a pair of Gucci boots away from another shopper like a dog stealing a bone. It’s a funny moment, but it’s a moment intended strictly to get laughs, and it doesn’t give the viewer a sense of how deep Becky’s addiction goes or how far she will go to rationalize her purchases. In the book Becky attempts to save money by making curry rather than buying Indian “takeaway,” but ends up spending almost seventy-five pounds between buying groceries and a “special” Balti pan (of course she had to have it-you can’t make curry in just any old frying pan in your cupboard).

There are also some moments of awkwardness to the movie. In one scene, Becky’s flatmate, Suze, forces her to go to a Shopaholics Anonymous meeting. Although the portrayal of the group members is funny, the whole scene at the meeting is handled in a very jokey, exaggerated way that I (as the daughter of a recovering alcoholic) felt was insensitive and disrespectful to anyone trying to recover from a real addiction. In the book Suze does very little to help with Becky’s addiction, other than ripping up Becky’s rent check and suggesting that she should “invent something” or write a book to earn extra cash. Instead, Becky buys herself a self-help book called Controlling Your Cash and then rationalizes purchases of a $4 notebook and $1.20 pen so that she can start to write down all of her unnecessary purchases. It is following this “self-help” advice that Becky’s rationalization spins out of control.

I have to say, other than saddling her with an American accent, the filmmaker’s choice of Fisher as Rebecca Bloomwood is pretty dead-on. When I think of Kinsella’s character, words like vibrant, lively, colorful, energetic, hopeful, rambunctious, come to mind. If she were a color she’d be magenta. Or fuchsia. She’s fun. She’s fantastic at getting herself into the most ridiculously hopeless predicaments and then coming up with a brilliant (and yet still plausible) way to get right back out of them. Fisher pulls that off nicely. As for the character Luke Brandon, while I admire Dancy’s acting, he seemed a bit… not quite what I pictured. Too young. I think when I read Confessions, I pictured Luke as more scary, more reserved, more of a “Big” from Sex and the City type character.

The film’s script was a mishmash of Kinsella’s work-the screenwriter mashed the plots of the first two books and several chapters of the third book into one semicoherent storyline. Where some important bits were left out, other bits (random namedropping of Luke’s mother for no apparent reason, introduction of the character Alicia Billington as Becky’s career rival and Luke’s girlfriend rather than as Luke’s conniving employee) were thrown in haphazardly. Instead of being the owner of a financial public relations firm, as he is in the book, in the movie Luke is the editor of a financial magazine and Becky’s boss. That also seemed awkward and for no reason other than to perhaps save some time on introductions.

The one thing that did translate really well from the book to the big screen is Becky’s relatability. Although most of us will never get ourselves into the kind of debt that Becky did, I can see a little of my own shopping habits in hers. Even while buying movie candy-I spent $4 on a 3.5-serving package of Sour Patch Kids that I was going to eat all by myself-I told myself it was okay because they swiped my Regal Rewards Card, so I’ll earn points for that purchase. I earned enough points on the movie ticket purchase to earn coupons for a free small soda and popcorn. Of course, for only 50 cents each I could upgrade those to mediums…

The bottom line is, Confessions will be disappointing to hardcore Kinsella fans, but taken on its own it was a fun and frivolous guilty pleasure on a Wednesday night. And heck, I deserved a little treat…