Just as there are certain stars who make me want to see their movies, so are there certain stars who make me want to avoid their movies at all costs. Especially when one of those stars is actually the star of the film, the part they play might as well be them in real life, their name happens to be Paris Hilton, and the name of the film is The Hottie and the Nottie.

As you might guess, Paris is “the hottie,” also known by Joel Moore (Nate Cooper) as Cristabelle Abbott, the girl he fell in love with in first grade and the girl who every other woman has had to measure up to since. As Joel sees it, Cristabelle has always been the woman he is meant to be with. And so, when another one of his relationships ends in disaster, he decides that it’s about time for him to return to his childhood home and reclaim his destiny.

The problem—as Joel’s slacker friend Arno (Greg Wilson) puts it—the hotness of one girl is always directly proportional the ugliness of her best friend. Enter Cristabelle’s best friend June Phigg (Christine Lakin). Introduce the slightly taming-of-the-shrew-esque premise that Cristabelle won’t date until June has someone special in her life. And follow the fairly predictable story of Joel trying to find someone for June so he can date Cristabell, June slowly transforming from a caterpillar to a butterfly, and Joel finding that in the end, June is the woman for him, not Cristabelle.

Forget that Paris Hilton is its star and ignore its title, and I have to say the story behind The Hottie and The Nottie has its positive aspects. The message at its center is classic—value, beauty, and love are all more than skin deep. It is a story that is made for us to connect with, and at various points, I did. I identified with June’s struggle of not feeling like the hottest woman in the room and knowing that to all the men around, that is all that matters. At moments, I smiled at June’s transformation and took comfort in the idea that there is a beautiful person inside us all. And at the movie’s end, I did find myself happy for where June ended up.

But even though the movie has its points of connection, inside the context of its whole, they just didn’t work for me. As much as I love a good caterpillar-to-butterfly story, the problem with June’s story is that her transformation is just too extreme. I’ll go along with a haircut, a bit of make-up, and a new dress. But when the girl at the end is barely recognizable as the one at the beginning and she probably spent her life savings on at least five different cosmetic procedures to get to that end, I have to say I found myself unsure whether the movie had actually told me that all of us are beautiful or simply that—“That’s hot. That’s not.”—and I should imitate accordingly.

On the surface, the story may be a shout out to all of us who have never even dreamed of being on a magazine cover. At the movie’s end, the regular people are the ones who have found love, and the “pretty” and “perfect” people are the ones who are alone. But as much as I would love to have left The Hottie and the Nottie feeling empowered and just as deserving as everyone else out there, the fact remains that Paris is still the movie’s star. She is still the pretty one, the perfect one, and the one whose kind heart is credited with any good that came to anyone else in the movie. Flash back to that scene in Mean Girls where Regina George tells a girl walking by how much she loves her skirt, five seconds later tells her posse how ugly that same skirt is, and as much as I would like to take the movie’s positive messages to heart, seeing them as anything more than inauthentic words thrown out into the world for the sole purpose of making one pretty girl feel even prettier is difficult for me to do.

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