"Confessions of a Shopaholic" (quality rating: 6 out of 10)
Director: P.J. Hogan
Screenplay: Tracey Jackson, Tim Firth, based on the Sophie Kinsella novel
Cast: Isla Fisher, Hugh Dancy, Joan Cusack, John Goodman, John Lithgow.
Time: 1 hr., 45 min.
Rating: PG (some moderate vulgarity)

Hey, I kinda liked this. One of the chickiest chick flicks I've ever seen, I'll not go with the critical community which is generally calling it air-headed and valueless.

Uh-uh. What I liked about "Confessions of a Shopaholic" is, first of all, the overwhelmingly, effervescent and infectiously sparkly. Isla Fisher who does a full-capacity performance in an ambitious film that roams and romps over the high-end Manhattan magazine publication and journalism world in substance and style that keeps you on-edge, off-edge and almost always smiling. True, it's not all that convincing in the rapid, bumbling-upward career launch by its heroine in the cutthroat competitive world of New York publishing but give that a shrug. That's not the film's breath and blood.

The film does test your patience. Although in its vibrant, sizzling opening it sprays the screen with chick energy in quick clips of frenzied shopping-based action, the number and variety of shrieking women, plus a cat fight or two, pushes the film toward slapstick. Still, it's well-managed and leaves Isla Fisher with a reasonable amount of dignity. She is a very talented comedienne and her antics in this film, in the impressive visual dynamics offered by director and editor, come off quite fascinating, at least at the beginning. But the portrayal of pulsating wackiness of women in the throes of shopping ferocity in energetic images, sometimes almost in montage, cannot sustain itself past halfway in and the film does find itself scrambling for material to maintain its peppery energy.

As to how convincing it is in the matter of the shopaholic, well, it's a hilarious yet sad concept, and the sequences of the Shopaholics Anonymous meetings is pretty funny, especially when she starts to actually subvert them.

Rebecca Bloomwood (Isla Fisher), is a grand embodiment of seemingly patholically acquisitiveness, a self-managed princess who pontificates openly that, from childhood on, her goal in life went on a laser course to get a credit card and a belief that "A man will never love you as well as a store."

When it comes to shopping she is, in every sense of the word, an addict. As with an alcoholic or a gambler, this addiction has her buried in debt. What's her dream ideally? She'd like to work for a major fashion magazine. And she knows exactly which one, but they're not welcoming. But what does happen quite by accident is that she inadvertently gets a job as advice columnist for new financial magazine, Successful Saving, a money mag run by handsome young Britisher Luke Brandon (Hugh Dancy). Like wow, she's an immediate celeb. Still, her drowning debt is poised to destroy her career. She is forced to face herself down and re-order her life's choices.

Still, her new success is encouraging even though she hasn't the vaguest understanding of finance and she's supposed to give advice in the column she writes.

Meantime, to add some spice, a relentless dorky debt collector (Robert Stanton) keeps tracking her down -- she explains his presence as a "stalker."

It's hard to say if you or you or you will enjoy this. Just take it as a possibility and have fun with it.