200 POUNDS BEAUTY (2006)

Hanna is an overweight young singer with a great voice who works two anonymous jobs - as a phone sex operator, and as the real singing voice of a rising Korean pop star.  Her self-esteem is so low, she can't confess her love to Sang-jun, the music producer who hired her as a ghost-singer; even her father, living in a nursing home, thinks she's her mother, often asking his "wife" why she's gaining weight.  But a failed suicide attempt leads to Hanna's dropping out of sight for a year, during which she gets head-to-toe plastic surgery that turns her life around when she finally re-emerges, unrecognizable, as the thin, beautiful Jenny.  Working again with a clueless Sang-jun, "Jenny" becomes the star Hanna always wanted to be - but the greatness of 200 Pounds Beauty is in its straight-up message of just how much beauty on the outside may corrupt beauty on the inside, if you let it.  It's an homage to the "fat and ugly," people who spend their lives in the shadows - yet who, like flowers, need to bask in the sun to have any hope of growing at all. (not rated)  B+