“Confessions of a Shopaholic” is a bad movie about bad people getting rewarded for behaving badly.

New York City writer Becky Bloomwood is utterly inept at everything she does, except for picking friends with gigantic apartments their parents own in New York City, which seems to be the only way to survive there on $10 an hour writing jobs. She’s even bad at racking up debt, having only accumulated $16,000 in it despite five years of impulse purchases in a land of $600 shoes and $120 scarves. She tells horrible, hurtful, stupid lies to family and friends and writes the kind of anonymous, everywoman, super-sincere first-person columns — What It All Means to be won over by a fake cashmere coat — that get buried even in high school newspapers.

In 10 years, Becky will be one of those sad hoarders on “Clean House,” Niecy Nash shaking her head sadly at a train-wreck of still-boxed QVC twinsets and Ross-discounted prom dresses, halls caving in under stacks of never-unboxed shoes. But, because the editor of a magazine — about, get this, financial responsibility! Get ready for hilarity! — finds Becky cute, she’s made it.

She blows off her story assignments to nip off for sample sales, which is just as funny as watching someone sell their work computer for crack, isn’t it? Who couldn’t identify with someone who’s never had to sweat or struggle or learn humility? Of course, in this twisted world, the debt collector is the bad guy. Who cares about the more than 60 percent of bankruptcies due to unmanageable medical bills? Forget universal health care. Someone bail out the girl who just had to have those $700 Christian Louboutin pumps.

“Confessions” is actually like “Meet John Doe,” the Frank Capra classic from 1941, if that movie had been made by stupid, soulless people. Both have at their center an anonymous column that unexpectedly resonates with the world. But while Ann Mitchell’s made-up “John Doe” starts out cheaply threatening to jump off City Hall because he thinks the world’s gone to hell, her column sparks a genuine change for the better as she uses her platform for good, not just for fireworks.

It’s an odd reflection on our nation that — whether it’s George H. W. Bush or Barack Obama — a president telling the nation’s children to work hard and graduate high school provokes a storm of outrage from people who apparently have never heard the expression “pick your battles.”

Meanwhile, groups of people can labor for years on a movie whose message is basically that if you’re a cute, plucky white girl with nothing more than fashion sense, you’ll end up at the top of the world with the cute boy. It’s hard to imagine how empty and rotten one has to be inside to waste their talents on such a message. The problem with the presidential speech outrage is that there isn’t any ‘there’ there, to bastardize Gertrude Stein. Especially with so many worthy cultural cuspidors out there.

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in theaters anymore.