Movie Review: The Devil Wears Prada

Okay, there was this one time, ages ago, when my best friend (straight) and I were watching the Oscars in his apartment in Omaha, NE. The show goes and he squints at the red carpet preshow I was forcing him to watch. The day before he had been bitching about how he didn't care for Joan Rivers and how he found the whole thing to be quite fake and gregarious.

And as he watched now, he leaned back and said something that I still laught about today.

"She looks like crap in the dress."

Here he was, straight as an arrow--and all his education and straightness--and he knew what looked good and what doesn't.

And we think gays are shallow? Seems to be universal.

But our obsession with beautiful manifests itself in slick commercials, ongoing programs of self-improvment and reality shows of the pressures of said art. Now there's a movie too.

The Devil Wears Prada is a formula movie. I noticed novelty is far and few between this year. Must be because last year was so full of duds, they went with easy crowd-pleasers. This is one of them. Girl gets glossy job, starts to join their ranks of elitism and then decides it's too fake of a life. Yep, heard it before.

The film is decent, but far from a hit. Every one nails down what they are supposed to do and the plot meaders from expected experience to expected experience. But whereas TransAmerica uses it to teach lessons, Prada seems to just be going through the motions.

Where the film will appeal to many is Meryl Streep. She plays the villianous boss to the hilt and when she's not on screen, you keep finding you wish she was. Is this supposed to be comedy? If it is, it's not very funny. If it's supposed to be a drama, then more angst needs to grace the screen.

What bothered me is the interactions the characters had. I've read Dr. Deborah Tannen's collected works, and I do believe that women speak in a manner that is different from men. Especially at work. So when Streep's boss insults the protagonist's shoes with a crude (but perfect!) stare, why does the youth merely kowtow into a new pair of heels? Why doesn't she quit?

For we wouldn't have a movie without it happening. I just felt that if Anne Hathaway's young office assistant is so intelligent that her boss sees it on her resume--how can she be so dumb as to merely accept her position as underling? And worse? She improves herself by being more fake.

In the end, of course, everything fixes itself in the manner I'm describing, but still...I have more faith in today's youth. It shouldn't take a year and trip to Paris to figure out your boss is so wrong.

So this is fair-to-middlin' movie. See it for Streep. See it for the clothes. See it for the air-conditioning. But don't keep you hopes up too high. This is merely high fashion, after all.