admin @ Fri, 2006-09-15 08:00
The Devil Wears Prada is based on a book by Lauren Weisenberger and directed by David Frankel of Sex and the City fame, so it avoids being an air-headed chick flick by a very small margin. Meryl Streep's regal presence helps save the film from being a Cinderella in fairyland kind of comic book movie.
The novel was a satire on the fashion-and-media industry, with thinly disguised portraits of real-life people, notably Anna Wintour, the autocratic editor of Vogue. So small-town gal Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), steps into the world of high-fashion when she joins Runway magazine as second assistant the editor, Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), a job million would kill for, even though it means being chewed alive by the ogre.
In a world obsessed with style, Runway is an influential magazine, and the editor has enormous power in fashion circles. Miranda rules queenlike, expects slave like devotion from her staff, including first assistant Emily Blunt (Emily). Miranda is cruelly demanding, reducing her assistants to doing menial jobs and making unreasonable demands of them—like the order to get a manuscript of the new Harry Potter book for her twin daughters before it's been published.
Andy is not in the least stylish and when she starts working at Runway, in her unfashionable clothes, she finds the people at the mag shallow and when she's with her boyfriend Nate (Adrian Grenier) and pals, she makes fun of them. But of course, she is being sucked into that very world she ridicules- - she is even taken to Paris, the fashion capital. Of course, she undergoes transformation with the help of the mag's fashion editor Nigel (Stanley Tucci) and becomes trendy, and of course she gets attracted to another man (Simon Baker) and realizes in the end, that she must be true to herself—that's the point of the story. Don't expect any surprises.
The satire is wickedly funny, but the melodrama that accompanies Andy's ‘awakening' is tedious. There's really no need for a satire to be moralistic as well, this one unfortunately is. But in most part it is amusing (the lines are witty), and watchable for Meryl Streep's super performance. Anna Hathaway, earnest though she is, cannot stand up to the Streep charisma.
This is cache, read story here