The Devil Wears Prada
Utter crap. Boils down to “Do not do this cool thing”. This was sold as a polemic about the dog-eat-dog world of fashion, but instead is a perpetuation of stereotypes and actually an apology to a series of completely horrible human beings contributing to an even worse system.
We follow the aspiring writer that can’t get an interesting job anywhere. Her friends are equally overqualified young hipsters. An opportunity appears for her to go through the meat grinder to be able to write for a “real” magazine in the future, and she takes it. She sees herself as someone who cares, has Amnesty International posters in her bedroom, and then sells herself to indentured servitude. When the boss asks her for the impossible, she puts a fake smile, nods and procures the damn thing even if it means sleeping with womaniser magazine writers. I would expect someone who cares to send them all to hell and quit on the spot. Her co-workers mock her frailties instead of helping her out. When all this bile turns her into a stuck-up bitch, her old friends shun her out, with reason. When themselves are the sellouts, they demand compassion and understanding.
I think the turning point is the dinner with her father. He’s complaining that she doesn’t even write anymore and is wasting her life serving someone who doesn’t deserve. She shrugs this off, saying it will all work out well in the end, but then the boss demands some TPS reports or something and she abandons her family to do some errand. When seen from this angle, the ending is consistent with the rest of the message: whoring out is the only way to be someone in life.
Meryl Streep has about 10 minutes of worthwhile screen time, it’s mostly throwing stuff at underlings or looking offended. Her speech about the blue sweater is absolutely laughable, but it’s treated as some kind of deep life lesson that proves without doubt that fashion rules the world. Instead, it makes her look like a better dressed Pointy-Haired Boss who lives on a tastefully decorated ivory tower. Her speech about how her life is secretly crap and fashion is all she got in not pitiful but pathetic.
This film is so bad, Emily Blunt plays a meek girl getting stabbed in the back by the lead and she can’t even make me root for her.
At least the costumes are … varied.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.