Yup, as I said in the previous post, I might be taking my sweet time before posting again, and, by God, I have.
Also, it seems nowadays I'm only writing to bash some overrated movie. Call me a one-trick pony and spank my bottom.
This time it's The Devil Wears Prada. This flick got generally good reviews, many commentators going so far as to call it one of the top comedies of last year.
It is a wretched piece of crap.
I don't believe I have ever seen such a flimsy piece of couture daydream / shampoo commercial camouflaged as actual filmmaking. I know that sounds like a fairly obvious statement with regard to this movie, but to make it even more painfully obvious I'm going to go ahead and say it: there is no film there. Really.
The film seems like it was literally designed for 12-year-old girls with the attention span of a bee (and women of similar disposition), ravenous for something to fill their hours with between flicking through Teen Vogue and obsessively cutting themselves in front of the mirror. It is that bad.
There is no story to speak of, the characters' development is akin to something you might see in an E!Entertainment special on celebrity pets, and, worst of all, there is no humour. And that, my dears, is not the greatest of news if you're trying your damnedest to be a comedy. I don't believe I laughed even once.
Not only is there not humour, the so-called satire is about as blunt as a blue whale. In these post-ironic times, it is simply not enough to offer insight on the level of "fashion people are, like, really into looks" and "can be a little bit bitchy". Yawn.
The Devil Wears Prada consists of long montages of ultra-slick New York and Paris cityscapes, and people, including the protagonist, strutting along in nice clothing, soundtracked by the most obvious soundtrack music you have ever heard anywhere (Hey, it's Madonna's Vogue! In a movie about fashion! Some house music! And U2! And Mo-fuckin-by!).
This sentiment gets thrown about a lot nowadays with regard to movies, but I don't think it has ever actually occurred to me before during a film. Until now, that is. The Devil... feels exactly like a commercial; it is simply that manipulative, parading a couture fashion sensibility around under the pretext of mocking it. Guess what? This film doesn't mock fashion, or, in the end, people in the fashion industry, its fetishistic portrayl of fashion rather serving to exalt it and cement its grip on our collective psyche.
The movie does have two saving graces though: Meryl Streep as the bitchy editor (though she's not exactly funny either; she manages to portray something deeper, sadder) and, of course, Anne Hathaway's boobs.
Of course there's the knee-jerk cop-out ending in which the protagonist (Anne Hathaway's boobs) finally "sees the error of her ways"; that she should be "chasing her own dreams" since, after all, "the fashion industry is a cut-throat world", and, as she tells her ex in their big reunion scene, he was "right about everything" and she had "lost her way". I guess he won't mind then when she tells him about the sleazy journalist with something weird going on with his eyebrows who she bedded one night after they had kind of broken up. Right..?
Once more, for fun:
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