The Devil Wears Prada is AWESOME, especially considering how utterly formulaic the plot is.
I mean seriously, see if you can fill in the blanks: Young midwestern girl arrives in NYC and gets big break in the upper echelons of the ____ world. Struggling to fit in she gets mentored by the kindly _____. As she begins to adapt to her new life, her old friends begin to wonder if she _____, and her boyfriend _____. At the same time she attracts the attention of the suave _____. Suddenly one day she must choose between _____ & _____. She makes her choice but comes to realize that she _____ after all, so she _____.
That being said, you won't really care about the plot. The movie is very funny, Anne Hathaway is really good, and Stanley Tucci (who I love) steals every scene he's in. Unless of course he's up against Meryl, who flat out blazes onscreen. She is incandescent.
Give her her 3rd Oscar right now & be done with it.
Saw it this afternoon, and indeed The Streep is the major reason to pay 10 bucks to see this movie. She's fab (and I can't WAIT to see her play Martha Mitchell). Tucci is also wonderful, as is the young British woman who plays Streep's other assistant (if you've never seen
My Summer of Love, rent it). But the script is utter horseshit, that typical crisis-of-conscience, am-I-betraying-my-roots stuff that American audiences love because they believe there's no middle ground in anything. I can't stand Adrian Grenier (Hathaway's boyfriend) on
Entourage either, he's a total blank for me, but his character is on her case for being a sellout and he's...
an aspiring chef in Manhattan??? Oh, no... no ass-kissing involved that THAT profession! Jeez.
Nicely directed, with maybe a few too many musical montages (it's obvious David Frankel has worked on
Sex & the City) and maybe THE most-obvious use of a song in ages -- U2's "City of Blinding Light", during a Paris-at-night montage.
The guy who runs Hollywood-Elsewhere.com asked recently: If you met a young woman, a recent Northwestern grad and a Journalism major, and she
had never heard of VOGUE magazine... wouldn't you think she was, like, retarded or something? I had a hard time getting that question out of my head for most of the movie.
