BEFORE: Well, I started the year with three Meryl Streep films, and now here are three more. Meryl carries over from "Stuck on You" and will stick around for tomorrow's film as well. I've got to be close to closing out the Meryl Streep category by now.
I certainly never envisioned myself here, watching this film, when I started this project. But I've been down a lot of roads that I never imagined walking down - zombie films, old Cary Grant screwball comedies, films about rap music - I didn't think I'd ever get to the Marx Brothers movies, but I got there.
I saw a video once of a man at a beer festival, and he'd kept track of all the different beers he'd tasted over the years. By his calculations, he'd tried 4,999 different beers, and was about to sip his 5,000th. Before he did, though, he had to go through his clipboard notes and make sure this was really a beer he'd never tried before - meanwhile, the beer sample is sitting in front of him, and he's not drinking it. (I do keep a sort of mental checklist of beers I've tried, but surprisingly, I'm not all anal and organized about it.) I'm similarly organized about the films I've seen, but I never want to let the record-keeping get in the way of the enjoying - so I really should just try to dive in and enjoy each film for whatever it's worth, even if I'm not inclined to enjoy it, because that's the point of it all, right?
THE PLOT: A smart but sensible new graduate lands a job as an assistant to Miranda Priestly, the demanding editor-in-chief of a high fashion magazine.
AFTER: It turns out I know even less about the fashion industry than I do about the oil industry or the insurance industry. (Hey, there's a theme for the week - businesses and trades I know nothing about...)
I see where they're going with this one, they want me to root for Andrea as she gets a low-level job at a fashion magazine and tries to advance, or at least survive, as she works for a very demanding boss. But the boss didn't read as cruel to me, so I'm sort of with Miranda Priestly on this one. She rose to the top of her industry, she's in charge of a prominent fashion magazine, so she wants what she wants when she wants it, and if she's got a bizarre request, there's probably a very good reason for it that her underlings just don't understand. And here comes this young hot-shot who doesn't even want to make a career out of fashion, and she thinks she's going to have it easy? That she doesn't have to put in extra hours or be available around the clock to do errands? I think not.
I probably empathized more with Emily - not "Emily" as represented by Andrea, the generic term for one of Miranda's assistants, but the actual Emily, who's directly under Miranda, but in charge of other staffers. Yeah, I also work for a boss who often has strange demands, but I'm still running the day-to-day of the office, and I can assign work to interns if I need help, and I can plan projects, advise the boss or even disagree with him if I see fit (within reason, of course). Wisdom eventually comes in knowing when to correct the boss, and when to let him be wrong (so I can ultimately be proven right...).
The smartest character here is probably the head stylist, who (politely) puts our heroine in her place, and tells her to suck it up. It's called "work" because it's not supposed to be easy, you dope. Did you think everything was just going to fall into place for you, and other people would scurry around the office, thinking of ways to make your life easier? Yeah, that's not how it goes down. Other people are there to play their parts, and their interests are often going to conflict with yours - buckle down, put in the time, and look for opportunities to advance by going the extra mile. (He's also proof that an actor can play a presumably gay character without overly queening it up.)
However, he also recommends that Andrea start dressing better - ah, nothing solves a problem like just getting a makeover and proving to everyone that you're really a pretty girl. This sends completely the wrong message out to America's youth - I know, they say "Dress for the job you want, not the job you have." But what about being true to yourself, and developing your own personal style? It's not like Andrea was wearing a burlap sack to work, she dressed the way she wanted at first, and making her conform to another person's sense of style just to curry favor at the office seems like bad advice to me. Of course, I work in an office where nobody cares about how people dress, the boss usually wears shorts and flip-flops, and my biggest concern each morning is deciding what I want my novelty t-shirt to say.
Also starring Anne Hathaway (last seen in "The Dark Knight Rises"), Emily Blunt (last seen in "Into the Woods"), Stanley Tucci (last seen in "A Life Less Ordinary"), Adrian Grenier (last seen in "Anything Else"), Daniel Sunjata (last seen in "Melinda and Melinda"), Tracie Thoms, Rich Sommer, Rebecca Mader, with cameos from James Naughton, Gisele Bündchen (hey, Tom Brady was here just last night...), John Rothman, Heidi Klum, Donatella Versace.
RATING: 4 out of 10 Hermes scarves
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