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This is a fun Saturday night cable movie. Not one I’d have been happy to pay $10 each to see in the theater but the colorful fashionistas do look really good on our HDTV screen. Star Anne Hathaway’s made several fairy tale princess movies and The Devil Wears Prada (2006) seems like a bit of a translation of one of those to the fashion/publishing world.
A fairy tale must have a bitter queen and Meryl Streep surely goes to town as Miranda Priestly, longtime editor of Runway (think Vogue) and the ruler of the designer kingdom. Hathaway’s naif Andy comes to Manhattan after college graduation, school newspaper clippings in hand as well as a complete lack of interest in fashion. Somehow she gets an interview to be Miranda’s junior assistant and is hired by showing, er, spunk.
A fairy tale also needs a magician to guide our heroine and Stanley Tucci plays Hathaway’s, as Miranda’s long-suffering design chief Nigel. I never did decide if Tucci was going for the understated gay or tasteful yet slightly fey straight, which probably means he did a good job; certainly he was nothing like the aggressive, fuse burner Tucci’s played so often.
Adrian Grenier, of Entourage, is Andy’s aspiring chef boyfriend, who has difficulty handling the transformation she goes through in order to come out the other side of her time with Miranda intact. Simon Baker (TV series The Guardian) is a writer with the hots for Andy’s body but no real interest in her mind. Emily Blunt is Emily, Miranda’s senior assistant, a woman pretty good at taking the boss’s piss albeit not without sucking in the stress.
recommended
