The Devil Wears Prada (2006)

Director: David Frankel

Finally sat down with the wife to watch this oft-referred-to film. Not bad, and I can see why it generates a lot of discussion and debate, even nearly 15 years after its release.

The movie follows Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), an aspiring young journalist struggling to land work as a writer in New York City. Looking for any way to get her foot in some kind of door, Andy applies to become an assistant to Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), the brutally exacting and vicious editor-in-chief of an immensely popular and prestigious fashion magazine. Despite knowing and caring very little about fashion, Andy lands the job, agreeing to be Miranda's assistant for a year, in the hopes of getting a bulletproof recommendation for a job in journalism. After many rough growing pains and adjustment, Andy embraces the world of high fashion, along with the incessant and often boundless demands of her boss, eventually alienating her closest friends. By the end of the tale, Andy has learned Miranda's one great lesson to her: reaching the top of the world of fashion requires a ruthlessness and focus that Andy simply does not have. Still, Miranda helps her land a good job at a New York City newspaper, thus kickstarting her career as a journalist. 

It's not hard to see why this movie is basically like mainlining heroin for anyone remotely concerned with fashion. You have a ton of great actors and beautiful people putting on great performances, nearly all dressed in flawlessly chic outfits, turning in great performances. Even more, these dynamic characters are all about the world of looking striking and powerful through your clothing. In short, if you dig really nice clothes, you'll dig looking at this movie. Of course, the film goes beyond this, digging into the essence of fashion (to an extent) and its greater place in society. This is what makes Andy's character essential. Like many of us, she's a fashion neophyte, so her entry into the world is our entry to the world, and it's handled well enough that even someone like me can find it interesting. 

The greater reason that this movie was and still is so often discussed is the Miranda Priestly character and, to a lesser extent, her relationship with Andy. I see three aspects to Miranda that inspire debate: representing a successful woman in a cutthroat business, her management style, and her estimation of fashion's place in the world. Based on the Lauren Weisberger novel of the same name, The Devil Wears Prada is based on the author's time as an assistant to Vogue magazine editor Anna Wintour, so Weisberger had a first-hand look at a woman who makes it to the top of this very industry. The movie certainly suggests that a woman must be at least as ruthless as a man to reach such heights, even though it doesn't completely dig into this theme. 

The more obvious (and entertaining for many people) element to the movie is how Miranda is a Hall of Fame-level "horrible boss," in that she's brutally demanding of Andy and everyone else around her. Because of her success in the fashion world, all of her employees are constantly on pins and needles, continuously attuned to her every word, movement, and gesture. With very few exceptions (such as Stanley Tucci's character), this all creates a palpable "terrified of Mom" vibe around the entire magazine. Many viewers find this comedic, but I almost always grow irritated when seeing or reading about such characters. My feeling is that anything that forces a person to become such an obsessive, exacting tyrant is unhealthy, and I have a hard time watching it happen, even in fiction. 

Apparently, countless fans have weighed in on
whether Andy's friends are good or horrible. 
Arguments can be made for both sides, but this
actually speaks to a slight lack of depth in the film.

Then there's the entire backdrop of the world of high fashion. To put it bluntly, I don't really care about it. Yes, I know that it's a multi-billion dollar industry that employs plenty of people. And yes, I do have enough of an eye to know a nice outfit from an unflattering, "casual" outfit. I can also appreciate the amount of talent, skill, and effort that can go into designing and creating clothing. But ultimately, it's mostly superficial luxury to me, and I can only care so much about it. Miranda Priestly's instantly famous "Cerulean" speech seems to be meant as a definitive defense of fashion as some all-encompassing necessity to human life. To me, it's a well-delivered, scathing speech about something that is, in the grand scheme, not all that important. Just because an extremely poised, focused, and intelligent person has made it their entire world doesn't mean that it's essential for the world. This is yet another major theme, like women in highly profitable and competitive businesses, that felt like it could have been explored more deeply and critically but wasn't.

I did enjoy that Andy ultimately turns her back on the fashion world. It does go some way towards suggesting that one's humanity is more important than pure success, especially conspicuous success. True to its nature, fashion is all about being seen a certain way, regardless of how true it is to the actual person putting it on display. This seems to be the moral of the story, if there is one, and I can get on board with that. 

I'm glad that I finally got around to seeing this one, as it's so often referred to and is one that my wife has seen multiple times and enjoyed. I found it to be a well-made movie that raises some interesting themes. And while it doesn't dig into some of the more difficult questions as much as I might like, I appreciated the messy, grey areas that it included. Good movie, though not one that I'll feel the need to see again any time soon. 

Colossal (2016)

Director: Nacho Vigalondo

Kind of disappointing, actually.

I finally got around to watching this, after regretting not catching it in theaters several years back. I knew of the premise, which sounded fun and intriguing, and the movie got a fair amount of positive critical acclaim. And it's not that I found it bad. Rather, it just didn't come together enough to live up to what may have been overly high expectations.

The story is mostly that of Gloria (Anne Hathaway), a trainwreck of a party girl who has to retreat from New York City after yet another wild night out that leaves a trail of drunken bodies and self-involved hedonism leads her boyfriend to break up with her. She returns to the modest little town where she grew up and begins to reconnect with childhood friend Oscar (Jason Sudeikis). Things become wildly bizarre when Gloria and Oscar discover that their actions towards each other sync up with a pair of gigantic, Godzilla-like monsters which have been periodically materializing and destroying parts of downtown Seoul, South Korea.

You have to admit - that's a premise you probably haven't heard before. And for the first 30 or 45 minutes of the film, it shows some serious potential. Gloria and Oscar are clearly damaged people, with some sort of pain from their pasts that is connected to each other. They both drink heavily to keep away whatever is eating them up, and having such repression expressed in a movie through East Asian kaiju is a fun approach. But there were two problems with this movie that never resolved themselves:

I stuck with the Oscar and Gloria story to see if the resolution
explained the issues I had with the movie. It really didn't.
It was a shame, since I really like Sudeikis and Hathaway, and
they do fine acting work in this movie. 

One was that the characters, especially Oscar, didn't seem to be fully formed enough to explain their behavior. Erratic would be one thing, and it would make sense to an extent with these characters. But Oscar's actions often showed little to no rational from one moment to the next. Within the span of a few days, he goes from being a fairly likable, if boozy, old friend, to an absolutely self-obsessed and murderous maniac. The reasons the story offers for this dramatic transformation really don't add up enough to make it satisfying.

The other issue I had was how the movie unabashedly equates the inner turmoil of two pretty run-of-the-mill white Americans with the death and suffering of thousands of East Asian people. Perhaps this was part of the greater message of the movie - that privileged people can lose sight of how their petty concerns and personal issues can have massive impacts on other societies, but that message didn't seem to be set up or explored well at all, if such was even the case.