Why, God, why?

 

The Devil Wears Prada
For some reason, you can buy it on DVD

They say never to judge a book by it’s cover. However, this is a film, and the DVD cover offers some very good clues as to the quality of said film contained within this seemingly innocent case:

Clue #1 -  There is a positive quote from Heat magazine on it  (“EXCELLENT! 5 STARS!”). Heat. The magazine which consist mostly of pictures of Z-list celebrities and their cellulite. And not a lot else.

Clue #2 – I nearly fell asleep halfway through reading the plot synopsis on the back.

So, as I (attempt to) provide my own synopsis of this ‘film’, I’ll try to make it more exciting – mainly by using UNECESSARY BLOCK CAPITALS IN BOLD, so you don’t start to nod off.

Andrea ‘Andy’ Sacks (Anne Hathaway) is an aspiring journalist who lands a job at the fashion magazine Runway OH MY GOD MONKEYS ON FIRE RIDING MOTORCYCLES, where her ’hilarious’ lack of fashion knowledge is mocked by colleague Emily (Emily Blunt) ROBOT NINJAS FIGHTING ZOMBIE PIRATES IN SPACE and her boss, and head of Runway, the sarky Cruella de Ville-alike Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) AND MR T IS WRESTLING GODZILLA IN A NO-HOLDS BARRED CAGE MATCH. Oh, and Stanley Tucci turns up playing the funny gay character out of Ugly Betty, only not gay, and not funny.

Then Andy starts to fit in more, turns vapid and mean like her colleagues, loses friends/love interest because of this, gets new boyfriend, he’s also mean and vapid, she sees the error of her ways, she quits the job, Miranda and Emily suddenly respect her, yadayadayada. The end.

In fact, the film follows such a cliché chick-flick plotline, I had to come up with ways to stave off the boredom – I thought of ways the film could be improved (mainly by inserting a sequence wherein a police car is driven into a helicopter, ala Die Hard 4.0); then I did that thing where you draw your finger to your nose and it makes you go cross-eyed; then I flew my biro around like a rocket (with appropriate sound effects); then I thought about how this subject matter is handled so much better by Ugly Betty; then I just gave up and fast-forwarded a large portion of the middle of the film.

(Also, Torchwood was on, and I didn’t want to miss it because I was watching this. Now there’s something that would have made this film better – bi-sexual, time-travelling aliens).

But since, as I said, the plot is so clichéd and all the action (if you could call it that) is so inconsequential, it didn’t really matter. I could follow the story, even at twenty times the speed.

The Devil Wears Prada is just so…lame. Not even offensively bad, just lame. The supposedly ’witty’ banter between one-dimensional characters I couldn’t give a monkey’s about, the dull love-triangle which lasts about five seconds (literally for me, since I was still fast-forwarding at that point). Also, Anne Hathaway is probably the least convincing ‘ugly duckling’ character ever. I can sort of handle the mocking of her supposedly ‘dorky’ dress sense, but calling her fat? She’s Anne Hathaway! I could see her collarbone at one point, she’s so skinny! Gah!

Maybe it’s just some satirizing of the whole size-zero, crazily impossible pressure they put on girls in the fashion industry – but I doubt it. This film isn’t that smart.

In the end, The Devil Wears Prada is just as empty, vapid and shallow as the fashion industry which it attempts to satirize.

(Note: Torchwood wasn’t actually that good. But still worth fast-forwarding this for)

(Second note: Christ knows why I watched this. The person who lent me it also lent me Freddie Got Fingered, for God’s sake)