Meryl's movie

So, to cut straight to what you really want to know without having to wade through several paragraphs of plot-rehash followed by the director’s CV and his favourite seasonal vegetable, will you like this film? Hell, how should I know? I don’t know the first thing about you. But I will say this: OK, The Devil Wears Prada is no Pour Toi, Un Bon Morceau de Fromage (André Labourious’s seminal masterpiece about a morsel of cheese drifting aimlessly around Paris in the rain) but it does have its merits. True, when Meryl Streep isn’t in a scene the film tends to die on its arse somewhat, and as a satire on the fashion industry it flags in quite a few places, but there are some good jokes in it. And, as Labourious (turnip) himself once said, ‘If you can’t have a bit of cheese in a film, then you must have some good jokes.’ And he’s the master, after all.

The Devil Wears Prada is about an out-of-town dowdy girl called Andrea (Anne Hathaway …I should be so dowdy!) who gets a job as an assistant to the editor-in-chief (Meryl Streep) of Runway, a high-fashion magazine based in New York. She’s a nice dowdy girl, this girl, but as she gets more and more into both the fashion and the lifestyle she quickly becomes a glamorous but not-nice girl who knows she is glamorous but not nice because her very, very hairy boyfriend — what is that about? — tells her so. And? Well, she thinks on this, agrees the boyfriend is right, quits and reverts to being nice. It’s kind of like Cinderella, except she gives the slipper back. I hope it wasn’t a Blahnik slipper. You don’t get many of those to the pound.