Take the swooping white hair and bad attitude of Cruella DeVille, mix in the people skills of Vlad the Impaler and you’ll get Miranda Priestly, the worst boss in all of moviedom. As played by Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada Priestly, the editrix of a fictional fashion magazine called Runway, never met an assistant she couldn’t humiliate with a withering glance and a few choice words.
Rumor has it that she is based on all-powerful Vogue editor Anna Wintour who apparently uses assistants like the rest of us use toilet paper. In 2003 one survivor, Lauren Weisberger, extracted revenge on her former boss, writing a vaguely fictionalized account of her time spent working for the dragon lady of fashion. The Devil Wears Prada changed the names, exaggerated the stories and offered a scandalous look at the inner workings of a big-time New York fashion magazine.
In the movie version Anne Hathaway plays Andy Sachs, a fashion-impaired university grad who takes a job as Miranda’s assistant as a stepping-stone to her dream job of writing capital “J” journalism for The New Yorker. Courtesy of Miranda’s right hand man Nigel, Andy is given a high fashion makeover from the Jimmy Choo’s on up. Dripping in Dior she quickly becomes Miranda’s star assistant, eclipsing the ambitious, and supposedly firmly entrenched Emily. Andy soon learns that in Miranda’s fast paced world results are the only tings that matter. Other little details like personal relationships, dignity and self worth are secondary. The story is as thin as the models in the pages of Runway, but it is the characters that make this so much fun.
The Devil Wears Prada moves along at a nice clip when Streep, draped in Chanel and clutching the latest Marc Jacobs bag in her talons, is on screen. She gets the rare opportunity to show off her comedic side and seems to have devious fun with the character. She’s nasty, but of course Streep brings more to the role than vicious one-liners, (“The details of your incompetence do not interest me,” she says to a frazzled helper.), and evil eyes. She plays Miranda without a hint of weakness. Her marriage may be falling apart but she chose this life and is willing to accept the consequences no matter what the cost. She takes a one-dimensional character and turns her into the most interesting person on-screen.
Stanley Tucci as Nigel, Miranda’s long-suffering, but tough as nails sidekick and Emily Blunt as the snooty Assistant Number One are also perfectly cast and fun to watch. The least interesting character, Andy Sachs, has the most screen time, and while Anne Hathaway is charismatic and beautiful she gets slightly bowled over by the over-sized personalities of Streep, Tucci and Blunt.
The Devil Wears Prada only wears thin when the filmmakers indulge Hathaway’s inherent decency. By the time she decides that she doesn’t care about the glamour and glitz of the fashion world we don’t care either. Luckily the bulk of the movie is wicked fun.
Usually they sound like one long breathless sentence that seems scarier than the disease the drugs are meant to prevent.
A new film, Love and Other Drugs, starring Jake Gylennhaal and Anne Hathaway as a pharmaceutical salesman and the girl he loves respectively, however, forgoes the disclaimer. In fact, in what almost seems like a 90-minute ad for Viagra, it appears that the drug’s—Vitamin V, Jake calls it—only side effect is that it works too well.
It is the rare movie that uses a real brand name drug as a plot device. Even though the odd movie like Prozac Nation dares to name names, often filmmakers use fictitious drugs to advance their stories (and avoid lawsuits from notoriously litigious Big Pharma), but even in fantasy, side effects abound.
Brain Candy, the 1996 Kids in the Hall comedy, created a cure for depression called GLeeMONEX that “makes you feel like it’s 72°F in your head all the time.” Unfortunately the pill’s patients also turn into comatose zombies.
David Cronenberg devised Ephemerol, a tranquilizer used as a morning sickness remedy for his film Scanners. Side effects? Telekinetic and telepathic abilities. Later, in Naked Lunch, Cronenberg featured the more recreational drug Bug Powder, a yellow dust formally used by exterminators, informally by people looking to find a “literary high.”
In Repo! The Genetic Opera, Paris Hilton’s character Amber Sweet was addicted to a powerful blue, glowing opiate extracted from dead bodies called Zydrate. I’ll do wild things to “your soul for one more hit of that glow,” she sings. An alternative cinematic painkiller is Novril, the pills that kept James Caan sedated in Misery.
Filmmakers don’t just fictionalize pharmaceuticals, however. Plenty of recreational drugs get the Hollywood treatment. Remember Space Coke from Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie? One snort was enough to send both Cheech and Chong literally into outer space.
A Clockwork Orange was chock-a-block with fake drugs; everything from Drencrom to the synthetic mescaline Synthemesc to Vellocet, which produced ultra-violent tendencies and sudden outbursts of Singing in the Rain.
Perhaps the strangest recreational drug from the movies is Alien Nation’s Jabroka. Aliens find it highly addictive and grow to monstrous proportions when they take it, but to humans it tastes like dish soap and has no effect.
Since the beginning of filmed entertainment, 25,367 weddings have been portrayed on the big screen.
OK, I just made that number up; it’s probably way more than that. It seems the only thing people enjoy more than going to a wedding is seeing a wedding on the big screen. At least that’s what the producers of this weekend’s Bride Wars are banking on.
Weddings are a movie staple and as Katrina Onstadt pointed out on cbc.ca, they can define the tone of the whole film. “(A) movie that starts with a wedding will always be gloomier than that which ends with one” she wrote.
It’s an astute observation. Comedies tend to build up to the big ceremony while dramas often use the walk down the aisle as a starting point for conflict. The elaborate wedding sequence that kicks off The Deer Hunter is the opening salvo in a movie Roger Ebert called “a progression from a wedding to a funeral.” Once again, the going gets grim after the I dos.
Probably the most famous wedding in film history, though, is one that never gets to the vows. The wedding scene at the end of The Graduate is a classic but the scenes that make it memorable weren’t shot as originally planned.
Director Mike Nichols originally intended for Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) to loudly bang on the church windows to disrupt the wedding between his love, Elaine (Katharine Ross), and her intended, but in rehearsal the windows rattled so ominously someone panicked and yelled, “Everybody out!” Hoffman suggested spreading his arms out and cautiously tapping on the glass with open hands. “The clincher,” Hoffman said, “was the reviews all saying this was Benjamin’s Christ moment. It was a fix. That’s all it was.”
In a subtler, but equally memorable, moment, Elaine and Benjamin dash from the church, laughing, fleeing convention toward an unsure future. Then, suddenly, they stop laughing as though the consequences of their actions have just sunk in. It’s a powerful moment that caps a terrific movie, but again it wasn’t planned. As they shot the scene Nichols was so overbearing the two actors instinctively clammed up and sober expressions appeared on their faces. In post-production, Nichols liked their transition from cocky confidence to uncertainty so much he kept it in.
Ironically, when the film opened in Portugal censors felt the ending set a bad example for kids and clipped the last few minutes. That version ended with Elaine obeying her parents and marrying the blonde frat boy. Portuguese audiences may have missed the whole point of the movie, but at least were treated to the thing most paid to see — a big wedding scene.
119 years after her death Jane Austin remains one of the most indemand writers in Hollywood. Although she only wrote six novels, but IMDB lists no fewer than 39 adaptations of her work for the screen. The appetite for her work is so fierce that now that the books have been made, re-made, adapted once again and updated a la Bridget Jones’ Diary, filmmakers have found a new source of Austinonia to exploit—her letters. Becoming Jane, a new movie starring The Devil Wears Prada’s Anne Hathaway at Austin and James Last King of Scotland McAvoy as Tom Lefroy , the only man she ever really loved.
Hathaway plays Austin as a 22 year old who must decide between marrying for love or for money. Her paramour Lefroy is a penniless lawyer in training, who, while rakishly charming, must depend on an allowance from his rich uncle to survive. Mr. Wisley (Laurence Fox) a socially awkward but wealthy young man is in love with the pretty Jane, and hopes that one day her affection for him will blossom. Not likely. She’s head over heels for Lefroy, even though her mother tells her, “Affection is desirable, money is absolutely indispensable.”
Becoming Jane is an affecting portrait, in a Masterpiece Theatre kind of way, of the early years of one of the world’s most beloved authors. Based on her letters to her sister Cassandra it is rich with the kind of details abou6t her life that should win over Austin-heads, while more casual viewers may enjoy the romantic twists and turns of the plot. Hathaway is fine in the title role, and avoids the wrinkled-nose mannered kind of performance that ultimately sucked a lot of the fun out of Renee Zellweger’s performance as Beatrix Potter earlier this year. She plays the young Austin as a headstrong woman with much more verve than is usually ascribed to her. Despite the mannerisms of the time—the curtseys etc—Hathaway plays Austin as a thoroughly modern woman trapped in a pre-feminist world.
Her chemistry with McAvoy is strong, much like the prickly dynamics between Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy in Pride & Prejudice. He makes the most of his naturally raffish smile and charming manner handing in a performance that sparkles but actually digs a little deeper to really bring the playboy he’s portrayed as in the script to life. When the story switches from romantic cat and mouse to romantic tragedy and McAvoy’s true feelings for Jane are revealed it’s a touching and well played moment.
Becoming Jane may disturb Austinophiles who might feel that the writer’s name has been exploited to sell a story that is essentially a costume drama with none of the wit and finesse of an actual Austin story, but less fanatical eyes will find a likeable, although slight romance about the true nature of love.
The only thing more popular than going to a wedding is going to see a wedding on the big screen. My Big Fat Greek Wedding is one of the highest grossing independent films ever and movies like The Wedding Singer, Father of the Bride and Four Weddings and a Funeral have ridden the bridal train all the way to the top of the box office. This weekend 20th Century Fox is hoping that a combination of bridal bouquets and star power will pack ‘em in to see Bride Wars, a new comedy starring Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway.
They play Liv and Emma, childhood friends with the shared fantasy of June weddings at The Plaza Hotel. When it comes time to tie the knot with their respective fiancées it looks as though that dream will finally come true. Dates are booked, dresses are purchased and flowers ordered. Everything is perfect until a scheduling error is discovered—their wedding dates had been booked for the same day—and one of them must change to another venue. When neither is willing to move dirty nuptial tricks ensue and the bride wars begin.
Bride Wars is like an extended episode of Bridezillas with more appealing leads. The old cliché about temperamental brides is amplified by a thousand, pushing the limits of how far brides will go to make sure their perfect days is, in fact perfect.
Even though it is set in a world were being engaged is the most important thing in a woman’s life—just one of many old fashioned ideas wedged into the script—the movie isn’t really about weddings, or the horrible things these two do to one another. It’s actually about friendship and finding a person who will always love you no matter what. It’s a good thing there’s some weightier subtext here because the comedy side of things pretty much falls flat.
Kate Hudson can do this sort of material in her sleep, and brings some energy and charm to the role but little else. Candice Bergen continues her winning ways as a supporting actor who steals every scene she’s in. As in The Women and Sex and the City she provides the film’s best line—it begins with, “A wedding marks the first day of the rest of your life… you have been dead until now…”—and generally shows up the younger actors in every scene.
As for Anne Hathaway, Bride Wars feels like a giant step backward after her delicate and layered performance in Rachel Getting Married. I know girls just wanna have fun, and after serious turns in Rachel and the psychological thriller Passengers she perhaps was looking to hone her comedy chops, but Bride Wars plays along the same lines as a sitcom and we’ve simply come to expect more from her.
There is even some talk in the blogosphere that this stale performance could actually harm her chances with Oscar voters à la the Eddie Murphy Norbit snafu. Many blame his failure to take home an Oscar for his work in Dreamgirls on Norbit, which was released the same weekend that many voters were filling out their ballots. Let’s hope the Academy gets it right this time and chooses to celebrate Hathaway’s star turn in Rachel and not punish her for taking on thoroughly average work like Bride Wars.
Bride Wars marks the beginning of the January doldrums. After an exciting movie season that saw the release of interesting movies like The Wrestler it’s always a bit of a slap in the face when the b-material gets dumped into theatres. Bride Wars is little more than a sitcom premise stretched to feature length.
