Wonderful but too short

Rating: Null/10 (28 February 2012)

I didn't see this movie until after I had seen four seasons of "Ugly Betty", a great TV series that I enjoyed a lot. And with all the similarities between the two, I naturally found myself wanting more from this movie. On the TV series, it took the bumbling ingenue years to become indispensable. Here, it happened in just over an hour, commercials included. And I couldn't believe it was over so fast.
I've liked Anne Hathaway for a long time, and she was charming, adorable and quite pretty. It took her a while to demonstrate intelligence and drive but she did it admirably. At the beginning of the movie I couldn't see anything so wrong with Andy, but then I thought she was cute and attractive and didn't understand what someone working in the fashion industry was supposed to look like. Later, with the proper clothes and hair she looked amazing. Andy wasn't quite as sweet and innocent as I would have expected; with her friends she could be a little on the edgy side. But overall I liked her a lot. It was a shame to see her having to deal with moral dilemmas late in the movie, but she did what she had to, and then she did what she should. Andy is a good person.
Miranda was enjoyable and considerably less of a monster than one might expect. Though incredibly demanding throughout the movie, her evil persona mostly came from being relayed through Emily. Miranda seemed much more human when making the demands in person, though you get the impression one still expected to be punished severely for the least little offense. One effectively edited sequence showed Andy being harassed day after day after day, too fast for the viewer to really take in each individual action, but fast enough to convey Andy's misery. Mostly Miranda was throwing her coat on poor Andy's desk, but there was surely more to it.
Later Miranda showed much more of a human side and even appeared vulnerable. The night after I saw this movie, Meryl Streep accepted only her third Oscar and made a point of mentioning the wonderful hair and makeup artist Roy Helland who had worked with her on all her films for years. He really did good work; I'm not sure how old Miranda was supposed to be but she looked attractive enough to be working in the fashion industry. But in one scene, the one where Miranda actually showed herself to be the most human, she looked like she belonged in a nursing home. Was Streep really that old or was it just more of Helland's work? Either way, very effective.
Emily Blunt did a great job. I don't think we were supposed to like her, and I didn't in the sense of loving to hate her, but she made Andy's life miserable in an entertaining way, mostly by relaying Miranda's unreasonable expectations. But she didn't want Andy to succeed, so she made Andy figure things out more than she really helped her. Andy, forced to do things herself, eventually figured it out, and Emily ended up making us care about her.
Stanley Tucci did a fine job as Nigel, Andy's biggest supporter. Now this is a character we were really supposed to like.
I recognized "The Mentalist" as the man with the potential to further Andy's desired career. I've never seen the show, but I sure did like him and found myself wishing I had watched his series.
I didn't really like Nate. One wouldn't expect a cute girl like Andy to have such an edgy boyfriend. But she wasn't really all that cute, was she? I found myself rooting for Christian as Andy had to make a choice.
Overall, it was a great effort, and the one weakness I observed was that it all happened too fast and we didn't really get to enjoy any single stage for all that long. Maybe a three-hour movie (commercials included) instead of two.