Stinker-roo

Rating: 1/10 (25 December 2006)

I watched the DVD of this film on Christmas Eve with a bunch of friends. I've heard so much about it and how well it was doing, I couldn't wait to take a look. What a huge disappointment. It was slow, boring and predictable.
Sadly, it's becoming difficult to find 'orginality' in film year after year, so when you have something that is the same as something else, you've gotta do the best you can to entertain at $10 plus a ticket, $4.99 a rental. I did have the mind set that I was going to watch a theme that I had seen before. What I did not expect was that I was watching a theme I had seen before from several films that were also "so-so" to snoozers. It was the re-hashing of already cooked hash that wasn't good when it was new.
Maybe it's the "fashion industry". Sounds like a good thing to bash since it seems pretty glamorous, treats women like objects and "walking hangers just to see how the fabric of THEIR design flows" and very cut throat so based on that, it should make an interesting, through provoking story. But from many of the films I've seen try to "expose" that industry, they've been "okay" to down right "boring". This one is one of the REALLY boring ones.
The story is the same: fish outa water girl (Anne Hathaway who's 98% of films she has done is playing this same type of role) gets job with total female tyrant over 40-year old boss (And these women have GOT to look as old as heck, fashionable but OLD - a trick from "Valley of the Dolls") (Meryl Steep) who treats her like a slave, she gets in with a male gay who 'secretly' helps her dress and 'play the game', she weighs her life against the work life, meets some guy her twice her age and a guy her age (pick any young actor of the moment and throw him in here) continues to question which one to bed/have, realizes she's a slave, tries to overcome tyrant female boss, the industry and herself to realize she's better than what she's doing. Throw in a few fashionatas,(top models, runway showing, magazine covers, camera hungry Eurpean designers people watching can point at and say, "Isn't that so and so? Wow!" some nice clothes for this time, a somewhat shallow "I'm being used" ploy and you've got "The Devil Wears Prada" and 25 other films before it - except you used the name of a top line of fashion design to make it more ... sexy.
What also bothered me about this film is that I caught on early that no one spoke over one line sentences and formed words over seven letters long. But ... everybody looked good, the women traded simplistic "cat fight" snarls, and everyone fit into their stereo-typical part nicely - so I guess that makes it a blockbuster film.
"Blockbusters" aren't like as they used to be, I guess. If you're looking for a little depth skip this, if your looking for meaningless time to kill with folks wearing nice clothes and conversing in short cliché sentences with no thought process behind them, and you like knowing what sentence and scene is coming next, this may be your kinda film.