Pretty Good

Rating: 5/10 (1 July 2006)

I read the book years ago and thought it was campy fun. I thought the movie was sorta fun, but not campy or snarky enough. I always love Meryl Streep (who doesn't?), and I thought she did a great job as Miranda, the boss from hell, however I would have liked to have seen her meaner. Frankly I didn't think she was as awful as her character was depicted in the book and it would have been more fun if you could really hate her, which I didn't.
I thought Hathaway was good as Andrea, the dough eyed idealistic assistant who at first rolled her eyes at shallowness of the fashion world, but quickly embraced it and became what she had mocked. I also thought it might have been more fun to see someone really transform from an ugly duckling to a fashinista swan, but Hathaway, even with her dowdy clothes and plain jane look....still easily looks like someone who WOULD fit in in a place like that. So there was hardly any ooing and ahhhing when she changed her look
I thought it was cliché how all her friends were angry with her for becoming a slave to her job. It was very Hollywood. She had a very demanding job. She didn't choose her job over her friends. She began to like her job and wanted to dedicate herself to it. If it WAS a journalism job (the job she really wanted) would her friends have been more understanding?
SPOILERS I thought the whole sleeping with the enemy thing and then "accidentally" finding out that Christian was a bad guy was way too easy.
In a movie like this I feel the lines of good and evil are not clearly drawn. While it would seem that Andrea was good and Miranda was bad I wasn't so convinced of either. I also thought it was extremely hokey how she called that bitch and offered her the clothes she got in Paris. She sucked up to people who treated her like hell. It just made her seem not so nice, but sort of pathetic.