great title, but there's nothing here - Avoid

Rating: 1/10 (12 February 2007)

Sorry fans, but this movie is terrible. It insults your intelligence at every turn, lacks any real bite or insight, and, I assure you, flash clothes aside, this movie will ruin your evening. The production is slick, the editing pointlessly rapid, the cast yawningly toothsome, but where it really lets itself down is the plotting. Was this movie REALLY based on a book? Where's the story? The New York 'fashion scene' is so toadily portrayed and offers so little critique, I wondered just which fashion bigshot it was that the film-makers were going out of their way to avoid offending. But it's when the plot finally creaks and flops into Paris, in what passes for a 3rd act attending - ahem - "Fashion Week" that this movie just falls apart.
Why does aspiring serious 'writer' Andy, with her cool Bo-Ho credentials, stick around in the nauseating world of 'Runway' for so long? Okay, so she landed the job that 'a million girls would kill for', but the inevitable moral crisis for someone as principled as Andy is never satisfactorily explored. She's blatantly seduced by it, but we never get to understand any of the tension her character feels, or why she's the one we're meant to root for. Okay, I get that it's a comedy, but does Andy have to be such a vacuum? Oooh, nice freebies, and shooze!! Her cypher boyfriend seems to be there to continually remind us what we should all be thinking about her. Anyway, she chucks it all in on a whim at the end, seemingly to keep her lug of a boyfriend (to whom she has just been spectacularly unfaithful) happy.. ah, the fate of modern girls in modern cinema, doomed never to be truly free of a man's control.
Its (trite, superficial) 'fashion' appeal, and (relentlessly charmless) cast has garnered it some wincingly favourable reviews in the Fash Mags, but great title and the casting against type of Meryl Streep aside, this undercooked movie deserves to be quietly forgotten. Truly Awful.