It sucked. It sucked so much that I feel sorry for Ugly Betty that it happened to start a few months after the movie came out, because surely anyone who saw Devil and didn’t like it (i.e., everyone who saw it) would read those articles and think, “It’s like Devil Wears Prada? I would rather eat one of Anne Hathaway’s feathered bowler hats than watch a show that has anything in common with that movie.” Happily, though, Betty seems to be doing quite well for itself in the ratings, even here in the UK, which is as it should be.
The movie, however, was a glossy, flat, affectless cliché-well, a comedy that didn’t raise so much as a smile from us (unless you count laughter at Anne Hathaway’s increasingly ridiculous outfits) and was so full of Guptic characters that it was hard to care what happened to any of them, aside from hoping that somehow the wolves from the New York of The Day After Tomorrow would escape from their movie and come ravage the brightly-colored fashion mavens instead of blameless and long-lashed Jake Gyllenhaal.
The movie began with “frumpy” Anne Hathaway taking a job at the fashion magazine Runway, because apparently there are no journalism jobs anywhere in all of New York City. That’s believable, right? That it’s easier to get a job at a premier fashion magazine than a newspaper? Of course it is. No – stop thinking! I should mention that “frumpy” Anne Hathaway, aside from wearing outdated girls-boarding-school clothes, doesn’t actually look that bad. I am no fan of hers, with her stretchy duck lips and her huge cow eyes and her weird, gangly body, but mussing someone’s hair a bit doesn’t actually make them look ugly. It just makes them look human, and possibly combless.
Anyway, Andy (for that is Hathaway’s name in the movie) begins working for Miranda (Meryl, her hair the color of a stainless steel fridge and her attitude just as icy) as her second assistant – Emily Blunt plays the senior assistant. Blunt is good in the role; she manages to get the few laughs the movie has to offer, though unfortunately she is saddled with the worst eye makeup this side of Tammy Faye Baker.
And the days go by, Miranda duly chucking her coat and bag at Andy every morning and giving her increasingly insane tasks to do. Just as a side note, one of Salon’s writers did a piece about how Miranda is a great character because she’s a strong female boss – in her zeal to praise this leap forward for feminism, she managed to make it sound like she thinks Miranda’s attitude is something we should all strive for, to be so obsessed with our work that we treat other people as if they were faulty computers, to be abused whenever we feel like it. Betty Friedan? You’re welcome.
One day Stanley Tucci (who is, as AdmiralNeck pointed out, is dressed here as a gay Nazi scientist) takes pity on “frumpy” Andy and leads her to Runway’s closet, the place where they store all the clothes they use in photo shoots. It first appears to us accompanied by a soundtrack of angelic voices and a glissando. Apparently it’s every little girl’s dream, even Andy’s, even though she has professed time and again that she does not care about fashion. Yet her true feelings have emerged! She, like every woman, is helpless in the face of such beauty.
Is that the garden trellis Matter-Eater Lad was chomping earlier? No, it’s a fashionable poncho. Not as fashionable as some others, obviously.
So Andy has her incredible makeover, which, other than the clothes, seems to consist of someone brushing her hair and actually making her bangs worse – at the beginning of the movie they are mostly swept to the side and admirably cover her fivehead while still being unobtrusive. After the makeover, they look like someone gathered all the hair on her head, swept it forward, cut off half of it, and piled the rest on top.
The first post-makeover outfit is shown in slo-mo -- it is apparently so fashionable that it slows down time itself. And it is, may I say, hideous. A bejewelled cruise-captain’s jacket paired with skintight leggings and boots that are clearly too wide for Hathaway’s legs. All aboard on the SS Duck Lips -- we're off to Crazytown. But we could expect no less from the woman who brought us these memorable fashion moments:
Patricia Field, your continued employment is all anyone ever needs to justify why fashion is so incredibly stupid and arbitrary. Go back to the planet Zorleck, you freak.
I’ll skip over the rest of the plot, as I’m sure that even if you haven’t seen the movie, you’ve figured it out by now. But before I go, I must mention the…oddness of Simon Baker’s appearance in this movie. If you don’t know him, he’s an Australian dude who’s been kicking around in Hollywood for a few years – he was the lead in that short-lived tv show The Guardian and, more recently, a movie called Something New. He’s usually pretty good-looking, in a tanned way.
In this movie, he looks…well, the best description is insane clown. His eyebrows have taken on a life of their own and are seen here colonizing his face in preparation for their imminent takeover. As for what’s going on with his hair…I can only think it’s waging its own war.
If that's not enough to put you off sex forever, I give you this:
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