The devil wears Primark: is the romcom reporter about to get the sack?

Glamour? Money? Hope? They’re so last season. With fashion magazines on their knees, where does that leave The Devil Wears Prada 2 – and its famously relatable heroine? Runway magazine is collapsing. Miranda is eating in the cafeteria and flying economy. Andy is the new features editor. Emily is dating a billionaire. Somebody dies. Amelia Dimoldenberg makes a cameo. But the one unexpected detail in The Devil Wears Prada 2 that I can’t stop thinking about is this: Andy worries that she’ll never be in a position to unfreeze her eggs. “Left New York for 15 years, not married – never found the right person, and my kids are at a doctor’s office on 85th,” she breezily reports to Emily when they reunite after 20 years. “They’re eggs,” she clarifies, adding that she is excited to have children. And in that moment, I couldn’t help but wonder: was the woman who once had the job “a million girls would kill for” always this relatable? Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/...

American Graffiti at 50: a classic hangout comedy with a surprising melancholy

George Lucas’s 60s-set tale of California teens offers some freewheeling fun but also a lingering sadness

Ninety-nine times out of 100, the postscripts that get tucked in before the closing credits, telling us where the characters’ lives have gone from there, are totally unnecessary, especially in a fictional story where their fates are better left to the viewer’s imagination. But in George Lucas’s American Graffiti, which turns 50 this week, they are the most important part of the film, not least because two of the four characters don’t have much longer to live. We can feel that darkness lingering around the edges of Lucas’ dusk-till-dawn nostalgia piece about the last night of summer vacation in 1962 Modesto, California, even while its teenagers are getting into mostly light-hearted forms of trouble. This night has to end, and when the sun comes up, their entire world turns back into a pumpkin.

From the opening shot of Mel’s Drive-In, set to Bill Haley and His Comets’ Rock Around the Clock, American Graffiti seems to unfold inside a snow globe, an idealized past with invisible borders that separate it not only from the outside world, but from the future itself. It’s one of those films, like its spiritual successor Dazed and Confused, that has the quality of a hangout comedy, loose-limbed and goofily episodic, but laced with an air of melancholy that’s so subtle you miss it entirely. (That’s why the postscript is such a slap in the face.) It aches for a scene that had passed just a decade earlier, before the tumult of the Vietnam war and counter-culture, but must have seemed, even then, like ancient history.

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