The subject of today’s “Streetwalker” profile on Fashionista, Chloe was scouted on Second Avenue in the East Village. Like a cross between Anna Wintour and Little Lord Fauntleroy, Chloe has not only the trendy name of a new village patron, but she sports the perfect getup, too. It was, the blogger says, her combination of red ankle boots, Marni shoulder bag and white coat that caught their eye.

But before any grumpy, nostalgic grousing ensues, one should consider that Chloe, like so many penny-pinching scholars before her, is a sucker for a good sale. Of her ensemble, she said: “My coat is from a vintage shop in England, and I got my Marni bag at an outlet store in Italy, when I was studying abroad there. I like designer things but I don't pay that much for them—I have Prada shoes from Milan that were like 70 Euros. And I just bought these shoes this morning, from the Marc by Marc Jacobs store. They were fifty bucks! I bought like four pairs!”

Our fellow blog, The Culture Czar, reported earlier today that the storied Gucci dynasty will be the subject of a new film by blood-and-guts director Ridley Scott. (Yes, the same guy who made Gladiator and G.I. Jane.) What’s more, as Fashionista reminded us this afternoon, Mr. Scott is not altogether ill-prepared to take on such a stylish subject, however much blood gets spilled. He shot a short for Prada last winter, in which Canadian model Daria Werbowy dons several archived outfits made by the Italian clothier. Apparently, the theme of the mini-film came from a poem the director’s daughter, Jordan, stumbled across. We’re on pins and needles to see if Mr. Ford will be played by Blow Out’s Jonathan Antin or Entourage’s Jeremy Piven.

John Flanagan, a 40-year-old nightlife impresario, was sitting with a large group drinking $350 bottles of vodka.

“I’m upset for the American lives that are lost, and the Iraqi lives,” he said. “It makes me feel confused about the direction we’ve taken and whether it was for the right cause.”

He referred to the war as an “unpleasantry of life.”

“I’d rather not be talking about this,” he added. “I’d rather talk about helping out Darfur, helping victims of Katrina.”

By the bar stood Laura Choi, a 25-year-old wearing a black-and-white-striped Marni dress. She said she did not support the war.

“Living in Europe, I feel like I always have to defend myself, and people are always attacking me,” she said. “I mean, I’m in Paris, I’ll sit down for dinner with a bunch of French people, and they’ll just attack Bush. I’m not a Bush supporter, and yet I feel, as an American, I have to defend my country.”

Interior designer Brinton Brewster, 38, was also very upset.

“We were brought into the war under false pretenses, the public was lied to, and we’re creating another generation of terrorists,” he said.

“Unfortunately, the ‘fabulous people’ get a bad rap,” he continued. “Just because we live life in a certain way, they think we don’t have compassion for other people. It’s just not the truth. But you know, what really upsets me, honestly, is the propensity of the media to focus on Lindsay Lohan going in and out of rehab. I don’t care about celebrities and what they’re doing. I’ve met them all.”

Emily, a history major at Princeton University, took a seat. “I am upset by the Iraq War, but I don’t focus on it, because it’s a negative energy,” she said. “I think we are overanalyzing the situation. I mean, here we are at Bungalow 8!”

Next up was a blond woman in her late 30’s. She was wearing a black fedora from the men’s department at Bergdorf Goodman, a black Moschino dress and shoes by Christian Loubouton. I asked her about Iraq.

“A rack? You mean titties? Like a really big rack?”

Iraq.

“Don’t ever waste a moment in life. Fly to the moon and play amongst the stars, be happy, understand how lucky we are—and don’t fight,” she said. “I feel personally connected in one way—I’m a mother, and every day in Iraq somebody is losing their child. My little girl will never go to Iraq. I’m sorry, she’ll go to Prada.”

Jacqie Venable, a 40-year-old music producer, was wearing a beret and jeans. She said she wasn’t wearing underwear.

She said the war in Iraq was meant to happen “karmically.”

“In my spiritual picture, it has to do with karma,” she said. “Everything that happens in life, to each of us, is what we call into our space. Everything comes full circle. So right now, it’s going to work out to whatever it works out to be. It might be happy for me and not happy for you.

“The people who are there fighting—it’s their journey. This is our journey,” she continued. “People are dying all around the world. Forget Iraq—they’re dying in this country. And their parents are suffering with them, and our parents suffer for us because we’re at Bungalow. There is no separation in the trauma.”

How does she feel as an American?

“I don’t see myself as an American,” she said. “I see myself as a child of a higher being, and I feel privileged to walk this earth with my daughter and my family. The war in Iraq just reminds me of my everyday war. The only way that I can make a difference is being really grateful for the good, the bad, the ugly—what I can do for me. If I’m straight and I love everybody in a grateful world, that’s the only contribution I can make. And I can teach that to my daughter.”

I asked what she’d rather be talking about.

“My daughter. Shoes. Handbags. Fashionistas to laugh at. Waxing the undercarriage—from your poonnany to your back door. It’s fucking painful.”

I met Holger Braun, a 31-year-old entrepreneur from Austria.

I asked if he cared that American soldiers are dying.

“Not for a second,” he said. “Because the Americans are the people who are attacking the world; it’s not the other way around. There’s no one who is aggressing America; it’s just America aggressing the whole world …. My girlfriend is from America, and I’m always just talking with her about it. And, you know, she hates me for my opinion.”

Paul Johnson-Calderon, a 23-year-old fashionista wearing a Balenciaga tunic, was also upset.

“I think that the initial reason for us going into Iraq, to get rid of Saddam and his regime, was a good thing,” he said. “How it’s been handled is terrible.”

How does he feel to be an American these days?

“I’m a little bit ashamed, because you go abroad now and everyone hates Americans,” he said. “I was in Florence, Italy—it was my birthday; I’d just turned 21—and everyone was like, ‘Oh, America—fuck America!’ And I was like, ‘No, not fuck America. There are a lot of great people who don’t back Bush, so don’t judge me.’

“I live this debauched life of partying and fun,” he added, “but you have to think about Darfur, you have to think about Iraq, you have to think about the pressing danger of Iran. I think people should enjoy themselves—which I’m not going to stop doing—but at the same time, there should be a level of guilt.”

He looked around Bungalow 8. “Do you think the Iraqis, little villagers in Kandahar, are doing this?” he said. “None of them are. And that’s the sad, awful truth.”

I am also convinced that being a trash-watcher is not determined by class or money. All you need is a great sense of fun, a deep appreciation for the foibles of humanity and a love of community. Yes, I said community. Watching trash TV is a shared interest that provides the glue vital to the survival of any social group. In addition, watching trash TV enhances group productivity: So desperate are my girls and I in the Barneys advertising department to rehash the previous night’s shenanigans on I Love New York, we all arrive early for work on Tuesday morning!

What better place than the Winter Antiques Show opening soirée to confirm my supposition that rich people in mink stoles were tucking into Ego Trip’s (White) Rapper Show and The Surreal Life: Fame Games along with the rest of us?

Surveying the famous-ish faces on Jan. 18 at the Seventh Regiment Armory on 67th Street (the event tends to have all the restrained humility of a Puerto Rican drag show, and last Thursday’s extravaganza was no exception), I spotted Ivana Trump, looking like a high-glamour flight attendant in a scalpel-cut blue two-piece.

“Do you watch trash TV?” I asked.

“It’s all trash!” said the gorgeous mother of Ivanka and ex of trash-TV titan Donald. “I don’t vatch trash. I vatch CNN for the news and New York 1 in the morning to see vhat’s going on viz ze traffic.”

Similarly unconvincing denials came from befurred Town & Country editor in chief Pamela Fiori. “Absolutely not! It’s the imbeciling of America,” said the always-glam Pam, effortlessly inventing a great new word.

After these negative comments, the evening’s hostess, Margaret Russell, editor in chief of Elle Décor, was a beacon of fiery enthusiasm. “I started with Queer Eye—I just love reality television,” said she, lovely in simple black Lanvin and Prada.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that La Russell’s excitement could have something to do with the fact that she herself has thrown her chapeau into the reality arena. Starting on Jan. 31, Margaret—“Peggy” to her pals—will star in Top Design, Bravo’s interior-design version of Top Chef. And—further disclosure—the fact that I am ranting on about it in this paper could have something to do with the fact that my Jonny, Jonathan Adler, is the lead judge on the same show. Yes, my Jonny has a major TV gig!

Entre nous, I’m actually starting to get a bit worried about my Jonny. Top Design has not even begun to air yet and he has already turned into a deranged spotlight-crazed Gloria Swanson–esque figure. The turning point was a recent West Coast Bravo press junket, where he hung out with his idols, The Real Housewives of Orange County— “They’re my new posse, now that I’m part of the Bravo family,” he bragged—and hasn’t shut up about it since. As his media star rises, mine, of course, is plummeting. If this show is a hit, I will end up in the Erich von Stroheim role, picking up his dry cleaning, chauffeuring him around and keeping my trap shut regarding my own former reality-show glories avec Tyra Banks on America’s Next Top Model.

Back to the tiaras: Having found little enthusiasm for trash TV among the show’s attendees, I decided that I should probably ask some of the exhibitors. I felt sure that I would find some TV addicts among these antique dealers, who are—despite the ultra-snooty nature of their attire and their offerings—mostly just a bunch of tarted-up carnies. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!)

I went straight to the top and buttonholed the always genial and camera-ready Leigh Keno, one of the legendary Keno twins.

“I love American Chopper!” he enthused with an air of butch bravado that was slightly at odds with his artificially bronzed visage, “and I’m really into racing motorcycles.”

Though Leigh and I might enjoy the same telly programs, our taste in furniture differs dramatically. Maybe I am too flashy and nouveau riche to understand the Keno aesthetic; either way, those lugubrious but stratospherically priced Early American antiques fill me with suicidal melancholy. (I suspect his stuff might appeal to those narrow-minded poo-poo heads.) The last time I saw Leigh, at the 50th Show, he was flogging a monumentally depressing little object, a minute Queen Anne tea table, for an astonishing $385,000. Guess what? He actually sold that one, and now he has another one. Here’s the bad news: It’s even more frowzy and forgettable than its predecessor. Now the good news: It’s more expensive. At $410,000, it is totally imbecilic!

In fairness to Mr. Keno, he was by no means the only carny flogging absurdly expensive (if not roll-in-the-aisles expensive) historic mundanities at the fair. At the Wayne Pratt Antiques gallery, I found a nest of three horrid little muffin baskets. They were so dreary and depressing that I knew that, in this wacky opposite-world, they would surely be worth a bloody fortune. Chatting with Marybeth Keene, the V.P. of Wayne Pratt, I wasn’t surprised to learn that these were special “Nantucket” baskets and that they could be mine for a mere $78,000—for all three! Thanks but no thanks. I think I will buy the entire floor stock of my local Pier 1 instead.

Unable to nail any real enthusiasm for trash TV among the szhooshy guests or exhibitors, I turned to that old stand-by, interior decorators. When asked about his TV preferences, Thomas Jayne immediately confessed to an abiding passion for plastic-surgery reality shows. “Plastic surgeons and interior decorators are basically the same thing,” said the handsome, bow-tie-wearing giant: “We take an old ruin and transform it.”

At last! A real TV enthusiast, I was anxious to probe further. But the clock was ticking. It was 8:45 p.m.; I had exactly 15 minutes to get downtown in time to watch American Chopper. Judging by the stampede of lacquered, perfumed, tweezed incroyables reclaiming their sables at the coat check, about half of the guests had had the same idea. Case closed. Hypothesis proven.

As my cab pulled away from the gorgeous Armory building, a light rain was falling. I waved at the exiting TV addicts—my people, the new intelligentsia. And then a wave for all those still preening inside. Farewell, earnest poo-poo heads! Enjoy your $78,000 muffin baskets!

Vive la vulgarité!

We started off our trip in Positano on the Amalfi Coast. This city is just dripping with chic and charm. When you go, bring Jackie O sunglasses, some sexy Prada slip-on walking shoes and the biggest memory chip you can find for your digital camera, because around every corner are some of the most stunning, spectacular views I've every laid my peepers on. The beach there looks pretty from afar, but its actually fairly rocky and not so glam. We spent $20 Euros to get ourselves some lounge chairs one day and after about 45 minutes, both of us were bored out of our minds and sick of looking at the parade of women walking by who were wearing bikinis and really should NOT be wearing bikinis. We took day trips to Capri (which believe it or not was even more chic than Positano and Ravello) and really lived it up like the Glitterati.

We then hoofed our way over to Florence. If it's possible to have a city soulmate, then Florence is the Abbott to my Costello. There is something about this magical city that sucks me in from Go. The history...the architecture...the food...it just all makes me so happy to be there and to be alive. While there, we took an amazing day trip on a wine tasting tour of the Chianti region in Tuscany and I experienced getting drunk by 11am for the first time. We walked all over the city, ate gelato three times a day and just had a seriously fantastic time.

My favorite part of the trip, by far, is how much Greg enjoyed telling everyone that we were newlyweds. The moment anyone ever said anything slightly resembling "where are you from?" or "what brings
you here?" Greg would grab me, throw his arm around my shoulder and proudly say "We JUST got married!" with this big, smirky grin on his face. It was achingly adorable.

Ms. Bilton reports that the last time she came to New York, it was on the Concorde, with a suite at the Four Seasons. But at the behest of a gang of Buddhists, and some unnamed TV crew, she returned earlier this year to spend four days as a homeless person.

In preparation, she bought a new jacket, as she thought her Prada wouldn't "quite cut it on the streets." Also, on the way to the airport, she purchased some Tom Ford sunglasses. Here are some of the things she learned about our fair city during her four days:

· Long synagogue services on the Lower East Side are improved by water bottles full of vodka.
· It feels better to smoke butts from the gutter than it does to ask fresh ones of passers-by.
· Bryant Park has great public bathrooms!
· People don't seem to notice the homeless. They walk right by them!
· The Staten Island Ferry is warm--and free!
· Stupid people begin cycling on the Hudson River park paths well before dawn.
· The Mercer Hotel doormen, shockingly, don't admit homeless people.

Still, for the sake of argument, let us stipulate that an otherwise serious-minded female journalism major is momentarily dazzled by the glamorous glow of the fashion scene. Then why would our heroine wear a defiantly I-don’t-care-what-I-look-like outfit to the job interview, as if to assert that she was a real person far beyond worrying about her surface appearance—which is only about 100 percent of what counts in the fashion world, if not everywhere else as well.

Anyway, Anne Hathaway as the initially iconoclastic ingénue, Andrea (just call her Andy) Sachs, can’t carry off the conceit as well as a younger Julia Roberts or even today’s Jennifer Aniston—to say nothing of Audrey Hepburn, she of the fabulous Cecil Beaton fashion-model figure in Stanley Donen’s Funny Face (1957) and George Cukor’s My Fair Lady (1964).

Of course, if the girl in question plans from the start to write a tell-all best-selling book about her experiences and then sell it to the movies, all bets are off. Audiences would never approve of the character if that touch of realism were added to the plot; movie heroines can never be so crass. But is Ms. Hathaway’s Andy intended to be the heroine of the piece? Or are we supposed to be enthralled by a lesbian-like intrigue in which Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestley, the Prada-wearing devil of the title, functions as a cartoon dominatrix to her two submissive female flunkies, Emily (Emily Blunt), Andy’s jealous supervisor, and Andy herself, oh so eager to be crushed under Miranda’s heel?

At the very least, the film is laboriously designed as a chick flick in which the male species is clearly subordinated to the female. Andy does sleep with two men in the course of her self-discovery amid the runway scenes in New York and Paris. But what poor specimens of manhood they are: Andy’s regular boyfriend Nate (Adrian Grenier) is a grubby cook who never shaves, even on his birthday (which Andy misses while serving Miranda, thus making Nate sulk fiercely). When Andy decides to have a Parisian fling, it is with a useful contact in fashion publishing, Christian Thompson (Simon Baker), who is immediately exposed as a plotter and a schemer, and insincere besides.

Indeed, the only interesting and articulate male character in the film is Stanley Tucci’s flamboyant Nigel, Miranda’s second-in-command, who serves as an unofficial fashion Pygmalion to Andy’s gauche Galatea, much as Hector Elizondo’s helpful hotel manager did for Julia Roberts’ culturally insecure courtesan in Garry Marshall’s Pretty Woman (1990). In the end, however, Nigel finds his unswerving loyalty to Miranda repaid by being first promised, then denied the cushy top slot at a new design company after Miranda decides to put someone else in the slot in order to eliminate one of her chief rivals in the fashion power game. Andy finally—and, I thought, somewhat too belatedly—decides that Miranda’s power games are more than she can bear, and so, despite Miranda’s desire that she stay on, she decides to leave her now-cushy job for a more serious journalistic berth. As a final gesture of moral rehabilitation, Andy donates all the beautiful clothes she got as freebies on her Paris jaunt with Miranda to poor Emily, whom Andy had temporarily displaced in Miranda’s pecking order.

Ms. Streep has received a string of Oscar-worthy quotes from many of the critics, though I am not sure why. She certainly outshines her co-star, Ms. Hathaway, but much of what she is asked to do is so laughably outrageous, in a cardboard kind of way, that I’d think it would be considered too easy for special mention. After all, unalloyed bitchiness is so familiar a phenomenon in the movie world—much less the fashion world—that it would seem to come a little too easily to the inhabitants of either realm.

The biggest problem with the movie, however, is that it tries to make a big deal out of a subject that has been beaten to death in the tab-loids and the media. Mr. Grenier, for example, plays the stellar flame to a retinue of dependent moths in the hit cable show, Entourage. He is much funnier in his mock-unassuming manner in the show than he is pretending to be superior to the fashionistas in The Devil Wears Prada. Hollywood has always been on dangerous ground when it tried to play the integrity card. It would have helped, of course, if Ms. Hathaway had been capable of eliciting genuine oohs and aahs when she materialized one morning with what the movie’s own fashionistas decided was an eye-popping change of wardrobe. She wasn’t, and that’s all she wrote.

Buying In

Terry Zwigoff’s Art School Confidential, from a screenplay by Daniel Clowes, based on his short comic story, has been less well-received than their previous exercise in adolescent alienation, Ghost World (2001). I felt that the latter had been somewhat overrated because it indulged the viewer’s sense of moral superiority over all the hypocritical, materialistic people sitting nearby. It may be that Art School Confidential is less successful because it doesn’t let the viewer off the hook that easily. After all, how many of us have drawn and painted our way to fame and fortune in the contemporary art world?

This is what the young, sensitive, idealistic hero, Jerome Platz (Max Minghella), wants to achieve by attending the Strathmore Academy in New York City. For one thing, he has fallen into a deep, sincere love with a nude picture of Audrey (Sophia Myles), a classroom model on the school’s promotional flier. Poor Jerome is shown to have been a tempting target for bullies from an early age, and hence an unlikely candidate for any kind of careerist rat race. But his family agrees to pay his tuition, and off he goes from his suburban wasteland into the cold heart of the Gotham art world.

His introduction to the Strathmore Academy is far from reassuring. His vicariously beloved Audrey does pose nude for his class, but she clearly prefers the company of the jock-like Jonah (Matt Keeslar), who also impresses the students and faculty with his polished but retrogressive drawings. It’s as if he has never heard of Picasso, who just happens to be Jerome’s patron saint.

American movies have never been comfortable with artists and the circles they inhabit. At the very least, the makers of Art School Confidential should be congratulated for not having their characters prattle endlessly about “integrity” and “not selling out.” As Jerome and his classmates learn very quickly from the world-weary Professor Sandiford (John Malkovich), the problem is never “selling out,” but learning how to “buy in.” Making it is all that matters. How you do it is nobody’s business but your own, and if you have to kiss people’s posteriors to get there, just wet your lips and pucker up.

Curiously, this relentlessly cynical tone turns out sounding refreshingly original compared to the usual pieties in the genre. Jerome fails miserably at first, despite his being more talented than anyone in the class, including Professor Sandiford. It is only when he begins cheating and stealing others’ work that he starts getting the attention that invariably leads to success. Along the way, he becomes the prime suspect in a series of stranglings of Strathmore co-eds, but this is a small price to pay for fame and fortune.

Unsurprisingly, Jerome ends up completely cynical about the art scene and his place in it. But he has had wise mentors in Professor Sandiford and a washed-up Strathmore graduate named Jimmy (Jim Broadbent), who dies in a fire started by Jerome’s carelessness with a cigarette. That is the kind of world Jerome has entered and contemptuously conquered. It is a world in which catastrophes are commonplace, and true talent is not properly appraised.

Though the murders are never solved on-screen, we are left with a pretty clear idea of the murderer’s identity. Some reviews criticized the filmmakers for taking such a light, flippant tone toward the killings, as if these crimes had been a central concern of the film instead of morbid MacGuffins employed as ironic counterpoint to the life-and-death struggle for survival engaged in by all the artists.

Mr. Minghella is the son of top-drawer director Anthony Minghella. He gives about as competently straight a performance as anyone could with such a farcical character, and Sophia Myles didn’t strike me as entirely as hopeless an actress as many reviewers said she was. I thought she projected an aura of seriousness and intelligence with her clothes on, and with her clothes off, she was more than adequate as the stuff Jerome’s dreams were made of.

Still, the most stinging performances in the film are provided by Mr. Broadbent and Mr. Malkovich, though Joel David Moore, Ethan Suplee and Nick Swardson are not far behind as Jerome’s irreverently wise-cracking classmates. It is nice to see Anjelica Huston again, even in a tiny role with a more positive spin than the rest of the film.

The Big Man

The Museum of the Moving Image (35th Avenue at 36th Street, Astoria, Queens) is doing itself proud with a 24-film retrospective of the marvelously vibrant oeuvre of Frank Borzage (1893-1962). Borzage was, even in Hollywood, that rarity of rarities, an uncompromising romanticist. In his time, Anglo-American film historians generally underrated him on the facile Marxist assumption that the director’s romanticism was a commercially motivated betrayal of realism. Yet the way of the romanticist is usually much harder than that of the realist. Still, Borzage never needed dream worlds for his suspensions of disbelief: He plunged into the real world of poverty and oppression, the world of Roosevelt and Hitler, the New Deal and the New Order, to impart an aura to his characters, not merely through soft focus and a fluid camera, but through a genuine concern with the wondrous inner life of lovers in the midst of adversity.

His anti-Nazi films— Little Man, What Now? (1934) and Three Comrades (1938)—were far ahead of their time, emotionally and politically. Borzage’s objection to Hitler was a curious one: What Hitler and all tyrants represented was an invasion of the emotional privacy of individuals, particularly lovers, those blessed creatures gifted with luminous rapport. History Is Made at Night (1937) is not only the most romantic title in the history of the cinema but also a profound expression of his commitment to love over probability. Borzage’s cinema is typified by his extraordinary treatment of Janet Gaynor and Margaret Sullavan, actresses with screen personalities molded by the director. Jean Arthur and Gail Russell fit into the Borzage tradition on their first and only tries, and Borzage’s actors—notably Spencer Tracy, Charles Boyer and James Stewart—were made to discard Hollywood’s traditionally superficial attitudes toward love. Many of Borzage’s projects, particularly toward the end of his career, were indisputably trivial in conception, but the director’s passion never faltered, and when the glorious opportunity of Moonrise (1948) presented itself, Borzage was not stale or jaded.

The AMMI’s series begins on July 15 at 2 p.m. with Lucky Star (1929), rediscovered long after it was thought to be lost. Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell star in this imported 35-millimeter restored print from Netherlands Filmmuseum.

Moonrise (1948), with Dane Clark and Gail Russell, follows on Saturday, July 15, at 4:30 p.m. and Sunday, July 16, at 6:30 p.m.

History Is Made at Night (1937) plays on Saturday, July 15, at 6:30 p.m. and Sunday, July 30, at 4:30 p.m.

A Man’s Castle (1933), a Depression classic, with Spencer Tracy and Loretta Young, plays on July 16, at 2:00 p.m.

The Mortal Storm (1940), with Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart, arrives on July 16, at 4:30 p.m.

The series runs through Sunday, Aug. 20.

I don’t know about that. All I ever did was put in some time as the movie critic for Vogue. But I leave it up to the People Who Know Things, and Lauren Weisberger, author of the phenomenally best-selling book from which this movie has been adapted, is a fashion-magazine survivor who took notes. The result is a movie about a magazine called Runway and its chic, powerful, vicious, cold, ruthless and subhuman editor, Miranda Priestley, played with electrifying control-freak relish by Meryl Streep. Despite the diplomatic denials of everyone involved, Runway is Vogue, and Ms. Streep is Anna Wintour. I don’t know her, but if she’s anything like this, Anna Wintour and the Spanish Inquisition were made for each other.

The other star is Anne Hathaway, always lovely but sometimes bland, in a career-defining role as Andy Sachs, a recent Northwestern journalism graduate who arrives in New York to be a serious writer and ends up joining the disillusioned crew of desperate, underpaid vassals who sacrifice their I.Q.’s, integrity and personal lives to work for prestige and perks at Runway. If they fetch enough Starbucks lattes and Hermès scarves and endure enough insults, they get to rub elbows with the most superficial people in town.

Andy has no style or sense of fashion, but she’s smart and learns fast, and out of pity Nigel, the magazine’s swishy art director (a plum assignment for Stanley Tucci), plays Fairy Godmother, treating her to a “makeover.” The oddest thing about Andy is her refusal to be defeated by her boss’ ego-deflating sarcasm and ridicule, and the oddest thing about the movie is that in the early scenes, when she first arrives at Runway wearing cable-knit Gap crewnecks, pleated paid skirts and wool stockings, she looks more appealing than she does in the later scenes, wearing Blahnik stilettos and thigh-high leather Chanel boots in ugly coifs, and kohl mascara that resembles a raccoon on Ritalin. Like Diana Vreeland, who used to coin such quotable but pointless phrases as “Pink is the navy blue of India,” Miranda Priestly declares that “2 is the new 4, 0 is the new 2” and chucks a layout, asking: “Aren’t there any lovely, slender female paratroopers?” Andy is a size 6, which is the new 6, but she plunges on: She starves herself into Saint-Laurent and Donna Karan, learns how to spell and pronounce “Patrick Demarchelier,” bows to Dolce & Gabbana, takes messages from “Isaac” and “Donatella,” and tries to please a woman who thinks she parted the Red Sea after changing it to cerulean blue.

Miranda isn’t happy unless everyone around her is panicked, nauseous or suicidal; she has only been seen smiling one time, at Tom Ford in 2001. At home, Andy alienates her family, her boyfriend Nate (Adrian Grenier) and her friends, despite handing out lavish presents from the accessory department like python headbands, $1,100 Bang and Olufsen phones and $1,900 Marc Jacobs handbags. But at work, she surrenders her nerves to her job, stressing out 24/7 with challenges above and beyond the call of civilized duty. Typical crisis: to locate and make three copies of the unpublished manuscript of the next Harry Potter book before 4 p.m. or you’re fired! Andy has no options, cautions her snobby, condescending officemate Emily (a camera-conquering performance by British actress Emily Blunt that takes no prisoners), who informs her that the last person in her job made the mistake of cutting her hand open with a letter opener and ended up at TV Guide! As predicted, Andy sells her soul to the devil the day she tries on her first pair of Jimmy Choos.

As the high priestess of a distorted kingdom, Meryl Streep plays a workaholic Demon Seed of fashion with a drama and flamboyance that is terrifying and obnoxious, but also funny and touching—shrink-wrapped in Prada, catching every detail with withering glances at 45-degree angles. Making and breaking careers with one nod, Ms. Streep can touch a couture gown with disapproval, and shreds of yarn fall to the floor like splinters. She can be cruel, impossible and self-absorbed, but she can show vulnerability too. When her latest neglected trophy husband (James Naughton) humiliates her by filing for divorce, we get a rare glimpse of Miranda wilted and without makeup in a hotel bathrobe, wiping a tear from her eye. The next minute, she’s reinvented herself, snapping, “Rupert Murdoch should cut me a check for all the papers I sell for him.” It’s the blend of so many qualities that keeps Ms. Streep at the center of the film, ghoulish and glorious. Kay Thompson played the same kind of obsessive fashion dictator in Funny Face with even more “bazazz” (her takeoff on Diana Vreeland singing “Think Pink” is legendary), but Ms. Streep is a triumph of her own making.

To be honest, nothing about The Devil Wears Prada holds a candle to Funny Face, Stanley Donen’s 1957 masterpiece, which it emulates in many ways and wants desperately to be. (Funny Face is, in fact, a check-list role model for this movie, whether its creators realize it or not.) The Devil Wears Prada wasn’t designed by Richard Avedon or produced by Arthur Freed, its haute couture cannot compare with Givenchy, and it doesn’t have a score by George and Ira Gershwin. Ms. Hathaway is adorable, but if Ms. Streep is no Kay Thompson, her co-star is no Audrey Hepburn. She doesn’t fall in love with the world’s most famous fashion photographer, played by the world’s most elegant man, Fred Astaire, but she does get to Paris Fashion Week, where she sleeps with the handsome writer (Simon Baker) who saved her swan neck by swiping the unpublished Harry Potter manuscript. Disappointingly, by the time Andy sees the light, gets her priorities straight, learns the meaning of treachery, deception and backstabbing, and tosses her cell phone into the fountain at the Place de la Concorde, her sudden moral insight is not entirely plausible. How do you explain to a Vogue subscriber that there’s more to life than Fendi and make it stick?

Still, I enjoyed this movie immensely. It lacks the beauty, glamour and compositional balance of Funny Face, but if there’s a name or a product in fashion to be dropped, Aline Brosh McKenna’s colorful screenplay drops them all, while director David Frankel puts to good use what he learned about putting women all over the screen at the same time in Sex and the City. You get the fashion models, fashion designers, fashion hysterics, fashion politics, fashion wars and fashion events at the Metropolitan Museum. And you get the keyhole view of a dying industry where today’s fashion victims become tomorrow’s fashion cops—and vice versa.

Lost in Spacey

Superman Returns, the fifth and noisiest in the DC Comics franchise, doesn’t make a word of sense. Silly as it is, that tiny deterrent shouldn’t stand in its way of achieving summer-blockbuster status. The movie is nothing but special effects, but in two and a half hours of incomprehensible tedium, even when I found myself dozing off, it was better than a single unwatchable frame of Jack Black in Nacho Libre. This time, astronomers discover the remains of the dead planet Krypton, and Superman goes back to search for traces of his childhood home. Finding nothing there but the voice of Marlon Brando, he returns to Metropolis, dons his horn-rim glasses, turns back into mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent and gets his old job back at the Daily Planet. Behind his back, his criminal nemesis Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) got out of prison on a technicality (for two consecutive life sentences?) and somehow managed to get to the crystal galaxy (in a helicopter, yet!) to collect the Kryptonite that can destroy Superman.

To Clark’s surprise, Daily Planet editor Perry White (now played by Frank Langella) has replaced him with a new star reporter, his handsome nephew Richard (über-hunk James Marsden), who has become the fiancé of Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth), who won the Pulitzer Prize for an article called “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman” and gave birth to a son. The 5-year-old sends a grand piano flying across the room with a touch of his pinkie—and if you have any doubts who his real daddy is, your free pass to the next action-hero comic-book convention has just been revoked.

Moving right along, arch-fiend Lex Luthor hatches a diabolical plan to use those Krypton crystals in some kind of indescribably vague “advanced alien technology” to destroy America and thereby force the rest of the world to beg for land and space, making him the world’s richest nutcase. Ah, the magic of that green Kryptonite, which looks like a broken ginger-ale bottle. It destroys Superman’s power and renders him limp as a wet willy, so now it’s up to Lois to rescue the injured crusader from an underwater grave by diving into the ocean (in an evening dress!) and then kiss him back to life like Sleeping Beauty.

As the Man of Steel, wooden newcomer Brandon Routh, making his movie debut, was obviously chosen not for his talent, but because he looks awesomely like Christopher Reeve. In a variety of corny wigs, Kevin Spacey has fun sending up comic-book villainy, torturing the captured Lois and cynically snarling, “Pulitzer Prizes are like Academy Awards—nobody remembers what you got one for!” The hopeless Parker Posey poses blankly as his idiot girlfriend, with none of the sexy joy that made Valerie Perrine so memorable in Superman II. The film’s biggest surprise: three brief guest appearances by the great Eva Marie Saint as Clark’s adoptive mother in Kansas, and by Noel Neill and Jack Larson, who played the original Lois Lane and Jimmy Olson in the syndicated Superman TV series. Strictly for fans on school vacation.

I don’t know about that. All I ever did was put in some time as the movie critic for Vogue. But I leave it up to the People Who Know Things, and Lauren Weisberger, author of the phenomenally best-selling book from which this movie has been adapted, is a fashion-magazine survivor who took notes. The result is a movie about a magazine called Runway and its chic, powerful, vicious, cold, ruthless and subhuman editor, Miranda Priestley, played with electrifying control-freak relish by Meryl Streep. Despite the diplomatic denials of everyone involved, Runway is Vogue, and Ms. Streep is Anna Wintour. I don’t know her, but if she’s anything like this, Anna Wintour and the Spanish Inquisition were made for each other.

The other star is Anne Hathaway, always lovely but sometimes bland, in a career-defining role as Andy Sachs, a recent Northwestern journalism graduate who arrives in New York to be a serious writer and ends up joining the disillusioned crew of desperate, underpaid vassals who sacrifice their I.Q.’s, integrity and personal lives to work for prestige and perks at Runway. If they fetch enough Starbucks lattes and Hermès scarves and endure enough insults, they get to rub elbows with the most superficial people in town.

Andy has no style or sense of fashion, but she’s smart and learns fast, and out of pity Nigel, the magazine’s swishy art director (a plum assignment for Stanley Tucci), plays Fairy Godmother, treating her to a “makeover.” The oddest thing about Andy is her refusal to be defeated by her boss’ ego-deflating sarcasm and ridicule, and the oddest thing about the movie is that in the early scenes, when she first arrives at Runway wearing cable-knit Gap crewnecks, pleated paid skirts and wool stockings, she looks more appealing than she does in the later scenes, wearing Blahnik stilettos and thigh-high leather Chanel boots in ugly coifs, and kohl mascara that resembles a raccoon on Ritalin. Like Diana Vreeland, who used to coin such quotable but pointless phrases as “Pink is the navy blue of India,” Miranda Priestly declares that “2 is the new 4, 0 is the new 2” and chucks a layout, asking: “Aren’t there any lovely, slender female paratroopers?” Andy is a size 6, which is the new 6, but she plunges on: She starves herself into Saint-Laurent and Donna Karan, learns how to spell and pronounce “Patrick Demarchelier,” bows to Dolce & Gabbana, takes messages from “Isaac” and “Donatella,” and tries to please a woman who thinks she parted the Red Sea after changing it to cerulean blue.

Miranda isn’t happy unless everyone around her is panicked, nauseous or suicidal; she has only been seen smiling one time, at Tom Ford in 2001. At home, Andy alienates her family, her boyfriend Nate (Adrian Grenier) and her friends, despite handing out lavish presents from the accessory department like python headbands, $1,100 Bang and Olufsen phones and $1,900 Marc Jacobs handbags. But at work, she surrenders her nerves to her job, stressing out 24/7 with challenges above and beyond the call of civilized duty. Typical crisis: to locate and make three copies of the unpublished manuscript of the next Harry Potter book before 4 p.m. or you’re fired! Andy has no options, cautions her snobby, condescending officemate Emily (a camera-conquering performance by British actress Emily Blunt that takes no prisoners), who informs her that the last person in her job made the mistake of cutting her hand open with a letter opener and ended up at TV Guide! As predicted, Andy sells her soul to the devil the day she tries on her first pair of Jimmy Choos.

As the high priestess of a distorted kingdom, Meryl Streep plays a workaholic Demon Seed of fashion with a drama and flamboyance that is terrifying and obnoxious, but also funny and touching—shrink-wrapped in Prada, catching every detail with withering glances at 45-degree angles. Making and breaking careers with one nod, Ms. Streep can touch a couture gown with disapproval, and shreds of yarn fall to the floor like splinters. She can be cruel, impossible and self-absorbed, but she can show vulnerability too. When her latest neglected trophy husband (James Naughton) humiliates her by filing for divorce, we get a rare glimpse of Miranda wilted and without makeup in a hotel bathrobe, wiping a tear from her eye. The next minute, she’s reinvented herself, snapping, “Rupert Murdoch should cut me a check for all the papers I sell for him.” It’s the blend of so many qualities that keeps Ms. Streep at the center of the film, ghoulish and glorious. Kay Thompson played the same kind of obsessive fashion dictator in Funny Face with even more “bazazz” (her takeoff on Diana Vreeland singing “Think Pink” is legendary), but Ms. Streep is a triumph of her own making.

To be honest, nothing about The Devil Wears Prada holds a candle to Funny Face, Stanley Donen’s 1957 masterpiece, which it emulates in many ways and wants desperately to be. ( Funny Face is, in fact, a check-list role model for this movie, whether its creators realize it or not.) The Devil Wears Prada wasn’t designed by Richard Avedon or produced by Arthur Freed, its haute couture cannot compare with Givenchy, and it doesn’t have a score by George and Ira Gershwin. Ms. Hathaway is adorable, but if Ms. Streep is no Kay Thompson, her co-star is no Audrey Hepburn. She doesn’t fall in love with the world’s most famous fashion photographer, played by the world’s most elegant man, Fred Astaire, but she does get to Paris Fashion Week, where she sleeps with the handsome writer (Simon Baker) who saved her swan neck by swiping the unpublished Harry Potter manuscript. Disappointingly, by the time Andy sees the light, gets her priorities straight, learns the meaning of treachery, deception and backstabbing, and tosses her cell phone into the fountain at the Place de la Concorde, her sudden moral insight is not entirely plausible. How do you explain to a Vogue subscriber that there’s more to life than Fendi and make it stick?

Still, I enjoyed this movie immensely. It lacks the beauty, glamour and compositional balance of Funny Face, but if there’s a name or a product in fashion to be dropped, Aline Brosh McKenna’s colorful screenplay drops them all, while director David Frankel puts to good use what he learned about putting women all over the screen at the same time in Sex and the City. You get the fashion models, fashion designers, fashion hysterics, fashion politics, fashion wars and fashion events at the Metropolitan Museum. And you get the keyhole view of a dying industry where today’s fashion victims become tomorrow’s fashion cops—and vice versa.

Lost in Spacey

Superman Returns, the fifth and noisiest in the DC Comics franchise, doesn’t make a word of sense. Silly as it is, that tiny deterrent shouldn’t stand in its way of achieving summer-blockbuster status. The movie is nothing but special effects, but in two and a half hours of incomprehensible tedium, even when I found myself dozing off, it was better than a single unwatchable frame of Jack Black in Nacho Libre. This time, astronomers discover the remains of the dead planet Krypton, and Superman goes back to search for traces of his childhood home. Finding nothing there but the voice of Marlon Brando, he returns to Metropolis, dons his horn-rim glasses, turns back into mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent and gets his old job back at the Daily Planet. Behind his back, his criminal nemesis Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) got out of prison on a technicality (for two consecutive life sentences?) and somehow managed to get to the crystal galaxy (in a helicopter, yet!) to collect the Kryptonite that can destroy Superman.

To Clark’s surprise, Daily Planet editor Perry White (now played by Frank Langella) has replaced him with a new star reporter, his handsome nephew Richard (über-hunk James Marsden), who has become the fiancé of Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth), who won the Pulitzer Prize for an article called “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman” and gave birth to a son. The 5-year-old sends a grand piano flying across the room with a touch of his pinkie—and if you have any doubts who his real daddy is, your free pass to the next action-hero comic-book convention has just been revoked.

Moving right along, arch-fiend Lex Luthor hatches a diabolical plan to use those Krypton crystals in some kind of indescribably vague “advanced alien technology” to destroy America and thereby force the rest of the world to beg for land and space, making him the world’s richest nutcase. Ah, the magic of that green Kryptonite, which looks like a broken ginger-ale bottle. It destroys Superman’s power and renders him limp as a wet willy, so now it’s up to Lois to rescue the injured crusader from an underwater grave by diving into the ocean (in an evening dress!) and then kiss him back to life like Sleeping Beauty.

As the Man of Steel, wooden newcomer Brandon Routh, making his movie debut, was obviously chosen not for his talent, but because he looks awesomely like Christopher Reeve. In a variety of corny wigs, Kevin Spacey has fun sending up comic-book villainy, torturing the captured Lois and cynically snarling, “Pulitzer Prizes are like Academy Awards—nobody remembers what you got one for!” The hopeless Parker Posey poses blankly as his idiot girlfriend, with none of the sexy joy that made Valerie Perrine so memorable in Superman II. The film’s biggest surprise: three brief guest appearances by the great Eva Marie Saint as Clark’s adoptive mother in Kansas, and by Noel Neill and Jack Larson, who played the original Lois Lane and Jimmy Olson in the syndicated Superman TV series. Strictly for fans on school vacation.

- Riva Froymovich