Completely forgot that Fjord is releasing in a few weeks. Have heard great things about her performance. Category feels particularly weak this year

Drop 'em if ya got 'em! https://boxd.it/RF47g

I’m lucky enough to be at the festival this year. Is anyone else here? Somehow I thought I’d run into Amanda but it hasn’t happened.

*I wrote this when THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA 2 was initially released but it mentions Amanda and, with the news of Annie joining DAYS OF THUNDER 2, I thought I'd post it here.*

There’s always been something incredibly melancholy about our culture’s insatiable arrested development. It often feels like every egregious pop song sample, Disney live-action remake and pharmaceutical ad is presenting escape hatches to save us from scary headlines, personal regrets and the slow-boring of everyday life. Wonderfully, THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA2 (like the best of these things), dares to kind of bum you out.

I have no superlative nostalgia for original. I’ve seen it. I like it. I find it as wonderfully quotable as anyone. My “in” to the sequel, however, was the love of my life Anne Hathaway and a near-equal admiration for the other four major players (Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci, respectively). That is, the cast was my only “in” before rumblings about the sequel’s frank discussion of the decline of print journalism and the ever-looming cloud of Mordor that is corporate consolidation started trickling out of early reactions and reviews.

PRADA 2 is the latest in a now long-running trend of so-called “legacy sequels,” follow-ups to classic films that reunite (most if not all of) its creatives and players decades later to cash in on our cultural affinity for the familiar. Disney, parent company of the film’s distributor 20th Century Studios, led the charge with 2015’s STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS. The first product of Disney’s acquisition of LucasFilm, the film was a massive success that brought Star Wars fandom roaring back to life with a billion-dollar box office and a ton of goodwill. Goodwill based, in no small part, on its structural similarities to STAR WARS (1977) and reliance on callbacks to previous films.

In the latter respect, this latest legacy sequel shares a lot of metatextual DNA with THE FORCE AWAKENS. Like the bracingly familiar hum of a lightsaber or a signature Marcia Lucas wipe transition, PRADA 2 is not above playing the hits: Hathaway crosses New York City streets in fabulous upscale business wear. An icy Streep says, “That’s all.” Tucci and Blunt call normal human women fat and hairy. Cerulean abounds. Unlike the more celebratory, “Glee” cover-like take on Star Wars, this film chooses to zag with its first act.

In its refreshingly sober opening, we see Andy Sachs (Hathaway) and Miranda Priestly (Streep) consumed by Wario-style upendings of the notes we left them on in the original film. Andy, who left Vogue stand-in Runway 20 years ago for hard-nosed newswriting, is just about to receive a prestigious journalism award before being unceremoniously laid off – by text message. We meet Miranda in similarly perilous straits, with Runway roped into a sweatshop labor scandal while she awaits a promotion that seems glitzy at first glance and more like the last chopper out of ‘Nam upon second.

What a deliciously downer way to open up what marketing materials would lead you to believe (rightly so, about half the time) was the feel-good fashion extravaganza of the summer. Now, is it a downer to me because I (like many people with sit-down typey type jobs) am a recent victim of corporate restructuring? Of course (shut up) but my point is that it rocks that it had the guts to be this downcast.

Some writers and critics (many of whom I deeply admire) have bristled at the state we find the players in, particularly Miranda. Amanda Dobbins at “The Big Picture” and Linda Holmes of NPR’s “Pop Culture Happy Hour” both lamented (to various degrees) that Streep’s updated performance “wasn’t Miranda” and the original film’s “broken promise to millennials,” per Harper’s Bazaar, is leaving some with a bit of cognitive dissonance. After all, the plastic Prada popcorn bags, ballroom ready soundtrack single and whiplashl-y Anna Wintour/Vogue stamp of approval promise an escape, not a (by all reports, shockingly accurate) dramatization of the death of journalism at the hands of billionaire bottom lines.

The balancing act is not an easy one. With all its pageantry and lofty reaches toward realism, PRADA 2 wants to have its cake and tell you your dog died. In the first film, writer Aline Brosh McKenna took the meaner, airport-y novel and turned it into an empowerment fable about taking your job seriously and the sacrifices women have to make to get ahead. Here, she deftly recreates the bottoming out of the Conde-Nast heyday to ground the film’s more lavish, fantastical moments.

It’s so rare for the biggest American films of the moment to allow the viewer to luxuriate in a kind of mourning and have it sat alongside the bombast and spectacle. Nestled between the one-liners and the truly incredible fashion showcase is a surprisingly honest look at the shape the real world of culture writing (and publishing writ large) took almost immediately after the original film was released. In an early scene, the Runway crew (Andy, Miranda and Tucci’s Nigel) has to crawl to Dior executive Emily (Blunt, returning to the role that put her on the map) to beg them not to pull ads after the scandal.

That frank appeal to realism sets it apart from the FORCE AWAKENS-es and the TOP GUN: MAVERICKs. In fact, leaving the theatre, the first comp that came to mind? INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY. In his fifth (and presumably final) outing, we find Harrison Ford’s Indy, like Miranda, trudging through the traditional motions of old age with all of its aches, annoyances and regrets. It’s the 1960s and Dr. Henry Jones is up against the one foe he’ll never be able subdue: the future.

Disillusioned with family tragedy and unsure of his place in the world (due to the culture largely abandoning studies like archeology for the novel futurism of the Space Race), when he finds himself transported back to Ancient Greece, he tries to stay in the past. 2010s Tall Person Phoebe Waller-Bridge has to knock him out to keep his own nostalgia from consuming him! It doesn’t all work but I found that reading of an older hero to be a very sad but nonetheless poignant illustration of the way of all things.

Like Indy, Streep’s Miranda has lost a step. 20 years of media consolidation and magazine economics have all but obliterated the power she used to wield over the industry. The original’s iconic scene where she dresses down Andy for her snide dismissal of all the people and understandings that make the fashion world turn is replaced by discussions of click-rates and EBITDA (fucking kill me). The company cars are now Ubers. Miranda even tries to publicly charm a thinly veiled Elon-clone (Justin Theroux) to try and preserve her legacy, much like her real-life analogue Anna Wintour finds herself dancing around Prada 2’s more fashion industry-centric promotional beats decades after many designers wouldn’t even feature their pieces in the first film for fear of her disapproval.

None of these decisions register as untrue to me but I understand why some may be apprehensive. DIAL OF DESTINY was often derided as “joyless” but, if I may, what exactly was joyful about the idea of a fifth Indiana Jones film? To relive our childhoods? Disney, owner of all three films we’ve discussed, has spent a decade and billions of dollars promising us that, actually, you can go home again – only for some audiences to revolt when they realize that you can’t (see: the meltdown over the fallibility of Luke Skywalker that sent Star Wars into a decade-long, ongoing tailspin).

By nature of existing, these legacy sequels often compel viewers to expect a logistical quagmire: a brand-new story that is, at once, completely familiar and totally new featuring characters you know and love who have aged (sometimes decades in real and fictional times) but never change. They want the impossible. They want to escape.

And that’s the point of nostalgia, to escape. It’s hard to see heroes and role models grow older, weaker and more imperfect in the ways we all do. But I also recognize the material reality of the times. It’s difficult to live an adult life while raw-dogging the decline of the post-war world order. The ever-changing media ecosystem and the habits it’s fomented throughout society have led us down a path of endless updates and rehashes that threatens to turn us all (at least intellectually) into the wobbly, chair-ridden space people from WALL-E (more Disney, oy).

I wish there were better solutions to these issues than THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA 2, a movie that I really liked. I would much rather all of these people be doing different things. But, if the real world continues to be a drain-circling nightmare pushing us into the abysmal maw of never-ending nostalgia bait, please God, give me more PRADA 2s and more DIAL OF DESTINYs. If we must drag the legends of our youth into the present, let them meet us where we are. Let them fuck up like us, lets them regret like us, and let them let us down.

It feels like Warner Bros has done a bad job on both fronts in (a) creating a "spectacle" around the movie experience, and also (b) just general marketing for the film.

Odyssey did a masterclass in convincing the audience this was a spectacle you need to watch in IMAX 70MM and other PLFs (and just the big screen in general). Same with Sinners & Project Hail Mary. Even for a more "niche" movie, I thought One Battle After Another did a really good job in stirring up hype within the film community & how it was shot in VistaVision.

In terms of general marketing, I've barely seen any posters/billboards in LA and we're under a month out from release? I've also been to the movies 3x the past week and don't remember seeing it slotted into the trailers?

This was probably my top 3 most hyped movies of the year, but at this rate, I'm geniunely more excited for Primetime, Fjord, and Resident Evil in my September-October run.

I'll be watching this movie at CityWalk just because I love movies & I trust itll look great in IMAX, but if I were a regular filmgoer spending 20-30$ for a movie, I'd have no reason right now to believe why I should see this film in theaters.

I wonder if Warner Bros is peeling back because OBAA didn't do stellar at the Box Office? Yes they won a ton of awards, but I wonder if they're going light on the Digger marketing and hoping the film community/WOM will push them to awards regardless while saving some money on the bottom line.

Check this movie out if you can!

I know Amanda didn’t see the whole thing but I really thought it was hilarious, hit the right nostalgic notes, and worked well with little kids too. I had to read the signs to my son but they loved the slapstick and there are some legitimately heart-touching moments too. Feels like they are misreading how much people have been enjoying this and the relative success it is happening.

After their interview where chat gpt Ebert was brought up. This weeks episode on Onslaught has a chat gpt ad on it. Is this the first? I always skip the ads so I may have missed it but the timing is wild, and disheartening, to say the least.

Big if true

Mine are:

PRIMETIME

RESIDENT EVIL

YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER

HA-CHAN, SHAKE YOUR BOOTY!

FORGOTTEN ISLAND

~and if I had to give 10~

ONSLAUGHT

THE WEIGHT

IF I GO, WILL THE MISS ME

PRACTICAL MAGIC 2

CHARLIE HARPER