Following my fondness for devils in fine suits, here is Miranda Priestly, the boss from hell in "The Devil Wears Prada."

This is a relatively quick drawing. The longer I look at it the less I'm satisfied... I've been contemplating moving it to "scraps," but I won't be able to do a better picture until I get this film on DVD. Since I love Miranda so much, even though this drawing fails to do her any justice I'm leaving it up...

But eventually I *will* do a better one. Let's just call this one practice... or maybe a bit of homage to an obsession. I don't like fashion. But I adore Miranda Priestly.

If you haven't seen "The Devil Wears Prada," this review I came across pretty much sums up my thoughts on it:

"Running at a fluffy, fast-paced hour and a half, Prada follows Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), a recent Northwestern University journalism grad, as she attempts to become a Serious Writer. Having recently moved to New York, she has to lower her entitled, Ivy League standards by landing a job millions of other girls would kill for: working at the elite fashion magazine Runway as the assistant to its demanding editor, Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep). Miranda has Andy perform increasingly impossible errands (like, say, tracking down the unfinished new Harry Potter manuscript for Miranda's twins), and, after a year, would give Andy a glowing recommendation that would help her gain entrance to any magazine she wanted to write at.

As most people know by now, the movie is based on Lauren Weisberger's hugely popular and critically derided roman á clef of the same name, which chronicled her own experience working at Vogue for its notoriously demanding editor, Anna Wintour. Weisberger wrote the novel in her mid-twenties and didn't have the perspective to truly understand her own book's most fascinating character - not herself, but Miranda. The movie, however, fixes that problem by allowing Miranda to not only be fierce, aggressive, and scary, but also brilliantly talented and, more importantly, nuanced and even vulnerable. Of course, it helps to bring out those layers when the character is played by an icy, strutting Meryl Streep.

If you can, see the movie sooner rather than later, when there's packed audiences who will laugh, hoot and holler and maybe even applaud at some of Miranda's best lines. One of the best scenes (not from the book) is after Andy snickers at Miranda and her fashion crew over debating two similar belts. Miranda then coolly delivers a monologue, while simultaneously putting together the centerpiece of a photo spread, explaining how Miranda's decisions trickle down from Runway to runways to department stores to the Bargain Bin that Andy so carefully picks through to prove she doesn't care about fashion. It's a great way to explain how far Miranda's influence spreads across the fashion world, and you can't help but even root for her as she puts the entitled, equally snobby, Andy in her place.

Streep delivers everything in a cool, restrained, almost dulcet voice, and she can destroy someone with either a fierce glare or, better yet, a dismissive, sleepy-lidded look to remind the recipient they're not even worth the energy of a fierce glare. In a word, Streep is awesome.

Actually, even though I referred to the movie as "fluffy," it does have some interesting points about working in your twenties (doesn't everyone worry that their boss will be a Miranda Priestly?), sacrifices, accountability, priorities (if you're personal life is shit, that means you're probably doing well at your job; if you have no personal life, prepare to be promoted) and gender politics. In fact, Prada seems to be the movie everyone is talking about.

There's not a lot of movies that I want to see a second time so soon after the first, but this might be one of them. Actually, I don't want to see the whole movie. I want someone to re-edit the film with only the scenes that Streep is in. Okay, any scene with her or Stanley Tucci as her snappy, witty sidekick. I would definitely watch that 45-minute "best of" compilation over and over..."

Yes I would. The full review is at [link] Now I go back to fantasy art and photomanipulations... until I can get a good shot of Miranda to paint.