Yes, I know I’m pretty late on this.

I did not enjoy this movie. However, I understand that this movie panders to an audience that deserves being pandered to more, which leaves me in a bit of a bind. Should I even write about this if I’m just going to shit on it? Then again, there’s a theme here I really want to talk about, so here we are…

Andy, who was the second assistant to Miranda, the editor of Runway, in the first movie, has been building a career as a journalist for 20 years. Then her whole team gets cut and fired from her publication just before she receives an award for her work. So, she vents in front of a very appreciative audience of other journalists. However, at the same time Runway has messed up by accidentally glazing a fast fashion company, which puts them in the center of a scandal, and their owner decides that he needs to get some respectability for the mag. So, he hires Andy to handle that. Conflicts ensue, she turns her failing new career around by getting an interview from a reclusive billionaire…

So, it’s been 20 years since the first movie and that has become so iconic that even all the people criticized by the first movie (and the preceding book) have embraced it. This means that the movie is full of celebrity cameos, many of which I did not recognize, since I’m not really interested in the world of fashion.

The movie also assumes on many cases that you have a very clear memory of the previous movie, which is pretty outrageous considering that it is 20 years old.

There is an overall theme of journalism being gutted. What it misses, of course, is that Anna Wintour, whom Miranda is based on, is partly responsible for this.

Spoilers.

Within this theme, the owner of the company that owns the magazine dies suddenly, which means that the new owner wants to restructure, including cuts. So, they have save the magazine. How do they do this? They get billionaire to buy it. When that turns out to be a ruse to give the magazine to Emily, who was assistant 1 in the first movie, they find another billionaire to buy it.

This sucks. This sucks so bad. Fuck anyone who was behind that decision. Andy brings up problems with capitalism over and over again, yet they fall back on capitalism when their position is threatened. I follow so, so many journalists who have gone independent. Many of them write freelance to other publications, but they mostly build their own brands now. Apparently, the reality of journalism was too much to imagine, so they had to take the easy path out.

Here’s a solution: Let the people working in the magazine buy it. If you can’t figure out how they got the money to do it, you can let the billionaire participate by giving them a loan with a low interest. This would easily correct many problems with the current solution. I guess this is just beyond the imagination of people from Hollywood.

Another problem I had is with Miranda. She is waiting for a promotion where she would become responsible for the content of every mag the company owns, which is what Anna Wintour does now. However, if she really loves the Runway, as the movie claims, why would she want that promotion? If she got it, she wouldn’t be able to do much work regarding one specific magazine. Conde Nast, which the company in the movie is modeled after, has 16 publications currently. Even though some of those editorial staffs have been consolidated, that still cuts the time you can use on one specific publication to a fraction of what you were able to do before. Never mind company trying to build around the vision of someone who is already in their 70s.

So, it was badly written. It was way too preoccupied with being cool over being good.

Here’s a weird thing that was probably a joke that was cut out of the movie: At one point Andy is trying to figure out the room number for Emily at the hotel, which is 408. Later, we see that Andy’s room is 405, so Emily was pretty much on the other side of the corridor. Did they mess this up or did something just end up on the cutting room floor?

One more thing: at one point we see Andy wake up. She is wearing a shirt with the cover of Björk’s Post. What was that about? They had to get permission to use that in a film, so it must mean something, but since we only see it when Andy is alone, does that mean that this is something she doesn’t want other people to know about? If so, is Björk seen as too common for these people? Or is it supposed to tell us that Andy is like us? Or something…