Devil and Match Point

On my birthday I picked two movies to see. The Devil Wears Prada began to show in theaters, and I invited Guo Li, a friend who has a figure of fashion models, to go with us to view this highly-promoted motion picture.

As expected, it is Meryl Streep's stunning portrayal of the demandingly-impossible boss of a New York fashion magazine that lights up the sparkles in the viewer's eyes, in spite of all the dazzling models, assistants, and party guests dressed in their designer clothes parading on the screen. Anne Hathaway, with her chic looks accented by stylish hairdos and couture outfits, shines in her new character that shows no sign of her just coming out of the Brokeback Mountain role of a Texan rodeo queen wearing cowboy hat and bleached-blonde hair.

Behind the glamorous scenes of the fashion world, The Devil Wears Prada, on a certain level, elucidates women's struggle bewteen career and family. Streep and Hathaway's roles provide two different choices, but, obviosuly, they are merely two answers to a complex question.

The second movie I saw was the DVD version of Match Point, a Woody Allen film I intended to see in theater but didn't. Through a tale that deals with emotion, lust, and wealth on the surface level but comments on the importance of random luck in life at its core, Allen surpasses those filmmakers who often provide moral solutions to such film plots and make sure the murderer gets punished. One such exemple that comes to mind is Consenting Adults, a thriller movie I recently saw on TV. Despite its refreshing plot at the beginning and the overall great acting of Kelvin Kline and Kelvin Spacey, the movie ended with boring and overly-redundant scenes of fistfights followed by triumph over killing the bad guy. In Match Point, however, what we get is not about what should happen in life based on any overarching moral order, but a plain phenomenon that we often feel guilty to admit its existence and importance. Allen opens a new window for us to look at the horizon of our life experiences and consequences.














Guo Li in California