Friday, July 07, 2006

Devil's in the Details

Went to see The Devil Wears Prada the other night. Cute and enjoyable, and Meryl Streep is as good as everyone says she is…and that girl form the Princess Diaries is pleasant enough.

Um…her boyfriend has a job that gets him hired as a sous-chef at the Oak Room? When does he even have time to be pissed that she has no time? Everyone I’ve ever known with culinary aspirations has worked about eighty hours a week.

The combination of this movies, and my TV writing course has brought to mind all the production jobs I had in my early twenties, which were not unlike Andie’s in this movie—except without the designer clothes. Although I watch and know that there is an element of absurdity to the mentality depicted, I also really relate to how after a while, the exactitude of these jobs also make a perfect kind of sense.

The first time I saw Swimming with Sharks and Frank Whaley’s character picked up the wrong packet of sweetener, I immediately knew he was heading for disaster. “Nooo—that’s the wrong one!” I yelled silently. Many jobs seem persnickety when viewed from the outside, but I wonder how many people in this country actually have lives that do have these kind of standards, in various capacities. Most of the people I work with right now seem to me obsessed by the presence or absence of commas, and go to great lengths to make these perfect. I can’t say its something I really care about, but hey, it’s the culture.

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