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[This was originally written on July 3, 2006 by myself on my very own blog]

Hi there, film fans. I am not going to salivate over A Scanner Darkly (yet); we have Independence Day (the holiday, not the movie) to get past first.

But with the Fourth hoving ever closer into view (I, still the holder of a British passport, have far less mixed feelings about that than perhaps I should) it's actually been a strangely apposite day to go and see another one I'd been looking forward to - The Devil Wears Prada, with the reliably waspish Meryl Streep and commendably doe-eyed Anne Hathaway taking lead roles.

Warning: Plot/Ending Spoilers follow.

Seriously. This will spoil it if you haven't seen it and want to.

I mean it. I'm not kidding.

Right. Either you aren't going to see it (so why do you want to know what I thought about it? Vicarious cineastes ... now there's a concept, actually; like never reading a book, but only the reviews of it. Idries Shah's sufist vademecum, The Book of the Book, approaches that idea from another angle ... sorry, getting sidetracked, or foretracked) or you already have. Welcome to the review, or more accurately to my meditations tangential to having watched the film.

As a writer and a reader - as a trader of stories, primarily - I have some sympathy with the view that there are only a very small number of stories, in which the scenery and dramatis personae may change but the arc of the whole remains a reliable constant. The Devil Wears Prada, it is immediately obvious, belongs to the Coming-Of-Age stable of stories, In Which Our Heroine First Loses And Then Finds Herself. It's a story about enlightenment (in which I have an unprofessional interest) and identity (with which I have a positively unhealthy obsession), so naturally of some interest to me.

Using the world of fashion, in which appearance is all, as a device is a shrewd move - there's a particularly telling Streep speech where she traces the lineage of Hathaway's dowdy apparel to its haute couture ancestors, demonstrating that what's on the surface shapes what we like to think of as being underneath more often than we stop to realise. As a metaphor for the human condition, particularly for the mistaken apprehension that the successive experience of moments and their effects upon us somehow form a coherent and 'deeper' whole, it's pretty neat.

Hathaway, true to form for these kind of stories, initially resists and then accepts the strictures of this new milieu - not perhaps a Paulian "putting

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