Recent releases: The Devil Wears Prada 2, Sgt. Haane and Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition

Firstly an apo­logy to the editor-in-chief who accep­ted my sug­ges­tion that we watch Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” on stream­ing the oth­er night and then had to endure the whole thing her­self after I fell asleep. The error is regretted.

I also want to apo­lo­gise to sub­scribers for the tardi­ness (and paucity) of this recent releases update. I’ve had a lot on lately – pro­fes­sion­ally, socially and med­ic­ally – and I haven’t made it to the cinema as much as I nor­mally would.

Back in 2006, I had just star­ted review­ing for the weekly paper Capital Times and I wrote this about the first The Devil Wears Prada:

When I took this gig I knew there would come a time when I would be asked to review a film for which I was com­pletely unqual­i­fied. What I didn’t real­ise was that the moment would come so soon. The Devil may well wear Prada but this review­er wears Hallensteins and names like Jimmy Choo and Manolo Blahnik might as well be shoe design­ers for all I know.

Idealistic young journ­al­ism gradu­ate Andy Sachs (irrit­at­ingly squeaky-voiced Anne Hathaway) gets a job as 2^nd Assistant to Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), editor-in-chief of Runway magazine hop­ing to par­lay the pos­i­tion into a job as a cru­sad­ing social issues report­er at the New Yorker. She soon finds out that fetch­ing scarves from Hermés and slop from Starbucks is not actu­ally journ­al­ism though it does approx­im­ate it in prestige. The Devil Wears Prada floats com­fort­ably above mediocrity thanks to the exceed­ingly witty script, nice obser­va­tions and a per­form­ance out of the very top draw­er from Streep. It’s worth see­ing for her alone.

That con­clu­sion is per­fectly apt for the sequel as it turns out. Streep turns in anoth­er mas­ter­class as Priestly reveals her­self to be a much mis­un­der­stood tyr­ant. Turns out that every­one – even the fam­ously single-minded edit­or of the world’s greatest fash­ion magazine – has to serve someone.

Twenty years on, both the media industry and the fash­ion industry have seen some changes. Fashion is even more reli­ant on branded accessor­ies and retail – Emily Blunt’s Emily has left the magazine to run Dior’s flag­ship store – and magazines are now sec­ond­ary to digit­al influ­en­cer con­tent and journ­al­ism itself is under threat. Hathaway’s Andy is laid off from her pres­ti­gi­ous news­pa­per fea­ture writ­ing gig at the same time she is accept­ing an award for it.

The free-spending media world of two dec­ades ago has gone and now the only example of con­spicu­ous lux­ury con­sump­tion is in the world of the tech bil­lion­aires who buy and sell prop­er­ties like Runway magazine on a whim.

More often charm­ing than not, The Devil Wears Prada 2 does carry a ser­i­ous mes­sage along with its laughs at the expense of the fash­ion world. Media and fash­ion are both worlds that skew female and when oppor­tun­it­ies shrink the impact is felt unequally. And Streep’s lovely final speech, wist­fully say­ing how much she loves her work, could eas­ily be a per­son­al state­ment, too.

I’m not nor­mally a fan of doc­u­ment­ar­ies rely­ing on dra­mat­ic recre­ations. My sense is – if you don’t have the primary mater­i­al to work with, make a prop­er fea­ture film and be done with it¹. But I totally under­stand why Tearepa Kahi has chosen the hybrid mod­el for Sgt. Haane, his salute to Te Arawa WWII hero Haane Manahi who led the suc­cess­ful assault on the Nazi strong­hold of Takrouna in Tunisia in April 1943. Manahi was nom­in­ated for the Victoria Cross by three seni­or officers but was down­graded to a Distinguished Conduct Medal on the recom­mend­a­tion of an anonym­ous British officer.

With no foot­age of the event – and very little that might sup­ply con­text for it – and Manahi being mod­est enough that there isn’t even very much of his life after­wards, dra­mat­ic recre­ations make sense. And because the testi­mony of his (and oth­er Māori Battalion sol­diers) des­cend­ants is so cru­cial to under­stand­ing who he was and who he became, you would­n’t want to leave them out of it either. The present day mater­i­al also helps con­tex­tu­al­ise Māori atti­tudes to mil­it­ary ser­vice and the (para­dox­ic­ally) import­ant rela­tion­ship to the Crown, mak­ing the film more than the sum of its unlikely parts.

The recre­ations (led by Alex Tarrant as Manahi) work best in the quiet moments, focused on the rela­tion­ships and moods. I felt that the battle stuff suffered too much from war film clichés to be really mov­ing or even to work all that well as drama. Another sec­tion involving a present day Tunisian man recount­ing his ver­sion of the events to his own son rein­forces the intergen­er­a­tion­al themes but are too obvi­ously staged and the energy drops.

Still, it does Manahi’s story a great ser­vice and, hope­fully, goes some way towards keep­ing the deeds of these men alive in our col­lect­ive memory.

Even though I’m not an offi­cial fan of the heavy met­al band Iron Maiden, I’ll admit that my mood improves whenev­er a track of theirs shows up on my shuffle and I am very fond of two doc­u­ment­ary films in which they appear. Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey is about the music’s pas­sion­ate fan­dom and dir­ect­ors Sam Dunn and Scot McFadyen then got to fol­low the band around on the 2008 Somewhere Back in Time to make Iron Maiden: Flight 666.

Maiden now have a prop­er doc­u­ment­ary about their his­tory. Burning Ambition uses their prodi­gious archive² to tell the story of some lads from start­ing out in the pubs of East London – furi­ously res­ist­ing the calls form them to embrace Punk – and a met­eor­ic rise to the aren­as and sta­dia of the world. There are a few hic­cups along the way but its a fun­da­ment­ally pos­it­ive and uplift­ing story. Even the band mem­bers who were kicked out along the jour­ney remain happy for the exper­i­ence and grate­ful that they live in a world that still has Iron Maiden in it. And so say we all.

Also reviewed in that October 2006 column: Dwayne (then still “The Rock”) Johnson in Gridiron Gang, “In The Guardian, a big wet tongue kiss to the US Coast Guard, Kevin Costner and Ashton Kutcher battle it out for the title of Captain Smug with Kutcher win­ning by a length”, “new-fangled” mo-cap anim­a­tion thrill­er Renaissance, C.R.A.Z.Y. an early film from the late Jean-Marc Vallée (Dallas Buyers Club, The Young Victoria), and the pres­ci­ent doc­u­ment­ary, Who Killed the Electric Car?

1. A good example of a film that sup­ports my argu­ment is Bart Layton’s The Imposter (2012) and he has indeed gone on to make dra­mat­ic fea­tures. I missed Crime 101 in the cinema but it’s on the catch-up list now that it has arrived on Prime Video. ↩︎
2. There’s a long sec­tion about a 1984 tour to ‘behind the Iron Curtain’ Poland which seems to be going nowhere until the band goes look­ing for an after show drink in Poznań, crashes a wed­ding party and ends up using the wed­ding band’s instru­ments to play Deep Purple cov­ers to a bemused con­greg­a­tion. ↩︎