While everyone is compiling their year-end (and decade-end) best-of lists, I thought it might be a good idea to take another look at this piece. While The September Issue wasn’t the best movie I saw this year, it was certainly one of the most though-provoking, especially as a member of the print media.
Almost immediately after seeing it, I started writing this. What can I say? It left me with a strong opinion of Anna Wintour. While I put it aside afterward—mostly out of a sense of, who am I to critique Vogue?—rereading it now makes a lot more sense than it did then as print continues to suffer.
So while this isn’t a straight-up movie review like my previous post on The Bourne Ultimatum, it still reminds me of something I would have written in college—but instead of turning it in to an editor at the DTH, I would have submitted it to one of my professors in the comm studies department.
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Vogue and I never really had a relationship. When I was in high school (and long before I ever knew I’d end up working in the world of magazines), I picked up a few issues when I realized I was getting too old for Seventeen and wanted a different source for pretty clothes. But all it taught me was that there was a class of people I could never dream of joining. They lived in New York, vacationed in places like Sag Harbor and Saint Tropez, and wore clothes by designers I couldn’t even pronounce. The only piece of information I retained from those pages is that there are three Miller sisters, who all married into royalty—the design, philanthropic and literal varieties.
Last week’s entry regarding my time at the DTH made me think of this piece, which I wrote in late 2007. See, my main gig at the DTH—all four years—was reviewing movies. Most of the time, they were split between heavy-duty art-house films and insipid popcorn flicks. But over time, I got used to it. There was a definite pattern to writing reviews…and it was always much more fun to trash the bad movies. (And as the photo suggests, in my early days on the arts desk, we awarded feet instead of stars.)
