The Second Assistant; Earthquake Weather

You knew someone would give the Devil Wears Prada treatment to some soulless sap in Hollywood. In Assistant, the Anna Wintour-like antagonist is a superagent whose tell-all assistant, a hot ex-congressional intern, moves to L.A. and is quickly overwhelmed scouring the trades, highlighting her hair, and coveting a 7-Series Beemer. Coauthor Hare has worked in development on films like Jerry Maguire, but don’t expect much insight from this subpar chick lit.

Lankford, a former screenwriter-director, shows a better grasp of the biz in Weather, a zippy noir about an ambitious D-boy and the not-so-surprising murder of his sleazy producer/boss. Lankford’s take on L.A. is dead-on, like the ”tragic” irony that ”people at the very bottom of the food chain are passing judgment on what should…be made into feature films.”