Given the slight Sense and Sensibility kick I'm on, I was a bit concerned about the upcoming modernization of the series with a Latina twist, From Prada to Nada. Fortunately, we've got a trailer I can agonize over:
I'm feeling cautiously optimistic about this. Sure, the main characters before they lose their money have more in common with the novel's social climbers, and they're a bit unfortunately stereotypical.
But I do think the decision to make the movie focus more clearly on the sisters' adaptation to their new lives is smart. In the novel, the characters essentially get rescued from poverty after a brief hiatus: their virtue and charm rescues them from any serious reconciliation with poverty. Here, it's not just reduced circumstances, but ethnic identity (and with it, work ethic and a lack of wastefulness) that the characters have to come to understand, and to understand in a way that's part of their core values and self-expression. I have no particular personal insight on whether this is a sensitive, or stereotypical, portrait of urban Latino family life, but the "immigration!" jokes and references to Latino gangs seem to be executed in a reasonably understated way so far—this reads more like Ugly Betty than Our Family Wedding to me, at least in extremely condensed form.
I think a slightly more complicated take on identity is probably worth the sacrifice of the more byzantine romantic subplots which, rooted as they are in a time when large parts of the aristocracy simply didn't work, and adults were far more financially dependent on their parents, probably wouldn't translate well to the screen. Modernization is the easy part—it's finding a truly appropriate translation and transmogrification that's hard.