LOVELY//Fug or Fab: Amy Adams

I feel like Amy Adams has this tendency to occasionally dress up like she’s a very expensive gift that’s been wrapped by one of those professional giftwrappers who are always trying to stick silk flowers and raffia and pussywillows and whatnot onto your presents. This is no exception:

Sorry, she didn’t feel up to giving us the full frontal view – here’s hoping AA isn’t morphing into Elizabeth Berkeley and will now only allow us to view her from one pre-determined side. And my goodness, isn’t she pleased with herself? As for me, I don’t know. Certainly, she is pretty, and I am sure the dress itself is lovely, albeit surely too much for a premiere of a movie like Tropic Thunder, which she isn’t even in. And yet something about it feels rather Fussy Mumsy Plays Ava Gardner to me. But what do you think?
I’m just going to come out and say that I don’t think a giant bow ever works, unless it’s splashed across the hood of a new car:

Because I feel like Amy Adams looks a bit dowdy and somewhat droopy in this, and Amy Adams is far too young and lithe to look dowdy. And yet, here she is, all in costume as Dowdy Droopy McDated, with the huge bow and the pink lipstick and the toes and nails matching the lips and it’s like all of a sudden I’m back at my junior high school’s multi-purpose room heading into the eighth grade graduation dance — at which I, for the record, ALSO wore something with a bow AND tiered ruffles. Although it was 1989, and I was 13, and the flowers on my dress coordinated with the elastics on my braces, so I think I looked pretty rad. But while this particular dress would have been, of course, far far too sophisticated for a junior high dance, there is still something about it that’s Not Quite Right for 2008, if you’re 75 or younger.