thoughts on Girls, Season One (spoilers)

So.  I rented Season One of Girls from the public library on Thursday and finished it in three days.  The episodes are short (about thirty minutes each), and the whole season was only ten episodes long, so it went fast.  Some thoughts:

Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham) is an interesting character.  A couple of things she goes through in the first season are so similar to things that I've gone through that at one point I said out loud, "Wow.  None of my life experiences are original," and at another point, I shut an episode off halfway through and went back to it the next day because I just really couldn't even deal.  There are other aspects that I can't relate to at all.  The whole action of the series is set in motion because her parents tell her that they're not going to support her anymore, given that she's twenty-four and has been out of college for two years now.  What? People's parents do that?  And there are yet other aspects that make me sometimes say out loud, "You're a ridiculous person," or cover my face with my hands because it's so uncomfortable to watch.  She makes a rape joke on a job interview, for example.  At another point, she has a boss who is a little handsy, and rather than asking him to stop, quitting the job, just putting up with it like her co-workers do, or taking any number of courses of action that you might imagine a human being taking in this scenario, she offers to have sex with him in the most awkward and uncomfortable way possible.  Her goal is to be a writer, but she goes through long periods of unemployment where it doesn't seem like she's even really actively looking for a job, which is a little frustrating to watch because Marnie (Allison Williams), her best friend and roommate for most of the first season (who actually has a consistent, real, paying job), winds up picking up the slack a lot, and Hannah seems to kind of take it for granted. 

This eventually becomes a problem, though I don't know that I totally got the argument at the end of the season that leads to Marnie moving out.  Marnie has been dating a guy named Charlie (Christopher Abbott) for four years.  She's pretty much done with the relationship from the very beginning of the series, but it doesn't actually end until Charlie's friend Ray (Alex Karpovsky) snoops around, finds Hannah's diary, and reads Hannah's thoughts on Charlie and Marnie's relationship.  This leads into a fairly horrifying (from the perspective of someone who keeps a diary, anyway) scene where Charlie and Ray play a song called "Hannah's Diary" in one of their shows that consists of Charlie reading aloud from Hannah's diary while he and Ray play accompanying music.  It's awful.  Charlie and Marnie have a long talk in which she eventually begs him to stay together, then decides (during sex) that she really does want to break up.  He starts dating someone else almost immediately, and she is miserable.  This all happens at around the same time that Hannah starts dating her hook-up, Adam (Adam Driver), for real, and Marnie and Hannah eventually have a huge argument that leads to each of them yelling about who's more selfish and who's the worse friend.  Marnie eventually says she wants to move out.  I don't totally get what leads to this, or what they're really arguing about.  I don't know if this is because the show didn't lead up to it well enough, or because the argument isn't really about anything in particular and just the culmination of issues that they've been dealing with for years.

Hannah and Marnie's group of friends is rounded out by Jessa (Jemima Kirke), who went to college with Hannah and Marnie, and Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet), Jessa's cousin.  Jessa is a nanny for most of the first season until the father of the kids she's watching becomes interested in her.  She surprises everyone by marrying someone she's known for only two weeks in the season finale.  Shoshanna lives in an incredibly pink and fluffy apartment (that she shares with Jessa and eventually Marnie); uses terms like "OMG," "obvi," and "totes adorbs" a lot; accidentally smokes crack at one point; is a virgin until the season finale; and is maybe my favorite character on the show, even though she has the least to do.  It's just always a good time when she shows up.  Ray watches her when she's high on crack and is eventually the guy she loses her virginity to, and he tells her she just "vibrates on a different frequency," which is as good of a way to describe her as any. 

Hannah, Marnie, Jessa, and Shoshanna are all so different that I don't fully understand how they're all friends.  I know that's a complaint that was made about Sex and the City, as well, and I guess I'll give it a pass since these girls are all just out of college (or in Shoshanna's case, still in college), and I feel like college friendships are often based more on randomness (who you're assigned to live with or near in the dorms, who you have a work study job with, for example) than common interests.  Still.  The thing about TV friendships is that they often withstand things that would tear real-life friendships apart, simply because everyone's still on the show and it usually doesn't work to have characters that don't really interact with each other.  If we all look back at Friends, for example, we will remember that Chandler basically stole Joey's girlfriend at one point, and that, brief periods of trying to avoid each other notwithstanding, Ross and Rachel stayed friends during the "off" parts of their on-again, off-again relationship.  Because it's less common for real friendships to survive under such circumstances, TV shows have to show either that these characters' lives are so intertwined that it's impossible for them to avoid each other, or that their friendships are so strong that they will fight to work out conflicts, withstand periods of awkwardness, and move past their own hurt feelings and pride in ways that real friends are, quite frankly, not always able or willing to do.  I don't get that from these four girls yet.  As I said, I will give it a pass because these are college friends and college wasn't that long ago, and also because we're only ten episodes in.  Also, I really like each of these girls separately, even if I don't totally get them together.  Also, also, I appreciate that it's fairly out in the open that Marnie and Jessa don't really like each other (at least for most of the season) and only hang out because they have friends in common.

The final important element of the show is Adam, who starts as Hannah's hook-up and eventually becomes her real boyfriend, though their status is unclear at the end of the first season.  In an early episode, Hannah complains that he's so great when they're together, but then she won't hear from him in two weeks and he won't return her texts and she'll feel like she's made him up.  Eventually, she shows up at his apartment to deliver the iconic speech that includes the sentence, "I just want someone who thinks I'm the best person in the world, and wants to hang out all the time, and wants to have sex with only me."  They supposedly aren't going to see each other anymore after that (and after he has sex with her one "last" time, because aughhhh), but within a couple of episodes he's yelling at her, "Do you want me to be your boyfriend?! Is that what you want?!," and then he is, and then things actually change for the better.  The season ends with him offering to move in after Marnie moves out, and her brushing him off and asking her gay ex-boyfriend Elijah (Andrew Rannells) to move in instead.  Adam is hurt, upset, and frustrated by this, and it's unclear where they stand at the end of the episode and season.

Also: Jessa and Thomas-John's (Chris O'Dowd's) wedding.  We don't even know that Jessa and Thomas-John, a character who we've been introduced to exactly once before, are dating at the time that Jessa invites all of the main characters to a "mystery party" that turns out to be their wedding.  They tell the story of how they met and fell in love.  Most wedding goers seem surprised, mystified, and a bit skeptical.  Shoshanna is visibly upset.  Adam cries a little; when Hannah asks him what's going on, he says something like, "I'm very moved.  People finding love, taking shelter...it's beautiful." And...I'm sorry, but it is pretty moving.  I know that it's silly to marry someone you've known that short of time.  I know, based on the number of episodes IMDB tells me that Thomas-John is in, that it probably doesn't last.  There is something moving about being willing to make that big of a commitment and take that big of a chance, though. 

So, despite some small issues, I enjoyed it a lot.  Looking forward to watching the next season.  It is going to be delivered to my public library from a different public library within a couple of days.  So that's exciting.

thoughts on Tomorrowland

As a child, Frank Walker (Thomas Robinson) visited a World's Fair at Disney World with a jet pack that he had invented.  It didn't quite work, but his enthusiasm and smarts lead a young girl named Athena (Raffey Cassidy) to give him a pin that transports him to Tomorrowland, a dimension that seems to be an idyllic and technologically advanced future.  More than forty years later, optimistic teenager Casey Newton (Britt Robertson) also receives a pin.  She briefly gets to visit Tomorrowland; when her pin stops working, she does research and finds that a novelty shop in Texas is looking for the pins.  She travels to the shop and learns that the pins were given to optimistic and gifted individuals that could help create a better world; however, Frank (played as an adult by George Clooney) discovered that the world was going to end on a date now less than sixty days in the future, so recruiting was supposed to have ended.  Casey has been brought in as a last hope.

The movie is wild.  We're going back and forth between the past and the present, between Earth as we know it and Tomorrowland.  There are robots that look like humans, impressive technological developments, and a lot of fun details that incorporate current attractions and landmarks (Frank first enters Tomorrowland through the Small World ride at Disney World; Casey later learns that the Eiffel Tower is actually a rocket).  It's, for lack of a better word, neat: lots of fun stuff to see; actors with expressive, almost cartoonish faces; and a dash of Disney cheesiness (Frank gives a speech near the end that basically amounts to, "Let's save the world using science and optimism!").  I enjoyed it quite a bit.  It was fun.  Bring the kids.

thoughts on Pitch Perfect 2

The Bellas are back.  The first time around, they were a laughingstock because Aubrey (Anna Camp) projectile vomited onstage at Nationals. This time, they're a laughingstock because Fat Amy (Rebel Wilson) had a wardrobe malfunction while the group was performing for the President of the United States at the Kennedy Center.  The group still gets to perform at the World Championship since they're the defending national champions, but they have been replaced on their world tour by the German group Das Sound Machine, and they aren't allowed to recruit new members.  The film primarily focuses on the group trying to bounce back from their embarrassment while dealing with what they're going to do after graduation (would-be music producer Beca (Anna Kendrick) already has an internship that competes for her time); welcoming the only new member they were allowed to take on, a legacy named Emily (Hailee Steinfeld), into the fold; and entertaining a rivalry with Das Sound Machine.  Also, Fat Amy has a romance with fellow a cappella enthusiast Bumper (Adam DeVine).

The storyline of the first Pitch Perfect was a bit tighter, and it worked better as a standalone movie.  However, there are SO MANY CHARACTERS in these movies, and it was nice to walk in knowing most of them and just being able to get down to the story.  Looking back at my review of the first movie, I also see that a lot of the conflict in that one was a bit tedious (Beca thinks it's dorky to be in an a cappella group! Aubrey has a problem with Beca dating a rival Treblemaker! Aubrey is stubbornly clinging to the way things have always been done even though it's clearly not working!); the conflict in this one seems a bit more natural (Fat Amy doesn't realize or acknowledge her feelings for Bumper until it's almost too late; Emily takes awhile to gel with the group; Beca is caught between her past and future, as many college seniors are).  The previous story was about a group of very different young women putting aside their differences to achieve a goal; this story is about a group of close friends trying to grow up without growing too far apart.

There is also zero projectile vomiting in this movie.  For me, that is a HUGE point in this film's favor.

It was fun.  Good songs and familiar, likeable characters.

thoughts on The Age of Adaline

At age twenty-nine, a young widow named Adaline Bowman (Blake Lively) was in a car accident that changed her life forever.  During a freak California snowstorm, she veered off the road into a river.  She was nearly dead when lightning struck her car; a narrator tells us that the effects of the lightning strike were threefold: it defibrillated her heart; it jolted her awake; and it froze her cells in a process that supposedly won't be named/discovered/explained until 2035, effectively stopping the aging process.  When she is in her early forties, people begin to notice that she is not aging; acquaintances and the police become suspicious, and the FBI wants to bring her in for questioning.  Instead, she runs away and changes her identity, moving once a decade to avoid arousing suspicion, doing her best to avoid forming ties with anyone other than her daughter (played as an adult for the bulk of the movie by Ellen Burstyn).  In the year 2014, at age 106, she meets Ellis Jones (Michiel Huisman), a man who might just make her want to stop running.


One might imagine a lot of things they might do if they discovered that they were going to be young and feel great forever.  There are some limits that one might not initially think of, however, and Adaline imposes more limits on herself by choosing to keep her condition a secret and to repeatedly change identities.  You might say, for example, that you would want to travel and see the world, and Adaline does a little of that...but since she's changing her identity once a decade, she can't really save up money for that long, or acquire debt without becoming a legit criminal when she changes identities.    You might try to test the limits of your mortality, what your body could do, and what you could get away with, and it seems that maybe Adaline has done that, too, given that she drives like a maniac...but you'd have to live with the consequences of anything you did FOREVER, meaning that you wouldn't want to do anything that caused non-fatal but permanent damage to your body, or do anything that would land you in jail.  You might be happy that you have all the time in the world to accomplish your goals...but remember that you only have a decade in any one place, and that you're trying to avoid drawing attention to yourself.  Add to that the fact that Adaline is generally kind, and careful with other people's hearts.  She winds up living a pretty small little existence; she's witnessed over a century worth of history but doesn't have a history of her own, or not one that she can tell anyone about, anyway.  It would be sad, to not be able to keep in touch with people or keep pictures or have goals or tell your own stories.


The film is interesting and entertaining.  However, given its premise and a few directorial choices, it is also sometimes silly.  The narrator adds a degree of whimsy to the proceedings, which doesn't really fit given that the film mostly takes itself seriously.  Prior to Adaline's accident, the narrator tells us very seriously that something "almost magical" happened that night: it started to snow in northern California!  "Adaline did not know how to drive in the snow!," I thought to myself dramatically, anticipating the accident that was about to occur.  The narration tries to provide transitions between the different parts of Adaline's life; while transitions are perhaps necessary, one wonders if there might have been a less clunky way of providing them. 


The film also takes a somewhat odd turn when Adaline meets Ellis's parents and is immediately recognized by Ellis's father, William (Harrison Ford), with whom she had a brief but intense love affair decades before.  William recognizes her so easily; is so quick to doubt Adaline's explanation that William must have known her mother, not her (Adaline is now calling herself Jenny); gets Adaline to tell him the truth with so little trouble; and accepts the truth so readily that one wonders why she didn't just tell him when they initially knew each other: he obviously would have believed her.  Further, as a would-be doctor turned astronomer, he had the intelligence, resources, and contacts to try to help her understand her condition.  It would be one thing if they had added in a detail that she had tried to tell lovers the truth in the past, but they had either thought her crazy or believed her but freaked out about the age difference; we are given no reason to believe that any such thing has happened.  The secrecy seems unnecessary, then, and seems to have cost her literally decades worth of happiness.


I generally enjoyed the film.  The performances were good; the costumes and sets were beautiful.  You have to get past the fake science and some silliness and just roll with the story if you're going to see it, though.