thoughts on Scandal: "It's Good to be Kink" (spoilers)

The gist of this episode is that a woman named Sue Thomas (Lena Dunham) is planning to publish a book in which she reveals the details of her rather kinky sex life; this is going to be both scandalous and of interest because she has slept with a number of Washington, D.C.'s movers and shakers, including David Rosen (Joshua Malina) and Leo Bergen (Paul Adelstein).  Abby Whelan (Darby Stanchfield), who has been romantically involved with David and is currently involved with Leo, enlists Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) to put the kibosh on this.  Olivia first tries shaming Sue, telling her that if she publishes this, the whole town is going to think she's a whore.  Sue will have none of this; how DARE Olivia, one of the most powerful women in Washington, try to make her feel bad for having an active sex life and wanting to talk about it.  She wants three million dollars not to publish the book. 

Liv's next course of action is to figure out who all of the men (who Sue has given code names) are, get them all together in one room, and try to get them to pool together the $3 million.  Now it is David Rosen who will have none of Liv; this is extortion, plain and simple, and none of them should have any part of it.  Everyone begins preparing for the eventuality of Sue publishing the book.  David Rosen assumes he will be fired as Attorney General.  Huck (Guillermo Diaz) fears that this will cost him the immunity David has promised him in return for testifying against B6-13.  Abby prepares to turn in her resignation to the White House; she gives a great speech (the second great speech in the episode, after Sue's) to Leo about how as a woman, she gets critiqued not only on her job performance, but on her appearance and her love life, and that she will be ruined along with Leo for her involvement with him.

Liv's Plan C is to do some research on Sue and figure out what she's after, exactly.  It turns out that Sue was fired by a boss who assumed she would have kinky sex with him and basically had her blackballed from her field when she said she wouldn't.  Olivia helps her go after the boss and get a new job, and Sue agrees not to publish the book, realizing that while she isn't ashamed of her sex life, she doesn't want to be defined solely by it, which is what would happen if the book came out.  This doesn't stop Huck from MURDERING HER out of fear that her stories would eventually get out, anyway, and his deal would be ruined.  Quinn (Katie Lowes) steals the only copy of the book.

Huck visits David to discuss his deal.  David laments the death of Sue, and gives the episode's third great speech.  He didn't do anything wrong, he supposes.  He had consensual sex with Sue.  He refused to be extorted or to let other people be extorted.  He didn't do anything illegal.  Still.  He didn't particularly treat Sue with respect, and now she, someone's daughter, is dead.  He may not have done anything wrong, but he didn't do anything particularly right, either.

I thought it was a solid, solid episode.  There are a couple of other subplots going on-- Olivia tries to move past her kidnapping, as well as past her relationships with Fitz (Tony Goldwyn) and Jake (Scott Foley); Mellie (Bellamy Young) takes preliminary steps toward a run for senator of Virginia.  But for the most part, the show's main characters are involved in the Sue storyline, and along the way, they have a lot of thoughtful and thought-provoking conversations about the way women are judged for their sex lives and appearances, and how these judgments often overshadow their professional accomplishments.  Lena Dunham gives a solid guest performance in a role that honors the actress's feminism.  Huck is unfortunately still crazy as hell.  Leo and Abby continue to be both solid and really fun as a couple.  David continues to prove that he represents the moral and ethical best of all of them.  And Liv has some hot sex with a man who is neither Fitz nor Jake.  What's not to like?

thoughts on Hindsight, Season One (SPOILERS!!!)

So.  Those of you who know me in real life and/or keep up with me on The Facebook know that I've been going nuts over this show Hindsight on VH1.  To recap: as the series begins, Becca (Laura Ramsey) is about to marry longtime friend Andy (Nick Clifford).  She already has one failed marriage under her belt, but her biggest regret is the loss of her friendship to Lolly (Sarah Goldberg), who hasn't spoken to her in ten years.  Becca has the opportunity to travel back in time to 1995 and set things right; her first order of business is to never marry her first husband, Sean (Craig Horner).  As the first season progresses, the details of Becca's life the first time around are revealed little by little.  Eventually, we learn the following:

Becca and Sean initially got along great and had a lot of fun together.  However, he was an artist who Becca had to work to support.  Because she was responsible for supporting him, she stayed far too long in the wrong job. Meanwhile, Lolly fell in love with her longtime friend Kevin (Steve Talley) but could never bring herself to tell him how she felt.  As Becca's marriage to Sean went downhill, she wound up forming a friendship with Kevin that eventually developed into an affair.  The eventual revelation of the affair was the reason that Lolly stopped speaking to Becca.

In her "redo," Becca leaves Sean at the altar, quits her dead-end job, and gets a job writing for a cutting-edge new magazine.  Becca reveals to Lolly that she is from the future and that the two of them had a falling-out the first time around, but doesn't tell Lolly why.  Becca is initially happy to have the opportunity to "undo" her big mistakes, as well as rectify some smaller disappointments for both herself and others; for example, in one episode, she remembers that her (now former) coworker Lois (Lauren Boyd) was crushed when no one attended her birthday party, so she rallies Lolly, her cousin Phoebe (Liz Holtan), and Andy's then-girlfriend Melanie (Jessy Hodges) to join her at it.  They all have a great time...but Becca is horrified to learn that Phoebe ditched a blind date with the man who Becca knows became her husband the first time around in order to be there.  Not only does she sometimes mess things up without meaning to, but she also is frustrated to learn that just because she knows how things play out doesn't mean that she will always be able to change them; for instance, the first time around, Lolly broke Becca's brother Jamie's (John Patrick Amedori) heart, sending him on a downward spiral.  Even though Becca tells Lolly that things ended badly the first time around, and even though Lolly believes her, Lolly still pursues things with Jamie. 

Sometimes it seems that nothing Becca does matters; Phoebe meets her husband anyway, and it seems that one way or another, things weren't going to turn out well for Jamie.  Sometimes, however, her actions lead to HUGE changes: as a result of a series of events set in motion by Becca, Andy, Becca's future second husband, marries Melanie, the girl who the first time around broke up with him because of his failure to commit.  Sean never succeeded as an artist before; now, not being married to Becca frees him up to meet a woman whose connections in the art world help his career.  Becca encourages Lolly to tell Kevin how she feels about him; she does, he tells her that he loves her like a sister, and Lolly actually eventually gives Kevin and Becca her blessing to date each other.  It seems that things really are going to turn out for the better, for almost everyone, this time.

Except then Lolly figures out that something must have happened between Kevin and Becca before, and Becca tells her the truth.  And Lolly tells her that their friendship is over, and Becca is confused: she fixed it!  She did things right this time!  Lolly tells her it doesn't matter: it still happened.  Becca still has it inside her to do something like that.  She's a bad person.  She can't fix that.  And Becca runs back to the elevator that allowed her to time travel in the first place, screaming that she wants to go back. 

Stop for a minute and wrap your head around that.  Imagine that you have gone back in time and made things better for almost everyone, including yourself.  You avoided the failed marriage.  You left the dead end job.  It maybe wasn't even so bad that you had an affair the first time around, because the guy you cheated with was the guy meant for you.  Your second husband-to-be was better off with his old girlfriend all along, and you gave him the push he needed to commit to her before it was too late.  Some things you did didn't matter, and you couldn't save everyone, but for the most part, the world is a better place because you time traveled.

Except you couldn't fix the one thing you most wanted to fix.  And the person you love most in the world has pointed out that you'll never fix YOU.  So...do you stay in this new, better world and try to move forward, knowing that there are things you will never, ever change no matter how hard you try?  Or do you do what Becca does and run back to the time machine, begging to go back to the future that is worse in some ways, but where at least you don't have the burden of knowing everything and, in some cases, hurting people all over again no matter how hard you try not to?

The episode ends on a cliffhanger, so we don't know yet whether Becca gets to travel back to the original 2015, whether she's stuck in this new 1995, or something else entirely.  But the image of Becca in that elevator screaming and crying that she wants to go back is POWERFUL.  Apparently, knowing the future is painful.  And maybe even if we did get do-overs in real life, and maybe even if we did get to change some things for the better, we still wouldn't be happy.

We'd still just be us.

thoughts on Fifty Shades of Grey (spoilers)

This is less a review than a piece where I try to work through my thoughts on things.

I tried to read Fifty Shades of Grey a little over a year ago.  I couldn't get through it (though when I went back and looked at the placement of the bookmark in my copy the other day, I saw that I actually made it through quite a lot of it-- over 400 pages, albeit 400 pages read in short bursts of "I guess I'll try to read that book again" determination to try to finish).  I have friends who legitimately liked it and thought it was really hot.  I have friends who found it laughably bad.  I found it pretty bad; the dialogue in Anastasia Steele's first meeting with Christian Grey is written in such a way that when I tried to tell my friends about it, I said something along the lines of, "Yeah, so she's interviewing him for her college newspaper, and his answers to her questions are basically like, 'I'm an important businessman!  I do important businessman things!'" There was also Anastasia's inner monologue, in which she makes repeated references to her "inner goddess."  Then there was my impatience with the contract.  The contract included a lot of things that very few people would agree to, including restrictions on her diet and exercise habits and the stipulation that she stay with him EVERY weekend.  She wasn't signing the contract and it was pretty clear she wasn't going to; my feeling was that she just needed to say no and move on with her life, rather than what she does, which is try to negotiate, eventually agree to it, and then put him off every time it comes time to actually sign it.

The thing I didn't get until after watching the film, however, is that Ana's hesitation to sign the contract isn't mere indecision.  I saw her as having two choices: live with Mr. Grey on his terms or without Mr. Grey on her own terms.  She wants there to be a third choice: live with him in a relationship in which they discuss things and make compromises and both maybe get some things they want and some things they don't want, but are both happy at the end of the day because they're together.  At the end, however, she realizes that no compromise she could make would ever be enough for him; she's not willing to go to the lengths he wants her to go to. 

Upon discussing it with my friends after leaving the movie, it was mentioned that he was very straightforward about how it was going to be and what he wanted from the very beginning.  Yes, he was...but he also actively pursued a relationship with her knowing that she wasn't "into" the same things he was into.  He showed up at her place of work.  He took her out for coffee.  He sent her an expensive graduation gift.  He showed up and took her back to his hotel with him when she made a drunken phone call to him.  He even showed up at her apartment after she read the contract and told him, by e-mail, that the whole thing was off.  He was ALWAYS the one pursuing her, even at the times in the film when he was telling her that it could never work.  Why keep pursuing her?  Because he wants to be with her and expects that she will "come around" to what he wants.

So what we basically have is a couple in which both members enter the relationship knowing that the other person wants completely different things than they do, but hoping that the other person can and will change.  What's more, because of their power dynamic, and because, with the contract, he HAS set up their relationship in "we'll do this my way or you'll completely lose me" terms while continuing to pursue her, she is actually being pressured to change.  This very well-written article considers it interesting and important that she leaves him at the end of the movie; the article discusses it in terms of rejecting the wealthy but ultimately empty lifestyle he offers.  Looking at it through the frame I've been discussing the movie, the end also suggests that they both accept that neither of them can change, and no "compromise" is going to work for them.  However, this is the first in the trilogy, and we know going in that they'll somehow "work it out."  I'll admit that I'm curious to find out how they do so.  I'm just having trouble imagining how they could ever possibly do so, or that it could possibly be a good thing if they did.

thoughts on Nightcrawler

Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Louis Bloom, who stumbles onto a career as a "nightcrawler," showing up at crime scenes with a video camera to get footage to sell to the local news.  This is more consistently lucrative than what he was doing before, which early scenes establish was mainly stealing things and selling them to pawn shops.  Even at its best, "nightcrawling" is a pretty skeezy profession, as it involves waiting around all night for the police scanner to alert you to crimes and then hauling ass to make it to the scene before your competitors.  However, Louis quickly takes it to the next level.  He moves a dead body before the ambulance gets there to get a better shot.  He blackmails the news director at the TV station he sells footage to (Nina Romina, played by Rene Russo) into sleeping with him.  He cuts the brake lines on his top competitor's van.  Before long, he is basically staging crime scenes-- withholding information from police and revealing it at just such a time that it is likely to erupt in a particularly violent way.  Some of the people at Nina's station think showing some of this footage is unethical, but Nina is desperate for ratings.  The cops are on to Louis, but they can't prove anything.  The worse Louis behaves, the more he is rewarded.

Louis is a disgusting character, and it's disturbing to watch him commit more and more heinous atrocities with a calm smile on his face.  He is not charming, exactly, but he can talk his way out of or into almost anything.  Gyllenhaal and Russo both give excellent performances.  It's not an enjoyable movie, exactly; I felt a little like I was going to be sick afterwards.  However, it is somewhat fascinating to see how far he will go and how much he will get away with.

thoughts on Into the Woods

James Corden and Emily Blunt star as the baker and his wife, who learn that the reason that they haven't been able to conceive a child is that a witch (Meryl Streep) has put a curse on their home.  To reverse the curse, they have to go into the woods to get a cow as white as milk; a golden slipper; a red cape; and hair as yellow as straw.  This provides the set-up for a story that weaves together characters and plot details from Jack and the Beanstalk, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and Rapunzel, ultimately culminating in the main characters trying to save their village from the wife of the giant at the top of the beanstalk.

It's all incredibly well-done, with songs and the baker and his wife providing the connection between the separate stories.  All of the actors give solid performances, with Chris Pine stealing the show as Prince Charming.  It's a well-acted, magical twist on familiar fairy tales.

thoughts on The Words (spoilers)

We open on a renowned writer named Clay Hammond (Dennis Quaid) giving a reading in a packed auditorium.  He narrates the story of aspiring writer Rory Jansen (Bradley Cooper), who, as the story begins, is told by his father (J.K. Simmons) that he needs to stop asking him for money all the time and get a real job.  Rory winds up working in publishing and marrying his girlfriend, Dora (Zoe Saldana).  The couple honeymoons in Paris, where Dora buys a beautiful leather satchel for Rory secondhand.  When they return to the United States and Rory opens the satchel, he finds an old manuscript.  He types it up on his computer, not changing a word or even correcting the spelling mistakes.  When Dora uses his computer, she finds it and reads it; she tells Rory that it's beautiful, and so different from his usual writing.  His "usual writing" keeps getting rejected by publishers, but they like this one, so he passes it off as his own, winning major awards and getting other, previously rejected, work published.  Everything is going along well until he meets the actual writer of the book (Jeremy Irons), who tells Rory his story.  And so we have a story...within a story...within a story, with Clay narrating first to his audience, then to a grad student/potential lover played by Olivia Wilde, and the writer narrating to Rory.  The main conflicts of the movie, then, are whether the writer or Rory himself will reveal Rory as a plagiarist; what the consequences will be if the truth is revealed; and whether Clay's story is, in fact, a fictionalized confession of the plagiarism.

Rory isn't a terribly likable character.  In one of his very first scenes, he yells at his dad for not believing in his writing career, then laughs in his face when his father offers him a job.  He also desperately, melodramatically yells at Dora at one point before he has made it big that this wasn't how his life was supposed to turn out; she asks how that's supposed to make her feel.  When he eventually tells her that he didn't write his career-making novel himself, he accuses her of knowing all along and just wanting it to have been written by him.  In other words, he blames everyone else for his own shortcomings and mistakes and lashes out at people who have, from what we see, been fairly supportive of him.  Because of this, it's hard to care about what happens to him.  The story that Jeremy Irons tells (which we see play out) also isn't terribly compelling, and it starts too late in the film for us to care about the characters in it, either.  Dennis Quaid and Olivia Wilde have pretty good chemistry, and Clay's narration adds a bit of suspense, but as a whole, the film is kind of a mess, with too many layers and not enough attention paid to any of the characters.

thoughts on Interstellar

In what appears to be the relatively near future, food is scarce, and Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) works as a farmer, as, we're told, do most people, though he was educated as an engineer and once worked for NASA.  It's unclear whether corn is the only food available, but everything we see anyone eat is corn-based, and rampant dust storms are a way of life.  Technology appears to have stalled (at one point, Cooper complains that were MRIs still in use, his late wife's cancer might have been detected earlier), and in school, children are taught that the moon landing was faked to bankrupt the Soviets, and that, in fact, space travel of that kind is impossible.  The New York Yankees play in what looks more like a high school stadium, suggesting a lack of people to both participate in and attend games.  Coop's ten-year-old daughter, Murph (Mackenzie Foy), thinks that there is a ghost in her room.  Coop doesn't pay much attention to this at first, but when binary code appears in the dust that blows in through an open window, he and Murph follow the coordinates it directs them to and wind up at NASA, which is still operating secretly. 

Soon Coop is recruited to go on a mission to investigate three potential planets that might be hospitable to life.  Plan A is that one of these planets might serve as a new home for those currently living on Earth; Professor Brand (Michael Caine) has been trying to figure out an equation that will apparently make this possible.  Plan B is to populate the new planet using fertilized embryos they are taking along.  Complicating everything is the fact that time will operate differently in space; on the first planet they are to explore, for example, one hour will equal seven years on Earth.

At the heart of the movie are a couple of key issues.  Coop's frustration with most of the people on Earth is that they are so focused on day-to-day survival that they're not looking ahead at all; for instance, we learn at a parent-teacher conference he attends that though universities still exist, only the very best and the brightest students get to attend.  Few people seem to see the point of many people going; they just need farmers.  Few people are interested in exploring new ideas or new technologies; they're just trying to keep people alive in the present, regardless of the quality of life they might have.  At the other extreme is Professor Brand, who eventually tells the adult Murph (Jessica Chastain), by then a NASA scientist, that he has known for years that the equation is unsolvable, and that there is no hope for the current population of Earth to live on one of the planets being explored even if one of them is hospitable.  What's the point, then? Why are Coop and the other astronauts putting their own lives on Earth aside for some theoretical potential future involving people who don't even exist yet?  Why is The Future of the Human Race more important than the actual, living and breathing people trying to survive right now?  Coop hasn't given up on the people of Earth, and neither has Murph, and we are given small hints that things might not be completely hopeless...but things look incredibly bleak for awhile.

A day after seeing the movie, I'm still thinking about and feeling incredibly unsettled by it.  In other words, it's quite thought-provoking.  McConaughey and Chastain give great performances, as well.  One issue that I had was that I wasn't exactly sure what the equation Brand, and later Murph, was trying to solve was going to exactly *do*, or why it was the key to humanity's survival.  It's certainly possible that I just missed or did not understand this.  It's also possible that the filmmakers figured that much of the audience wouldn't be scientists or mathematicians and would be willing to just roll with it.  This bothers me.  Because of this issue, it ultimately winds up being unclear *how* the main characters ultimately accomplish their main objective.  Again, it's possible that I just didn't get it.  It's also possible that it didn't make actual sense.  The film was well-done as a whole; there were just some unclear things that I found troubling.