GIRLS talk (the Lena Dunham thread)

just watched 'tiny furniture' and was surprised by how much i (and especially my gf) enjoyed it.

the pipe scene was the clincher

yeah, agreed.
the pat on the thigh from spent dude was just painfully real.

i channel surfed through Tiny Furniture for a few minutes recently and could barely stand it, the direction/acting was like kevin smith-level bad

"In the street?"
"No, worse than that"

Dunham is curating a mini-fest where i work called Hey, girlfriend. bummed i missed mulholland drive last night (one of her picks)

at least i have seen it on the big screen b4 tho

twice actually!

haven't seen any of her stuff, she's doing several days of film 'presenting' at BAM, tonight w/ Whit Stillman.

i sympathized with most of the characters in tiny furniture?

haha me too

i saw one of the episodes on the weekend it was... idk, im p excited to watch them properly but it was a bit of a mess. theres a lot of ambivalence in general i guess

Tiny Furniture was horrific but she might do okay in a TV format. As long as she's not directing.

oops hey i missed surm's posts, sorry.

some dude OTM about Tiny Furniture's filmmaking, but I also can't find it in myself to give a shit about the problems of an educated rich kid in this hard hard world of moving back into the 'rents multimillion dollar loft.

still going to give Girls a shot, maybe there will be characters who aren't hateable

I think she's more self-aware than people who offer that criticism realize

I think she is sorta cute and seems fun and smart

"WKIW", as I believe you say

Like the scene where she has the big argument with her mother and she's all "I'm 22 and i just graduated and i got my first job". I have to believe that was somewhat tongue in cheek

I don't think it was, or that the entire movie was one big self-aware joke at the expense of overprivileged twentysomethings... but I'm not sure that it would improve things had that been her intention.

i like how the friend from ohio felt like a protagonist that wandered in from some other (slightly more conventional) movie

That's another thing. She tells her friend a day before she moves to New York that she's not going to move in with her, avoids all her calls, blows her off at the art thing cos that dude turns up etc. It has to be a joke, right?

idk it's all part & parcel of being an actual horrible, spoiled 20-something

the character, not lena i mean

I think there was a degree of self-awareness on display in Tiny Furniture, but probably not the degree of self-awareness that she might've had if she'd waited a couple more years to make it.

Which is a lot of why I'm open to Girls being more "my thing".

its not a "joke" but it is "self-aware"

Yeah but she didn't. She made it when she was like 23/24 and it's pretty much ABOUT being that age.

xxp

I mean, she was self-aware enough to not portray her character as a completely sympathetic protagonist (see: the treatment of her friend from Ohio) but I don't know that she was as aware of her character's/her own level of privilege as I would've liked.

It's certainly no less self-aware than you might hope/expect given the age and status of the filmmaker.

Why does she have to apologize to you for being rich

I never really understand the "ugh, why would i want to watch something about rich people" criticism. I like to watch things about all kinds of people. I'm not rich btw

She made it when she was like 23/24 and it's pretty much ABOUT being that age.

That being the case, I almost wish it had been less self-aware and more just a document of 23/24-ness. She probably had more awareness of how ridiculous people are at that age than most people do when they actually are that age, but it still didn't seem like a terribly high level of awareness.

am i automatically supposed to give a shit about poor people but not about rich people

I've also heard the opposite argument, the why-make-art-out-of-other-people's poverty argument that seems to suggest ALL films should be about people who are at LEAST of the same social status as the filmmaker/potential audience, which is deeply weird.

It's interesting that a desire to see a higher level of awareness of the characters' privilege translates to some as a demand for an apology or a lack of desire to see a movie about rich people. Kinda not the same thing at all.

i think its really 'self-aware' but not entirely self-critical, like these are the worst impulses and decisions and stuff but its not about how terrible its just like, this is how it is

i tend to think that the best art is usually made about people from the same social/economic background as the filmmaker, this is not a real Rule at all but i guess im saying id rather lena dunham make this movie and whit stillman make those movies and john updike write about rabbit than have them all try to do like "menace II society" or something

OTM. Although the attempt might be horrifyingly absorbing.

anyways her character is not rich, her parents are better off than average. she leaps head on into being working poor. Having the puffy white cloud of conditional support beneath you is nice, but her story seems to be about what happens when you've always had gentle hands carrying you everywhere and then the palanquin stops and you gotta figure out how to be a grown up.
the "I feel like I'm entering a really exiting period in my life right now" / "What are you talking about? Everything you own is in garbage bags on my kitchen floor" joke is very much dead on with my experience during that time and feels pretty real. sure it's privileged, but she's hyperaware of it and seems to be primed to make good stories within that space

a desire to see a higher level of awareness of the characters' privilege

i mean i think there are lots of parts of 'tiny furniture'/what ive seen of 'girls' thats really aware of how privileged some of the characters are but they maybe still dont know what that means, how they should deal with their comparative privilege not knowing the right tone to strike or pose to take or w/e like knowing w/o really understanding, being 22

^

as a guy who DID move back home with his parents after college i suspect i'll find things to sympathize with here

I don't think that it's about rich vs. poor, it's about the stakes being so small that Tiny Furniture/Lost In Translation/etc. wind up being about "this is how it is" for the overprivileged. Which is just not a very interesting story to tell.

I loved 'Wendy & Lucy,' which is also kind of "this is how it is" (you could criticize Michelle Williams's character's choices and how it all could have been easily avoided, etc.) but there's real shit going on there.

anyways her character is not rich, her parents are better off than average.

(will totally cop to being a Stalinist about the wealthy, fwiw)

I will allow for the possibility that I didn't particularly care for the movie in large part because it's so grueling to watch people in their early 20s wrestle with the inherent douchebaggery of being in one's early 20s.

Have said elsewhere that my response to Metropolitan after 30 minutes was "nuke them all from orbit," Tiny Furniture was not this bad.

it's about the stakes being so small

'what is a life worth?'

i tend to think that the best art is usually made about people from the same social/economic background as the filmmaker, this is not a real Rule at all but i guess im saying id rather lena dunham make this movie and whit stillman make those movies and john updike write about rabbit than have them all try to do like "menace II society" or something

I get your point max but I guess it really depends on how much the filmmaker has a public presence that forms part of the conversation around the film. Obviously with LD that is a factor, but not every artist fits neatly into some social or economic type and it always seems like a much bigger deal than it should be. If you only make work about who you are and where you are from, you can easily turn that into an examination of identity or you can just come across as totally self-absorbed. I think it is to Lena Dunham's credit that folks ITT seem split on that question.

"anyways her character is not rich, her parents are better off than average."
basing this on the promo language where she asks her parents for 1100 a month for the next two years to get on her feet and they straight up laugh at her; the rich would shrug and put up with that shit methinks
anyways, i'm talking about a show I haven't seen yet; I should shut up until I see the pilot.

I really enjoy Girls but 'child as redemption' is such bullshit

what happened with jessa/adam at the end, again?

Oh I didn't think there was a "child as redemption" thing. Hannah storms out of the house screaming "thanks mom for choosing to raise me with a homosexual father and deny me any semblance of a nuclear family", then she shows compassion for a teenage girl in trouble only to find out she's just trying to get out of her homework, and she gets mad and asks for her pants back and the girl calls her a psycho. So she goes home and Grover and crying. A running theme in this show seems to be that there is a complicated relationship between children and parents. There's a lot of "Jessa is a monster" "Marnie is a monster" about this show but I think the show very aggressively wants you to understand there are no good or bad people in the show, the characters are too complicated for that reduction.

I was pretty drunk last night and was wondering what thread I had posted on. Ha!

earlier post was about how Hannah figured it out and grew up after deciding to have a baby

holy shit this lunatic narcissism

As I planned my summer in Wales, my head filled with visions of romance, I supposed I’d do what the heroines of novels did when they crossed the pond for a new life: go to the shore to take the healing air. Meet a man and move into his stunning manor, possibly watched over by a sinister housemaid. Scurry through cobblestoned streets and into dusty bookshops, furtively pulling up the hood of my cloak. Go to a banquet and dance to piano music in a great hall. Taste gamey meats on a date with a count, then become a countess. Shoot a bow and arrow. Develop a slight accent. Images of everything from Brighton Rock to Emma, The Woman In White to Notting Hill, filled my head. There was even a little 24 Hour Party People in there. But as it would happen, my days were long, and much more Wernham Hogg than Wuthering Heights.

Spoiler: It's about Love Island

we must protect lena dunham at all costs

why would anyone print this inane article

^ probably to quietly point out how she has spent five months in the country without ever noticing that it is a different country to the one she thought she was going to

Emma is set in Surrey, England
Wuthering Heights is set in Yorkshire, England
Wernham Hogg is situated in Slough, England
24 Hour Party People is set in and very specifically about Manchester, England
Brighton Rock is set, and there may have been some clue to this, in Brighton, England
Notting Hill also drops some subtle titular hints as to its setting in Notting Hill, a district in London, England
The Woman In White is set in Cumberland, England and Hampshire, England, and London, England

also Wales has neither counts nor countesses. you can become a countess by marriage in England, but not by marrying a count, because England also does not have counts.

Has she done this before (getting things terribly wrong about the U.K)? Otherwise I'm just experiencing deja-vu and nevermind.

she's just in "britain" and is eliding - just due to ignorance, i would assume - the particularity of the member nations

just due to ignorance, i would assume

yes

this is the point

she literally can't be bothered to look out of her own head for 0.5 seconds to realise that she is thinking about a different country, even when she is writing 9,000 words about how ignorant she is due to making unthinking assumptions

the particularity of the member nations

she's eliding a bunch of European nations too

sounds like you find her annoying sic

It’s dumb spacefiller but would be hard-pushed to find it annoying or lunatic or... anything, really

common or garden yank ignorance wrt these islands is hardly in the top 1000 of lena dunham's crimes of discourse

sounds like you find her annoying sic

I watched and mostly liked the first four or so seasons of Girls

I love Lena and everything she's ever done and said

:D

She is a flawless human being and an inspiration to everyone

idk im tired at work it's slow as shit this is pure unfiltered sleep deprived flappy bird hours

New feature film (Sharp Stick) debuts at Sundance (online) this weekend.

Enjoyed this more in retrospect than while watching it. If the strengths of Girls made that show worth watching for you (great casting, honest moments, good dialogue, complicated sex), this one has those as well – as well as (as with Solondz et al) the feeling of an individual rather than a studio deciding how to provoke in ways that match her personal truths.

What’s different is that this protagonist feels much, much younger than the Girls women. Not just sheltered. And only a throwaway line of dialogue establishing her as 26 keeps this from feeling like it’s about someone mid-teens.

I love Girls. An amazing show all the way through.

Great post:

Emma is set in Surrey, England
Wuthering Heights is set in Yorkshire, England
Wernham Hogg is situated in Slough, England
24 Hour Party People is set in and very specifically about Manchester, England
Brighton Rock is set, and there may have been some clue to this, in Brighton, England
Notting Hill also drops some subtle titular hints as to its setting in Notting Hill, a district in London, England
The Woman In White is set in Cumberland, England and Hampshire, England, and London, England

also Wales has neither counts nor countesses. you can become a countess by marriage in England, but not by marrying a count, because England also does not have counts.

― quelle sprocket damage (sic), Wednesday, July 31, 2019

finally watching season 5 and finding it frequently funny tbh

rewatching this series for the first time since it originally ran and shocked at how good it is, but also how it seems to be from another century entirely, despite only being 12 years old.

funny to look back at the reactions people had toward these characters, who are simply human.

I loved this show from start to finish.

Even with the passage of time and eating ass becoming a meme, the kitchen butt motorboat still seems pretty out there for a non-Cinemax show.

Empire had the blowjob bib but American TV is regressing when it comes to lol wtf sex scenes.