GIRLS talk (the Lena Dunham thread)

ha, forgot about that

Lena Dunham's life of privilege is no less interesting to me than Larry David's or James Bond's or etc.

Novel James Bond was a rough, poor kid who found it difficult to interact with polite society IIRC

nevermind privelege, "the lives of young people in NYC" is a pretty tapped vein, were you guys this pumped about How To Make It In America?

"pumped" is a bit strong, but I haven't seen How To Make It In America. Was it funny? Tiny Furniture was pretty funny.

i dont think people are psyched about girls because theyre psyched to see another depiction of the lives of young people in nyc

How To Make It was about as funny as the early Entourage seasons, with a different kind of name-dropping.

I don't much about How to Make It in America. For a long time I thought it was a crime story but apparently it's about fashion?

two young guys from Brooklyn want to be designer/entrepeneurs, so they fail miserably at selling skateboards and then at making jeans and then one of them bangs Gina Gershon and there's a chance for success and then the series gets cancelled

Luis Guzman was probably the saving grace of the whole affair as an ex-con who actually starts a successful, normal business selling energy drinks

wow, this sounds bad

imagine Entourage if Vince wanted to be Michael Kors instead of Brad Pitt and was still doing commercials and waiting tables

number of GIRLS on the GIRLS talk thread = 0

i'm lurking.

i count at least 2 in the first few posts?

Oh yeah, horseshoe made one post. I stand corrected. (Donna is not a GIRL, btw)

i been done fooled

i figure you're all girls unless your display name starts "Mr."

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/3b/Boys_Don

and they think they know how girls talk
girls talk, girls talk

I am gonna make BOYS, it's gonna be all about an English guy in LA and his basic middle-class post grad school life.

Actually I think it would be great if I had the time to make it.

isn't their a current buzz band named girls too, not sure if the world is big enough tbh

i liked the first 10mins of tiny furniture but then i turned it off cause i cant deal w/that level of embarrassment

i'm also lurking. i am putting off watching tiny furniture because i assume i'm going to really like it and then feel like it's very important for me to defend it on ilx and embarrass myself etc.

don't be embarassed

So much embarrassment itt.

its a good movie horseshoe you should just go ahead and watch it, its p self aware and privileged or w/e

i've softened a bit on tiny furniture. it's not without its charms. there's something about dunham as a performer too, where at first you think you're not gonna like her but you end up finding her pretty compelling. not interested in Girls but i'll probably give it a shot

the comparison to whit stillman is interesting because the milieu of eg. Metropolitan is certainly as alien to me (though the place & time of the movie is also intentionally obscured) as the one in tiny furniture, yet Metropolitan is a movie i can relate to far more easily than TF - on a broad level the group dynamics in it are just so well observed that it hits that sweet spot of feeling universal without being generic (and maybe being about boys put it more in my wheelhouse too)

i dont think i could argue that tiny furniture is less well observed, because im not in a position to know, but it was definitely less relevant to my life

i dont think people are psyched about girls because theyre psyched to see another depiction of the lives of young people in nyc

― max, Thursday, April 5, 2012 2:20 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

i think that's certainly why they're cynical about it though (its why i am anyway)

i tried metropolitan expecting to like it and turned it off after like fifteen minutes as utterly unredeemable
i tried tiny furniture expecting to dislike it and ended up being shocked at how good it was

how to make it in america was pretty crummy (in a bland way, not in the way entourage made you feel that it was necessary for civilization that beverly hills be bombed), but it did lead to this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7vPfmiDLpI

heh the first 15-20 mins of tiny furniture are a real trial by fire imo - once you get past that it starts to get a bit better

that guzman video has moments of pleasure in it for sure

the 15 mins of 'how to make it america' i watched seemed like the same empty vodka ad fantasy-world that lots of other nyc shows inhabit for all their privilege the characters in 'tiny furniture' are occupying a more realistic and observed world

i agree though i did find it funny that hbo was clearly pushing how to make it and now girls as replacements for entourage and sexcity when neither are appealing as lifestyle fantasies in the slightest, which is the aspect that kept people watching their predecessors long past their primes

i think that's certainly why they're cynical about it though (its why i am anyway)

― these pretzels are makeing me horney (Hungry4Ass), Thursday, April 5, 2012 4:53 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh yeah, sure, i was just calling out al's (intentional?) point-missing

admrl can i be in your show??

the same empty vodka ad fantasy-world

love this description

of course!

i tried metropolitan expecting to like it and turned it off after like fifteen minutes as utterly unredeemable

Watch the whole movie, it's dope.

man i just i dunno

oh yeah, sure, i was just calling out al's (intentional?) point-missing

― max, Thursday, April 5, 2012 5:10 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

oh yeah it was pretty intentional. but seriously at this point any new york-based artist whose art is primarily about being a starving artist in new york can jump in a well afaic

food in there

also other artists, so warm

i know no-one was waiting for a sincere & impassioned defence of miranda july's work itt but:

But it would’ve been more repulsive if I was like, “Okay, I’m going to have her work in a prison, because that will make her gritty and likeable.” That’s playing it safe, to make everyone likeable and a good person, you know? I think it’s more interesting if you go all the way with the world you have, and really look at it, and push it to an even more extreme extreme. So I guess that’s my answer. But then I don’t have the same relationship to those characters that a critic would, because I wrote them, and they come from things that matter to me.

she said this about the future, in response to criticism of it solely depicting the angst of handsome metropolitan white liberals, & it's otm i think. i can't correlate between filmmaker circumstances & films in class terms - & it ignores the i think pretty broad correlation between higher-class filmmakers having made a lot of the key depictions of lower-class living in cinema (particularly british & neo-realist stuff iirc) - but yeah i can't understand automatic disdain for something that doesn't feel earthy enough.

the 2nd ep of this show is called "Vagina Panic" fyi

I don't really give a fuck if the subjects of someone's fiction are suitably earthy or working class or whatever, I'm just tired of the world bowing down everytime someone finds a slightly insightful new way to say "student loans, amirite?"

like honestly, i think it's great that navel-gazing meditations on urban bohemia have made great creative strides since Reality Bites, but that was gonna happen no matter what with all those monkeys typing away about the same subject

it is hard, turning on the tv and its like non-stop navel-gazing mediations on urban bohemia

*throws tv down well*

so glad I had cable taken out and my antenna gets nothing