GIRLS talk (the Lena Dunham thread)

yeah it's pretty solid.

if u haven't seen it (i haven't either) apparently it's showing on 04/29 8:00 - 9:45p on Sundance channel. i didn't realize i even got that channel tbh but apparently i do

lol @ Buff Maynard G. Krebs

How have you guys not seen Tiny Furniture? I thought everyone here was cosmopolitan, metropolitan, clued-in, wired up and media savvy. Are some of you in the provinces?

Here listen to Lena talking to Elvis Mitchell

http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/tt/tt101124lena_dunham_tiny_fur

Oh, thanks Morday. I just figured out I get sundance so that's cool.

oops- mordy

Morday comes before Tuesday

that's actually the 2nd time you've called him Morday in this thread today, E. the first time really cracked me up.

Mordé

the new scent from calvin klein

Are the parents really not supposed to come off as, like, logical and correct here? Like I seriously do not think that you are supposed to watch this and *actually* see them as the BIG BAD AWFUL ROTTEN MEANIES or some shit. I mean it was sorta fucked to give her 0 grace period bcz I mean it's going to take more than the length of dinner for someone to find a job, but seriously I think LD is a bit more self-aware than a lot of y'all are giving her credit for.

I mean seriously

Also I'm still sort of confused how all of this is coming from ONE (1) THIRTY-MINUTE EPISODE GUYS IT'S NOT A WHOLE THREE SEASONS YET IT'S JUST ONE EP JUST CTFO

i felt like the first scene could have stood to be a lot more excruciating than it was. though tbf it was pretty excruciating. points for the really forced "and it's so nice to see you" stuff. also dunham's mouth-full "mmm a growing girl!" or whatever - yes, v writerly

i didn't make it through to the end of the episode because all of the scenes with the 'british' girl appalled me

'british'? the actress was born and raised in england afaik

o, i know that

what do quotes mean then

Pretty sure I'm the only person who said "yow, didn't appreciate seeing the freaks & geeks mom be hateful to her daughter" so no reason to keep reaffirming that parents were in the right (though yeah, f'd up they were so sudden) or that one can assume a sympathetic backstory for the characters, neither of which I disagree with. And I promise this is the last time I will reaffirm my deep, personal truth about the misuse of Becky Ann Baker in pilots.

lol.

i really enjoyed that she was the freaks & geeks mom, it's a nice nod

as opposed to the incestuous and gross s&tc stuff, which seems i. like it's making someone at HBO v happy ii. like it's kind of a forced attempt by the kind of 20-something who'd get an MFA to write the kind of 20-something who'd be deeply engaged with that show. HOWEVER i am unaware of conditions on the ground so if that person seemed more plausible within the grounds of the fiction to other people then OKAY

what do quotes mean then

i didn't enjoy the way her britishness was leveraged for the sake of the script, and it didn't jibe w/ my experience of overprivileged british girls. // unless she's meant to be fronting with not knowing what s&tc is and not knowing the word 'hoodie' which also seemed sort of plausible

The first ep. of the show made it seem like the start of an aimless indie film indulgence. I'm curious to see if the conceit can sustain a show. I mean, not curious enough to watch this, but curious enough to follow the thread!

there were some good lines. "but then you won't be here to read it." "let's play the quiet game." hahaha. i'm paraphrasing.

Wife and I watched it last night. Both liked it. She said it totally nailed the scene btw protagonist and Buff Krebs as far as ridiculous amorphous early 20s 'arrangements'. I thought the dad was classic during the 'opium tea' bit.

The dad was classic. Scolari! I know I said I hated the Mamet girl but I remembered last night the way she said, "You're so fucking classy". That was pretty great.

cant believe th dad was the guy from newhart

Wha--*head explodes*

and bosom buddies. don't forget about bosom buddies.

Seriously!

http://www.celebritynooz.com/images2/peter-scolari-bosom-then.jpg

GIRLS

"Hoodies" are as talked about in the UK as they are here, so unlikely

since this is ilx, i'm surprised that this thread has focused so much on the social realism, or lack thereof, in the first episode (only one i've seen).

i found the whole thing kind of unpleasant (because of the characters and the conversations) but i would be interested to see whether dunham goes anywhere with it. especially whether she goes anywhere with the theme of her being an artist. i think that would help justify some of the things about the pilot that read as disappointments / missteps.

she says right from the start that she's trying to 'become who she is', which reads as a pretty blatant nietzsche allusion, given that it's a show about a post-collegiate. and she's trying to become an artist; the implication, confirmed through the rest of the episode, is that she is NOT one yet.

that's what makes her character kind of pathetic and what makes all the humiliations seem fitting. she thinks of herself as, ideally, self-assertive and independent, but she's making a 'living' by interning for free (in the industry she would like to be identified with) for people who have no interest in what she considers her most important abilities. (her boss even belittles her quippy voice.) she subsists in that by living off her parents, people who since they're identified (both, right? i have seen people talk as if it were just the father) as professors you might expect would be sympathetic to the idealism of their precious snowflake, but who instead have decided that enough is enough and are cutting her off. which in a way seems justified by her youth and her situation - it is implausible to think that she is going to have all that much to say for herself as a writer without having lived any, and her parents are even basically appreciative of her funniness, which is not much of an accomplishment on the artistic scale - but rather than accept that as someone trying to become-who-they-are might, dunham's character reacts like a child and demands to be taken care of for the sake of her art. which is totally consistent with the idea that an artist has to be devoted to her art (no time to work to support herself), but classically that's the kind of thing that an artist would demand and receive on the basis of demonstrated talent (thus the hopeful pushing of the manuscript on the parents), not a somewhat fruitless post-college meander. the closing bit with her taking the housekeeper's money shows her doing in a petty way - taking for herself - what she should be doing elsewhere if she's going to 'become who she is'.

if she's not what she wants to become yet, you would think that her character should be pretty self-loathing for more important reasons, but that seems to be misdirected in various ways at herself (exemplified comedically in the eating, creepily in the sex with the playwright/woodworker, comedy-of-manners-y in the company that she keeps), so i would expect one thing that could happen to be her gradually learning to direct some more contempt / loathing / judgment at people and things around her.

i'm not sure what the other characters are going to be there for on this reading. obviously one thing that dunham's character could gradually do is BE the voice of her generation by, say, exploiting the lives of her friends so far as they let her step outside herself a little (something that the title suggests). but in terms of the artist-becoming-an-artist story they might also serve as dramatic contrasts. the one friend is made out to be beautiful and loved to the point of anger by her clueless boyfriend (suggesting a pretty standard way for the artist-protagonist to code her non-beauty as a blessing to her art). the british friend codes, or i guess is coded by others, as fashionable and sophisticated, and she's the one who especially projects artist-as-romantic-icon fantasies to dunham's character when she's encouraging her to be an artist (especially mixing in rock stars with flaubert). the zosia mamet character seems like a way for the dunham character to be positioned as somewhat pathetic (given her not yet having become what she wants to become) but as not so bad that she's like THAT - and apart from her idolizing the british friend, the most notable thing she does in the pilot is to enthusiastically relate to a popular artistic representation of women and show that she thinks of herself, reductively and in a kind of incoherent way, in terms of it (another danger for someone like dunham's character who sets out to be an artist, since she's bound to take a lot of her inspiration from the artistic creations of the past - which she confirms when talking about her tattoos - images from children's books - and her slightly out-of-sync way of responding to a less-popular trend in artistic representation - riot grrl).

i read the young-new-yorkers / living-off-parents / post-college-dinner-parties setting as partly an honest reflection of the creator's and main character's problem as an artist, i.e. 'i want to make art, how am i supposed to do it out of this?'. and i think the tone and the attitude toward the characters and the kind of uninvolving slice-of-a-narrow-segment-of-life conversations go along with that. but that kind of makes me worry for how things will go from here, because two natural alternatives seem like: a) find something really involving and interesting to say, art-wise, with these materials in this situation, or b) intensify frustration and self-loathing at wanting to make art out of this when you should really just be letting drop the idea that just because you want to, you can make art without richer materials for doing so.

I should've paid more attention - I thought she was a writer, not an artist.

She is a writer. Artist in the general sense of creative person.

I want to say "Yes, but an actual artist, for which such concerns are appropriate", but it is a little early on Sunday for trolling, even trolling which reflects my immediate reaction.

Actually, particularly such trolling :)

Has anyone made a Reality Bites comparison yet? This show is watchable. Kind of derivative. Maybe I am too old to relate now and have seen it all before. And I would smack these girls if I had to hang out with them. But maybe it will get better.

I do like how everyone is not very attractive. Very 80s.

"demands to be taken care of for the sake of her art. which is totally consistent with the idea that an artist has to be devoted to her art (no time to work to support herself), but classically that's the kind of thing that an artist would demand and receive on the basis of demonstrated talent"

This is kind of stupid - she is (or was) working, & in a job that could pay off for her long-term as well. They're just not paying her. I'm not of that world but it's probably a lot easier for your demonstrated talent to be rewarded if you have friends and connections at a publishing house.

Lena Dunham, creator of HBO's new angsty hit, says she would totally love to see the gals from Sex and the City pop up on her show.

"We acknowledge that this show couldn't exist without Sex and the City," Dunham told me when Girls first premiered last month at South by Southwest. "These are girls who were raised on Sex and the City. It's a part of why they're all moving to New York."

But SJP & Co. wouldn't have to work too hard. "Maybe we can have something like Miranda [Cynthia Nixon] drinking a smoothie and walking by the gym," Dunham said. "But maybe it's something you save for the series' finale. You know, it's this amazing moment where they're just sitting at a table in the background."

Besides, Dunham, cracked, "I feel like they probably come with a hair and makeup team we can't afford."

This is kind of stupid - she is (or was) working, & in a job that could pay off for her long-term as well. They're just not paying her. I'm not of that world but it's probably a lot easier for your demonstrated talent to be rewarded if you have friends and connections at a publishing house.

thanks, but if it's stupid it's the way she presents herself to her parents. she has considered the idea of getting a paying job to replace her non-paying one, but (a) she needs one too quickly and (b) she doesn't want a job that doesn't suit her sense of college-educated dignity. but even though she has presumably been supporting herself on her parents' money while spending time working, so she COULD give up the time at a paid job while spending another two years writing her book, what she asks for is to be supported by them just to finish it. i took the implication to be that she planned to do so without looking for another non-paying or paying job.

If they hadn't cut her off, she wouldn't have found herself quitting/being fired from her internship. Maybe she was kidding herself that it would eventually become a salaried job, but it's not a preposterous idea, is it?

I am sympathetic to people, college-educated or not, who want work that provides them with dignity. Less so to those who suggest they go work at Mcdonalds.

bill simmons liked the first episode

show don't tell

first half of 2nd episode: lot of sex, funny job interview

this episode was WAY better

much better, could still do without the virgin

yep, if comparisons 2 louie continue, i can actually see/get it after this ep

God bless her; this is great.
"i'm gonna leave a map of africa under your arm"

Terrible pilot: 1000 posts
Good episode: +/- 50?

most of us probably haven't seen it yet since it aired at 11:30 on HBO so even if you've got HBO GO you're probably not going to see it until later in the week, and if you're torrenting it you're almost def not watching it by 11:00 AM Monday morning.