With some closure for Carrie and Quinn, and the clues about what’s happening falling into place, this episode sets us up for a game-changing finale.
Personal Growth Rankings: Girls 6×05 “Gummies”
I have to say, I was definitely a naysayer about Adam and Jessa’s movie, but now I’m a believer. Not in the sense that I think the movie itself will be good; it still looks like a corny and even more twee version of 500 Days of Summer. It checks all the boxes of the worst kinds of indie movies: a manic pixie dream girl (because OF COURSE that’s how Hannah looks from Adam’s perspective), stereotypes about mental illness (“My head feels so noisy, I just want it to stop!!”), a dysfunctional relationship, and a cute yellow sundress.
But I’m on board with the movie as a plot device, if only because it gives us a hilariously meta spoof of Girls‘ early seasons. Hannah clumsily dancing half-naked to an ironically cheerful song, Hannah and Adam being ridiculously melodramatic about their relationship (“I don’t care if you ruin my life, at least you’ll have been in my life”), and Hannah wanting to be treated like shit by a guy, because that’s just so painfully edgy.
But anyway, let’s get to the personal growth rankings: Continue reading →
Homeland Recap: 6×10 “The Flag House”
The pace of human change is slow, as I remarked last week–but it can still happen. This week, we see Carrie’s priorities, however unevenly, shift towards Franny.
Links We Loved This Week — 4/7/17
Netflix has been so busy tugging at my damn heartstrings… first it resurrects Gilmore Girls and now there’s this absolutely lovely trailer for their new Anne of Green Gables adaptation!!! (Yes, the three exclamation points are absolutely deserved. If I were Emily of New Moon there would be italics, too.)
I recently read George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, and woke up the very next day to find The Millions had published an amazing parody: Trump in the Bardo. (For those not familiar with the concept, Saunders’ novel consists mostly of dialogues among the ghosts living in the graveyard where Lincoln is visiting his dead son.)
The New York Times reports that bookstores are instrumental in galvanizing people to direct political action.
At a bookshop in Massachusetts, a manager privately asked his senior staff members how the store should respond to the Trump presidency.
“Go hard,” they told him.
Homeland Recap: 6×09 “Sock Puppets”
As usual, this episode is a fascinating exercise in alternate reality: How would the “fake news” issue and the frothing rage of right-wing media, and the concept of a “deep state” working against the elected government, look in a very different world where the President hadn’t, you know, hired the King of Fake News as his advisor?
The Good Fight Review: 1×06 “Social Media and Its Discontents”
In this episode, The Good Fight takes on one of the thorniest issues currently facing the tech world—and by extension, the actual world—when Neil Gross comes to the firm and asks them to come up with a plan of action for him to deal with trolls and racist or misogynistic harassment on his social media platform.
Personal Growth Rankings: Girls 6×04 “Painful Evacuation”
Well, that was unexpected. Girls‘ final season just took a completely different direction in its fourth episode, courtesy of a huge reveal that was surprising by virtue of being entirely too conventional. All we need now is a wedding, a funeral, and a tearful going away party, and we’ll have the perfect ending to a very un-Girls-like 90s sitcom.
All right, let’s get to the personal growth rankings: Continue reading →
Homeland Recap: 6×08 “Alt.Truth”
Previously on Homeland: A social worker took Franny away to a state-registered youth home after being tipped off by a Secretly Evil Dar Adal; Quinn was trapped in a safe house in the country with Astrid, after Dar Adal made a deal; Dar finally told Quinn about how Carrie woke him up to get information out of him; Javadi showed up to New York and got Saul to agree to set up a meeting between himself and the President-Elect; Keane was criticized by a vicious far-right talk show host named Brett O’Keefe.
Links We Loved This Week – 3/17/17
Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
An amazing human on the internet wrote a hilarious in-depth study of the art collection of Mike and Carol Brady (at wearethemutants.com, found via Longreads). Favorite excerpt: “The wall space in the office vestibule suffered three different paintings in five years. This had a disorienting effect on the kids and may explain why Greg once abducted a goat.”
Margaret Atwood, whose Handmaid’s Tale is going to be on Hulu soon, penned an essay about the book’s sudden relevance to the events of today (via NYTimes).
Vulture writes of The Good Fight‘s strange dualities and inner contradictions. The article is full of clever and unexpected insights. The one thing I think they miss is the duality of the white privilege on the show–the white characters are forced to confront their privilege, yet they are only front-and-center on this show because of an inherently conservative TV structure where known quantities (more likely to be white) get top billing.
We can never resist a good long article on Rebecca Solnit, feminist hero, and inventor of mansplaining. (via Elle)
The Good Fight Review: 1×05 “Stoppable: Requiem for an Airdate”
Well, it was probably inevitable that, at some point, The Good Fight, which opened its pilot with a closeup of a second-wave feminist watching Trump’s inauguration in absolute horror, would eventually take a bigger swing at the president. In this episode, they really go for it, portraying a case whose entire outcome is swayed by one ill-thought-out tweet from the President himself.
Adversion 