To Rave About: GIRLS Season 2, Episode 6

While I am still trying to finish my To Rave About for a movie that managed to land itself on to my most favorite movie list of all time, I am completely raving about this week's episode of GIRLS.

This isn't the first time I blogged about GIRLS. I did mention it before in a post, but the mention is very minimal. And given that I rarely blog about TV shows, I guess it should be telling that I am taking this time off to blog about Girls. 

Girls, in case you haven't seen the series yet (and you should), is produced by Judd Apatow's Apatow Productions and airs in HBO. Written and directed by the very young (and very talented) Lena Dunham, GIRLS premiered to polarizing online community opinion--deriving criticism for its portrayal of young women: unlikable, self-absorbed, twenty-somethings doing unlikable things. But to encapsulate Girls in that view is limiting oneself to traditional TV and its norms of having a strong likeable lead. On the show's defense, the online community has praised Dunham's for its eerily accurate portrayal of the millenial generation. Often described as self-absorbed, vain, always online, tech-savvy, and almost always broke, Millenials in Dunham's GIRLS paints with all courage today's youth, tomorrows upcoming leaders or broke bums.

After last week's episode's straying into Louie (weird and surreal TV show from FX, another one you should try) territory, not my favorite episode to be honest, GIRLS comes back strong with this week's series-defining episode. The mini film of an episode managed to squeeze in several banters while dishing out emotional punishment to its cast and its audience that are in the same age bracket, experiencing the same struggles, all the while explaining what each character represents to this generation. It's an amazing episode that compares and contrasts seemingly different and seemingly similar personalities to prove otherwise--what seems similar is dissimilar and vice versa.

SPOILERS START HERE

What separates this episode apart from the other episodes so far is that this one dissects the different character's insecurities and the youth they represent in real life. The series has progressed in such a way that we are  now familiar with each character and we know how they behave. But this episode, entitled Boys, penned by Claudia Weill and directed by Murray Miller, takes the focus from Hannah (who's been all over season 2) and puts it on these characters' interaction and their deep-seated insecurities, with a centerpiece on the oddest pairing in the series so far: Ray and Adam.

Initially, Ray and Adam share tons of similarity

This pairing, brought about by Hannah leaving Ray's copy of Little Women in Adam's apartment, brought a lot of banter and male perspective normally absent in the series. While on the boat ride to Staten Island to return the dog that Adam stole, Adam and Ray discuss a few things about the women they've been with. Initially, we are made to believe that Ray and Adam are very similar. By dialog, both seem intellectual. They both haven't achieved much. And both live on the kindness of women (Ray on Shoshanna's and Adam on her grandma's). This similarity is further bolstered by the duo's affable conversation on the barge and agreements on women. And as Adam admits, "we're both kind of weird-looking." But this is later smashed as Ray tried to chime in on Adam's dislike of Hannah.

The sudden turn of events from cordial to sour puts into the perspective the differences of Ray and Adam. Adam, who almost always appear as dumb until he speaks something deep, is acutely aware of his problems and his difficult behavior ("Everyone's a difficult person. She was accepting of my brand of difficult.") and in a way, has accepted his failures and learned to live with them.

Adam represents the youth comfortable with their own inadequacies. He lives on his grandma's money, aware that he doesn't have a job and does not feel bad about it. He's so comfortable with his living conditions that it is impossible to talk him into cleaning his apartment simply because he'll probably give a good reason why he shouldn't. Adam is the sort of stubborn youth who doesn't mind what people think simply because he's so sure of his convictions (contrast this with Jessa later). Adam likes work (theater) but he wouldn't do it unless he's really into it, unless it gels with his convictions. He is rarely affected by others' opinion (not even Hannah) and could usually do without much care for what is being said or done to him.

Ray on the other hand couldn't.

A crying Ray with the stolen dog

At 33, Ray feels like he missed the ship (the last shot where he sits with the dog as the barge blows its horn for its last trip is a very nice metaphor for how Ray feels). Ray represents the youth who hide their own shortcomings brought forth by their own choosing of the easy way out (as Adam points out that his relationship with Shoshanna seems confirming of this behavior). He is smart enough for Hannah to ask advice for with her writing, but unlike Hannah, Ray is easily discouraged and wouldn't pursue a job that taxes his intellect.

Meanwhile, Marnie and Hannah take their turns. Hannah has been offered to write an e-book by the editor of PUMPED magazine due in a month (!!!), while Marnie basks in the glory of being reigning queen of Booth Jonathan's art kingdom. While Hannah's focused on her career, Marnie's focused on her lovelife. Both have once obsessed to have what they have now. Marnie to have Booth as her boyfriend, and Hannah to be a writer. The contrast is that while Marnie who's once upon a time curating art in New York while enjoying a relationship with Mr. Right Charlie is now settling for hosting restaurants, Hannah seems to be on the rise, being recognized as a voice of her generation, at least by the feedback she's been getting from her employers, after being let go in her former internship in favor of the girl who knows Photoshop.

The scenes at the party relate to how insecure and how driven both women are in hiding these insecurities--flaunting to each other things that are conveniently disguised to be nice. The phone call that happened after is one of the saddest moments of this season--both women unable to admit just how much they are failing--a common trait among today's millenials. Today's generation would rather tweet it than to relate it to a close friend who's doing well in fear of being judged, fear brought about by their own vanity. They represent the struggling millenials who still has the drive to finish what they set out but are too proud to admit their missteps.

Anyways on to the other characters:

Shoshanna, who's only present for a short time in this episode, represents the complete opposite of Ray. As most millenials graduate college, they are optimistic and idealists. They have a naive idea about the corporate world, work, and success. These new millenials have little insecurities given how naive they are or are only insecure because older people tell them to be.

Jessa on the other hand, for the short screen time she had, represents the negative version of Adam's failure-accepting character. While Adam is comfortable of his shortcomings and openly does not value other people's opinion of him, Jessa secretly desires approval and is uncomfortable with her own failure. She pretends to be cool to hide her own discomfort with her screw-ups (but she doesn't realize all of this until she breaks up with her husband 2 episodes ago) and wishes everyone to feel the sadness she feels. Jessa has accepted failure not because it's comfortable but because she can't do anything about it and she wishes no one sees it.

Booth represents the millenials who have it made but feels as if they don't or insecure that they people might notice that they haven't really got it made. Booth is afraid of being idealized because, for some reason, it might not chime in with his person and he might fail to meet those expectations. He hates everyone that adores him because it's another expectation to meet. Perhaps he also finds people calling him a hack (like Marnie did) irresistible because it's easier to prove people right by failing than to prove people wrong by not meeting their expectations. In other words, some people find it less scary to prove they're a failure to people who dislikes you than to fail the people who believe in you.

Hannah's sad smile as she hears how happy Marnie is.

What ultimately links this episode to each of the subplots going on is that all these people have insecurities they deal with. And the way insecurities were portrayed is painfully real (genuinely human without feeling overly pathetic), with almost all characters closing the episode with sadness or tears to a sad score. It is the sensitivity and vulnerability of this episode that marked very well. One of 2013 TV's finest 30 minutes.

In Review: Mama

Directed By: Andres Muschietti
Stars: Jessica Chastain, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, a CGI poltergeist

What I Liked
Cinematography by Antonio Riestra provides a creepy atmosphere full of scares and surprises

What I Disliked
Pedestrian resolution, throws a bunch of potentials that it never fully develops

Gist
It's a frightfest executed with creepy visual style, but Mama is flush of potentials that it never fully develops--giving itself to a rather pedestrian idea of an ending.

After being left to fend for themselves for five years, the Desange sisters were found alone in a cabin in the woods. They were remote from human: feral, savage, and running on all fours. Their uncle, a spitting image of their father, and his girlfriend, claims them and fends for them. But a shadowy, jealous guardian that they call Mama has followed them to their new home, unable to let go and ever wanting to whisk them away from their new family.

There is little doubt after one look at Chastain's wig that this film would be scary. If you guessed like I did, you're more than right. Mama is indeed scary. Not in The Hills Have Eyes or Texas Chainsaw Massacre scary, but in an Insidious, The Grudge, or The Eye (original Asians versions of the latter two) scary. But who is this Andres Muschietti? To most of us, he is a first time director, and the probable reason you are watching this film is because 1.) you heard Guillermo del Toro is producing (or in my case, I thought he was directing), 2.) you like either Chastain or Coster-Waldau or 3.) You have no idea who those people are and you just heard from your friends that this movie is nuts (actually, del Toro directed Pan's Labyrinth and Hellboy, Chastain is Zero Dark Thirty's Maya, and Coster-Waldau is Game of Thrones' Jamie Lannister, but you probably know that anyway). Anyways, Muschietti.

Andres Muschietti created in 2011 a short film called Mama, stress on the last a, that caught del Toro's imagination. Below is that video where del Toro justifies why he produced Mama as well as the full short film itself (actually 3 minutes long only but is way scarier than the full-length film itself). The scene has an identical in the movie. So, if you haven't seen the movie, I would advise against watching it just yet.

If your reason is number 3, then your friends are right. Mama is crazy nuts scary, one that would work better on the cinemas as a sort of a communal screaming event. The cinematography invites a certain atmosphere of creepiness in a suburban setting that unsettles. Hands down also to the acting of the two little girls, Charpentier and Nelisse were very good at portraying nature-raised jungle children, hostile to any modern form of social interaction. The score also contributed to the largely creep-out feel of the film. Of course, there was a lot of CGI use. Mama is full-on CGI and everytime she appears, CG artists get paid.

At the start of the film, you would think that this is going to be a largely psychological horror movie, with most scares coming from the psychological terror of an unknown house intruder inflicted upon its cast, and it attempted this to good effect. Eventually, though, this idea is dispelled as Muschietti's monster become ever more visible. The more the Desange orphans feel human, the more monstrous Mama is, and the more abandoned the psychological terror is, making it clear that this is a creature feature rather than a psychological purveying of any sorts.

Some day, Chastain would look at this wig and think it was
all worth it.

Chastain's character, a rocker chick who you'd think would guest star on an episode of Jackass just for the hell of it, slowly develops maternal instincts just because. There's no explanation how she'd acquire the parental skills required to rear two jungle rats other than the fact that she was with them for days on her own (and probably for the love of her boyfriend). It's just hard to imagine how a woman on her late 20s (or early 30s) who'd praise the Lord for getting negative on a pregnancy test wouldn't immediately run and return these children to foster care. I mean it's not really that bad, but come on, we can do with some depth in the character development.

Anyway, all that lack of depth in character development makes the movie feel faster than it should be, trading away dialogue and heart for more scares. And it does feel scary, especially with the score and the cinematography (and all that grunge and moth and Nelisse acting all jungle book and shit). But as the movie reaches its third act, everything feels so unimaginative and derivative already--a common pitfall in almost all horror movies is that they don't know how to end themselves after delivering several scares. As with most horror movies, everything is revealed in the end, explained, and ends as unimaginative as you can get (but, in all fairness, not as shaky a resolution as Insidious). By the time it's about to end you know, like the whole movie, the resolution will compromise.

It frustrates me, that we couldn't really have a horror movie nowadays with an ending that 1.) doesn't feel cheesy or 2.) feels like a femme fatale movie or 3.) just doesn't have a heart or 4.) makes you think it's planning a sequel. Mama attempts and ending that is satisfying and has a heart, but its methods are too unimaginative to pull it off. Yes, I loved Mama, and I wish it was a bit better than it is. As it is, it's a frightfest executed with creepy visual style, and Mama is flush of potentials that it never fully develops. In the end, it gives itself to a rather pedestrian idea of an ending and that just feels a bit too much of a wasted opportunity.

Judgment: 3.3 out of 5 stars

For this movie, I'm willing to pay, 170 to 190 pesos.

In Review: Warm Bodies

Directed By: Jonathan Levine
Stars: Nicholas Hoult, Teresa Palmer, Analeigh Tipton, John Malkovich

What I Liked
Levine managed to mash a dozen of genres into an entertaining genre-bending feature film, Analeigh Tipton outdoing Teresa Palmer

What I Disliked
Teresa Palmer feels and looks like Kristen Stewart, incosistent zombie behavior

Gist
Warm Bodies successfully mashes several genres into a darkly comic oddball full of quirks. And while its resolution or its casting of Palmer is not as strong as the other leads, direction, or its screenplay, Warm Bodies still makes for an enjoyable take on the zombie genre.

Nicholas Hoult plays a zombie named "R." He narrates his daily goings on as he walks around their airport home. One day, while searching for food with his horde, they stumbled upon a group of humans looking for medicines in an abandoned lab. This encounter result in him falling in love with Julie (Teresa Palmer), prompting him to rescue her from his fellow zombies and take her home. But something in him is changing, and slowly as he protects Julie, he is starting to feel less dead and more alive.

I once read that of all the popular horror creatures, zombies are least likely to get the Twilight treatment.They stink, they have no humanity in them, and they eat you the first chance they get. This assumption was put to shame by Levine's Warm Bodies, adapted from the Isaac Marion book of the same name. Nicholas Hoult from UK E4's TV series Skins, and films like About a Boy, and 2010's X-Men: First Class plays quirky narrator  and dead walking who can only remember a fraction of his name, "R," opposite I Am Number Four's Number 6, Teresa Palmer as Julie, daughter of the leader of remaining human survivors (Malkovich). Levine, who directed 2011's cancer comedy 50/50, directs and writes a film quite difficult to adapt.

Immediately, one has to ask, will this be a movie one would like? Anyone would answer you with a canned "that depends." Initially, I was put off. "Ugh, they finally are ruining zombies and making a Twilight material out of the beloved brain-eating dead." But the final product from Levine is delightfully far from a disaster, at least in my books. But here's the thing, it would only work if you accept the central premise that in the universe where Marion's story is set, zombies are capable of thoughts. Yes, unfortunately, for zombie purists who grew up with titles like The Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and played games like Resident Evil, this is unthinkable. Zombies think?! And not only that, this zombie (R) narrates, too, cracks jokes, and is given to school boy anxieties--heck he even grew a vocabulary and maintains a house. If you remain unaccepting of the central premise, then this movie will frustrate you since that premise is its main source of humor, too.

At an early point in the movie, I felt it did a full stop when it tried to explore the humanity in R after he rescues Julie. This part, I felt, Levine failed to take advantage of. It felt slow and given to teenage tendencies.  There were scenes that felt out of place or inconsistent with the whole premise. For instance the scene when Julie and R went driving a car on the airport for fun because Julie was bored--and yet no zombie could smell Julie, but we were shown early just how keen zombies are to the presence of the living, come on, why would Julie even do that after the traumatic experience early on?! Then there's also a scene when R narrates that zombies can't run. Yet later on, zombies run.

But that's not my main concern at all. The inconsistencies are forgivable because I didn't really take the movie as seriously as one would, say, Inception or No Country for Old Men. Of all, it was Palmer's casting that bothered me most. Palmer, in most of her shots, looks and feels like Kristen Stewart--something I cannot find pleasure at. The initial impression to me was that this casting was made to ensure investment returns and that it feels comfortable for Twilight audiences--probably the same target audience of this film--to watch this film. After the movie, I was able to research about how she was cast and it bothered me less. I mean, it's not her fault that she looks like K-Stew. She fought for the role and got it after working hard. Still not a fan of her acting, though, and for those who are bothered by the existence of Kristen Stewart will be bothered by Palmer's casting, too.

K-Stew on the left, Palmer on the right

After the slow parts at the airport, the movie begins to enjoy itself. Levine manages to throw in several genres into the mix: at one point it was funny, in another it was rife with suspense, in another it was full on horror, then action, then romance, then soon enough you can't tell just what genre it is because it stirs so many emotions (sports fan beware, it doesn't transform into a sports flick, though. Sorry).

Analeigh Tipton, who plays survivor Nora, occasionally trumps Palmer in their scenes together. In the film, Nora is the sort of girl who doesn't feel shaken by the Apocalypse or by the fact that she saw her comrades get eaten by zombies--which makes little sense but whatever. She is lively through out and another source of humor for the the remainder of the film as well as a dependable companion.

In the end, the resolution might still be divisive for those who remained and enjoyed the film thus far. For me, it wasn't as weak or corny as one would expect--although you'd know it's going that way and feels predictable. It  manages to be humorous--a bit awkward at spots, but altogether works, albeit limping. As I said earlier, zombie purists wouldn't last the film halfway if they reject the premise. But those who are open and stuck it with Warm Bodies will be rewarded with a film that successfully mashes several genres into a darkly comic oddball full of quirks. And while its resolution or its casting of Palmer is not as strong as the other leads, direction, or screenplay, the zombie purist in me who opened himself up and didn't take the movie as seriously finds that Levine's (or Marion's, for that matter) take on the zombie genre makes for an enjoyable 97 minutes.

Judgment: Zombie purists exercise caution on watching this film. Do not expect this to have a Walking Dead treatment, think Zombieland with a wtf twist. The romance is also light and does not go cheesy so this one is also for the guys. 3.67 stars out of 5.