Katherine Murray – Page 2

‘Ovarian Psycos’ Highlights the Reasons We Still Need to Take Back the Night

The Ovarian Psycos is a cycling club for women of color in East Lost Angeles that’s a lot like Take Back the Night. Its purpose is to build a sense of community between local women, but also to draw attention to the fact that women aren’t safe unless they travel in packs. … [Directed by Kate Trumbull-LaValle and Johanna Sokolowski] the film captures something true and beautiful about the power of grassroots organizing, and the idea that regular people can band together and try to create change.

Written by Katherine Murray. | Ovarian Psycos is screening at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival.

A few years ago, I went to a Take Back the Night rally and experienced the joy of walking down a street after dark without feeling afraid. I’ve come to understand how that sounds weird to some men, but almost every woman I know, including me, has at least one story about trying to walk from point A to point B after sundown and being harassed by a stranger. Even in cases where the stranger didn’t do anything violent, we had no way of knowing whether or not he would. It’s not a good sign when someone starts chasing you and won’t back off when you tell him to leave you alone. It makes you scared, and it makes you angry. It makes you think, “Why don’t I have the right to walk two blocks in peace, without having to worry that you’re going to rape me or kill me?”

The Ovarian Psycos is a cycling club for women of color in East Lost Angeles that’s a lot like Take Back the Night. Its purpose is to build a sense of community between local women, but also to draw attention to the fact that women aren’t safe unless they travel in packs. The club hosts several different events, but the ones that get the most attention are the ones where women meet to ride through LA streets at night.

A new documentary from Kate Trumbull-LaValle and Johanna Sokolowski follows the club during a transition in leadership, when one of the founders, Xela, abruptly drops out. Although focus is split between three club members, Xela is arguably the principle character, and the filmmakers spend time uncovering her back story and motivations for starting the club. We learn that she experienced violence and abuse growing up, and felt alone with no one to confide in except a mother who rejected her feelings. Xela wants her daughter to feel like she’s part of a community, with other women in her life who she can turn to, so she started to Ovas, but it seems like engaging with violence against women on a regular basis stirs up memories that are, at times, overwhelming.

The other two members profiled in the film are Andi, who steps up as leader after Xela drops out, and Evie, a new recruit whose mother disapproves of her joining a bike club. Each of them struggles separately with how to make their families understand why this is important and how to make a difference in the community.

As events play out, it’s interesting to watch the internal dynamics of the club – the meetings where they make decisions about recruitment strategies and events are extremely democratic and sometimes emotionally charged – and the filmmakers do a good job of capturing the hard-to-articulate truth that we need to support and protect each other, and that being able to move freely through the streets is a right that’s been stolen from us.

Ovarian Psycos is structured so that we learn about the purpose and mission of the club before finding out how people on the street react to it, and it’s a little disappointing to learn that the group gets slammed with hateful, ignorant comments on a regular basis. The filmmakers interview a handful of people outside the club, some of whom are completely okay with a bike club for women of color, but they also find one man who works at a bike shop and manages to whitesplain why their club shouldn’t exist (it’s discrimination and not actually in the tradition of the Chicano movement). This is later challenged by a scene where Xela concisely explains intersectionality and how, as a woman of color, it’s hard to find a place in either white feminist or patriarchal Chicano contexts. And, while I’m bummed out that I wouldn’t be able to join this club, I can’t really argue with her logic about why it needs to exist.

What’s frustrating, as ever, is the realization that some people have been able to live their whole lives without realizing that this is a problem. Either because they’ve always been able to walk from point A to point B, or because they’re used to the idea that men attack women like jackals whenever they find us alone. That isn’t a mindset that’s helping anyone – it reduces men to predatory animals and implies that there’s no way to make gender-based violence stop – but it’s the mindset you find whenever someone says, “Why do you need a bike club for women at all?”

Ovarian Psycos answers the question of why you need a bike club for women, and specifically, in East LA, why you need a bike club for women of color. One of the less-explored, but very interesting aspects of the club is that Xela and some of the other members seem to have a desire to reconnect with pre-colonial indigenous Mexican traditions. I’ll confess my own ignorance and say that it never occurred to me that would be an important part of Latinx identity, but it makes complete sense, and I would happily watch another documentary just about that.

All together, the film captures something true and beautiful about the power of grassroots organizing, and the idea that regular people can band together and try to create change. The frustration of being misunderstood and misrepresented in media is part of the package, but there is a real sense that these women have found something meaningful in this club and formed strong connections. They have the opportunity to be leaders, and it’s an opportunity that they created for themselves out of virtually nothing.

There are still people who’ll say, “How is riding your bike at night supposed to do anything for women’s rights?” but it does a lot if it reminds you what it feels like to be free, and how far we have to go before we get there.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies, TV and video games on her blog.

‘Inside the Chinese Closet’ Highlights the Need for Social Acceptance of LGBTQ People in China and Globally

Often, when we talk about LGBTQ rights, we focus on legal battles – criminalization, marriage equality, adoption, and civil rights – but Sophia Luvara’s new documentary reminds us that social acceptance and cultural attitudes are just as important. ‘Inside the Chinese Closet’ follows Andy and Cherry, a gay man and a lesbian woman who struggle to reconcile their desire to live truthfully with their families’ expectations of them.

Written by Katherine Murray. | Inside the Chinese Closet is screening at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival.

Editor’s note: We have used LGBTQ to be inclusive but the documentary only addresses the issues facing gay men and lesbian women.

Often, when we talk about LGBTQ rights, we focus on legal battles – criminalization, marriage equality, adoption, and civil rights – but Sophia Luvara’s new documentary reminds us that social acceptance and cultural attitudes are just as important. Inside the Chinese Closet follows Andy and Cherry, a gay man and a lesbian woman who struggle to reconcile their desire to live truthfully with their families’ expectations of them.

Andy spends time trying to arrange a “fake” heterosexual marriage for himself through an LGBTQ dating service designed for that purpose. When asked what he’s looking for in a fake wife, he says that he wants someone who can be a best friend and that, in the long run, they’ll have to have some kind of love between them if they’re going to live together and raise children. During his conversations with potential matches, they have business-like discussions about who will be expected to do what in the relationship, whether they’re willing to adopt or have children through artificial insemination, and what their parents will want from a potential son or daughter-in-law. In between these exchanges, Andy takes phone calls from his father, who urges him to work harder at finding a wife, and to make more demands of potential candidates.

Cherry is in the process of ending her own fake marriage, and feels pressure from her parents to adopt a child. In China, there’s no legal way for her to adopt as a single parent or as a lesbian woman or lesbian couple, and her mother and father propose an outlandish scheme to buy unwanted babies from the hospital. Cherry says that the only time her father beat her was when he found out she was gay, and we learn from her mother that the neighbors make her feel ashamed for having a child-free daughter. They also contemplate the practical problem of who will take care of Cherry when she’s older, if she doesn’t have any children.

While Chinese laws criminalizing same-sex relationships have relaxed in the past 15 years, and Andy and Cherry are each out to at least one of their parents as well as their friend groups, they struggle with pressure to live up to their parents’ expectations, and to lead their lives as they wish. Even though it’s legal to be LGBTQ now, heteronormative cultural expectations still pathologize and stigmatize queer people by creating the sense that they aren’t living up to their adult responsibilities. It feels like Andy and Cherry are treated and viewed as the Chinese equivalent of American adults who live in their parents’ basements playing video games all day, while their parents urge them to find a job. The question of marriage equality or adoption by LGBTQ couples is so far off the table in China that the only way for Andy and Cherry to start a family, as they’re expected to do as adults, is to pretend to be straight.

Inside the Chinese Closet is an uneven film. The subject matter is interesting – and it certainly made me more aware of the nuances of LGBTQ identity in China – but it isn’t always clear why Luvara has chosen to follow these particular individuals. The press materials make it seem as if Andy’s major problem is finding a wife and Cherry’s major problem is finding a child, but it seems like the reverse is really true. As the film goes on, it seems as if Cherry is emotionally isolated, in love with a straight friend who doesn’t love her, and doesn’t actually want to have a child. Her struggle is in getting up the nerve to tell her mother to stop coming up with ridiculous schemes to buy a kid, because she doesn’t want one.

Andy, on the other hand, seems to really want a child. He blames it on his father when he discusses it with potential partners, but, from the way he talks, it sounds like he really would like to be a father. Andy’s biggest problem is that there’s no legal way for a gay man or gay couple to adopt a child in China – his dates with potential wives keep falling through, in part, because he’s afraid that they either won’t agree to have children, or will take the children when they break up with him or move abroad to live with a woman.

Many LGBTQ rights advocates in the U.S. and Canada would agree that the key changes in the last few decades have come not only from legislation but also from a growing acceptance in society of LGBTQ people. Homophobic hate groups have that right – we are promoting the message that it’s okay to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, pansexual, asexual, genderqueer, etc.; having more and more people accept that message has allowed many LGBTQ people to live fuller, more authentic lives. Inside the Chinese Closet is a reminder that, without that kind of social change – which comes slowly, and takes a lot of work – having the legal right to exist is only a small step forward. Andy and Cherry are still blocked from participating in the traditions and social structures they want to be a part of – they’re bombarded with messages that they should have families, but excluded from the joy of building families of their own with the people they love.

Compulsory heterosexuality and heteronormativity are still alive and well, and LGBTQ people still face stigmatization, even in countries with marriage equality. But Luvara’s film shines a light on how heteronormativity operates in an era where gay and lesbian people have enough savvy and technology to arrange fake marriages and cross-border adoptions from the comfort of their own apartments. It makes me wonder whether that’s going to speed up the march of LGBTQ rights in China or slow it even more.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies, TV and video games on her blog.

‘Starless Dreams’ Offers an Intimate Look at Iran Through Its Juvenile Detention Centers

In ‘Starless Dreams,’ we learn about the lives of teenage girls inside Iran’s juvenile detention centers, but we also learn how director Mehrdad Oskouei attempts to change hearts and minds in his own country. It’s an attempt that’s packaged for his fellow citizens rather than foreigners and, watching the film as an outsider is a complicated, multilayered experience.

Written by Katherine Murray. | Starless Dreams is screening at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival.

You can learn a lot about a culture by listening to the way its inhabitants discuss their disagreements – what they do and don’t say; how they couch their arguments; which topics are tacitly understood to be out of bounds. In Starless Dreams, we learn about the lives of teenage girls inside Iran’s juvenile detention centers, but we also learn how director Mehrdad Oskouei attempts to change hearts and minds in his own country. It’s an attempt that’s packaged for his fellow citizens rather than foreigners and, watching the film as an outsider is a complicated, multilayered experience.

The documentary, which has won multiple awards since its release, including the Amnesty International Film Prize, follows a group of girls who live in a correctional center outside Tehran. For the most part, the girls who appear in Starless Dreams could just as well be living in many other parts of the world. The stories they tell are all too familiar – they come from poor families where there faced violence and substance abuse; they got into crime through their husbands or boyfriends; they were molested, raped, or assaulted at some point; their futures look bleak and “pain drips from the walls.”

The detention center is, in some ways, an oasis from a world they don’t want to return to. Living communally in a dormitory-style room, the girls Oskouei interviews laugh, sing, and build snowmen together. They comfort each other and bond over their shared experiences, good and bad. Most are afraid to go back to their families or back to the street when they’re finally released. All of them harbor a dark, painful story about how they got to this place.

One by one, they open up to Oskouei with incredible candor, revealing that the brave face they put on masks a terrible loneliness and pain. They regret what they’ve done and what’s happened to them – what they’ve become because of what’s happened to them – and they speak to the camera as if this is the first time anyone has asked how they feel. Based on what we hear, it may very well be.

Oskouei doesn’t interview the guards or correctional workers, but we occasionally hear them speak off-camera, or see them drift across the screen. In one scene, one of the girls who’s just been released, tells a female guard that she’s afraid to go outside and see her father – afraid of what he’ll do, afraid she’ll have to run away again, afraid she’ll get back into drugs. The guard tells her, in a frustrated, exasperated tone, that she’s no longer their responsibility, even if she kills herself.

It’s not a very nice thing to say, but it’s reflective of the way prison systems work in many countries, including Canada and the United States. Prisons aren’t built to address the social, systemic factors that lead people to commit crimes in the first place – they’re just meant to punish criminals and send them on their way. The transition plan we see in Starless Dreams could be described as “putting child abuse victims back in the hands of child abusers,” since the rules require that someone from the detainee’s family come to retrieve her. One of Oskouei’s subjects initially refuses to identify herself because she doesn’t want her family to find her again – she says that she ran away because her uncle molested her and that, when she told her mother, her mother called her a liar and beat her. When she eventually relents and the guards contact her family, an off-camera voice says, “I’ll tell them they have to be nice to you,” which is the kind of intervention that doesn’t help at all.

It’s clear that most of these girls need a social worker more than they need a detention center, but that’s not what the system is equipped to provide them. I understand the guards’ frustration – they can’t be everything to everyone; it’s not their job – but there’s something heartbreaking about the way these girls hope the adults in their lives will help them, only to be disappointed each time. There’s a sense in which Oskouei, who they call “Uncle Mehrdad,” may be the only adult to take a genuine interest in their welfare. While he’s doing important work with this documentary, he also packs up his camera and departs after a few weeks, leaving us with the question of what happens after.

There’s a strange scene in the latter half of the film, where the girls are visited by an unidentified religious official. He leads them in prayer and then begins a discussion about “human rights.” We don’t see the whole discussion, but the girls ask him very politely – considering the circumstances – why it is that women have so few rights in Iran. He seems to respond by saying that we can’t do whatever we want in life and need to do what society expects of us. But the record scratch moment for me is when one of the girls, who’s been sentenced to death for killing her abusive father, asks why, if a child kills her father, the child is sentenced to death but, if a father kills his children, it isn’t even a crime.

Starless Dreams doesn’t explain or debate Sharia – or any part of Iran’s judicial system – directly. The problems faced by the girls Oskouei profiles seem – and on some levels, are – universal, but, for a foreign audience, there are occasional reminders that these universal experiences take place in a different social and political context. According to Amnesty International, Iran’s criminal justice system is a terrifying web of torture, mutilation, and execution – sometimes of minors – and women and minorities have few protections under law. Oskouei asked the government to let him make this documentary for seven years, and his stated aim is not to overthrow the judicial system, but to generate a greater feeling of compassion for the girls inside of it. This is how you couch an argument about the prison system in Iran.

One of the truths I’ve learned over the years is that you can’t change someone’s culture from the outside. You can’t do it without speaking the language – not just the literal, actual language of words and sentences and conjugations, but the tacit language; the language where you know how to talk about things within a certain political context. Mehrdad Oskouei speaks Persian better than I do, but I trust that he speaks Iran better than I do, too. Starless Dreams is a much more gentle, and gently melancholy film than I’d expect to see in this context, but maybe it’s the film we need. Maybe it’s one that will actually change the way Iranians see women and girls.

Starless Dreams is screening internationally as part of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. If you miss the festival, this is a documentary to keep on your list in the upcoming months. It’s isn’t an easy thing to sit with, but it provides a rich entry point into some very complex questions about the state of human rights in Iran and the state of correctional systems internationally.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies, TV and video games on her blog.

‘Game of Thrones’: Does It Feel Worse to Cheer For or Against Daenerys?

It’s hard to ignore that this is a white woman from a foreign nation who feels it’s her birthright to teach a bunch of brown people how they should behave. … On the flip side, watching a woman lose power on ‘Game of Thrones’ always seems to involve watching her be sexually victimized somehow, which I can’t really get on board with, no matter how awful she is.

Written by Katherine Murray, this post appears as part of our theme week on Game of Thrones.

As usual, Game of Thrones is a Choose Your Own Interpretation that always ends in tears.

One of the major cliff-hangers leading into the sixth season of Game of Thrones is the fate of Daenerys Targaryen, queen of Meereen, widow of Kahl Drogo, heir to the Iron Throne, and holder of a thousand other titles. After amassing a large army and conquering several cities in Essos (a separate continent from where the main action takes place), it looked like she was about to hit a reversal of fortune. A rebel/terrorist group called Sons of the Harpy staged an attack against her in Meereen, and she fled on the back of a dragon to parts unknown. She was immediately surrounded by a Dothraki army, and previews for season six featured images of Targaryen banners burning while a Dothraki narrator intoned, “You are nobody, the millionth of your name, queen of nothing.”

The Dothraki are known for raping the women they capture and, disturbingly, the full trailer for season six features a split-second scene in which it looks like someone tears Daenerys’ dress off her body.

The dress-tearing scene is still in our future, but the season premiere confirmed that the Dothraki immediately took things to a rapey place, after finding Daenerys alone. There’s a (somewhat) pleasant surprise in that she’s able to talk her way out of danger by telling them she was married to a different Dothraki rapist at one point, which makes her off-limits to them, but the entire situation leaves me feeling confused about who and what I’m supposed to be cheering for.

Like most rulers on Game of Thrones, Daenerys can be horrible, and she has the extra disadvantage of starring in a story line that seems kind of racist. From a pure narrative point of view, it also makes sense that a character who’s had a lot of good fortune lately is due for new challenges ahead. On the flip side, watching a woman lose power on Game of Thrones always seems to involve watching her be sexually victimized somehow, which I can’t really get on board with, no matter how awful she is. It’s different from a situation where you don’t know which of two people to cheer for, and feel torn between them because they both have good points – this is situation where I feel bad about any possible outcome for just one person. Unless she rows away in a boat forever like Gendry, I don’t see how this can end well.

Why it Feels Bad to Cheer for Her
Daenerys is kind of an asshole. She inherited her brother’s sense that ruling others is her birthright and she’s proven herself to be arrogant on more than one occasion. On top of that, she makes rash decisions that affect millions of people’s lives – she crucified the entire ruling class of Meereen without asking any questions about the internal politics of the city or whether some of them were actually opposed to slavery (which, as we find out later, some of them were). She’s also horrible to Hizdahr zo Loraq, an advisor she kidnaps into a sham marriage just so she can ignore his advice in more settings.

None of that makes her worse than any of the other power players on Game of Thrones, but it feels bad to cheer for her because Dany’s story, unlike most of the stories in Westeros, also has some gross colonial set pieces in it. It’s hard to ignore that this is a white woman from a foreign nation who feels it’s her birthright to teach a bunch of brown people how they should behave. The fact that Game of Thrones also hasn’t invested in developing many of its non-white characters means that we see almost everything in Essos through the eyes of foreigners who find it strange and disgusting. I’m not saying I disagree – slavery and forcing people to fight to the death in a pit is disgusting, but so is a lot of other stuff on this show, and we’re asked to see those things as being a normal part of this world. We’re asked to see Essos as savage and exotic, instead, and it’s hard to feel good about the racial component of that division.

People who defend the Essos story line generally argue that we’re not necessarily supposed to agree with what Daenerys is doing, but the way the scenes are dramatized makes that hard to believe. Daenerys’ sacking of the slave cities in Essos is staged as a series of Hell Yeah moments, starting when she tricks a slave trader into giving her an army for nothing and then uses the army to kill him. It’s great that she sets the slaves free, but she waits to do that until after they’ve sacked the city for her, and the show doesn’t really engage with the concept that someone who’s been born into slavery might not know what to do with an offer of freedom. The whole point of the scene where she offers to free her slave army seems to be to reassure us that they’re technically there of their own free will because she gave them a thirty-second window to leave.

The only person in the slave army who’s ever individually identified for us is Grey Worm, and there’s a weird, condescending scene where Daenerys tells him that he can choose his own name, and he says he’d rather keep his slave name because it’s the name he had on the glorious day she freed him. I’ve unpacked this elsewhere in the past, but suffice to say that that is a terrible line of reasoning, this scene only exists to tell us how amazing Dany is, and a lot of the slave plotlines and themes are like that.

The shallow characterization in the Essos story line, the icky colonial vibes, and the boring pattern where Daenerys just succeeds at everything she does all make me want her to fail. Unfortunately, it feels just as bad to cheer against her.

Why it Feels Bad to Cheer Against Her
There’s definitely a pattern on Game of Thrones where we’re supposed to cheer for the underdog. Part of what makes Daenerys such an awesome character is that she spent the first season making lemonade out of some of the worst fucking lemons that anyone’s ever seen. She was abused by her older brother, sold into marriage, raped multiple times, made to feel she was worthless, and somehow managed to dig in and transform a losing hand into a winning one by doing ridiculous stuff like eating the heart of a horse. The army of slaves and dragons she has is the only thing keeping her safe from more victimization, and cheering for her to fail is basically cheering for some new, horrible man to torture her some more.

There’s always a sense in which we cheer against the people with power in Game of Thrones, but with characters like Daenerys and the series’ second most powerful female character, Cersei, there’s an extra element where you have to remember that they live in a world where women are treated like garbage. That’s why I couldn’t be happy, last season, when Cersei finally started to lose her grip on power in King’s Landing. Yes, she’s a horrible person, but – as the show reminded us – the avenues she has to get and hold legitimate power are limited and the danger she’s in without that power is huge. I thought it was a terrible idea for her to be Hand of the King (because she’s a mean, selfish person who doesn’t have the interests of the common folk in mind), but I also thought it was terrible that everyone told her she couldn’t be just because she’s a woman. I thought she sort of deserved to get hoist by her own petard after arming religious fanatics to take down one of her enemies, but I also felt uncomfortable that it led to a scene where she had to walk through the streets naked while everyone called her a whore.

I had the same uncomfortable feeling when the khalasar horses started circling Daenerys in last season’s finale. A feeling that she was in an unfair, bullshit, gendered, misogynist danger and that, as much as I think she deserves to have her schemes blow up in her face, I didn’t want to go through another cycle of her getting raped by a horse lord. And I didn’t want to feel like the show thought that was titillating, or that I should enjoy it because it’s delicious when powerful women are turned into sexual objects.

I’ve been asking myself how it’s different from being happy that Stannis and Joffrey got killed – or even being happy that Jon Snow got killed, ‘cause I was kind of happy for that – and the only way I can explain it is to say that, on Game of Thrones, getting killed is not a penalty that’s based on hating someone for their gender. Getting killed is not a thing that’s steeped in a layered, complex, gross, disgusting refusal to see women as human beings. Being raped is. So is being publically shamed for your sexuality. So are a lot of other things that I don’t wish on female characters, even if they’re kind of horrible sometimes.

At this point, I don’t even know what to hope for from this story line. Do I want Daenerys to take back control of Meereen and keep being a colonizer? Do I want her to sail to Westeros and abandon the people she claims to have liberated without a backward glance? Do I want her to go back to the Dothraki and get treated like an animal or piece of property? Do I want her to die and be reunited with her awful rapist husband whom the show is convinced I should somehow like?

My brain keeps flashing back to details like that brothel a few days’ ride from Meereen, where the sex workers dress up like Daenerys, except their butts are showing. And I keep thinking about how, just like in real life, in Game of Thrones, it’s impossible to talk about how you think a woman’s using power irresponsibly without a bunch of other people climbing out of the woodwork to tell you that women shouldn’t have power at all. There’s a sense in which I would like to see Daenerys fail as a ruler because she’s terrible at ruling, but also a sense in which I’m aware that there are other people who want to see her fail because it reinforces a worldview where women are only good for sex.

It leaves us in a lose-lose situation no matter what happens, because the terms are so skewed by sexism.

What I really want is for Game of Thrones to be the product of a different culture – one where threats of rape aren’t hard-baked into gender relations. One where super-colonial themes would be present because the show had something to say about them, and not due to an apparent oversight. The way things are right now, I don’t have much to cheer for.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies, TV and video games on her blog.

Everything That’s Wrong (And a Few Things That Are Right) with ‘The Magicians’

Watching ‘The Magicians’ can be a lot like watching a real magician. One who’s not very good and keeps using such obvious distraction techniques that you want to rebel by looking at exactly what you’re not supposed to notice. And what we’re not supposed to notice here is an almost total lack of character development, followed by the thought that sperm is magic.

Written by Katherine Murray.

[Trigger warning: Discussion of rape and sexual violence]

Watching The Magicians can be a lot like watching a real magician. One who’s not very good and keeps using such obvious distraction techniques that you want to rebel by looking at exactly what you’re not supposed to notice. And what we’re not supposed to notice here is an almost total lack of character development, followed by the thought that sperm is magic.

The Magicians just wrapped up its first season on the SyFy network (Showcase, in Canada) and it was, overall, pretty disappointing. A TV show is not the same thing as a book series and, even though I was a fan of the books The Magicians is based on, I wasn’t expecting – or even wanting – it to be a faithful recreation of the source material. I did want it to tell a good story, though, and that’s where some of the narrative changes let me down.

Don’t get me wrong – I understand why the writers did most of what they did. In adapting the books for a TV series, they faced some difficult challenges:

The first book in the Magicians trilogy, which follows the adventures of Quentin Coldwater and his group of friends, is initially set at a magic school called Brakebills, but the action later moves to the magical land of Narnia Fillory and Brakebills becomes a footnote in the overall story. Because the first few episodes of a new TV show teach the audience how to watch it, there was a danger of setting up the false expectation that The Magicians was going to be about a bunch of students at a magic school.
The second book in the Magicians trilogy backtracks and spends about half its text explaining what Quentin’s friend, Julia, was doing while he was at Brakebills. This is vitally important to the story in book two, but Julia isn’t around that much in book one, and readers could be forgiven for forgetting she existed after she failed her Brakebills entrance exam. On TV, it’s hard to tell a long story in flashback and have it seem compelling.
Let’s be real – it would cost a lot of money to depict things exactly as they happened in the books.

For the most part, the solutions the writers came up with are good. They’ve accelerated the timeline of the original story so that the series hits its major turning points faster; they include action that takes place in Fillory and otherwise outside Brakebills right from the start; they place a lot less emphasis on classes, studying, and other especially school-like activities that take place at Brakebills which stops school from structuring the show; they cut back and forth between Quentin and Julia so that we can see their separate narratives unfold in real time; and they invent a character called Kady who moves between both stories and helps things feel connected.

All of this makes sense in theory – the problem is that, in practice, everything happens too fast.

The Magicians tries to cram all of book one, half of book two, and select revelations from book three into 13 episodes – that’s not even including the brand new plot points, story lines and characters it’s introduced. Some of the narrative choices kill two birds with one stone by collapsing multiple plot points into each other – Quentin needs a reason to be friends with Alice, Penny, and Kady and he also needs to accidentally summon a beast to the school; what if they all accidentally summon the beast together? But things start to fall apart when it comes to character development.

Repeatedly, season one of The Magicians expects us to believe that people undergo major changes in their feelings, perceptions, and relationships with lightning speed. Repeatedly, we’re asked to buy into emotionally-heavy plot developments with barely any time to explore what they mean. Quentin’s friend, Elliot, is torn apart by having to kill his evil, body-snatched boyfriend… whom we’ve known for about forty minutes. Elliot, later has to make a major, life-changing decision about whether to enter into a magical contract that would force him to stay in Fillory forever and never have sex again and he literally has 90 seconds to go on an entire emotional journey that leaves him okay with that idea. Quentin and his sometime-girlfriend Alice seem to be together for about five days before they break up and, in the season finale, she gives him a speech about his character that seems hollow because they barely know each other. The show rushes through a major plot point about how Alice’s older brother turned into a fire monster when he was at Brakebills and then doesn’t deliver the pay-off for that story in the season finale, leaving it as a random thing that everyone got super upset about for exactly one episode.

The most annoying example I remember, though, is a new plot line about how Quentin’s father is dying of cancer and believes that Quentin has wasted his life by being a weirdo. In the space of one episode, we are introduced to Father Quentin and his cancer, and the story of how, when Quentin was a kid, he ruined his father’s favorite model airplane and his father tried to glue it back together and just made it worse. At the end of the episode, Quentin goes back to his father’s house and uses magic to put the airplane back together, proving that he’s not just a weirdo and he’s finally done something with his life. And all of that is great, except that I’m supposed to believe Quentin’s dad just happens to keep that broken airplane from ten years ago in his living room at all times so that he can drag it out to hold a grudge against his son thereby providing an opportunity for metaphorical redemption. The writers know that they need to establish the backstory behind this airplane before the payoff where Quentin fixes it with magic, but the journey between establishing the conflict and resolving it remains too short, direct, and convenient. The same thing could be said for almost every major conflict in the first season.

The characters are also drawn in a pretty shallow way, likely because there isn’t time to develop them more. They always do and feel and say exactly what they need to do and feel and say to lurch from one plot point to another, but there’s no organic sense that these are real people, changing over time.

And that’s not even getting into the stuff with Julia.

Straight up – one of the things that impressed me about the second book in the Magicians trilogy is the way that Lev Grossman deftly, subtly, sensitively handled Julia’s back story, which involves a traumatic assault. Julia is Quentin’s childhood friend, but she fails the exam to get into Brakebills and then he’s kind of a dick to her. She goes off on her own and tries to learn magic on the streets – something that he’s kind of snobby about later on – and she has to do a lot of things that she’s not proud of and face a lot of choices that people like Quentin never have to deal with. Eventually, she makes some friends who become her whole world, and, just as everything looks like it’s finally coming together for her, it all gets blown to pieces.

Spoilers for the books and the TV show, but Julia and her friends try to summon a benevolent god to help them, and instead they get tricked by an evil god who kills most of Julia’s friends and rapes her when she tries to save another woman in her group. The book really conveys how horrible this is, and how it was more than just a physical assault – how it took everything Julia had, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually and made her a different person. The book is all about how she keeps trying to deny that anything changed, but how it’s only when she accepts this (horrible, traumatic) experience as part of who she is that she becomes stronger. Learning what happened to Julia and watching how she changes also teaches Quentin that he’s not the center of the universe – he learns to have empathy for others, and appreciate that they’re the heroes of their own stories, taking their own journeys, facing their own challenges along the way.

In the TV show, we don’t have enough time to appreciate all the layers of Julia’s emotional journey. She’s angry for a couple of episodes, hangs out with some ne’er-do-wells, makes friends with some people we don’t get to know very well, and then all of a sudden, she’s like, “I know I haven’t always been a great person, but this is my redemption and I want to help everyone.” Again, only for a couple of episodes before the whole thing goes sideways.

Because Julia is still in contact with Quentin in the TV show, and because it needs to make sense that she would help him move the plot line forward when she should be in emotional turmoil, the writers (pretty cleverly) invent a twist where, initially, it seems like Julia successfully summoned the benevolent god, and the benevolent god gave everyone exactly what they wanted, and they all went away somewhere to be happy, which explains why they suddenly vanished. The flashbacks we see of this beautiful moment all have cold lighting and zero sound, which makes them seem creepy. In the next episode, we learn that this is a false memory that a fellow street magician put in Julia’s mind to protect her from remembering the truth. When the false memory is removed, Julia loses her composure, and we see a terrifying (but simplified) scene of how she was attacked by the evil god.

That’s all okay, up until the part where Julia’s complicated quest to reconcile her memories of trauma and become a stronger person is replaced by a plot point where god spunk gives you powers.

I’m just gonna say that again – in the TV show, having the semen of a god inside your body gives you magical powers. That is why Julia has more power in the final episode. That is why Alice has more power in the final episode, too – Julia was raped and Alice drinks a mason jar of semen.

Also, spoilers for the books again, and spoilers for the TV show if this ends up happening later, but – in the books, Alice is the strongest magician and Quentin’s group of friends, and, when they finally face their nemesis the branch-faced beast (in the show, he is a moth-faced beast) she turns into a fire monster like her brother did. It’s horrible but kind of awesome and heroic at the same time, because she tries to do something good and she’s the only one strong enough to do it. In the TV show, Quentin realizes before they fight the beast that Alice is the strong one and gives her a mason jar full of semen to drink. Then, when they reach the actual fight, Alice doesn’t get to do anything before she (apparently) gets killed. Odds are that this is so she can survive somehow and stick around next season, but it’s still a weak ending.

Look, the TV show does a lot of things right. Casting Arjun Gupta as Quentin’s frenemy, Penny (which makes Penny a lot more likeable and charismatic), creating the Kady character to bridge the two stories, getting out of Brakebills faster, inventing a time loop that sort of explains why the TV show is different from the books, letting Quentin have his awkward bisexual three-way without having some kind of panic attack in the process, trying to misdirect the audience about who the beast is, trying to mislead us into thinking Quentin is the most important character so that he learns a lesson when he’s not, following Julia right from the start, simplifying some of the story elements to work with a limited budget – there are lots of good choices.

But, amidst all of those good choices, there’s also a sense of anxiety in the first season. There’s a sense that this might not be interesting enough, or people won’t get it, or they won’t think it’s exciting, so we need to pad the story out with sex and violence and rely on shocking plot twists to keep everybody invested rather than building a complex set of characters and relationships that earn their payoffs over time. It’s as if the show fears that, if it takes the time to build something solid, everyone will get bored and leave before it’s done. In that sense, its a lot like How to Get Away with Murder, Orphan Black, and Mr. Robot, in that it just keeps changing direction to throw us off balance. That kind of thing isn’t sustainable over the long term, and it makes me worried that the series won’t ever find its feet.

The Magicians has already been renewed for a second season, and I’ll watch it. But I hope that now that they burned their way through half the source material, they will stop jumping between huge plot points and give the characters more room to breathe. My other hope is that they retcon it somehow so that drinking semen doesn’t give you powers. WTF.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies, TV and video games on her blog.

‘Bleeding Heart’ and All the Times It’s Probably Okay to Shoot Someone

Written and directed by Diane Bell, ‘Bleeding Heart’ is about class privilege, moral hypocrisy, and the arrogance of preaching nonviolence to people about to be killed. Mostly, though, it’s a chance to watch Zosia Mamet play someone other than Shoshanna and drink in a dark but gorgeous colour palette.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Written and directed by Diane Bell, Bleeding Heart is about class privilege, moral hypocrisy, and the arrogance of preaching nonviolence to people about to be killed. Mostly, though, it’s a chance to watch Zosia Mamet play someone other than Shoshanna and drink in a dark but gorgeous color palette.

Having premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2015, Bleeding Heart tells the story of an ashtanga yoga teacher named May (Jessica Biel), who makes contact with a half-sister she’s never known (Zosia Mamet), and quickly has a crisis of conscience over how she should behave.

May’s sister, Shiva, is in a much different financial position and living with a boyfriend who treats her badly. As May gets to know Shiva better, she finds out that this boyfriend, Cody, is also Shiva’s pimp, and doesn’t seem to care very much for her safety. May feels the need to get involved, and tries to help by giving Shiva money, giving her a place to stay when she can’t go home to Cody. She tries to convince her to leave him for good but, the longer the situation goes on, the less it looks like there’s going to be a peaceful solution.

May’s interaction with Shiva is complicated by the fact that her business and romantic partner, Dex, doesn’t think they should get involved in the drama unfolding between two people they don’t really know, as well as by the fact that Shiva doesn’t always tell the truth. In the end, though, May has to decide whether she really believes in ahimsa – the principles of nonviolence at the core of her spiritual beliefs and practice – to the point of letting someone else get killed.

Spoilers, but the final act involves a lot more guns.

I get what Bleeding Heart’s trying to do, and I think it’s really interesting, even if I don’t always buy the execution.

At its core, the story is about a really specific, new age hypocrisy in which we claim to heal ourselves and the world by ignoring the harsh realities and difficult choices less fortunate people face. The key conflict in Bleeding Heart isn’t between Shiva and Cody or May and Cody or Shiva and May – it’s between May and Dex. May wants to help Shiva even though she doesn’t know her very well, even though it makes her life difficult, and even though Shiva might not even be her sister – Dex wants Shiva to go away and stop disrupting his positive energy. He’d rather use his and May’s money to build a new yoga studio than help Shiva pay her rent, and the point he brings up, over and over again, is, “This doesn’t have to be our problem.”

Bleeding Heart plays May and Dex against each other to show us how May’s choices reflect a conscious move away from the beliefs she held at the start of the film – a move toward an understanding that there’s a kind of arrogance in preaching nonviolence to people who live in real physical danger. She’s struggling with the idea of what it really means to help someone, and whether it’s enough to say that she helps people by teaching yoga practice. Ultimately, she finds that the only way to make a difference in the world is to do things she never thought she would do – she finds that there are some situations where nonviolence just isn’t an option.

May’s personal journey comes across really well in the film, so I was disappointed that the other characters seemed a lot less rounded in comparison. Dex is so self-centered that he can’t even process the concept that May might care about something else in addition to the yoga studio. When May tells him that she wants to take a day off work to meet Shiva for the first time – having hired private detectives to search for her for months or years – he tells her that meeting Shiva will probably be emotional for her and distract her from the business for more than a day, so she shouldn’t go yet. Even taking into account that he’s supposed to be a hypocrite, I find it hard to believe that he would just casually tell his partner to blow off meeting a long-lost, long-sought relative to focus on building a new yoga studio. Just like I find it hard to believe later on that he completely doesn’t care that Shiva’s boyfriend is abusive, even if he doesn’t want to be involved.

It’s part of a larger pattern in the film where the details of the characters’ motivations don’t ring true and drain some of the power from the story. It often feels like Dex, Cody, and Shiva make their choices based on what the plot demands of them, so that May can learn something new and grow as a person.

Aside from that, the cinematography is gorgeous and Mamet and Biel are both stretching themselves as actors, which is fun to watch. I especially gained a new appreciation for Mamet – she’s so good at making her lines sound like something she just came up with that it’s easy to forget how much skill that really takes. There are times in Bleeding Heart when she doesn’t have a lot to work with but definitely makes the most of it.

You can find Bleeding Heart on DVD and VOD in North America and the UK, where it goes by the name Bound by Blood.

Also on Bitch Flicks: Paula Schwartz interviews director Diane Bell about Bleeding Heart

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies, TV and video games on her blog.

‘Black Mirror’ is No More Universal Than ‘Girls,’ You Guys

The first season of the British sci-fi show ‘Black Mirror’ frames its stories through an unintentionally narrow and myopic point of view, just like the first season of HBO’s ‘Girls.’ For some reason, though, ‘Black Mirror’s extremely specific point of view is mistaken as being universal, while the extremely specific point of view offered by ‘Girls’ is not.

Written by Katherine Murray. Spoilers ahead.

[Trigger warning: discussion of bestiality and sexual assault]

The first season of the British sci-fi show Black Mirror frames its stories through an unintentionally narrow and myopic point of view, just like the first season of HBO’s Girls. For some reason, though, Black Mirror’s extremely specific point of view is mistaken as being universal, while the extremely specific point of view offered by Girls is not.

Black Mirror is sort of a cult-hit TV show, so far consisting of two seasons with three episodes each, and a Christmas special starring Jon Hamm. The series first aired in the UK in 2011, but only made its way to North America and Netflix more recently. Much like The Twilight Zone, each episode tells a stand-alone story about a world slightly different from our own, where something creepy and terrible happens. Specifically, Black Mirror is focussed on technology and how inventions like social media, robots, virtual currency, and computer animation can be put to destructive use. The three episodes that make up the first season are “The National Anthem,” “Fifteen Million Merits,” and “The Entire History of You” – each of which follows the same broad pattern: the first twenty minutes are fascinating and unsettling, and then you realize that this entire fabricated universe exists to screw up some guy’s sex life.

Let me break it down:

In “The National Anthem,” the Prime Minister awakens to discover that someone has kidnapped the princess and posted a ransom video on YouTube. The terrorists are threatening to kill her unless he gives into their ridiculous demands and has sex with a pig on national television. This is an extreme situation that touches on a very serious question, about which there is much debate in real life: how do you deal with terrorist demands? There’s a very solid school of thought that says you should never give in to terrorist demands because that makes terrorism seem like a good way to get what you want, and another very solid school of thought that says that, if giving in to small demands could save a person’s life, you have a duty to – wait, that’s not what this story’s about. After about twenty minutes, questions of terrorism are completely pushed aside and the story becomes 100% about whether this one particular guy gets pressured into bestiality and whether his wife will forgive him.
In “Fifteen Million Merits” – which, in fairness, has important things to say about class stratification – working class people peddle bikes all day to supply power to the one percent. Their only hope of escape is to compete on an X-Factor-like TV show, which they have been convinced will allow the most talented among them to become celebrities. A working class guy falls in love with a working class girl who has a beautiful singing voice, and he uses all the credits he’s earned from peddling the bike to pay the super expensive contest entry fee so that she can compete and maybe have a better life. When she competes, the judges tell her that they already have enough singers, but she’d make a really good porn star, and she’s pressured into accepting their offer because she knows this is her only chance to not peddle the bikes. Her life becomes a hellish nightmare of drugs and X-rated encounters with strangers and everyone tells her that she should be grateful – but, wait, this episode isn’t about that. This episode is about how the X-Factor-like TV show robbed the working class man of the one thing that was good and pure in his life and perverted it by making it dirty and a porn star. The whole thing builds to a big, dramatic speech where he complains about everything they took from him, because that’s the most important part of what happened.
In “The Entire History of You,” people have chips in their brains that make objective recordings of everything they see, allowing them to play their conversations and experiences back later, looking for the truth. Imagine all the ways that that technology would change the world! What would become of law, education, history, and politics? What would happen if someone could hack your objective memories? What about the people who decide to forego the implant or have it removed? What an interesting cultural divide – but, wait. This story is actually about how some particular guy gets ridiculously jealous after realizing that his wife’s ex-boyfriend plays back recordings of what it was like to have sex with her when he jerks off. Because, apparently, remembering past sexual encounters when you masturbate is a new technology requiring a brain implant.

All of these stories are told from the really particular point of view of a heterosexual man who’s a little bit weird and anxious about sex, and all larger societal concerns and conflicts are pushed aside in favour of focussing on how world events and technologies will affect whether or not he can be with the woman he wants. “The National Anthem,” particularly, is an unintentionally rich vein of data for psychoanalysis – personally, I’m fascinated by the mind that thought, “My greatest fear about the internet is that terrorists will publically pressure me to engage in bestiality. What do you do in that situation? You basically have no choice!” But the point is that it’s really specific. It’s not actually a representation of universal thoughts and fears and experiences that everybody thinks and feels. And yet, the critical appraisal of Black Mirror would lead you to believe that it’s somehow more reflective of our shared humanity than Girls.

I’m sure I don’t need to spend five paragraphs explaining what Girls is, but, when it premiered, it was a highly anticipated series that met with a lot of backlash. The backlash was mostly because the series was framed – through advertising and pre-premiere interviews – as a story that was broadly about women in generation Y, when the content was actually a very specific, idiosyncratic story about what the show-runner’s life had been like in young adulthood. Like, she even cast her real-life friends in those roles.

While I’ve grown to like Girls a lot in the years since it premiered, I’ll admit that I was one of the people put-off by the opening episodes. There’s one early review that describes the characters as working class, because one of them has an unpaid internship, and that makes me laugh out loud, because working for free is a bourgeois luxury. It’s not something that working class people can do. And, the off-putting thing about Girls, at least in its first season, was that it took very specific experiences like that – experiences that only people with a certain amount of wealth and privilege ever have – and behaved as though they were universal coming-of-age rituals. The scene that really got me was the one in the first episode, where the main character casually asks her parents to pay for her apartment, like that’s a normal thing that happens.

Both Girls and Black Mirror improve after the first season – and Girls is now one of the shows I look forward to most every year – but my visceral reaction to the opening episodes was the same in both cases. I felt like I was being excluded from something I was supposed to belong to, and told that a group loosely defined as “Everyone” did not include people like me.

I know that lots of viewers had a similar reaction to Girls, not only for reasons of class, but also because it’s strange that the characters live in a diverse, densely-populated city like New York and only ever socialize with white people. But, reviews of Black Mirror usually don’t mention anything about the point of view. That’s partly because Girls is called Girls and Black Mirror is called Black Mirror. It’s also partly because both seasons of Black Mirror dropped in North America around the same time, so viewers had a chance to appreciate how the series grew in its second season. But, let’s be real – it’s also because stories about men are routinely accepted as being stories about human beings in general, while stories about women are immediately seen as more particular.

A few weeks ago, Linda Holmes said this great thing on Pop Culture Happy Hour about how one of the narrative devices in The Big Short that was specifically intended to draw in the viewer and make the story more relatable for him backfired and made her feel alienated because it became clear that the filmmakers thought “viewer” was the same as “heterosexual man.” While there are some people who felt alienated from Girls the moment they heard the word “girls,” there are other people, like me, who only felt alienated once it turned out that “girls” meant “heterosexual WASP/white Jewish middleclass women,” at which point it felt like a bait-and-switch. In the case of Black Mirror, my suspicion is that the focus on the sex life of Some Particular Straight Dude is supposed to be a way to draw the viewer into the story, and make the stakes and circumstances of the Big Ephemeral Sci-Fi Ideas concrete, and I think the reason that alienates me is that it reveals an assumption that the viewer is also Some Particular Straight Dude and will be able to relate.

The second season of Black Mirror does expand its focus and tell two of its three stories from the point of view of Some Particular Straight Woman – the first of whom is also a little bit weird about sex and the second of whom is part of the show’s most controversial episode, “White Bear.” Without getting into a lot of spoilers for “White Bear,” I’ll confess that, even though I think it’s a good script, I had a hard time going along with it, because the series had failed to build any trust with me before it took these risks. Because I felt alienated by the first season, I went into the second season full of suspicion, and it was hard for me to figure out whether “White Bear” was a story about the horrific corruption of the justice system or about how creepy-cool it is to watch some woman get tortured for hours and hours.

I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with making a show that’s just about hamsters chasing themselves through some particular writer’s mind, but I find it a little bit annoying that the hamsters in Charlie Broker’s mind are supposedly more reflective of our shared humanity than the hamsters in Lena Dunham’s mind, when they both look equally foreign to me. There are a few experiences that are truly universal – we all love, we all die, we all face up to certain harsh realities of life – but, in an increasingly global community, and in a world where we are more and more aware of others’ voices, it doesn’t make sense to keep pretending that stories about what it’s like to belong to any specific race or class or gender or sexual orientation are stories that cover the whole territory of what it’s like to be a person. My issue isn’t that Black Mirror and Girls shouldn’t exist – it’s that, when we talk about them, we should recognize that they both have a really particular point of view that includes the experience of some people while excluding the experience of others.

The holy grail of writing a story that speaks to universal themes is still a goal that we can all shoot for, but we have to really scale back on our idea of what’s “universal.”

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies, TV and video games on her blog.

‘Fuller House’ and the Shocking, Heart-Squeezing Power of Time

I don’t remember thinking that the premiere episode of ‘Fuller House’ was very good, and I don’t remember paying attention to anything that happened in the plot. What I do remember is crying because it has been 20 years, and I can almost imagine how strange it feels for all of these people to be in the same room again.

Written by Katherine Murray.

I don’t remember thinking that the premiere episode of Fuller House was very good, and I don’t remember paying attention to anything that happened in the plot. What I do remember is crying because it has been 20 years, and I can almost imagine how strange it feels for all of these people to be in the same room again.

If you’re either nostalgic for 90s-era sitcoms or bummed that the Full House Reviewed blog had to end, Netflix just did you a solid by creating a Full House spin-off that features some of the original cast. The premise is that three of the grown-up kids from Full House – sisters DJ and Stephanie, played by Candance Cameron-Bure and Jodie Sweetin, plus annoying neighbour Kimmy Gibbler, played by Andrea Barber – return to their suspiciously spacious childhood home to raise DJ and Kimmy’s children after DJ’s husband dies. Other former cast members make guest appearances after that, but the premiere episode is the one that brings almost everyone from the original series back together, just long enough for each of them to say their catchphrases and leave. And, somehow, rather than being annoying, that’s one of the most touching things I’ve ever seen.

It’s not touching because it’s well-written or because Fuller House is a very good show – both the writing and the show are as blunt and dull as you’d expect. It’s touching because we’re all twenty years older, and “Our Very First Episode, Again” is a living, breathing snapshot of what it means to move through time.

I’ll confess that, while I was watching “Our Very First Episode, Again,” I wasn’t thinking about seeing DJ or Stephanie or Uncle So-and-So again. I also wasn’t thinking about the premiere episode of Full House and how much I loved watching it. I was thinking about a group of actors who used to see each other every day – people who grew up together, who watched each other grow up, who had a near-miss romance between them, who – whether or not they like it or want it to be true – will always be partly defined by Full House. People who had no way of knowing, when they shot the first episode, that they would always be loved and hated and judged and remembered for this weird, dumb show.

I was thinking about how they’d all had to make peace with that, in different ways, for twenty years. How some of them had even stopped acting during that time and moved on with their lives. And here they were, together again, on a set that looks like that set, calling each other by the names they had in that script, listening to people cheer for them for doing these weird, dumb, familiar things. They looked pleased and embarrassed and nervous and amused and the very best part of the episode was watching the faces of the other actors in the same shot when one of them barked out a catchphrase.

Netflix didn’t make Fuller House to be good. There are some self-deprecating jokes, but it’s not, like, a cool, hip reboot of the original series. It’s also not designed to introduce a new generation to TGIF. Fuller House exists to be a freaky time capsule that shows us all how much we’ve aged, how we can’t always choose what defines us, and how we make peace with legacies we have mixed feelings about.

I’m about the same age as Jodie Sweetin, and, when the super-nostalgic credit sequence fires up and shows us footage of her as a little girl, I am terrified and astounded by how old that makes me feel. It immediately reminds me of all the things I’ve experienced since I was that young, and it makes me a tiny bit invested in her character, in ways I never was when we were children. Similarly, there’s a scene where Candace Cameron-Bure’s character, DJ, starts crying because she’s all on her own, parenting, adulting, and not sure if she’s going to succeed, and, god dammit, that feels much more real to me now than it did when Jesse and Joey were messing up school trips and getting into fights with little kids. I feel a sense of solidarity with DJ that comes from nothing but the passage of time.

Fuller House is annoying in all the ways you’d expect – the jokes are lame; there are awkward musical guests; it’s weirdly heterosexist without being exactly homophobic; DJ’s kids are super loud – but that’s also part of the point. Everything is the same as it was in Full House – even, literally, the jacket John Stamos is wearing. The only thing that’s changed is that we all got older. And knowing that that’s all that changed makes the series a mirror, not to culture or society or anything we usually say that TV is a mirror to – it’s just a mirror to age.

It’s not exactly the same thing as cashing in on nostalgia – again, I don’t think anyone sat around missing Full House. It’s more like cashing in on narcissism – and I freely include myself as one of the narcissists, here. The draw of Fuller House is that it’s familiar and different at the same time – it sits somewhere next to the uncanny valley and Tír na nÓg, in a land that can only be accessed by people who were alive to see the original when it first aired, and where they can’t ever suspend disbelief for what they’re seeing. The episodes, for me, are not about the Tanner/Fuller/Gibbler family. They’re about how much these people’s lives have changed and not changed in 20 years, which makes me think about how much my life has changed and not changed in 20 years, and in what ways, and how I feel about that, and whether it’s good or bad. I mean, I think there’s Mexican wrestling or something in one episode, but that was really not the focus of my thoughts.

None of the episodes after the premiere hit me as hard, and most of them didn’t hit me at all, but I have to admit that, against anything I would have predicted, there really is something astounding about bringing this show back to life – even for only one episode. And, it’s something that only seems possible thanks to the Netflix model, where no one has to bank on this becoming appointment television. It’s something that seems specifically engineered for an age where all you have to bank on is that a few people will be in a weird mood one day and want to watch it.

So, if you’re in a weird mood one day, check it out. You will not be entertained but, if you’ve seen Full House before, you will also not be disappointed.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies, TV and video games on her blog.

Ladies and Gentlemen, ‘Master of None’ Is the Series We’ve All Been Waiting For

You don’t have to look further than the comments section on any website to see that people with more power routinely try to decide what people with less power have the right to complain about. It’s something that happens in every discussion about inequality, but it’s so rare for that to be the topic itself that I was actually shocked when it was in “Ladies and Gentlemen.”

Written by Katherine Murray.

If you haven’t had time to catch up on Aziz Ansari’s Netflix series yet, prepare yourself to be delighted.

Ever since it dropped in November, Master of None — created by Ansari and Alan Yang — has racked up critical praise. The comedy follows Ansari’s character, Dev, as he navigates his dating life and fledgling acting career in New York City. But what sets it apart is the diversity of its characters, and the insight it offers into day-to-day microaggressions related to race and gender. Master of None offers us a point of view that’s hard to find on television, and does it in a smart, entertaining way.

One of the episodes that has attracted the most attention is “Parents,” which focuses on first-generation Americans trying to navigate relationships with their immigrant parents. Ansari cast his real-life mother and father in the episode, and the story struck a powerful chord with viewers who had never before seen their own experiences as children of immigrants reflected in popular entertainment. Another episode, “Indians on TV,” highlights racist stereotypes and casting in mainstream media, calling out real-life examples, both obvious and subtle.

Master of None has received less attention for the way it approaches gender, but the first season shines on that front, too. Dev’s group of friends includes funny, smart people from many different backgrounds, including a straight white man and a Black lesbian woman who have roughly equal importance in the story. His relationship with his one-night stand turned girlfriend, Rachel, is respectful and emotionally mature – they act like equals at all times, and like each other because they have the same sense of humor, interests, and values. In the episode “Hot Ticket,” Dev agonizes over setting up a date with a really attractive waitress, only to discover that he hates her personality. It’s an idea that could have gone wrong, but the character and her awful personality idiosyncrasies are so specific that it doesn’t come off as a statement that beautiful women are X, Y or Z, so much as a statement that it’s not possible to know whether someone is a desirable date until you’ve spent time talking to them.

The most feminist episode of the first season, though, is “Ladies and Gentlemen,” in which Dev is surprised to learn that his girlfriend and female friends are constantly the targets of aggressive behavior from men. Like “Indians on TV,” “Ladies and Gentlemen” starts by highlighting broad, obvious forms of aggression, before drawing attention to subtler types of discrimination that even well-meaning people engage in.

“Ladies and Gentlemen” opens with a scene that cuts back and forth between Dev and one of his female co-stars leaving a cast party at night. Dev and his male friend, Arnold, share a pleasant conversation and cut through the park to save time. Dev’s co-star looks like she’s in a horror movie and ends up getting followed to her house by some asshole who tried to buy her a drink earlier and got mad when she turned him down. He hammers on her door demanding to know why nice guys like him never have a chance.

After Dev finds out about what happened, he hears similar stories from all the other women in his life. The stories are based on the real-life experiences of female staff writers, and they’re completely familiar to any woman watching the show, right down to the detail where you can’t post a picture of eggs on your Instagram without some strange guy showing up to harass you.

Armed with this new information, Dev and his female friend, Denise, make a citizen’s arrest when they catch a man jerking off on the subway. Dev becomes a hero to all the women at the bar, who start buying him drinks and telling him about the awful things that guys have done to them. Later on, while he’s still basking in the glow of being an upstanding feminist, one of Dev’s male coworkers stops by the table and introduces himself to all the men, while ignoring the women completely. Rachel and Denise point out the sexism of the situation and Dev dismissively tells them that they are being too sensitive and making a big deal out of nothing. He’s then confused about why Rachel is upset with him.

What follows is an amazing scene – also based on real-life experiences – where Rachel and Dev walk home together and she explains in an articulate but believable way, why it’s hurtful and offensive for him to tell her that her own assessment of a thing that just happened to her is wrong. It’s like the final scene in the Louie episode “So Did the Fat Lady,” except without being so problematic. In the end, Dev concedes that Rachel knows more about what Rachel just experienced than he does, and says he will try harder to listen, from now on.

It’s one of the single greatest moments I’ve seen on a TV show – and maybe the only one to directly address this exact, frustrating, aggravating, hard-to-articulate issue head-on. You don’t have to look further than the comments section on any website to see that people with more power routinely try to decide what people with less power have the right to complain about. That very act – that presumptuous attempt to unilaterally define the boundaries of what is and isn’t up for discussion; what we can and can’t feel offended by; what we can and can’t disagree about – that very act is, itself, an attempt to protect and reinforce the power structures we were trying to complain about in the first place. It’s something that happens in every discussion about inequality, but it’s so rare for that to be the topic itself that I was actually shocked when it was in “Ladies and Gentlemen.”

Non-traditional networks like Netflix and Amazon have opened new frontiers in terms of what a TV show can be and whose stories are profitable enough to be worth telling. Master of None is an example of the very best these new frontiers have to offer – a funny, insightful, well-produced series that broadens the range of experiences depicted on television and adds something new to the cultural discussion.

The good news is that Master of None was just officially renewed for second season, expected to show up in 2017.

Staff writer Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies, TV and video games on her blog.

What Happened to ‘Doctor Who’s Clara

Clara Oswald finally made her exit from ‘Doctor Who,’ and it was all the things that it could be – aggravating, thought-provoking, overdue, sad, confusing, and amazing.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Clara Oswald finally made her exit from Doctor Who, and it was all the things that it could be – aggravating, thought-provoking, overdue, sad, confusing, and amazing.

To recap: there’s an overall pattern on New Who where women who travel with the Doctor end up being destroyed in some way, and Clara Oswald, the Doctor’s companion from mid-season seven to the end of season nine, is no exception. Clara was first introduced as The Impossible Girl, a woman who kept showing up in the Doctor’s timeline and dying while she tried to save him. The reason for this was revealed in “The Name of the Doctor,” where we learned that Clara’s special destiny was/is/will be to throw herself into the Doctor’s time stream so that she can be torn apart and reappear as various women whose only purpose in life is to help him.

After witnessing this heroic sacrifice, the Doctor rescues Clara from the time stream so that she can stop dying forever and be his real companion. Thus begins a long story-arc in Doctor Who that’s unofficially titled, “We don’t know what to do with Clara anymore.”

In season eight, there’s a new Doctor in town and Clara’s story line is that – unlike Amy, who gradually drifted away to lead a normal life (up until she was past-zapped by aliens, because no one can ever be happy) – Clara gradually spends more and more time in the TARDIS, leaving her normal life behind. Her boyfriend, Danny Pink, is worried about the influence the Doctor is having on her, but then he dies, and Clara’s got nothing to keep her tied to her life on Earth.

By season nine, Clara’s fast-talking the aliens and coming up with clever, reckless plans as if she is the Doctor. The bells of foreshadowing start to toll as the Doctor talks about how he wouldn’t know what to do if he lost her, but, no matter how often he says they should be more careful, he can’t resist her when she wants to go on an adventure. At this point, it starts to become clear that, despite the murky character development in season eight, the new point of Clara is that she and the Doctor are a Bad Influence on each other, and that this is probably why the Doctor’s arch frenemy, the Master, played match-maker by introducing them.

Things finally come to a head in “Face the Raven,” when Clara tries to cheat her way out of an alien contract she doesn’t understand and ends up marked for death. The Doctor can’t do anything to save her, and, after a protracted goodbye speech, he’s left to watch as Clara gets killed by a magic tattoo bird of some kind.

Clara’s death got a mixed reaction from fans, with some thinking this was a stupid way for the character to go out, and some just glad to see her gone after she’d overstayed her welcome. I’ve never had strong feelings one way or the other about Clara (besides finding her a little bland in season eight), but I was willing to accept “Face the Raven” as the end of her story. Even if she had to die again, and even if her time with the Doctor had to destroy her, just like it destroyed all of his other companions, at least this ending offered us something different than we’d seen before, as well as a new perspective on the Doctor/companion dynamic.

When you watch a TV show like this, it’s normal to imagine yourself in the same situation as the characters and wonder what you would do. Clara’s character arc, such as it was, was a nice way of addressing the daydreams we have of being Really Good at Time Travel and underscoring the difference between the Doctor – who’s basically a god, in this story – and the mortals he travels with. Clara was, for a while, Really Good at Time Travel, and as close to being a Time Lord as anyone can be – but she was still human in the end – still mortal and fallible; still part of a story that can’t last for billions of years. It was annoying that she had to be destroyed like all the others, but it was a thoughtful, interesting destruction all the same.

Except, then she came back from the dead.

The penultimate episode of the season, “Heaven Sent,” delivers one of the best Hell Yeah moments we’ve had in long, long time, when the Doctor spends four billion years punching his way through a wall to escape a Time Lord holding cell and return to his home world, Gallifrey. The season finale, which aired this past weekend, reveals that he did this, in part, so that he could use their technology to violate the laws of space and time and undo Clara’s death.

His plan doesn’t work as well as he’d hoped, though. He’s able to snatch Clara out of time at the moment she before she dies, but she isn’t really alive. She’s walking and talking, but her heart is stopped, and she will ultimately have to return to the day she faced the raven, so that she can die for real. In other words, she’s kind of a time zombie four billion years in the future. Realizing that the Doctor plans to wipe her memory and leaver somewhere safe, Clara out-Doctors him and reverses his mind-wiping device so that it wipes his mind instead. He forgets everything about her, except that she existed, and she visits him one last time, disguised as a diner waitress, to confirm that he has no memory of who she is. And then zombie diner waitress Clara flies away in her own stolen TARDIS with Maisie Williams from Game of Thrones, and goes to have adventures before she has to die.

I’m not gonna lie – that’s pretty amazing.

As a TV viewer, there’s part of me that instinctively feels ripped off that Clara didn’t really die in “Face the Raven,” especially after all the hullaballoo that was made about it in the episode, and the long, protracted goodbye speech she got to give. But, as someone who’s on record as being bummed out that all the women on this show meet such horrible ends, I’m really happy at this surprisingly positive turn of events. In a way, it’s even more satisfying that’s it’s Clara, the girl who died again, and again, and again, and again during her time with the Doctor, who gets to live forever, through this weird, cosmic loophole, with everything she ever wanted. This wasn’t a story about how trying to be like the gods destroyed a mortal after all – it was a story about how, after she suffered so much for so long, Clara got to be amazing.

The turnaround where Clara escaped the memory wipe is also a really interesting call-back to one of the most brutal companion disposals thus far, in which the Doctor’s companion, Donna, saved the world by downloading his knowledge into her brain, only to discover that that meant he had to erase all her memories of him to stop her mind from imploding. While the general level of pessimism and tragedy in that ending may ring more true to life than the ending we get in “Hell Bent,” this reversal also drives home the point that Clara escaped the fate of all the companions before her – that she escaped even the story’s expectation that attempts to be more than she was would end in tragedy.

Speaking in general terms, season nine wasn’t always strong on story, but its presentation of women was unusually rad. Aside from Clara and Maisie Williams’ character (an immortal who appears in four episodes and is frequently both sympathetic and up to no good), this season also featured really outstanding work from Michelle Gomez as a female regeneration of the Master, Doctor Who’s first deaf character, played by Sophie Stone, and the return of a fan-favourite named Osgood whom I’m not all that into, but everyone else seems to like. What all these characters have in common is that they were cool and interesting and well-acted but didn’t, like, ruin their lives and kill themselves to save the Doctor from his sad existence. In many cases, they were, instead, the characters who made the story happen through their choices, and that was refreshing to see.

This season and last have also taught us that it’s normal for Time Lords to change gender when they regenerate, opening up the possibility of a female Doctor one day. It’s an important step for the franchise to take, not because there’s anything wrong with the Doctors we’ve seen, or because casting a woman will automatically make the show better, but because it’s one really good way to undo the uncomfortable undercurrents in the series so far, where the power dynamic always shakes out to Omnipotent Man – Vulnerable Woman.

Until that day comes, though, I’m very pleased that Clara is an honorary Time Lord. Even if she is a zombie waiting to get killed by magic birds.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.

‘Sicario’: The Movie That Dares to Ask if the CIA Really Cares About Mexican Families

An unholy mash-up of ‘No Country for Old Men’ and ‘Silence of the Lambs,’ ‘Sicario’ defames the city of Juarez, the FBI, and the CIA without telling us anything we don’t already know.

Written by Katherine Murray.

An unholy mash-up of No Country for Old Men and Silence of the Lambs, Sicario defames the city of Juarez, the FBI, and the CIA without telling us anything we don’t already know.

When I asked for Emily Blunt to be a detective, this is not what I had in mind. In Sicario, she plays FBI agent Kate Macer, a kidnapping specialist who gets pulled into a joint task force to investigate the operations of a Mexican drug cartel in America. From the moment she accepts the assignment, Kate is kept in the dark about most of her team’s objectives and shocked by the behaviour of the CIA agents she’s working with. Motivated by the hope that she can make a real difference and help to improve life for people both north and south of the border, she stays on, even as the situation looks more and more grim. Also on the task force is the mysterious Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro), who always has Kate’s back in a crisis, but refuses to answer questions about who he works for or what his role is. There are twists and turns as the story goes on, but the upshot is that Kate is disillusioned when All is Revealed.

Sicario is technically well-made, and I would never try to argue that it isn’t. It’s shot with both frankness and care, the score is deliciously creepy, and it manages to make a shoot-out in stopped traffic just as tense and exciting as a car chase. Emily Blunt and Benicio Del Toro are every bit as awesome as you’d want them to be, and Josh Brolin turns in a good performance as the task force leader, Matt Graver. That said, the story’s kind of annoying and, in order to explain why it’s annoying, I have to tell you how it ends. Which means I spoil all the twists and turns for you from this point on.

Here’s the deal: the CIA’s ultimate goal is to help the Columbians take over the drug trade in Mexico, with the understanding that they will stop the violence from spilling over to the US. Kate doesn’t find that out until the movie’s final act, when it’s too late for her to stop them. She also finds out that the CIA needs an FBI agent with them as a technicality, so that they have the legal authority to operate within US borders – meaning, the entire reason she was invited to join the task force was because she was motivated to get revenge on the drug cartel after they killed two of her guys, but ignorant about who the major players were and what standard operating procedure was in Narcotics. They purposely kept her in the dark because they want her to sign a piece of paper saying that she observed their operation and it was by the book.

Alejandro was once a prosecutor in Mexico, until a drug lord killed his whole family. Now he’s working for the Columbians and the CIA because they’ve given him the chance to assassinate the guy who murdered his wife and daughter. In the film’s final act, the CIA smuggles Alejandro back into Mexico and gives him intel to help him track, kidnap and murder various members of the cartel, including one man we’ve been set up to like – a Mexican police officer who’s moving drugs for the cartel, probably so that they don’t kill him. When Alejandro finally makes his way to the drug lord’s home, he murders the guy’s whole family in front of him, completing his revenge.

In the movie’s final scenes, Alejandro returns to the USA and confronts Kate, who’s refused to sign the paperwork after learning his true mission. He threatens to kill her and make it look like a suicide if she doesn’t sign, and, when she can see that he’s serious, she agrees. As Alejandro walks away, Kate points her gun at him but can’t make herself pull the trigger. The last thing we see is Mexican families watching their children play soccer while gunshots are fired in the distance.

I will say something good about the plot of Sicario, and it’s this: the movie manages to have a lot of characters tell lies while still presenting the audience with a story that makes sense from everyone’s perspective. That’s not easy to do. It also takes advantage of our expectations to trick us in a fairly clever way – we’re so used to seeing characters get drafted into super special teams that they’re not qualified to be on that we don’t even question why Kate was chosen for the task force, even though we’re told several times that she doesn’t have the knowledge or experience to be there. There are definitely a lot of well-executed elements at play here – but there were still some things that bugged me as I was watching.

To start with, Kate Mercer is a worse version of Clarice Starling. The comparison with Silence of the Lambs is pretty hard to miss – Clarice was also a naive FBI agent, brought onto a special project because her lack of guile and lack of knowledge made her the perfect candidate. And she also developed a strange friendship with a murderer whom she later couldn’t bring herself to kill. The difference is that Clarice was the hero of Silence of the Lambs – the entire story is about how she overcomes her inexperience and finds the courage and determination to track down a serial killer, proving to herself that she’s become powerful enough to protect others. Kate just gets tricked by some people. Her main purpose in the story is to witness how great Alejandro is.

Even though most of Sicario is shown to us through Kate’s perspective, and she’s the character the audience is most invited to identify with, this is really Alejandro’s story – and it’s not so different from any other contemporary action movie. He’s a brooding, dark hero with a troubled past who’s become a hardened killer, and he looks really cool doing it. One of the most telling things is that the movie suddenly ditches Kate once it gets more exciting to watch Alejandro kill people. We follow him for quite a long time before returning to Kate, and even then, he “wins” that exchange in the same way he’s won every other exchange he’s involved in. He never messes anything up, he never wavers from his mission – he’s totally sure that he’s right about everything, and he always gets the upper hand, just like every other action hero ever.

The other knock against Kate as a character – besides that she’s only there to watch Alejandro be a dark, capable assassin – is that she’s ineffective in everything she does. She tries to take a moral stand against the CIA but Alejandro forces her to back out of it. She tries to get the task force to follow procedure, but Graver makes her feel stupid for doing it and she, again, backs off. The worst part is a sequence where she tries to hook up with a friend of a friend only to discover that that guy’s working for the Mexican cartel and only there to find out what she knows. The way she finds out is the stupidest part of the movie – I’ll spare you the details – but, once she finds out who he is, he overpowers her and she’s ultimately saved by Alejandro, who reveals that he was following her the whole time because they used her as bait to flush this guy out. Then, she thanks him for saving her life.

The movie is also kinder to Alejandro when he does something evil than it is to members of the drug cartel. The film opens with a scene where Kate’s team accidentally discovers a house full of the cartel’s victims, and we get lingering shots of their corpses, all with plastic bags over their heads. When the task force goes to Juarez, we also get lingering shots of mutilated bodies hung up on an overpass, and dumped on the street by the cartel. But, when Alejandro kills Fausto Alarcón’s family, we don’t see the bullets enter their bodies. When he tortures an informant secretly transported across the border, all we see is a grate on the floor.

The movie acts like it’s a big surprise that the CIA doesn’t care about anyone outside America, but, no matter what your feelings are about that in real life, it’s obvious to anyone who’s seen a film before that that has to be where this is going. The more interesting question is how Alejandro feels about Mexico, after everything that’s happened to him, but the film doesn’t interrogate that very much.

It’s also interesting that the two focal characters in this movie are a woman and a Latino man, but the movie doesn’t make very much of that, either. There’s a weird dynamic where Kate keeps getting shut down every time she tries to assert herself, and where Graver tries to bully her into keeping quiet – and there are moments of that that feel realistic in an uncomfortably gendered way, though it isn’t explored very deeply. Just like it would have been nice to hear more about what Alejandro thinks of Mexico, it would have been nice to look at the awkward gender dynamic a little more closely, too.

The only character that really doesn’t land is Kate’s partner from the FBI, Reggie. Because race is so important to this story, it bears mentioning that Reggie’s black, and that, if Kate is bad at accomplishing things, he’s even worse than she is. Again, it’s interesting that the dynamic is one where a white man keeps information from Kate and behaves dismissively toward her, and then Kate keeps information from Reggie and behaves dismissively toward him, but I’m not sure it’s happening on purpose, or that it’s there to offer any kind of commentary. The actual result, though, is that Reggie exists to give Kate someone to explain things to or withhold things from. He doesn’t contribute anything else except advice that she doesn’t listen to. There’s even a scene where they go have beers and he spends the whole time talking about her, and trying to give her advice about her love life. Who is Reggie other than being Kate’s tag-along? We’ll never know.

Taken all together, Sicario is a pretty standard action movie wrapped in a thin layer of social commentary on the drug war and US-Mexico relations. Once you brush away a few contemplative shots and a few scenes where characters wring their hands over moral ambiguity, this is straight-forwardly a story about a hitman who is awesome at killing people – a beast that you admire from afar. The story is told from the perspective of a woman who knew him and, because she was ignorant about what was going on at the time, that makes his story more suspenseful.

Sicario is part of that awkward genre of action movie that wants us to enjoy watching someone indiscriminately kill people, but feels obligated to point out that it’s wrong to indiscriminately kill people – or, if it’s not wrong, it’s complicated – it’s a grey area – it’s a sad, hard truth of the world we live in – look at him shoot that guy through another guy!

I’m still waiting for a better Emily Blunt-led detective movie than this.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV (both real and made up) on her blog.

‘Maggie’s Plan’ Is Just as Awkward and Charming and Grim as Gen-Y’s Struggle with Adulthood

Like ‘Frances Ha,’ ‘Maggie’s Plan’ resonates with the gen-Y, mumblecore picture of adulthood that says, “We’re all average, imperfect, confused people trying to stay afloat in a world that feels random and chaotic.” Everything Maggie does comes out of a sincerely-felt – if slightly selfish – desire to be authentic and live truthfully while not having anyone get mad at her. It’s emblematic of a generation full of people who are re-discovering and re-inventing How To Be A Person while ignoring all the models that came before. It’s messy and screwed-up and sometimes stupid-looking, but there’s an optimism to it, too. There’s a sense that we can all cut our own paths through the wilderness, even if we mess it up and go the wrong way.

Written by Katherine Murray.

It’s no Frances Ha, but this romantic comedy directed by Rebecca Miller takes full advantage of its cast, including Greta Gerwig’s trademark brand of awkward charm.

If there’s one criticism I would make about Maggie’s Plan, it’s that the story is a little bit too complicated. When the film starts, we’re dropped into some pretty blunt exposition about how Gerwig’s character, Maggie, has come up with a plan to have a child through self-administered artificial insemination. The next 30 minutes or are devoted to a prologue that develops that idea by introducing us to an old acquaintance of Maggie’s who has now become a pickle baron and wants to be the sperm donor. Just as that seems to be gaining momentum, though, the film changes direction as Maggie falls in love with a married colleague, played by Ethan Hawke.

John – her colleague – is a would-be novelist trapped in a miserable marriage with superstar academic Georgette (Julianne Moore, with an extremely committed Danish accent). Just as she’s about to inseminate herself with the pickle man’s sperm, Maggie instead begins an affair with John, launching us three years into the future, where the action really begins.

In the near future of the main plot, Maggie and John live together with their daughter and she supports him while he works on his never-finished novel. Georgette has written a book about how their affair destroyed her life, and John and Georgette’s children shuffle back and forth between their parents. It doesn’t take Maggie long to figure out that John’s kind of a loser, once you get to know him well, and she soon hatches a plan to get him back together with Georgette, so that she doesn’t have to feel guilty for misguidedly wrecking their home.

The movie gets a lot more funny, purposeful, and creative once Maggie decides to offload John onto Georgette, but it takes a long time to get there. On top of that, as charming and likable as Greta Gerwig is in this and every role, Julianne Moore is the most entertaining person in this movie, and things pick up once she takes centre stage.

Like most romantic comedies, Maggie’s Plan isn’t especially daring in its social commentary – it’s designed to go down easy. The premise of the story – that Maggie would, ideally, like to be a mother without having a man involved – is never really explored beyond its value as a wacky situation, and the characters are drawn in such goofy, likable terms that none of the pain of divorce or failed relationships really seeps in.

The jokes that get the most traction – excepting the ones about winter in Canada, which were a hit with the crowd at TIFF – are mostly about the absurdities of writing and academia. John works in a super-specialized, esoteric field that no one understands but that is, nevertheless, outstandingly important to the handful of researchers he meets at conferences. His novel, when he first shares it with Maggie, is clearly a thinly-veiled story about his own life and how oppressive he finds it to live with a woman who’s always breaking out in stress-related rashes.

The central plot, when we finally get to it, is a nice twist that balances a sense of realism with the same absurdity that underpins most of the jokes. It’s funny that Maggie’s plan is to get her loser boyfriend back together with his wife, but there’s also a sober realization that John seems different after the glow of new love has faded around him. Maybe the most radical thing Maggie’s Plan proposes – radical for a romantic comedy; not radical in life – is that sometimes, when you’re sure you’ve met The One, it turns out to be a mistake. No because anyone was lying to you – not because you were tricked somehow – just because our feelings about and perceptions of people change over time. Sometimes we act impulsively, because we feel certain in the moment, and then regret the impulsive things we’ve done.

It isn’t fair to compare Maggie’s Plan to Frances Ha, which was helmed by different people, but there’s a strange combination of worldliness and innocence that Greta Gerwig brings to her roles, and that makes a kind of sense in both films. Like Frances Ha, Maggie’s Plan resonates with the gen-Y, mumblecore picture of adulthood that says, “We’re all average, imperfect, confused people trying to stay afloat in a world that feels random and chaotic.” Everything Maggie does comes out of a sincerely felt – if slightly selfish – desire to be authentic and live truthfully while not having anyone get mad at her. It’s emblematic of a generation full of people who are re-discovering and re-inventing How To Be A Person while ignoring all the models that came before. It’s messy and screwed-up and sometimes stupid-looking, but there’s an optimism to it, too. There’s a sense that we can all cut our own paths through the wilderness, even if we mess it up and go the wrong way.

Maggie’s Plan picked up a distribution deal with Sony after it premiered at TIFF, so there’s a chance it will end up in a theatre near you some time next year.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV (both real and made up) on her blog.