Wendy has fantasies of setting up Lenny in bucolic quarters in the mountains of Vermont where he can live with independence and comfort. But given the level of Lenny’s dementia and their lack of resources, Wendy has to let go of those dreams and settle for the facility Jon selects, which is far more modest, in Buffalo, with costs covered by Medicare. Another director might have tried to seize the dramatic content of such a conflict, as there’s no downplaying the seriousness of what it means to provide comfort and care to the beloved elderly one’s family. Jenkins, however, brings the funny rather than the dour. When Wendy and Jon take Lenny to a high-end facility for an interview to see if his mental acuity meets their criteria for admission, Wendy attempts to coach her father into giving the correct answers to such questions as “What city are you in right now?” That Lenny doesn’t know is sad, but Wendy’s earnestness to help him cheat is, somehow, delightfully absurd. Jon gets annoyed at his sister, but recognizes the difficulty she’s having with the situation and gently lets her be.
The general premise of ‘Someone Marry Barry’ is that every group of friends has a “Barry, “or someone who is wildly inappropriate and generally fails at life. Barry’s friends decide the best approach to mitigating Barry’s awfulness is to find him a girlfriend, because I guess he’ll be “tamed” by having regular sex with the same vagina and/or having someone to wash his boxers for him? Their plan backfires when Barry gets into a relationship with Melanie (Lucy Punch), who is just as inappropriate and obnoxious as he is (also even more funny, from the viewer’s perspective).
# The 100 3rd Rock from the Sun 30 Rock 2 Broke Girls A Ackee & Saltfish Adventure Time Agent Carter Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Alias All-American Girl Ally McBeal Alphas American Crime American Horror Story American Horror Story: Asylum American Horror Story: Coven American Ninja Warrior The Americans Angel Anne of Green Gables Archer The … Continue reading “TV Directory”
So far, this is Kristen Bell’s season to shine as the hard-hearted Jeannie Van Der Hooven on Showtime’s ‘House of Lies.’
And it sinks in. We can, half a world away, celebrate Pussy Riot’s name. We can listen to their music and cheer them on. What our challenge as feminists needs to be is to take their cause as seriously as those Carriers of the Cross take it. We must hold on so tightly to our convictions–at home and abroad–that the utter fear and terror of female power that those enmeshed in the patriarchy are emboldened by is neutralized.
The British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards took place on Sunday night. One of the films nominated for “Best Outstanding British Film” was the critically-acclaimed ‘The Selfish Giant’ (2013). It lost out to the sci-fi juggernaut ‘Gravity’ but it is a powerful, low-budget film that deserves a greater audience. ‘The Selfish Giant’ was, also, the only nominated film in that category written and directed by a woman. The director’s name, of course, is Clio Barnard and my primary aim, this post-BAFTA Tuesday, is to appeal to readers to seek out her films, if you haven’t already done so.
But mainstream movies have so much asinine fakery in them, from CGI that looks as if it came off the side of a van in the 1970s to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, audiences hunger for the real. In a time when big American news media are shutting down their offices in other countries (to save money) and more and more Americans are getting their news through the Daily Show and the Colbert Report Jehane Noujaim’s ‘The Square,’ which is nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary and just won The Director’s Guild Award in the same category and Luciana Kaplan’s ‘Eufrosina’s Revolution,’ which was part of Hot Docs and was shown in New York’s 2014 Athena Film Festival follow up on international current events with a thoroughness that is anathema to our amnesia-prone mainstream news media.
My entry point to this area is my interest in creating media that highlights women of color, queer people, its intersection, and other types of characters not often seen on screen. People who aren’t lawyers or in advertising. People who wear the same sweater more than once. People who don’t fit into prefab boxes. My conviction about the need for more diverse content won’t ever falter, but hearing truths from women working in the field is, unfortunately, a downer. While representation of women remains a glaring issue, it’s in the creation of stories and characters where we continue to see problems.
Last weekend, several ‘Bitch Flicks’ writers were lucky enough to attend the Athena Film Festival (AFF) at Barnard College in New York. The festival bills itself as “a celebration of women and leadership,” and it’s a four-day extravaganza of women-centered and women-helmed films. I already wrote about ‘Radical Grace,’ the terrific documentary about nuns fighting for social justice, and here is a whirlwind tour of some of the other highlights of my AFF weekend.
Wilma Pearl Mankiller became the first modern female Chief of the Cherokee Nation in 1985 after working with volunteers from the small rural community of Bell, Oklahoma to bring water to the town. ‘The Cherokee Word for Water’ is the story of this extraordinary woman and leader whose activism on behalf of her community continues to resonate across the Cherokee Nation today.
‘What Maisie Knew’ might have made a pretty good romcom to watch on an airplane or catch cable on a Sunday morning while you sort your junk mail or something. But it has aspirations of seriousness, despite building to a far-fetched frilly bow tie of a resolution (which, was, admittedly, tempting to my id that totally loves watching romcoms on airplanes and Sunday mornings). Ultimately, ‘What Maisie Knew’ wants to have its Tastykake and deliver a strongly-worded lecture about the dangers of high fructose corn syrup and trans fats too.
To be honest, with ‘RoboCop (2014)’ I was expecting a fairly straightforward attempt to cash in on late 80s nostalgia with a shiny, lightweight, brand-recognition film. I expected that the oppressively satiric nature of the original would be lost or watered-down, and that character development would take a back seat to gunplay and explosions. And I was… sort of wrong. The most poignant scene came in the first few minutes of the movie and featured a convoy of military drones clearing a village in the Middle East. Through the cold eyes of an unfeeling news crew, we’re very quickly confronted with the question of what constitutes ethical use of drones when civilians are in the line of fire.