Month: May 2012

I’m surprised I didn’t post about this last fall when it first came out. I watched it in a movie theater, and then again recently on DVD. It is far better than one might expect from the trailer, which appears to suggest the movie is just another standard action flick about competing assassins, with De Niro and Clive Owen tagging along with Jason Statham. Continue reading Killer Elite

Is anyone watching this? I felt duty-bound to watch it since Lena Dunham went to Oberlin, and there still exists video footage of some of her performance art around campus. I found Tiny Furniture to be too precious and privileged for my taste, but I’m very impressed with Girls. I don’t pretend to really understand the current generation of college students (and recent graduates) but something rings true about Dunham’s portrayal of them. The combination of hyper-awareness, deep insecurity, simultaneous comfort and disgust at their own bodies, ability to critique consumer culture while being embedded in it, all seem to capture something real, and quite distinct to this generation. The show is constantly compared to Sex and the City, though it has a far harder edge, shorn of the romanticism of the earlier show. The awkwardness of sex is also front and center in Girls, something very different from Sex and the City. It is too early, three episodes in, for the other friends to have really developed beyond caricatures, but Dunham’s Hannah is a remarkable, and remarkably fully formed, character.