Girls Recap: Season 2 Episode 4: It's a Shame About Ray

For whatever reason there were two episodes of Girls this week. I have no idea why HBO did this but it kind of gave me a funny Rip Van Winkle feeling. Maybe I fell asleep and lost a week. In any case I really enjoyed this episode and would not mind if the whole show was about Shoshanna and Ray.

It starts off with Hannah kicking Elijah out of the apartment. I kind of glossed over that scene because it is Hannah being a giant ass. Then we cut to her talking to Charlie and his little Navaho GF before a dinner party that Hannah is throwing to celebrate that she got paid for her writing. It seems that Gawker-like company paid her for her coke-fueled adventures in the last episode so she makes Pad Thai for her friends. However she invited Marnie but didn't think she would show up. More Hannah being a giant asshole for treating her "best friend" like a piece of crap by putting her in this situation.

Then Ray and Shoshanna show up. Shosh makes all sorts of excuses why they were late involving her earring being left in a car and other weirdness. Ray says they were actually having sex and she doesn't have to lie. They then have dinner and of course the conversation turns to sex. They trade various barbs about butt-plugs (which Shoshanna has never heard of) and how Marnie hates the word butt-hole. Then the Navaho goes off on her telling her she is a "Stepford wife" and forces her to flee to the roof. There is an interested scene of the Navaho getting freaked out looking back and forth with a very scared look on her face. She seems to be losing Charlie which isn't much of a loss IMO.

Of course idiot Charlie goes after Marnie. That guy is the worst. He then tries to cheer her up and then in doing so cops a feel and kisses her. Wait this girl dumped you and you have a new girlfriend and then you pull this. Marnie to her credit pushes him away saying she is seeing Booth Jonathan. Wow talk about your crappy choices. It is either worthless, clingy scumbag Charlie or freaky Ewok Jonathan. I hope the Marnie getting-hit parade ends with this episode.

Hannah finally does something laudable when Charlie calls Marnie a cunt. She goes off on him while defending her friend saying all the bad things that happened to her. Also I noted that Hannah did not add anything about herself to that list of bad things. Finally, Hannah thought of someone other than herself. This is the person from the first season that I sometimes enjoyed watching. 

Then we get to one of the best scenes in the entire show's brief history. Shoshanna finds out that Ray is basically homeless and is living with her. He then proceeds to eviscerate himself while they are waiting for the subway. He says that he is a 33 year old loser whose most prized possession is a signed photo of Andy Kaufman. He was counting the days until she found out that he was a loser.

He then asks her "why am I worth dating?" Shoshanna then says in her tiny little voice "because I am falling in love with you." Then Ray freaks out saying "it is too soon to say that. Just too soon." Then Shoshanna apologizes and when the subway car passes and Ray says " I love you so fucking much."

Bang! That is why I watch this show. The characters that Dunham has made are very real feeling. You want to see them succeed or fail and lead interesting lives. That scene was head-and-shoulders above anything in Sex in the City or nearly any other romantic comedy could muster. It was outstanding and a credit to Alex Karpovsky and Zosia Mamet acting chops. If Girls can muster scenes like this it will become a very iconic HBO show.

Finally we have Hannah singing Wonderwall to herself in the tub. I guess she is depressed or something but it is hard to tell. Jessa then pops up after she has broken up with Thomas John and is gob-smacked. She is crying like crazy because her whole world has been thrown up in the air. She has to start from scratch again. Jessa then strips and gets into the bath with Hanna and they console one another. Hannah then does a sweet thing by cheering her up and being funny. I guess there is a heart under all those self-possession after all.

In any case the next episode has Hannah probably hooking up with the Nite Owl from Watchmen (Patrick Wilson.) I am hoping it isn't focused too much on Hannah doing a bunch of the same crap. I want more Ray and Shoshanna.

Girls Recap: Girls Season 2 Episode 3: Bad Friend

Well this is the one where Hannah goes from loathsome character to someone you just want to see fail. She takes self-possession to a whole new level. We start off with Hannah getting a job from some strange Gawker like blogging concern. The editor tells her to have a threeway with people she meets on Craigslist or take a bunch of cocaine and write about it. Hannah of course picks the cocaine.

She gets if from a junkie that lives below her apartment from a guy named Laird that wears a little knit beanie. He is actually recovering but still points her in the direction of the drug dealer. He also has a turtle who he says sometimes is an asshole.

She then takes a bunch of coke with her kind-of-gay roomie Elijah and they are freaking out and writing on the walls. They then go to a dance club called the Greenhouse that is being DJed by iPad DJs Andrew-Andrew. They happen to be real people that make a cameo in the show. The Greenhouse looks like one of those places that Stephon the New York club reporter played by Bill Hader talks about on SNL. Lots of people with glow in the dark things on their face dancing spasmodically.

Her and Elijah snort coke off of a black toilet seat like it was 1986 again. However, Elijah lets slip that he had sex with Marnie. So of course Hannah freaks out and dunks her head under a faucet.

In the meantime Marnie meets Booth Jonathan at her hostess job. She then proceeds to hang out with him in a warehouse (or maybe a firehouse) that he has converted into his artists studio. I wonder if people are going to miss her at the job or was it the end of her shift? I have no idea. He is doing some strange crap with blood and a doll house and other nonsense. He also locks her in this television pillar thing that plays all sorts of freaky stuff. It kind of reminded me of the stuff playing in the background in the 70s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory movie when they are riding on the boat.

They then have some super weird sex where he makes her look at a doll dressed in a frilly blue dress. He is literally laying on top of her spread-eagled and asks her how does the doll feel. Marnie says "sassy?" which cracked me up. She is really spiraling out of control as the season progresses.

After Hannah finds out about Eligah and Marnie she heads over to Booths warehouse studio and proceeds to verbally smack her down. That scene was sickening and I just wanted to dump the potted plant on the table in the scene on her head. Hannah berates her and attacks her and forces her to say that she was the bad friend and that Hannah is a good friend. It was so bad because Hannah is a terrible friend. She doesn't care about anyone but herself.

Then Hannah has sex with Laird I guess to take back the power or something. She is such a loathsome character that it isn't even funny. I am mostly tuning her out to concentrate on the other characters. They seem much more interesting than the self-centered jerk-weed that is Hannah.

Movie Review of Mama

Well I saw the movie Mama last night. This is a new movie from Guillermo del Toro about two girls abandoned in a cottage in the woods and what happens when they are rescued. The movie opens with them being loaded into a car by their dad who is the guy that plays Jaime Lannister from Game of Thrones. He is supposed to have shot his business partners and his wife after some kind of financial crash.

They flee to some snowy part of New England and accidentally crashes his car. The father and his two kids who are 3 and 1 find an abandoned cottage in the woods. He then tries to shoot himself and when he couldn't tries to shoot the girls "Of Mice and Men" style. Before he could do it he is grabbed by something and tossed into the air and is presumably killed. Then we see the children trying to survive in front of a fire and a cherry rolls into view. Whatever killed the father is now taking care of the girls.

Then we cut to 5 years later and it turns out that the girls father has a twin and he is looking for the girls but is almost out of money to pay the searchers. He is reassured by his GF Annabel who is played by Jessica Chastain who looks barely recognizable as a tattooed, black-haired bob cut, bassist of an all girl rock band.

The girls are eventually found but they are feral and covered in filth. A psychologist works with them and eventually breaks them out of their state. The older girl is able to speak bu the younger girl is mono-syllabic and moves around like some sort of freakish monkey. Del Toro really does a good job of making their movements very off-putting and weird.

I'm not going to do a total analysis of the plot but suffice it to say there were quite a few interesting scenes and nice jump scares along the way. All of the roles were acted with quite a bit of gravitas and both child actors did a great job. The younger girl that played Lilly did an exceptional job of being creepy and weird and generally freaking out the audience. I think Chastain is a great chameleon type actress and it will be nice to see her in newer films.

The creature was hidden quite nicely though the first two acts of the film. It was mostly shadows and lots of weird floating hair. There was one scene where you can see that the creature has had all of her bones broken and it moves in this lurching, crawling manner. It gave me a little shiver that was quite nice to see in a scary movie.

The ending was perfect IMO and was not formulaic Hollywood. It shows that Del Toro actually puts a little extra into his movies so they won't just be another generic ghostly horror type of movie. This movie could have easily been another creature-feature like the Paranormal Activities and its many offshoots but Del Toro and the great acting raised it above those films. One thing that kind of sucked is that Nikolaj Coster-Waldau was missing from 2/3 of the movie. He was injured near the beginning but then kind of disappears for quite a bit of the movie. I guess there might have been some scheduling problems or something because I found it pretty odd.

After seeing the creatures and how he filmed the flashbacks in Mama I would love to see Guillermo del Toro do an H. P. Lovecraft adaption for the big screen. Maybe he could tackle At the Mountains of Madness, Shadow of Innsmouth, or Dagon. Hell, he would be great doing anything from Lovecraft's Dream Cycle especially The Dream Quest of Unknown-Kadath. Unfortunately his new film Pacific Rim looks like ass so I won't be seeing that one. In any case Mama is a great movie and is a definite must Redbox. However, seeing it in the theater really doesn't add much.

Girls Recap Season 2: Episode 2: "I Get Ideas"

This episode open with Adam singing some weird-assed song to Hannah and her and Elijah watches it and makes fun of it. They are afraid that he will kill himself at the end of the gmail "album" and decide not to watch it. Hannah is becoming even more unlikable than she was in the past.

She also breaks up with Sandy in the most passive aggressive manner she could think of. Sandy puts off reading her essay but finally breaks down and tells her what he really thinks of it. He says although it was well written nothing actually happens in it. So Hannah of course goes off on his Republicanism spouting some BS about gay rights and gun control. She also says that 2 out of 3 men on death row are black like Sandy should be concerned about that. Then he talks about how she has fetishized his blackness. She asks him for sex but he refuses her and she storms out. She is turning into a female Larry David.  Also that superficial look at the GOP is so twenty-something. I would have loved to hear why Sandy is a Republican and his parents are not. I bet that is just too high-brow for this show. In Hannah's world Republican=evil and that is that.

I think they seriously short-changed Donald Glover. There could have been some interesting arcs with race and politics that they could have explored with him but it was ignored. Instead he went from doting BF to evil Repug in just one episode. This is case-in-point of Dunhams poor development of certain characters. My money is on her not being able to write for a black Republican in anything other then a superficial way. So Hannah cuts him loose to spare her comically thin skin so Dunham doesn't have to write for such a character going forward.

Then she meets up with Marnie and attacks her by saying that at least she is "making clean money and not cashing in on her sexuality" which is rich when directed at someone that has paid her rent for months. Marnie is just trying anything she can including a "pretty person" job because it looks like museum curator is no longer a career choice. She is reeling and grasping for straws. Marnie's world has been turned upside down and Hannah can only dish out the judgement toward her career choice.


Finally Adam comes up to her apartment and uses her emergency key. It is very stalker-ish and creepy to not only show up unannounced but come in as well. Hannah dials 911 but hangs up when Adam comes close to her. They first lie to the cops but Adam shouts out his whole name and the cops check it. Sure enough he has unpaid parking tickets and a bench warrant for public urination. The cops take him away and Hannah yells after them half-heartedly while putting on her shoes. The line "I'll come with you if you tell me where you are going" sums up how crappy she is now.

The main takeaway is that Hannah has become quite the loathsome character. She is so thin-skinned and vindictive that people are hiding things from her. Marnie and Elija go all out to keep their sexual misadventure quiet to avoid her finding out. Elija casually tells his boyfriend/benefactor and they fight quite loudly. Hannah is of course oblivious trying to do some kind of online exercise program. I am certain that if Sandy said her essay was great and gave it some vague platitudes she would not have broken up with him Republican or not.

I wonder if Dunham wants us to hate Hannah so badly that we want to see bad things befall her. At least the other characters seem somewhat likeable so we aren't watching some totally bad show like Allen Gregory. Every character in that show was awful and you couldn't stomach them from week to week. Maybe we can go in for a "Girls without Hannah" cut like they did for Attack of the Clones that cut all scenes with Jar-Jar Binks in them.

Girls Recap: Season 2: Episode 1: "Its All About Time"

Well after seeing season one I decided to write a nice little recap of what happened in this past episode. Girls has been a very interesting look into the strange world of 20-something girls living in gentrified Brooklyn finding love and trying to get by as best they can. It is like Sex in the City but without a shoe budget, rich boyfriends, or huge uptown apartments. I enjoy Dunhams comedy and willingness to make herself look ridiculous to get a laugh out the audience. I have been looking forward to this new season for a while.

This current season finds lots of role reversals with Hannah (Lena Dunham) being much more in charge than the first season. The first scene is with her snuggled up with her gay roommate and seemingly totally over Adam from the first season. She is now dating (kind of) a black guy named Sandy played by the comedian Donald Glover. She is feeling guilty about not telling Adam about their being together. Sandy and Hannah gambol about kissing and having sex with one another in several scenes. I guess Sandy is Dunhams way of deflecting the "Brooklyn is just a bunch of white people" attacks she got last year. Sandy seems like a nice enough fellow and I'm sure Hannah will make him fall for her and then kick him in the nuts in the coming episodes.

The next scene shows Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) smudging her room with sage to purify it from the bad energies that losing her virginity seemed to cause. It seems that Ray has de-flowered her and ran for it. Then we see Marnie (Allison Williams) getting fired after lunch by her weird-assed boss who seems to tower over her for some reason. The boss can't fire the other screw-up guy that also works in the gallery because she slept with him and is afraid of a lawsuit.

Hannah is now taking care of Adam who is in a long leg cast. It seems that being clipped by the mirror of a truck has somehow broken his leg pretty badly. Hannah is being a total housemaid to him but she is no longer with him. She even holds a pot to let him take a piss into. She doesn't seem mortified or embarrassed and had a "no big deal" look on her face. This is a far cry from her freaking out when he peed on her in the shower. Hannah seems to be growing or maybe she is just used to Adams urine.

Next we see Hannah and her gay roommate stringing up lights for a house party. They are so cutsey together as they suggest various theme nights. I was thinking that those nights will never happen because Hannah will be taking care of Adam, banging Sandy, or generally being the same selfish ass-hat that she often devolves into.

Meanwhile Marnie is having a tough go of things. She is told "she looks 30" by her mother. She actually does look quite a bit older for some reason. I think they darkened her makeup or something because she looks thin, tired, and miserable. Maybe it was a lens filter that Dunham chose or something. The scene with her and her mother played by Rita Wilson is hilarious. I loved the line "sometimes you just want rough hands on your body" said by Wilson and then seeing Marnie going "that's gross."

Now we cut to the houseparty which is a bunch of hipsters with faux-hawks hanging out and drinking wine. There seems to be a multi-racial crowd too. I guess its more compensation by Dunham to shed her "racism." Shoshanna is avoiding Ray as best she can but you know they are getting back together.

Marnie sits down in Hannahs room to talk. She feels that she has lost everything and needs some sympathy. Hannah gets naked to change clothes. I think Dunham is contractually obligated to get naked at least a few times in every episode. Hannah has that "I'm too busy to be a friend" vibe going and says she has been busy writing and hanging out with Sandy and nursing Adam. In other words her life and struggles take center stage all the time. Suddenly her gay roommate bursts in and tells her to help him with his drunk boyfriend.

Next there is a scene with Marnie talking to her ex-bf Charlie hanging outside of the toilet waiting for his current GF the "tiny-Navaho." He says that she doesn't know anyone at the party so he is waiting for her right outside of the toilet. This is exactly why I hate this character. He is such a wimpy bastard. Just wave her over if she looks lost. She asks Marnie "if she has any powder" which I assume means coke. Um, trouble in paradise between the love-birds. Marnie can swoop in and pounce on this wimpy bastard if she wants him. 

The drunk gay boyfriend is doing Karaoke and then starts berating the young hipsters for being "boring and not doing even doing one fucking song." He rips into the 20-somethings in a way that is familiar to watchers of the show. It seems that older characters making fun of or berating the precious 20-somethings is running gag that never seems to get old.

Hannah walks the drunk guy outside and then runs back and locks him outside of the apartment. She also has to deliver pain meds and a care package who gets all "I'll die without you" on Hannah. She elects to stay with him instead of going back to her party.

Before that happens we see Shoshanna looking for her purse and Ray comes in and they have a nice little scene. Ray complains that when she isn't next to him she sends him texts with "emojis" with a panda, a gun and a present. I have no idea what he is talking about here or what that is supposed to mean. I guess this shows that Shoshanna is nutty. However, Ray seems to be drawn to her and he tells her he misses her charm, innocence, and strength. He misses her "fresh vibrant sincerity." They have a passionate kiss and are all over each other. I am really hoping these two live happily every after. If Dunham is smart she makes this the "relationship that works" to contrast all of the other Girls and their mistakes.

Then we cut back to the party and everyone has left except for Marnie and Hannah's gay roommate (Elija) are singing Karaoke in a boozy stupor. Marnie says she couldn't be a gay man because "she hates giving blow jobs and she hates anal sex. She assumes." She hasn't had anal sex so she has no reference. This is typical Marnie. She seems to love to over-share about herself.

Then it seems Elijah really isn't "all the way gay" and comes in for a hard kiss. Marnie hits him and he kisses her again. Then they have one of the most tortured sex scenes I have seen in a long time. Marnie is doing everything she can to cover her boobs while Elijah gets naked in a flash. I guess Williams is contractually obligated to cover he naked body at all times because she nearly dislocates her shoulder to take off her top. They have intercourse but Marnie ruins it by rolling her eyes when Elijah gets a little soft and needs some hand stimulation. I replayed the scene and Marnie really doesn't roll her eyes but does have a weird look on her face. I was waiting for Hannah to bust in on them inflagrante delecto for added hilarity but that wasn't meant to be. The scene ends with both of them sitting there with a "what the hell was that" look on their faces.

Finally we see Hannah going to Sandy's apartment for late night hanky-panky even though earlier she says she wouldn't be doing that. She strips down to the panties in like 5 seconds and lays on his bed. Then we see Marnie go over to Charlies place because she "just wants to sleep next to someone." I think Marnie is going in for some serious craziness this coming season. Hannah is self-centered as always, her mom doesn't seem to care, Charlie is a wussy bitch, and Jessa is married to some rich doofus so there is no one there for her. She is going to be rudderless and jobless much how Hannah was in the first season but with no Adam to obsess about. I'm thinking there will be an epic meltdown for poor Marnie.