‘Broad City’ and ‘Girls’ on Their Own Terms
My friend Hopie has an acronym that I love: “TMTM.” It stands for “The More, The Merrier,” and back in our twenties we used it when assembling invitation lists for club outings and dinner parties. These days, I’ve found a different application for the term: to nip female competition in the bud. Which woman is prettiest, funniest, smartest? Why choose? TMTM!
I mention this because, with the season premieres last week of both “Broad City” and “Girls,” comparisons between the two shows are flying fast and furious. In a way, it’s inevitable. Both are half-hour TV comedies about young women stumbling through New York City. But strike the “women” from that premise, and we’ve got the description of many of TV’s most successful sitcoms over the last fifty years, from “Friends,” “Seinfeld,” and “Will and Grace” to “Taxi” and even “I Love Lucy.” So rather than pitting them against each other, “Broad City” and Girls” deserve to be lauded for their individual merits. An either/or binary is a scarcity model that assumes only a limited number of females should be allowed to shine. And if there’s one thing these two shows do have in common, it’s that both deserve their moment in the sun. Continue Reading →
Space Crone at the Movies
All week I’ve been in a low-grade bad mood about my upcoming birthday. Normally I don’t mind aging; I consider my age a badge of honor in that way that 18-year-olds lord their senior status over freshmen in high school, and I’ve happily anticipated the stylistic and intellectual freedom of the self-realized space crone. But this has been a challenging year full of problems I’d hoped to have outgrown by now, and it’s given me a case of the What’s-It-All-About-Alfies. Anyway, last night I had to pay to see a movie whose press screenings I’d missed–a movie I was ambivalent about reviewing even when seeing it for free–and I decided to take back the whole situation. So I requested a senior citizen discount from the snotty-looking 19-year-old in the ticket booth, and, without blinking, he gave it to me. I know, I know. Members of the AARP would justifiably bludgeon me for such deceit but in that moment I needed a tangible payoff for getting older. The universe, g-d love it, gave me one.
Far From Perfect, Perfectly Mann: ‘Blackhat’
The opening few minutes of “Blackhat,” Michael Mann’s first release in nearly six years, are its dullest, and I’m fairly certain that’s deliberate. Mann is a director who’s always practiced the slow burn, and a cruddy-looking, old saw of a beginning – the camera zooms through a mouse-colored maze of computer wires and microchips – is in keeping with his strain of bombastic understatement, especially in a film about the pyrotechnics of cyber-terrorists. It’s not that Mann is establishing himself as doggedly anti-technology (as point of fact, he’s not anti-technology at all); it’s that he’s setting the stage for a different kind of action movie, one in which its hacker hero reads physical books by Foucault.
The hero in question is Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth), and we’re introduced to him after an explosion at a Hong Kong power plant and an attack on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange are traced to the same “remote access tool” (RAT). Enlisted by Chinese officials to track down the mysterious “blackhat” (slang for dangerous hacker), programmer Chen Dawai (Wang Leehom) ropes in his computer engineer sister Lien (Tang Wei) and then convinces the U.S. to release imprisoned programmer Hathaway on furlough; while undergraduate roommates at MIT, Chen and Hathaway wrote the code on which the RAT is piggybacking. Rounding out the anti-cyberterrorism team is an unblinking Viola Davis as Morgan, a fed who’s been scarred by 9/11. Continue Reading →