Reel life

Would would Sex and the City's Carrie Bradshaw do? Watch season finale of Girls — and be proud

It’s time for a completely unsurprising confession: I love Girls. Lena Dunham’s Girls, that is. The highly polarizing HBO comedy, which has its season finale tonight with reruns throughout this week, has made a fan out of me, despite instigating hatred in many others. And instigated, has it ever. Scores of articles are published on a daily basis lamenting Dunham and her cohorts for being too privileged, too naked, too whiny.

If Sex and the City represents the glitz and glamour of being a single woman in the city, Girls is the hair you pull from the drain after one too many updo s.

Yet for every hater among us lives a girl who sees a sliver of herself in the characters of this awkward group of Brooklynites. There’s free spirit Jessa, quirky Hannah, uptight Marnie, and the oddly relatable and undersexed Shoshanna. And it reminds me of something…

A teenager raised with the spoils of premium cable, I lapped up Sex and the City voraciously, albeit age inappropriately. I learned about waxing from Samantha, read Vogue along with Carrie, fought the feminism fight with Miranda, and even dreamed about Mr. Right with Charlotte. Yet when Carrie et al. said their final goodbye, so did I, closing the book on the big city lifestyle I knew even then was unattainable.

And then I went to college. In between classes, girls would stay home and marathon the show in syndication. They bought the DVDs. They had theme parties. They went on tours of New York. But most notably, they identified themselves by how they related to the show.

Sexually adventurous and outspoken? You’re a total Samantha. The best-dressed articulate friend? Carrie, to a T. Prudish? Charlotte. Duh. I was once reluctantly pegged as 75 percent Miranda, with a touch of Carrie and a dash of Madga. The maid. Clearly I wasn’t winning this game.

Yet women were making relationship decisions based on the age-old WWCD, mentality. What would Carrie do? She’d do nothing. She’s fictional.

Conveniently also a property of the Home Box Office, Girls is giving women a whole new set of archetypes in which to fit their personalities — grungier, more spendthrift archetypes. I’ll put it this way: If Sex and the City represents the glitz and glamour of being a single woman in the city, Girls is the hair you pull from the drain after one too many updos. Or at the very least, the mascara under your eyes after a long night out.

Regardless of the often cringe-tastic nature of the Judd Apatow-produced comedy, there’s something real about the way these women live.

Dunham’s Hannah Horvath is awkward. She possesses a more typical body type, and she most certainly isn’t afraid to show it on screen. Sure, she gets financial support from her parents, and doesn’t take kindly to having it relinquished, but she lives in a totally feasible apartment in a neighborhood not inhabited solely by socialites. She wears normal, even dumpy, clothes. She wore a sleeping bag and a mesh muscle tank all in a two-week span for god’s sake.

That’s not to say that there aren’t problems with the show. Though free-spirited, self-centered Jessa is a jetsetter without a care in the world who marries an investment banker after denying him a threesome. Marnie is uptight and unlovable, even when she’s completely down. Shoshanna, the JAP virgin, oddly becomes the most relatable, even when she sexts via emoji and oogles her Sex and the City poster. The irony’s not lost there. And Hannah's proclamation that she's the voice of her generation is enough to make this writer gag at times.

Regardless of the often cringe-tastic nature of the Judd Apatow-produced comedy, there’s something real about the way these women live. And if a college student five years from now purges the DVDs and decides she wants to have a gay roommate and wear Urban Outfitters clearance rack fare, I don’t see anything wrong with that.

In fact, I think Carrie would be proud. It’s not responsible to go into debt to support a shoe habit. At least Hannah spends her money on cupcakes.

unspecified

Movie Review

Feuding couple fights for survival in dark comedy Over Your Dead Body

Photo courtesy of IFC Films

Jason Segel and Samara Weaving on Over Your Dead Body.

When dysfunctional couples are depicted in movies, about the worst that typically happens is an acrimonious divorce. But in the new comedy/thriller Over Your Dead Body, the husband-and-wife have already gone way past that point by the time they’re introduced to the audience, with their plans leaning toward murder.

Dan (Jason Segel) is a low-level filmmaker relegated to directing pop-up ads, while Lisa (Samara Weaving) is an actor making do in small theater productions. The film finds them heading toward a rare getaway to a remote lake cabin, but it’s clear from the start that the married couple has been at odds for months, if not years. As the film begins, Dan clumsily drops hints at an alibi for his planned murder of Lisa to his ailing dad (Paul Guilfoyle) and others.

His shoddy planning was already sussed out by Lisa, who turns the tables on him when he tries to attack her, revealing a plan of her own. The situation naturally heightens their shared enmity of each other, but their blind hatred turns out to reveal the presence of Pete (Timothy Olyphant) and Todd (Keith Jardine), two escapees from a nearby prison who were helped by guard Allegra (Juliette Lewis). What was once a shared murder plan turns into a fight for survival, forcing Dan and Lisa to work together.

Directed by Jorma Taccone (The Lonely Island) and written by former SNL writers Nick Kocher and Briand McElhaney, the film aims to mine comedy out of darkness. Dan and Lisa’s ire for each other is palpable, and their interactions early in the film are uncomfortable. As the film turns increasingly violent with the introduction of other unsavory characters, most of the humor is derived from the creative ways people are attacked and the ultraviolence that results from them going after each other.

It’s a little tough to get fully invested in the story when the filmmakers throw the audience directly into the plot with almost zero setup. There’s not even a cursory montage of Dan and Lisa being in love, so it’s hard to care a lot about their current hate for each other. Likewise, the presence of the prison guard and escapees is completely random, and the three of them aren’t utilized well in the story despite having a couple of well-known actors portraying them.

The saving grace of the film, though, is the twists and turns it takes in the final act. Everyone on screen is put through the wringer, with each of them suffering multiple injuries or worse. The mayhem becomes so chaotic that it’s almost impossible to tell what’s going to happen next, which slightly makes up for the fact that the story as a whole is lackluster. Even though the audience knows they’re being manipulated, the sequences are entertaining enough to overcome that fact.

The cast as a whole is solid. Segel (How I Met Your Mother, Shrinking) uses his comic sensibility to keep the proceedings light. Weaving (Ready or Not) has done multiple movies in this vein, so she knows how to navigate the comedy/thriller waters. Olyphant feels a little out of place, but he has a presence that elevates his part. Lewis goes a little too manic in her part, and Jardine ably embodies the dumb brute.

The comedy history of Taccone, Segel, and Weaving keeps Over Your Dead Body as a positive experience even when the story doesn’t quite measure up. The film never becomes fully predictable, giving the audience a great dose of pandemonium that lifts it up despite its other faults.

---

Over Your Dead Body is now playing in theaters.

movies film