quarter_to_five (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
quarter_to_five) wrote2013-12-17 02:50 pm
quarter_to_five) wrote2013-12-17 02:50 pm
Entry tags:
Funny Women
STILL IN SNOW.
Ahem, anyway, roundup of recent-ish watching, with the theme of (sort of) comedies about women, in order of seriousness.
Mom - I checked this out on a rec ("acerbic and unsentimental," and apparently I...like Chuck Lorre stuff?) (No spoilers, just rambling) I like the premise - recovering alcoholic Christie's own recovering alcoholic mother comes back into her life as her teenage daughter (not an alcoholic) follows in her mothers, and grandmother's, footsteps and finds out she's pregnant (plus, Allison Janney!) - but almost none of the humor actually works for me on a line by line basis. I'm not sure why - I don't mind the laugh track and stuff, but it just feels too hammy. Unlike, say, TBBT where the cast is often good enough to give a twist of demented sincerity to words that are not inherently terribly funny and make it hilarious because of the characterization, everyone here is mostly just on the right side of too sane for it to work.
On the other hand, it's a pretty crude, cruel comedy that's almost entirely about women. All three women are sympathetic, flawed, often goofy and unabashedly sexual, and it all hits just the right note of funny/awful that appeals to me. And there was an episode that had like two lines alltogether said by men and consisted almost entirely of a series of AA meetings of middle aged women talking about their lives. Also, I may kind of totally ship Rudy/Bonnie after the last episode. So i'm probably going to keep watching this one, and I hope it gets a second season.
United States of Tara - About a woman with multiple personality disorder. I loved the first season, enjoyed the second, and then got completely bored by the second episode of the third.(And that's where I've gotten so far.) This just feels like a story that ran out of steam or of anything interesting to say once it started branching out into the bigger world beyond Tara's immediate family. On the other hand, while it stayed there, it was compelling as all hell. Not precisely laugh-out-loud funny, but I appreciated the absurdity of the general situation. The family's often ho-hum response to Tara's over-the-top alts was maybe the funniest.
There was a lot to dig into, in terms of thinking about how the alts emerged and where they had come from, what versions of femininity (or masculinity) they were bringing to different situations and why, and then against that psychological puzzle of Tara herself, the effect of it on the people around her (and then right back on her in an endless mirror.
Orange in the New Black - I agree here that Piper may be the least interesting actual character, but I felt like she was the most interesting question. I mean, I didn't care about her that much as a character, but the challenge she embodied to, well, liberalism, the viewers own (presumed) liberalism and the show's own liberal eye, was really interesting to me. Is this an adequate ideology for actual reality?
Ahem, anyway, roundup of recent-ish watching, with the theme of (sort of) comedies about women, in order of seriousness.
Mom - I checked this out on a rec ("acerbic and unsentimental," and apparently I...like Chuck Lorre stuff?) (No spoilers, just rambling) I like the premise - recovering alcoholic Christie's own recovering alcoholic mother comes back into her life as her teenage daughter (not an alcoholic) follows in her mothers, and grandmother's, footsteps and finds out she's pregnant (plus, Allison Janney!) - but almost none of the humor actually works for me on a line by line basis. I'm not sure why - I don't mind the laugh track and stuff, but it just feels too hammy. Unlike, say, TBBT where the cast is often good enough to give a twist of demented sincerity to words that are not inherently terribly funny and make it hilarious because of the characterization, everyone here is mostly just on the right side of too sane for it to work.
On the other hand, it's a pretty crude, cruel comedy that's almost entirely about women. All three women are sympathetic, flawed, often goofy and unabashedly sexual, and it all hits just the right note of funny/awful that appeals to me. And there was an episode that had like two lines alltogether said by men and consisted almost entirely of a series of AA meetings of middle aged women talking about their lives. Also, I may kind of totally ship Rudy/Bonnie after the last episode. So i'm probably going to keep watching this one, and I hope it gets a second season.
United States of Tara - About a woman with multiple personality disorder. I loved the first season, enjoyed the second, and then got completely bored by the second episode of the third.(And that's where I've gotten so far.) This just feels like a story that ran out of steam or of anything interesting to say once it started branching out into the bigger world beyond Tara's immediate family. On the other hand, while it stayed there, it was compelling as all hell. Not precisely laugh-out-loud funny, but I appreciated the absurdity of the general situation. The family's often ho-hum response to Tara's over-the-top alts was maybe the funniest.
There was a lot to dig into, in terms of thinking about how the alts emerged and where they had come from, what versions of femininity (or masculinity) they were bringing to different situations and why, and then against that psychological puzzle of Tara herself, the effect of it on the people around her (and then right back on her in an endless mirror.
Orange in the New Black - I agree here that Piper may be the least interesting actual character, but I felt like she was the most interesting question. I mean, I didn't care about her that much as a character, but the challenge she embodied to, well, liberalism, the viewers own (presumed) liberalism and the show's own liberal eye, was really interesting to me. Is this an adequate ideology for actual reality?