TV Talk

Is Lena Dunham's Girls the new Sex and the City?

It’s time for a completely unsurprising confession: I love Girls. Lena Dunham’s Girls, that is. The highly polarizing HBO comedy has made a fan out of me, despite instigating hatred in many others. Scores of articles are published daily, lamenting Dunham and her cohorts for being too privileged, too naked, too whiny.

Yet for every hater there is 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 goodbyes, so did I, closing the book on the big city lifestyle I knew even then was unattainable.

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.

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 Magda. 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.

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.

For every hater, there is a girl who sees a sliver of herself in the characters on HBO's Girls.

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Movie Review

Andrew Garfield leads peasant rebellion in medieval film The Uprising

Photo by Betina La Plante/Focus Features

Andrew Garfield in The Uprising.

Writer/director Paul Greengrass made his name with a cinéma vérité style of filmmaking that brought immediacy and depth to three Jason Bourne films, United 93, Captain Phillips, and more. In The Uprising, he uses those skills to tell the story of the so-called Peasants’ Revolt in 14th century England.

Greengrass wastes no time starting the main plot as Ploughman (Andrew Garfield) and his fellow villagers object to onerous taxes put on them by the country’s nobility, led by the young King Richard II (Woody Norman), to fund an ongoing war. Ploughman initiates a violent response over the tone-deaf — and unseemly — way the king’s guard go about their business, and the rebellion soon starts to spread across the countryside, with the citizens looking for a degree of autonomy.

The ever-expanding group makes their way toward London to try to make their case to the king himself. Meanwhile, the king’s top advisors, including Archbishop Sudbury (Stephen Dillane) and Treasurer Hales (Tom Hollander), try to usurp power from the inexperienced monarch even as the king’s mother (Katherine Waterston) tries to get him to be more assertive.

The history of the English monarchy is long and lurid, as Shakespeare detailed in multiple plays, including Richard II. Though the events in the film took place almost 650 years ago, it’s easy to see parallels between what the peasants were fighting for and modern-day politics. Greengrass’ storytelling intent is solid, and the righteous anger the citizens feel is initially relatable and palpable.

But the populism theme of the story soon gets bogged down in drudgery and minutiae that is difficult to understand, especially when the details are lost in the thick regional English accents. The leaders of the rebels — including John Ball (Jamie Bell), Wat Tyler (Cosmo Jarvis), and Alyce (Thomasin McKenzie) — are shown doing a lot of planning, but the strong feelings they have about their quest don’t come across well, leaving the audience as passive observers.

When there is action, Greengrass and his team employ a frenetic style that is not great for comprehension. While the gist of what is happening and what side is winning is legible, individual moments go by so quickly so as to be nearly meaningless. Save for Ploughman, any connection that has been made with various characters proves futile, as Greengrass doesn’t seem to have any time for emotion. Scenes that should feel thrilling or heartbreaking instead come off as empty.

Garfield is a two-time Oscar nominee who has done great work across multiple genres. He’s fine in this role, but whether it’s the story, the filmmaking, or something else, he’s not as captivating as usual. The same goes for other strong actors like Bell, McKenzie, Dillane, Hollander, and Waterston, who each seem to be giving their all to their performances but are somehow muted in the process.

Done right, The Uprising could have been a rip-roaring account of people standing up against their oppressors. What Greengrass has made, though, is a film that can’t translate its medieval story for a modern audience and concentrates too much on unexciting elements and too little on thrilling ones.

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The Uprising is now playing in theaters.

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