Category: Broken Girl Media

Film, Television, Radio, and Gaming

Pop Culture Stuff

  • UnReal is special to me for many reasons, among the biggest being that I identify with Quinn and Rachel more than all of the male characters combined. Shit, I’d be content to be Quinn, and there are only a handful of fictional women who meet that standard. If I could teleport myself into a new career with a snap of my fingers, I’d be show-running The Bachelor and torturing pretty girls for a living.
  • IZombie is back, which makes me happy. Rose McIver’s face is the round, button-nosed essence of adorable, and the supporting cast is stronger than anything outside of an ensemble like The Magicians. Making everything better, Rachel Bloom made a cameo as an involuntary brain-donor this week, which upped the adorability through the roof. (As an aside, If you’d asked me ten years ago which Michalka sister would grow up to be “the hot one”, I would have said AJ. But damn, Aly. Damn. Also if you’d asked me ten years ago if I’d watch a show featuring the guy from One Tree Hill that isn’t Chad Michael Murray, I’d have laughed.)
  • While I’m thinking about iZombie… so both Saoirse Ronan and Rose McIver are in Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones? How did this escape my attention? I skipped it at the time due to all the lukewarm-to-negative buzz… I wonder if it’s actually that bad, or if people were just all Jackson’d out in 2009? I haven’t liked anything he’s made since Heavenly Creatures, so it didn’t seem like much of a loss.
  • Altered Carbon was a giant, watchable mess; lots of big ideas, but no real payoffs. Meanwhile, everyone made a big deal out of the show’s nudity, but c’mon… it’s mostly just Joel Kinnaman and Martha Higareda striking sexy superhero poses with their clothes off. It’s aesthetically pleasing and all, but not hot. And as much as I wanted to like Dollhouse, it’s time we let Dichen Lachman go, or limit her to roles where she’s not required to read lines.
  • Thor: Ragnarok is now officially the first Marvel or DC movie I’ve enjoyed since the original Guardians of the Galaxy. And just to be clear, I would watch Tessa Thompson —who will always be “Veronica Mars’ Tessa Thompson” to me— in a Valkyrie movie ten times over before I would sit through one second of a Wonder Woman sequel.
  • Season two of Jessica Jones is going along fine; I’m only a few eps in, but I’m hopeful it’s going somewhere good. It’s still a little awkward, though… I try not to get all Cranky Fanboy about casting choices, but it bugs me that Krysten Ritter’s physical presence automatically changes Jessica from the dumpy, drunk, depressed schlub of the source material into a leggy model in tight jeans. And I love Krysten Ritter, for the record… Don’t Trust The B should still be on the air. I just think Jessica should be kinda short and generally wearing unflattering clothes.
  • The Last Jedi was good. I enjoyed every minute of it. And Mark Hamill actually seemed at-home on a movie screen for the first time in his life. Rian Johnson is clearly the 21st century’s Miracle Worker.
  • It was boring, because like Stranger Things, it’s too busy being about the ‘80s to be interesting. The ‘80s were terrible, people.
  • Legion is back. I have no idea what’s going on, and I don’t care. I just want more of it.
  • The Expanse is back, and honestly, I wish the entire show was built around Bobbie and Chrisjen. The rest is merely okay.
  • With the third season finale of The Magicians, I’m left thinking (a) that Felicia Day, while lovable, is not a fit for every franchise, (b) the show needs to find a way to make Quentin non-annoying again, and © as a plot device, Fillory is getting old. Also, I know I should be applauding her growth and inner peace, but I miss Sexy, Broken Julia from season one.
  • For the first time ever, I agree with Ronnie… Sam, you should have come back. It’s still fun having the Jersey Shore idiots back without her, but given that Ron is going to spend the entire show talking about her anyway, she might as well be there and collect the check. It’s interesting, though, how the relative maturation of most of the cast is making it clear that Vinny —once the most reasonable person in the group— is his own kind of dickish creep.
  • Last year, we decided to sit down and go through all eight or nine seasons of both Modern Family and The Middle. And I swear to you, no one is more surprised than me to learn that I’d rather watch the latter than the former… I’m sorry, but Sue is just the best. I’m only pissed that they’re all the way to the end of their run, and there hasn’t been a single Scrubs cast cameo other than Dave Foley. What, someone couldn’t throw a few bucks at McGinley to show up for five minutes to play an obnoxious high school basketball coach or something?
  • I’m glad Grant Morrison was able to get Happy! made. It’s gross and weird and I’m shocked it has any audience at all, but it’s very, very good.

Now that most of the run of Forensic Files is on Amazon Prime Video, we’re re-watching the really old stuff that we haven’t seen since the ‘90s, and wow, the tone is different.

In the ep we just watched, the narrator keeps referring to “choke and dump” murders and the “choke and dump” site, which feels like phrasing that wouldn’t fly today. And while the narration simply says that the victim died by slowly bleeding out from vaginal lacerations, the re-creation shows the perp with one arm drenched in blood, like he fisted her to death.

It Was A Different Time.

“Hey Mister” — Custom

Someone pointed out to me earlier today that 2002 was sixteen years ago, and most of you were innocent babies back then, so you don’t even know this song exists.

And talk about a fucking artifact from a time-gone-by…! Custom’s “Hey Mister” is peak perv-rock, up there with some of the greats from previous generations. (A hidden gem from the ‘80s: Deep Purple’s “Mitzi Dupree”, about meeting a chatty sex worker on a plane.) I doubt “Hey Mister” would be released at all today, but even a year after its release, it was still as omnipresent as “In Da Club” during Spring Break 2003.

As for the video? Sure, it’s cheap as hell, but that only makes it creepier, and the body writing just takes it to the next level.

Hey Mister I really like your daughter.
When I’m horny like thirsty
She’s a bottle of water.

Hey Mister how’d it get so bad
You raised her so well
And now she’s calling me dad
In the back seat naked of a new Volkswagen
The perfect little gift for high school graduation.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Spent a few minutes poking around Netflix’s account activity log, and discovered a couple things. First, we didn’t start binge-watching via Netflix until 2013; our first Official Binge would have been back in the ‘90s, when we bought up local VHS copies of Buffy, followed by BSG on DVD in 2004, and (I think) The Tudors via download in the late 2000s.

Anyway, here’s the first ten shows we binged on Netflix, between 2013 and 2015:

  1. Arrested Development S4
  2. Freaks and Geeks
  3. Orange Is The New Black
  4. Skins
  5. The IT Crowd
  6. Doctor Who
  7. The Killing S4
  8. The Catherine Tate Show
  9. House of Cards
  10. Daredevil

The second thing I discovered is that the activity log only tracks the most recent viewing of any given piece of content. Which means that even though you —purely hypothetically, of course— routinely use H.H. Holmes: America’s First Serial Killer as a lullaby to send your grown-up girl off to dreamland, playing it hundreds of times over the course of a couple years, it still only shows up once in the list.

Now you know.

Dolores! Holy shit… what a punch to the gut. You had the voice of…

Dolores! Holy shit… what a punch to the gut.

You had the voice of an angel —or at least a transcendently talented banshee— and when it comes to defining the sound of the ‘90s, you were probably more important than bigger names like Gwen Stefani. You will be missed.

(Lady Macbedtime’s only response when told the news: “NO!” This one is gonna be really hard on the GenX girls; someone put Shirley Manson in a protective bubble now, before it’s too late.)

I Love Dick was —by a wide fucking mile— the best show on television in 2017. If they don’t win some kind of an Emmy or Golden Globe for episode 5, A Short History of Weird Girls, then there’s really no point in anything anymore.

I’m sure Jill Soloway and everyone involved would be horrified to know that someone like me thinks their work is genius, but here we are. That episode in particular is such a triumph that I’m torn between being inspired by it and despondent that I’ll never write anything that good.

Thoughts:

I’ve always disliked Griffin Dunne’s characters, but Sylvere is his crowning achievement in a lifetime of determined unlikability. Sylvere’s a near-perfect distillation of everything that’s quietly insufferable about ostensibly enlightened men; the dude seriously makes my skin crawl in a few scenes. He’s a weak, sniveling little shit who only starts acting like a man when he’s alone in a room with a woman half his age. He’s also the utterer of perhaps the most pathetically unsexy thing a man has ever said to a woman during a handjob: “Your hands are so strong.” Ugh, man. Ugh.

Has anyone ever had a more varied, apparently enjoyable career than Kevin Bacon? He shook his ass for fame in the ‘80s, pivoted into character acting for a couple decades, rented himself out for fun garbage like The Following, and now he’s been cast as the hipster-cowboy personification of Profound Manliness at 59 years old. What a trip.

Kathryn Hahn is great at a certain kind of brusque, fast-talking, pushy comedy, so I didn’t really foresee how she would look when stripped down, literally and figuratively. Turns out, her vulnerability is beautiful. She really digs in and plays with the erotic aspects of humiliation, expertly conveying the way Chris’s obsession with and awkward pursuit of Dick feeds on itself; every poorly delivered rejoinder, every ill-timed decision, and every embarrassing mishap simply makes his attention more of a necessity. Needless to say, the whole thing is right up my alley.

But my favorite part of Weird Girls comes via Lily Mojekwu, whose character spends the first four eps hanging around the edges of scenes, reacting to other people and serving as functional glue for the plot. It seems like a bit part, at best. And then out of nowhere, in episode 5, she’s revealed as a complex, funny, interesting black woman who’s navigating a web of personal frustrations that have been entirely invisible to the white people watching. Television doesn’t get more metaphorically rich than that, folks.