Tag: tv

Kylie Jenner and Relating to Celebrities

Ana Lucena Leave a comment

If you don’t follow celebrity news, you may (fortunately) be unaware that socialite Kylie Jenner gave birth and announced it on Super Bowl Sunday with the release of a touching video to her daughter. As someone who is mystified by the continued popularity and success of the Kardashian family despite the wide-spread disdain the average Joe seems to have towards them, I want to dissect my experience of seeing people actually care about this birth.

Kylie is 20 years old, making the announcement feel more personal to me as someone who is also 20. She is not the first person my age to get pregnant, with Facebook keeping me up to date on the surprising number of engagements and childbirths that have occurred in my graduating class since we left high school. But I am fascinated by how much difference class seems to make when assessing individual success.  While I struggle to finish essays to graduate, Kylie is already the proprietor of a lip kit line despite the backlash her latest ventures in cosmetics have received. Though the material success at such a young age is impressive to me even as a privileged middle-class college student, the fact Jenner’s family was already wealthy before she came of age due to “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” makes the profits made on the lip kits less a story of individual triumph than corporate strategy. Following in her sisters’ footsteps, she has used her family’s overexposure on television to make lucrative business deals. Knowing how little social mobility there is in America, I am not surprised that the rich only find ways to get richer.

This makes the warm welcome and excited buzz for Jenner conflict me. On the one hand, I am of course happy to hear of a child being born healthy to an enthusiastic mother. This is evidenced by how Jenner managed to keep her entire pregnancy a secret despite being in the media spotlight and rumors being leaked and dismissed for the last few months. The way she did not prioritize making a profit off the attention her pregnancy would have generated is an encouraging sign she wants to put her baby first. However, I deeply question if a young, unmarried mother at 20 years old would have been met with such fanfare if she had been poor or Black. The stereotype of the “welfare queen” painted young, Black single mothers as a huge drain on government aid and was a tool of rhetoric in the public discussion about welfare throughout the presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan. What keeps us from calling Jenner irresponsible as opposed to some of the women most in need in our society — the money she is raking in now, or the financial stability we assume her upper-class status will guarantee her in the future?

I hope that Kylie will be a wonderful mother and has a happy future with her daughter. I hope that Travis Scott is a supportive father even after he will inevitably leave the picture, following what I’ve seen in Hollywood relationships. But what I hope more than this is more critical discussion of how we talk about the way race and class defines the way we talk about women’s agency. It’s clear that the media won’t.

When Product Placement Aspires to Be Art

Ana Lucena Leave a comment

The Emoji Movie sucks in a depressing way I’ve never seen before. It has all the trappings of children’s animated movies, like bright colors, an annoying comedic sidekick, and a quest filled with challenges along the way, but the weight of all the product placement broke its spirit. It’s sad to see Hollywood care so little about the average moviegoer that they would put together such an original corporate cash grab.

I’ve heard people compare the Emoji Movie to Inside Out because both look at the inner workings of a teenager’s mind, the former through his cellphone and the latter through her psyche. I was reminded of Wreck-it Ralph as well because of how familiar characters from video games were an easy way to make a connection with a young audience, who may not care enough to learn about your movie but will definitely have their eye drawn if they already know and love the characters in it. Those video game characters have star power in their own right. Phone apps, on the other hand, do not.

That’s why the Emoji Movie looked so eerily similar to a Disney animated feature on the outside while not having any emotionally intelligent writing on the inside. It was all a farce to stuff as many apps into the movie’s plot as possible, and most of it was just plain boring. I don’t appreciate the fact that this movie still got made with an A-list cast and everything despite all the laughter it received when production was announced. Hollywood executives believed in it when nobody else did, and the idea that youth today are so addicted to their phones that this movie speaks to a cultural zeitgeist or something makes me sick. I learned in a class that adults were concerned by teenagers in the 1950s for using landlines 24/7 to talk to their friends, so I’m convinced that putting down young people for using technology to deepen their relationships is an age-old sign of fear of change. That doesn’t make the Emoji Movie more timely, though, or universal; just cheap. Unfortunately, I can think of other examples of entertainment that were just vehicles for advertising.

The cast of the worst animated movie I’ve ever seen. Source: The Telegraph

The notorious animated move “Foodfight!” ripped off the Toy Story franchise in 2002 with the plot of food logos coming to life at night in a supermarket. Charlie Sheen starred as a dog detective who has to save the day when a femme fatale voiced by Eva Longoria from a generic brand takes over the store with the help of fellow Nazis(!) from the same company and tries to replace brand-name food products and their logos, i.e. nearly all of the other characters. It’s gross that a movie for little kids is teaching them that cost-effective products that are just as good as the national brands are evil and killing big brands, or big business for the owners of those brands, anyway. Thankfully, the film’s animation was stolen and apparently never re-done, so what looks like its first draft went straight-to-DVD in 2012. This is a decade after the celebrities in it were in their prime, but due to the stupid plot and abundance of sexual innuendo between the canine and the evil woman I doubt many people will hear about it.

Boys can buy from Sanrio, too! Source: next-episode.net

Another example of this genre I can think of is the anime Sanrio Danshi, literally Sanrio Boys in Japanese. This show is about a group of high school boys who all love Sanrio products, like Hello Kitty and friends. The main character, Kota Hasagawa, is embarrassed to have other people know he’s a guy who likes cute stuffed animals until by happy coincidence he meets other boys who are huge fans of Sanrio, too. The show was created by Sanrio itself (who would have guessed?) and I’m bitter that a positive message like men can like delicate things, too, is being used just to market their products. I felt completely pandered to with such a cute concept, and find it interesting that this show has a different view on economics than Foodfight! by showing buying as a positive way to express what you’re like on the inside.

The Emoji Movie is more realistic in that buying only really comes up at the end when the boy who owns the phone tries to get it fixed. Still, it was a waste of my time to watch. I hope the movie industry tries to think more about originality and creativity soon, but seeing how many box-office hits are sequels in franchises, I won’t hold my breath.

Bonding through Bad Movies

Benjamin Rosenstock Leave a comment

Watching TV and movies is a good way to bond with friends. Many of my friendships originally began because we shared an enthusiasm for a particular show—I still have go-to friends to text when I watch a new show that I love. But let’s be honest: when it comes to being close friends with someone, you need to have more than just a couple shows you watch in common. To take that final step to becoming close friends, you have to talk about something other than the newest episode of Jane the Virgin. (That said, the season premiere of Jane the Virgin, which aired yesterday, was emotional and hilarious, and I’ll love anyone who watches that show.)

I went on a ‘retreat’ this past weekend with a few of my friends for fall break. We stayed a night at my friend Christian’s parents’ cabin on Sage Lake. There may have been some drinking going on—not that I partook, obviously, since I won’t be of legal drinking age for another two months. But in terms of actual activities, we played some card games, played a game of sardines, and mostly just hung around by the lake or in the cabin. It was definitely a fun way to spend a day, with lots of good company.

Toward the end of the night, we settled down to watch a movie. The movie was largely fun—it was Avalanche Sharks, one of the terrible Syfy schlocky movies about poorly rendered sharks terrorizing civilization. (One of my chief complaints was that there weren’t enough sharks! There should’ve been more gore! At least we got to hear the phrase “it’s spring break” uttered 30 times.) I’m of the firm opinion that if you’re aiming to bond with friends, it’s much more fun to watch a shitty movie than to watch a good one. A couple people wanted to watch Blue Velvet, which I’ve been meaning to see, but on a night when we’re supposed to be having a bunch of fun, is watching a quality neo-noir drama really what we want?

Some of my best experiences with watching movies have been watching dumb shit. My brother and I regularly quote Birdemic, the famously terrible amateur movie about a bird attack. I still smile remembering the night in high school when I got together with some friends and watched Mega Shark Versus Crocasaurus. (We also watched Paranormal Activity 3 that night, but high-quality horror movies might be the exception to the ‘good quality = bad for fun’ rule.) The thing is, most good movies you can watch anytime. You don’t need to be with friends to do it. In fact, I’d probably prefer to watch Blue Velvet alone; it’d probably be more impactful that way. When I’m with friends, on a night kind of meant for bonding, I don’t just want to check off something on my movie list. I want to do something fun.

Maybe that’s why I started to get bored after Avalanche Sharks, when we decided to just watch some TV on Netflix. I get it. It’s a comforting default to put on an episode of Parks & Rec or 30 Rock, especially when everyone is tired. But one of my few disappointments of the retreat was that we started to fall back on TV when we could’ve made more of an effort to connect. Then again, maybe a trip where the explicit purpose is to ‘bond’ is a little forced from the beginning.

I’ve just learned more and more recently that most good TV and good movies I prefer to watch alone. There are no variables—I don’t have to deal with possible spoiler sources, or the slight self-consciousness that prevents me from really physically reacting the same way I might alone. (For example, I actually said ‘what the fuck’ many times when I was alone watching Dogtooth. If I’d watched that with a friend, I probably would’ve said the same thing, but more for their benefit, for the social aspect, than as a genuine reaction.) I don’t have to have my opinion influenced by someone else and what they might be thinking. I don’t have to get pulled out of the experience by some annoying theatergoer who’s laughing a little too hard, or a crying baby, or a guy who’s pointing out the logistical issues in the third act of Finding Dory. I can react the way I want to.

So yeah, there are a lot of reasons I don’t usually like watching high-quality movies and TV with friends. It’s usually better to just pop in something stupid. Sure, it’s sometimes fun to watch It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia when I hang out with friends from home. But every time I’ve watched Caillou, I’ve had a much more memorable time.

Science Fiction For Dummies: Orphan Black

Jeannie Marie Leave a comment

Although I’m not proud of it, I spent almost all day Saturday marathoning season three of Orphan Black, this crazy awesome show that some people have heard of but most people haven’t. But for those of you that don’t know, Orphan Black is a show about clones. Crazy, cool, awesome, kick-butt clones. And I absolutely love it.

My time with Orphan Black started this past summer, when I was studying abroad in England. Although I definitely had zero time for Netflix, and to be honest who wanted to spend time watching Netflix when you could literally explore Oxford, I still explored the offerings that UK Netflix had to offer and was pretty satisfied. And though I wanted to watch all the things, I decided that perhaps starting one show would be good. So when the pubs closed at midnight, I grabbed some food from the awesome food trucks and started a new adventure with Orphan Black.

Needless to say, I was hooked, and burned through both season one and season two pretty quickly, although I ended up stopping around episode 6 of season two because I couldn’t completely ignore my papers, even if I wanted to.

Although I tried to pick it back up once I got back stateside, I never really had time for it, and since I didn’t have it on the convenience of Netflix, I ended up kind of giving up, at least for the time being. Instead, I picked up awesome shows like Jane the Virgin and Quantico on TV right now, and I was satisfied.

But for some reason, last week I decided I wanted to watch Orphan Black, and my roommate chimed in “it’s on Amazon Prime,” which we have on our amazing smart TV in our apartment. So, of course, the order of the day was to finish it as soon as possible. Last night I finished season three and season four thankfully starts next week, and actually at a time when I can watch it live.

As I was watching it, though, I started to wonder what made me like it so much. I do like sci-fi, and I love that the lead is a woman, and it’s definitely a woman-empowerment show, without it necessarily being in your face about it, because Sarah Manning definitely has other things to worry about besides the patriarchy. I love watching the intricacies of Tatiana Maslany’s acting, how freaking amazing she is at portraying all of these completely distinct women. Like seriously, she often has to play one version of a character pretending to be another version, which is honestly mind-blowing from an acting standpoint. Give this woman an Emmy already.

But I also realized that one thing I love about it is that it’s not just sci-fi. It’s almost a whole new genre, realistic sci-fi. I remember when I learned about magical realism and how it essentially blew my mind. That’s what Orphan Black is. It’s sci-fi realism. Although the science, I’ve been told, is pretty far from being accurate, it’s really fascinating how they use the science throughout the show. It grounds the entire plot, making it not “clones from another world,” but real people dealing with this scientific thing. It sometimes gets out of hand, and you are thrown into a world where things happen not as logically as they would in real life, but for the most part, everything seems plausible. Everything crazy that happens on the show happens for a reason.

Science fiction is definitely a strong, diverse genre that often does not get enough credit, being written off by people who don’t like “that Star Trek stuff.” And I’m sure Orphan Black is not the first sci-fi narrative to use science as a way to make something unrealistic seem plausible. But it’s possibly one of the most successful, which is really, really cool, and I hope there’s more like it in the future.

Romance, Here I Come

Jeannie Marie Leave a comment

So I know I talked about Jane the Virgin a couple of weeks ago, but there was an important fact about the show that I forgot to mention.

Besides the million other things that I love about the show, one fact that I’ve always found comforting is that Jane aspires to be a writer. Though she has a degree in teaching, English specifically, her dream is to be a writer. And she actively pursues that dream, oftentimes over her romantic interests – right now, she’s in a creative writing cohort in graduate school.

But this wasn’t all that impressed me about her. To be honest, stories about writers are dime a dozen. For some reason, writers love to write about writers. Call it vanity, but it’s true. No, it wasn’t the fact that Jane was an inspiring writer. It was the fact that she’s an aspiring romance writer.

And guess what? No one says anything about it. Nothing. Her advisor doesn’t call her writing silly. Her mom doesn’t wonder why she doesn’t write a different genre. None of her romantic interests has ever questioned that maybe romance writing is not actually writing, that it’s not serious writing.

Nope. Nada. Nein. Jane is, and always will be, an unapologetic romance writer. And that shouldn’t actually be surprising. But it totally is.

Although I won’t name names, I will say that one time, I got an interesting critique back on a short story. It was, in a way, a romance, but a fabricated one. It wasn’t about love, it was about obsession, and it was meant as a thoughtful questioning of what is the difference between those two. But, in short, yes, it was about a relationship, this one between a man and a woman. But the critique? I remember words like “not feeling it” and “the vibe is wrong,” though this is probably also partially from my poor memory. But one that I do remember? “I don’t think I’m your intended audience.”  

Intended audience or not, does it really matter? Does it matter that my writing was borderline romance? Does it matter if I talked about love? Does it matter if the center of the story was a relationship?

I remember, even though that story was definitely a tough critique, one of my harder ones, that’s what hurt me the most. This person, whatever gender, didn’t take my story seriously enough because automatically it was categorized as romance. And because of it, I couldn’t get a serious critique about it, and it was harder to see what I could change to make the story better without thinking about the “intended audience” and whether I was pleasing that audience.

I was thinking about this in part because it’s Valentine’s Day this weekend, partially because Jane the Virgin was about her romance this week, and partially because I’ve been bingeing a very explicitly romance series.

But you know what? Despite the fact that it’s Valentine’s Day and I’m technically alone, instead of being lame, I’m going to the poetry reading at Literati on Saturday by Amber Tamblyn and then I’m going to do yoga with my best friends. You know what else I’m gonna do? I’m going to watch my romance movies, my romance TV shows, my romance everything. And I’m going to love it and not be ashamed.

Oh, and you know what else? I’m going to write romance. Unapologetic, unabashed, fantastic, life-changing romance. And you’re going to like it.

Why I Absolutely Adore Jane the Virgin

Jeannie Marie Leave a comment

This week, something extremely important happened in my life. What was it, you may ask?

Jane the Virgin returned after its mid-season break this Monday night.

*screams very loudly*

I love Jane the Virgin. I don’t know how many times I can say it in a week – I said it on Monday when the show came on, I said it on Tuesday night to my friends, I said it Wednesday to a girl I had just met. I love this show.

So here’s the story. Last semester, I was scrolling through Netflix to see what they had added recently, and I saw Jane the Virgin on there. I was instantly excited. I had heard really good things about the show, even if I didn’t know anything about it. However, this meant absolutely nothing. There are about 100 things on my Netflix queue that I was “really excited about” 3, 4, 5 months ago.

So when I was having a particularly bad day, and I didn’t feel like doing any homework (although, to be honest, when do I feel like doing my homework), I laid on the couch in my apartment with the lights off and looked on Netflix for something to make me feel better. Surprisingly, I clicked on Jane and started episode 1.

Eventually, one of my roommates migrated into the living room around episode 2 or 3, and we ended up watching either 7 or 8 episodes together. And after that I was hooked. The show was funny, dramatic, serious, clever, intuitive – everything I never knew I could have in a TV show but now needed.

I began telling everyone I knew about this show. I ended up convincing my other roommate to start it, and with one roommate already done, and three currently watching it, Jane the Virgin kind of became the apartment show.

However, all good things must come to an end, and by the time winter break rolled around, we were all done with season one and had to catch up on season two, so that this week we could all watch it together. And of course, we did, and it was fantastic.

Now that we’re all caught up to the present, I should maybe talk about the actual show. There are so many good things I could say about the show, I don’t even know where to begin. As someone who truly cares about diversity (#OscarsSoWhite y’all), I tend to get excited about things that feature a diverse cast. Last semester, I was all about Quantico. Though they could do a bit better, especially in the male cast, I am in love with Priyanka Chopra and Aunjanue Ellis is queen. Last year, I was all about Fresh Off The Boat, featuring the first Asian-American cast on primetime television in 10 years, even if its been surrounded in some much-needed controversy about representation of minorities on television.

So when I started watching Jane the Virgin, I was already pleased at how well the cast was organized. Jane has very strong latina roots, and they come across loud and clear on the show, and yet because of her sunny disposition and ability to befriend anyone, the cast opens up so that it isn’t just a latin@ show, and it doesn’t claim to be one. It doesn’t stigmatize or stereotype the lives of the women on the show, and yet they clearly aren’t there for diversity’s sake. They have complex, emotional lives, and are highly relatable characters.

And not only is the show centered on the lives of latin@s, it also focuses on female relationships and even, at times, prioritizes them over male relationships. For Jane, family is everything, and all of her decisions, her thoughts, feelings, dreams – they are all closely tied to her family. And for a very, very long time, her family has been three women. Three strong, independent, resilient, vulnerable, caring women. Even when portraying Jane as the “good girl” who took care of her teenage mom at times, Xiomara herself isn’t portrayed as helpless. I mean she raised Jane for crying out loud, so that’s saying something. And while Alba may be the grandmother, and therefore the oldest out of the three, she isn’t portrayed as “outdated” or “old-fashioned” in any way. She’s portrayed as strong and caring as well, clearly showing how her traits have been passed down all the way to Jane.

I could keep going, but I think my point is clear. Both comedic and dramatic, both sad and hilarious, both fresh and funny, Jane the Virgin is dazzling. It’s complex, it’s diverse, it resists and even challenges stereotypes, and seriously, when’s the last time you saw the main character of a TV show pregnant for the majority of it? And as evidenced by my apartment, it brings people together.

So your homework this weekend, then, is to sit down and marathon Jane the Virgin. You won’t regret it.