An interesting summary of Lena Dunham‘s Girls from N.Y. Times critic Alessandra Stanley: “Sex and the City served up romantic failure wrapped in the trappings of success. Girls offers romantic failure wrapped in the trappings of failure.”
Dunham’s Hannah “is not a heroine fit for network television. She is plain, unshapely and unpleasant in ways that are only occasionally endearing. She’s a parasite sponging off her parents and a forgetful and sometimes unreliable friend. Her liaison with Adam (Adam Driver), an out-of-work actor, is debasing.
“Adam lets her visit his apartment for sexual gratification — his own — and ignores her desires; most of his sexual fantasies seem borrowed from video games and porn videos. He is just as callous about her feelings, grabbing her stomach rolls and asking why she doesn’t lose weight. Those sex scenes are shocking not because they are graphic, though they are, but because the sex is so unsexy: they are as clinical and coldly funny as the seduction scene of Dottie in Mary McCarthy‘s novel The Group.”
Indiewire‘s Amy Taubin describes Hannah as “a stubborn, petulant, occasionally outraged cherub and a short-waisted, pear-shaped body that makes her desperately unhappy even as she dares us to notice that she isn’t as tall and slim as her best friends, and who is also disgustingly self-involved, lazy, limited in her world-view to the degree that she has one, and forever flinging herself at a guy who uses her like a blow-up sex doll with a bothersome voice mechanism that’s been programmed to say all the wrong things.”
And this: “Modestly entertaining in its defiant immodesty, Girls nails the way that women — make that ‘girls,’ no, make that white, upper-middle class, well-educated, and, as far as they know, heterosexual persons with vaginas — talk about sex. The show does that one thing better than any commercial series television has, including its obvious model, Sex and the City.”
I’d have some comments of my own, but I’ve been. like, too frazzled and disorganized and distracted by Bluray glitches and aspect ratios and everything else to obtain a screener so I’ll just watch along with everyone else on Sunday.
