[9.0/10] The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel already answered the question in some ways. How far would Susie go for Midge? How much will she push to break through those “brick walls” (or glass ceilings)? Is it just business between them, or is there something deeper, more personal that merits going further than she would for anyone else?
The answer came, in so many ways, in “The Testi-rostial”. But it doesn’t hurt to see it again in the present. Midge and Susie have tried everything they can to get Midge booked on The Gordon Ford show. Midge nudged Danny Stevens in such a novel yet funny direction that he tried to poach her. Susie staged a coup to get Mike the producer slot. Here, Midge even pens a sketch for Princess Margaret herself that is tasteful but funny, and absolutely kills in a must-win night for the creative team. And it’s still not enough.
So she makes the titular “plea” to Susie -- use your history with Gordon Ford’s wife, Hedy to get me on the show. Midge doesn’t know what she’s asking exactly. She knows it’s an end run around the gatekeepers who would hold her back from stardom. But she doesn’t understand why this is such a big ask for Susie, and in her defense, Susie doesn’t explain and doesn’t want to explain.
In the end, though, she acquiesces. Susie goes to Hedy and asks her to convince Gordon to jettison his rule and book Midge. She talks to the person she least wants to speak to in the world, someone who hurt her, someone she absolutely does not want to owe anything to, let alone ask for a personal favor from. Hedy herself acknowledges how hard this must be for “Susan.” And by god, the last thing Susie wants is the indignity of having to brook Hedy’s suspicions that her relationship with Midge is something more than professional.
But she does it anyway, because it is more than professional, though not in the way Hedy might think. Susie loves Midge. She wants to support Midge. She wants to break down those barriers together. This is her way of expressing it, in doing something much harder than “hopping over dicks” or haranguing talent bookers. It is, more than fixing Midge’s future Hawaiian wedding, the ultimate sign that when push comes to shove, Susie would do anything for her client, or at least this client.
Because she recognized something in Midge, something that Abe is just now starting to recognize in his daughter. When he sits down to dinner with his pal Gabe, and two more men of letters, Arthur and Henry, he is morose, shaken, unengaged with the Algonquin Table banter and intellectual debate of his contemporaries. His world has been shattered by the simple realization -- he’s done it all wrong.
It’s a long, writerly scene, filled with the kind of introspective and philosophical dialogue that could be ponderous in less deft hands. But the crux of it is simple. Here are four older white men, born of the 1800s, rattled by the constant change around them, trying to make peace with it all and realizing, to their creeping horror, that they may have had the wrong view of the world, of their lives, of their children, this whole time.
It’s a bracing thought. We too live in a time of what feels like epochal change to us in the same way it feels to every generation. There is still something harrowing about Abe’s epiphany, one steadily shared by his dining companions. Here are the educated cosmopolitan men, those expected by 1960s society to not only understand how the world works but be the masters of it. It is their jobs, in the eyes of the community and social hierarchy, to be the builders and caretakers of this great civilization.
Only, to Abe’s hollowing dismay, he sees his granddaughter upsetting all of his biases and expectations and, to his credit, it rocks him. He took his son Noah to Columbia, and never considered doing the same for Miriam. He acknowledges that she bought the place that they now live, borne on the backs of her courage and determination. He recognizes a fearlessness in her that he not only didn’t nurture, but doesn’t understand where it came from. (And even in the throes of his realization, can't countenance that she may have gotten it from his Match-Making Mafia combatant of a wife.)
There is an order, a way the world is supposed to work, that has been passed down from Abe by his father and his father and his father. But not to the daughter who disrupts that and makes him understand how the entire system upon which he’s built his life, the entire dynamic and dichotomy that undergirded his worldview, can be dead wrong, and his brave, persevering daughter, who succeeded despite him not because of him, is the living proof.
In the early stretch of Mrs. Maisel, one of the breakthroughs came in Abe understanding why Midge couldn't go back to Joel. It was the beginning of Abe seeing his daughter. Truly seeing her. And now, through her daughter, he sees her ever more clearly, so clearly that, in Tony Shaloub’s best performance on the show, he’s disturbed and disquieted to think about what he missed, and how he got this whole damn thing wrong.
A visit back to her alma mater with her old college comrades sells how close Midge came to sinking into the life her father would have constructed for her. The collegiate scenes are as vivid and fun as any in the show, with witty bon mots and rapid-fire gags as fit for any table. But they’re also a reminder to Midge that, as much fun as these old friends are, as fondly as she remembers her college days, as much as her former pals admire what she’s accomplished, they’re still a part of that world and don’t quite get that stand-up is her career now, not just a detour until she returns to orbit.
That's what she says to Susie in her Grand Central plea to leverage her relationship with Hedy Ford. She accepts having been the good soldier and trusting the process, but wants to make the final push. She acknowledges that it’s a little selfish, but that she wants more. In truth, Midge is a little unfair. Because she agrees that Susie has gone to the mattresses for her time and time again, but questions how far they can go together if Susie won’t go to the absolute limit to help her succeed.
It’s a little more understandable, though, both because Midge doesn’t know the gravity of what she’s asking of Susie and because we’ve seen what happened at the Jack Paar showcase. Susie protests that if Midge does succeed, she won’t want it to be tainted by having had to call in personal favors. But Midge has tried playing fair. She’s tried working twice as hard and being twice as funny for half the money. And it still hasn’t gotten her where she wants to be on talent and hard work alone. So if the playing field is titled against her for reasons beyond her control, why not use whatever arrows are in their quiver, fair or not?
Because most of all, Midge doesn’t want this to be something she did for a few years before settling back down into the staid life her mother and father had been preparing her for all those years. The show teases some of the good times between her and Joel, and as sweet as those were, as fondly as they both look back on them before things went sour, Midge wants more than that now. And in a way her father is just now starting to understand, she has the courage of her convictions to go out and get it.
When Midge opens up a “Letter to her future self” that she wrote in college, it contains only one word -- “don’t.” Maybe we’ll get the context in a flashback in the series finale, something to put a capstone on the thematic throughline of an unexpected boost into feminist rebellion that began the series. Or maybe we won’t. But for now at least, there’s only one other place that word is used.
When Hedy compliments Midge on the sketch she wrote for Prince Margaret, Midge is deferential, accepting her role as the impetus for the idea but crediting the rest of the writing staff for making it funny. Hedy admonishes her with the same word. Don’t. Don’t eschew credit. Don’t cast aside your laurels. Take them. Take them in a world where even the people who love you, well intentioned though they may be, won’t acknowledge them otherwise.
Don’t sell yourself short. Don’t settle for less than you are. Don’t give in to the expectations to simply play the part that's expected. Don’t stop until you’ve done what you set out to do. Maybe it’s just some teenage pablum scrawled into an old coke bottle. Or maybe, somewhere deep down, Midge already knew.
[9.5/10] The most ingenious choice that Greta Gerwig’s Little Women makes is to chop up the story so as to juxtapose present and past. It not only immediately marks this adaptation as distinct from its predecessors, but helps to recontextualize and connect different parts of the story to make it feel new again.
The audience has a chance to meet and appreciate Freidrich before Laurie has burrowed into their hearts. By the same token, the joy and connection between Amy and Laurie can be front and center from the get-go, without springing it on the viewer halfway through the story. And the bookend approach allows Gerwig to put Jo’s drive and travails as a writer into the spotlight early.
But the biggest advantage it confers on the film is how it allows Little Women to constantly contrast the lives that these young girls imagined they would lead one day, with the lives each finds themselves inhabiting in the future. Like the novel it’s based on, Gerwig’s adaptation is anchored squarely around considering the wildest dreams of its titular set of sisters, and measuring them against the paths actually available to women in their time, and the places their choices and passions take them. The jumps back and forth and time allow Gerwig to check expectation with reality, to trace cause and effect, and to resolve the two with poignance and grace.
It also allows Gerwig and company to flesh out each of the young women at the center of the narrative. Jo March still commands the story and the screen. Saoirse Ronan throws herself into the role, conveying all the punch, heedlessness, and subtle vulnerabilities of the character with endearing abandon. It is both a dream role and a hard one, but Ronan makes it look effortless.
And yet, this adaptation makes time for the other March sisters to falter and flourish. Amy is vivid and real from the jump, with her questioning of her own talents, her sense of being second to Jo, and her truth-telling relationship with Laurie put front and center. Meg’s chance at a life of elegance and plenty, the love that pulls her away from it, and the joys and hardships of that choice are given time to breathe. And Beth remains the heart of the film -- still a little too pure for this world, but one who suffers for her own goodness, reminds a kindly neighbor of what’s been lost, and spurs her sister to take up what she’s put down.
All the while, Little Women is utterly gorgeous to look at through the March Sisters’ misadventures. Gerwig and cinematographer Yorick Le Saux capture the bucolic beauty of scene after scene draped in New England splendor. The pair construct tableaus of faraway elegance and local beauty in turn. But these visuals aren’t gratuitous. Beyond making the movie a treat to watch, it helps sell the contrast at the heart of the film. Scenes set in Jo’s youth have a golden hue, an inviting glow that conveys the idyllic, hopeful tone of those early days. And the ones set in her adulthood are darker and starker, visually communicating the various cold realities the March family has had to grapple with in later years.
As necessary as it is to contend with those cold realities, it’s just plain fun to vicariously share in the joy that Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy share with their mother and friends in their family home. Apart from its structural choices, apart from its character focus, the greatest strength of Gerwig’s Little Women is how well it captures this sense of young people at play, of a headstrong young woman in their element, and that unfathomable, spontaneous vigor of youth.
The March Sisters, and their friends and close confidants, fight and babble and hug and exalt together. There’s a move toward Gilmore-esque speed and overlap in conversation after conversation, expressing the happy chaos that envelops these lives. This story is founded on the breadth of possibility forged in such a simple, familiar environment, on the pleasures and satisfactions found despite absences and meager means, on blessings shared and passed around. The warmth of the March household would not work if those who orbit and inhabit it, did not seem so real in their rough-and-tumble interactions and simple joys.
Those joys, however, are meant to run up against the expectations of adulthood that clash with allowances of youth. That’s the role Aunt March plays -- the naysayer to the slack existence her brother and his wife and children have made for each other. But Gerwig does not make her a villain. Instead, she is merely practical, a woman who knows from her own experiences which choices are permitted and which invite difficulties, delivered with an amusing wryness that makes her endearing even as she aims to stifle her nieces’ dreams.
That’s the crux of Gerwig’s adaptation. The March sisters imagine wondrous lives for one another, borne on the backs of each’s great talent. Jo pictures herself as a bold writer in the big city who never marries anything but her art. Meg sees glimpses of a life where she’ll never have to work, where there’s time for things like acting and society and beautiful dresses. Amy envisions the life of the genius painter overseas who stands with giants. And each finds those dreams running aground on the many limitations of the real world, with tethers made extra taut for the declaratively fairer sex.
All except for Beth, whose dreams lie in the simple doing of good, the making of music for those around to hear it rather than for the masses, despite her prodigious abilities. She is the cinch of Little Women, not merely in her death which brings the March sister home. But in her life of quiet kindness at home, in her peace with what must come and the joy to be found despite it, a joy they found together in the attic and can still share and revive no matter how big or little they are now.
Jo, Amy, and Meg each regains a measure of that golden glow in the shadow of the house they grew up in. Amy loses the artists life in Paris she imagines, but finds happiness in a partner who vindicates her talents and for whom love triumphs over station. Meg is denied by circumstance of the beautiful things and easy life she once pictured, but is buoyed by the care and satisfaction of family and a life built with the man she loves. Even Jo turns away from the “spicy” stories that sell to stuffy cigar-smoking New York publishers and finds her truth, finds her greatness, in the bonds fraught and familiar at home, with a winking-but-joyous connection to a beau of her own. And each is seen sharing the fruits of their talents, passing them on to a new generation of young men and women.
There’s a degree of wish-fulfillment to the close of the film, a heartstring-tugging image of familial warmth in a bucolic setting. But Gerwig earns that warmth. The happiness crafted in a humble home is measured against the metes and bounds of the wider world, and found no less worthy. The choices afforded to women of any station at the time are reckoned with and suffered in, with the ensuing joys and small, self-possessed rebellions made more potent in that unfair crucible. The losses each suffers, the distance between the lives they dreamed and the lives they live, is laid bare in the cuts between past and present.
But in the end, Gerwig does as Alcott did, and makes the fulfillment each chooses meaningful by those terms. The hardships great and small each endures, make it more than a publisher-mandated happy ending when, despite that difference between past imagination and present truth, each of these little women realizes they’re living the lives they truly want.
I binged Another Life - not because it was amazing, but because I wanted to get it over with.
While the entire concept of the show isn't new, it still provides an interesting scenario to explore - which is one of the main reasons I was looking forward to and decided to watch all episodes, just to see where this was going. I think the general direction is good, there are just many small things all across the board that have been rather disappointing.
My main issue with this show is the writing. It becomes very clear that this mission is extremely important - yet, the main crew's behaviour is quite immature and inadequate, their decision making often is self-centered, emotional and idiotic. At first, one might think this is due to their young age, but it becomes obvious it's actually just them (their backups are way more professional).
The dynamic between characters is really weird at times, the way they react to each other is sometimes quite irritating. Maybe the writers wanted to explore the psychological effects of such a mission - but the way it is portrayed really isn't enjoyable. The acting in some instances feels over the top, then again in some scenes characters are way too tame/indifferent - this random behaviour made it difficult to immerse myself, I often wondered "where is this coming from?" or "why is there hardly any reaction?". It feels like the writers couldn't decide how certain characters should react in certain contexts so they just went with whatever would provide the most drama. It's a lazy approach imho.
The story itself and all the little things that impact the mission are only designed to create obstacles so the crew has something to do during their journey. Most of their issues are self-imposed (due to their behaviour) and while their solutions can be considered realistic, all of it feels forced. It's like the writers had a rough idea how to get to the final episode and then didn't know what to do with the time in-between, so they invented a number of situations to provide some sort of development, all of which is rather irrelevant in the larger context.
In general, the actors have done an ok job - I think they did their best with the material at hand. If anything, the writers weren't really consistent and tried too hard to make this an unnecessarily over-dramatic journey. As a viewer, I haven't really gained any new insights, I haven't really experienced a gripping story, and couldn't really get involved emotionally - all of which made it really difficult to immerse myself. I'm sure that films like Interstellar , The Martian, Arrival, shows like The Expanse, or books like Blindsight (by Peter Watts) have set the bar higher, so maybe that is one of the reasons I felt Another Life was lacking in multiple areas.
Overall, the reason why this show was disappointing: it has so much potential, the foundation for a great series is right there - it's just wasted on silly things or attempts to mimic really popular films/shows, thus it's a mixed bag of everything resulting in an underwhelming experience.
New favorite episode this season. Hands down.
Alex going rogue and just beating the shit out of Cadmus people was so good to watch. I loved every second of it. And don't you dare tell me that she did it for the wrong reasons. Alex Danvers is the biggest Slytherin to ever Slytherin. At the end of the day, family comes first. That's just who she is. And it doesn't make her a bad person or a bad agent.
Maggie was on my screen for more than 20 seconds! Merry fucking Christmas to me! She's apparently gotten much better at pool, too. And she wanted an actual flash grenade for winning? What a dorky badass. I'd die for her.
"- I wish I had what you two have.
- Go away, Brian."
Am I still laughing? Yes. Yes, I am.
Also, Alex is Maggie's "ride or die". They are such a good team, working together seamlessly, kicking ass and supporting each other through everything. My little gay heart can't handle Sanvers. And Alex would definitely make an excellent arm candy.
Look at that, Kara had her own storyline! And a moral dilemma! And it was about journalism! So much yes. I'm super mad about her getting fired, though. Snapper had better hire her back soon. Remember when working at CatCo was an integral part of Kara's storyline and she said she couldn't be Supergirl without her job keeping her grounded? Good times.
Kara biting her lip while talking to Lena? Supergirl saving Lena and carrying her in her arms? I'm not saying it's gay, but it's so gay. And it's also an interesting, healthy, respectful relationship. Do the writers really think we'd rather see Karamel happen than Supercorp?
"Maybe being Supergirl and having you is enough."
Okay, here's the plan: we go home, we vomit. Then we book the next flight to Vancouver, get into the writers' room and ask them what the fuck they're doing. They should ask themselves "What would Cat Grant say about this?". Because she would definitely disapprove.
But yeah, aside from that one garbage moment this episode was awesome. And that scene between Kara and Alex when they were trying to stop the alien ship was raw and epic, and absolutely, utterly spectacular. This is the kind of content that we should get every week.
Supergirl is finally back, which means that I'm back to getting up at 4:30 AM just to bring you these dank-ass reviews that you guys love so much (sarcasm alert) before I have to go to school.
I think the writers finally remembered that Kara is the title character. This episode focused more on her and put her at the center of the story instead of sidelining her like the last few episodes did.
I just have to say, Roulette certainly knows how to make an entrance. And going from running an underground fight club in National City to running intergalactic slave trade on another planet? That is impressive. I mean, I don't condone her actions, but you gotta admire her talent for business.
I hope that we'll get to see more of Kara the Reporter. Working at CatCo used to be such a big part of her storyline, integral to her growth as Supergirl, and now she's barely ever there. If Cat Grant were here, she wouldn't stand for this.
And she most definitely wouldn't stand for the whole Man-Hell mess. They're trying to make him a more likeable character because they want the audience to jump aboard the Karamel ship. Well, how do I put this politely? You've got to be fucking kidding me. This guy was a selfish, immature jackass right from the get-go, he was just plain rude to Kara on multiple occassions, he didn't want to have anything to do with the superhero business until the plot needed him to. Honestly, it would've been so much better if he had stayed Kara's clueless little brother. She even compared him to her cousin at one point, so how can you not get creepy incest vibes from this relationship? I know I do.
(Sidenote: I feel like the writers saw Katie McGrath and her magical inability to play a straight character, realized that a lot of people shipped Kara and Lena, and scrambled in panic towards the writers' room to get Kara together with the first male character they could think of because we already have one (1) LGBT character on this show and now Kara has to be an Outstanding Heterosexual or the homophobes would lose their minds.
Sidenote #2: I didn't really ship Karolsen in season 1, but goddamn it, I'll take it over Karamel any day.)
I liked Winn's storyline. Jeremy Jordan nailed all the emotions that our beloved computer geek had to deal with after his brush with death. And his excitement when he managed to overcome his fear and defend himself was adorable.
Alex and Maggie were happy and domestic, Maggie was wearing Alex's shirt, Alex's heart eyes were out of control and I fucking died. Then the angst came, but fortunately, it was resolved pretty quickly. And damn, Maggie was sporting such a gay look in that last scene. Amazing.
"- Plus, the glasses don't help.
- I always said that too. It's kind of ridiculous."
Oh, thank God. At least one person's noticed how lame Kara's disguise is. I knew that Maggie "I'm a Detective, Agent Danvers, I detect" Sawyer wouldn't let me down.
