Jordan Ferguson is a lifelong pop culture fan, and would probably never leave his couch if he could get away with it. When he isn’t wasting time “practicing law" in Los Angeles, he writes about film, television, and music. In addition to serving as TV Editor and Senior Staff Film Critic for Next Projection, Jordan is a contributor to various outlets, including his own personal site, Review To Be Named (where he still writes sometimes, promise). Check out more of his work at Reviewtobenamed.com, follow him on twitter @bobchanning, or just yell really loudly on the street. Don’t worry, he’ll hear.
Michelle MacLaren is absolutely fantastic. It’s early yet for the sentiment to mean much, but I imagine months from now, it will still hold true that “Mijo” is one of the best directed episodes of 2015. Watch how she opens with quick cuts, of what we aren’t yet sure.
There are two major forms of tragedy. In one, all of the sorrow is caused by the tragic flaw of the central character, some weakness that they give into, leading to disaster. In the other, the sorrow is unavoidable; the events that unfold do so because they are fated to happen, and no amount of negotiation, compromise, or ingenuity can prevent them from occurring.
Its difficult to feel stuck in a web of your own making. It is tough to have made a decision, to have taken a chance, and to find those choices slowly rearing up to swallow you whole. Sometimes it is good to feel like you are in over your head; its in these moments that we learn to swim.
If you’re liable to lose faith in the movies in these early months of the year, when studios use theaters as their dumping grounds for whatever doesn’t fit elsewhere (largely for quality reasons, though there are usually some hidden gems that just belie marketing), seeing the Oscar nominated short films should disabuse you of …
In life, things pile up. Issues get punted down the line, small grievances fester, the metric weight of being hurt by the world begins to weigh you down. The good things about your life, the small instances of kindness or the miraculous moments of triumph, can accumulate as well. Yet rarely do those feel as vast, complex, and ever-present as the little indignities and tiny cuts we all endure throughout our lives.
One of the things that has always been a bit muddled about Girls is just how seriously we are supposed to take the dreams of its central characters.
Jordan Ferguson:: One of the keys to a great episode of Saturday Night Live is the ability to properly utilize the host, whether by letting them play within a familiar context, or by cleverly subverting expectations.
Innovation bears repetition in cinema. No idea is so great that it cannot be scoured by less imaginative directors to make a quick buck. The most potent example of this is the cinematic landscape in the years immediately following Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Tarantino’s film broke the mold, and a generation of …
Hannah going through a writers’ workshop and getting criticism from several burgeoning writers with their own perspectives and hangups is the sort of scene Girls lives to revel in, and at least part of the reason, I suspect, that the show sent Hannah to Iowa.
There’s a problem with ripped-from-the-headlines storytelling that sinks many shows too reliant on it. It’s impossible to capture the immediacy of an event, the pain and anguish or the real, complicated, messy discussions it encourages from the safe distance of a television production cycle.