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.
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.
Sometimes growing up is about taking a leap. You can make all the right decisions, or you can muddle through well enough, minimizing your mistakes to avoid catastrophe, but the road to maturity isn’t paved with perfect choices nor with big blunders alone.
The effectiveness of a melodrama often comes down to how well a film makes you relate to the characters and their outsized pain. A great melodrama is so engrossing, it forces you to contend with the titanic weight of the emotions on display, but it also in some sense replicates the way you experience…
Every storyline in “Hail Mary” rockets forward from the word go, as Diane and Kalinda fight to save Cary from prison while Alicia weathers some tumultuous debate prep. Throughout these plotlines, the characters mostly feel separated, by distance or by the secrets they are keeping from each other.