katha

That's my take on it as well, but there's nothing wrong with that IMO. They'll never be superstars, any of them, and DWTS gives them a platform for exposure for other projects etc. and pays them well. As far as dancing gigs go, it probably doesn't get much better than a contract as pro on the show. Plus, Peta is pregnant and has to sit out this season. I suspect DWTS approached Maks (they do like their headlines and drama...and ratings have been sliding), and with his upcoming baby and wedding, I'm sure the nice bit of income from the show is appreciated. Same with Derek's theatre work getting pushed back, he's got free time now so he's back for this gig. I can't really blame any of them, though the endless "this time I'm leaving" declarations from all the pros are rather tiresome.

The plot contrivance of having to keep Lane in SH to keep her on the show IMO limited what they could do with her education-wise. She might have gone to community college after the rift with her mom or something, but once she broke with Mrs Kim there wasn't money or support for a fancy education anymore. She might have applied for scholarships, loans, part-time jobs etc., but all of that would have taken her out of the town and I just don't think the show was invested enough in the character to go to all that trouble in writing an elaborate career path for her. And, this may be my UO, I don't think Lane ever showed much academic ambitions. She was smart and capable, but that doesn't always translate into wanting to go to university. She was interested in music and practiced on her drums and tried to make Hep Alien happen, while at the same time having a steady job with Luke to pay the bills. And yeah, Zach was goofy, but the show did hint that he was the more accomplished musician compared to Lane. And this is also where class issues come into it: Not everyone has the financial background to make college happen. Once her mother cut her off, Lane's path to higher education would have been much thornier. And even with her mother in the picture, she couldn't choose a college for herself, Mrs Kim chose something for Lane that Lane found stifling and useless. Not everyone has Rory's luxury of being able to apply to any school she wants and having a family that will pay everything for her in her fancy college. The Gilmore girls might have lived in Stars Hollow, but they, particularly Rory, were distanced from the working class/ lower middle class backgrounds many of the other townies came from. Lorelai had made it on her own (in a TV fantasy kinda way...), but even she grew more and more comfortable again with the privileges the elder Gilmores could offer. Rory, OTOH, had a super cushy existence in that aspect and couldn't relate at all to Lane, Dean, Marty, Jess and their various struggles on that front.

The Rory storyline actually has a lot of elements that ring true...but they're just never consequent enough with it and never follow through. And sometimes it seems like the dramedy format itself might play a role in that? So you can't go dark and really explore mental issues or failure or sustained unhappiness....quippy and charming needs to be around the corner. So they just conveniently shoved Rory's problems aside without ever properly addressing them. I guess my UO has always been that while Rory lacked self-awareness and tended towards entitlement and shirking responsibility...it was a totally logical development considering the environment she grew up in. All that sheltering and praising and protection, it had a flip side which was also sometimes hinted at: It could be smothering and restricting and someone with Rory's already passive and cautious personality got caught up in doing things a certain way, never rocking the boat, following all the rules...and then getting rewarded for checking all the boxes. So anytime she struggled with something, or didn't want to follow the rules, or didn't know what to do, it totally floored her and she reacted with panic or froze and did nothing (think the Jess/Dean dilemma). So she liked to stay in a bubble and liked to stay in denial about things that weren't working out, or tried to ignore her own discontent and/or confusion and/or misery as long as she could. And faced with challenges, as she got older her first instinct became to run away, hide and give up.

There are quite a few method actors, but many also don't want to admit to it because they fear backlash. And others use it for obnoxious PR or to excuse acting like jerks. At its core, it's just a technique among other techniques. Some great actors use it, some bad actors use it. IMO it's not inherently better/worse than anything else. For example, I know they use different ways to get there, but I think both Streep and DDL have a staggering, almost intimidating amount of technique and detail worked into their performances. Both have been accused of scenery chewing and being too cold etc., but for me it mostly works. Not everything, but a lot of it. And it's tied to the research and the bold decision-making that obviously goes into every performance. Bill the Butcher is one of my favourite characters ever, and it's because DDL chose to play him as larger than life pulp fiction comedy villain. Had he done him more "seriously", he'd had a much better chance to get an Oscar, but the performance he delivered instead suited the (flawed) movie he was in much better and was much more entertaining. I'm sure he could give you a whole lotta pretentious nonsense about why he did it like that, but at its core he did research, made decisions and used technique and talent to construct that performance. And he was singled out as the best thing in the movie by many, while Jared Leto recently wasn't treated as kindly and his performance was deemed a misfire, even though he's also a method actor.

The thing with Olivier for me is this: IMO his screen career is rather spotty, so though other actors may have annoying/pretentious methods of preparing for roles, he wasn't a poster child for brilliant movie acting. And to be fair to him, he always acknowledged that. Particularly in his younger years, but also later on to some degree, you always saw that he was a stage actor first. There were moments of brilliance, and then there were instances where he played "too big", or otoh he became too self-conscious about having to play small-scale now and played "too small". At least for me, it was all rather uneven. It's a shame that there isn't anything preserved (?) of his stage acting, since obviously that was his priority.

I love Miranda's arc, it's super well done. And I think is something where the show doesn't get enough credit because it's seen as "typical chick flick", rom com, whatever...and some of it is the show's own fault since they aren't radical enough about it, but often they do it well: They take these romance tropes and burn them down but good. Like Steve, another problematic character, but IMO well written and well acted, he's "okay guy". In a rom com he'd either be flawless and always sweet or he'd be the evil/annoying obstacle guy. Here...he's just a guy. He's whiny and passive aggressive, but also caring and warm and capable of great kindness. And Miranda struggles about what to do with him because he's not "Mr Right", and even someone as outwardly cynical as her secretly craves that perfect guy of her dreams. Or Big...who's "Mr. Right" on paper, but can be such a toxic mess. Or Carrie living beyond her means to create that Manhattan existence she craves for herself, that's a real miss here that the show doesn't dare pursue this more. She's not from money, there might be a class aspect to it that she also never learned how to manage money, perhaps she feels pressure to keep up a lifestyle for her social circle and for her career as a columnist and local celebrity. But it's pushed aside with that stupid "let's give her Charlotte's ring" nonsense. Charlotte wanting the perfect family and realizing that it might not work out that smoothly and her old money marriage comes with trappings. Samantha experiencing the pain of being hurt in a relationship and also the undercurrent that she might face a future where she'll be growing old alone, and while there's nothing wrong with that, it comes with its own set of problems.

The show was muddy on that. But I don't think that just because it was told from Carrie's perspective, viewers were always expected to take her side. IMO that also didn't change in the later seasons. With Aidan I thought it was pretty clear that getting back together was bad decision-making and that she did it out of questionable motives, they might not have wanted to inspire hatred and revulsion towards Carrie, but it was presented in an ambivalent way. Of course, I always thought that Carrie was a classic anti-heroine in the Dr. House, Seinfeld and so on vein, so I wasn't bothered by her less than awesome self.

I actually liked the Natasha confrontation, because it seemed to really dig into Carrie's dark underbelly as a character but without being preachy about it. Natasha gets her speech chewing Carrie out for being so hurtful and self-absorbed that she'd insist on confronting Natasha even though Natasha was obviously avoiding her. I didn't need any more, the writing had made perfectly clear what a tool Carrie was, that she herself wasn't quite that self-aware...eh, to some degree that always rang true to life about the show. No one wants to have a bad view of themselves and constantly live with self-loathing and no self-esteem, so even the mistakes and bad behaviours get rationalized to some degree to keep the positive narrative in your head about yourself going. Carrie was often obnoxious and selfish, but I think it also stood out so much because she was the main character. Even in the later seasons where I agree Carrie developed a case of "special snowflake" that hadn't been there before, the flaws were still there and often enough acknowledged. And you also had the consequences of her actions and decisions in the life she lived, good and bad. That one New Yorker article that talks about her getting more fearful and anxious the older she got and how that wasn't pleasant, but rang true, I always agreed with that. And in the later seasons the realization that her lifestyle might not be so pleasantly crazy and fabulous as she got older, her friends moving on and starting families while she stayed the same Carrie she'd been with 29. The relationship with Aleks that IMO was played with an undercurrent of anxiety/desperation on SJP's part to convey that Carrie was a bit lost and trying to find solid ground again. There was lots of cop-outs and fairytale BS, but IMO what they did acknowledge about growing older for Carrie and the other women was interesting and more than TV series like that had shown before.

See, I think he didn't dump her because he liked what was going on to some degree. He liked that he had all the power in the relationship and that Carrie obviously was more into him than he was into her and it gave him the perfect excuse when there was conflict: "I'm not responsible for anything, she's just being a typical hysterical woman, amirite!?!" I'm firmly in the camp that believes that Big was as responsible as Carrie for the toxicity of their relationship right from the start, how he behaved in the affair later on was just a logical extension of his earlier actions. Even when he married, he didn't really want to invest in those marriages, so had a history of cheating on his wives. He was a tool, frankly. But so were most of the characters of the show, to some degree, wasn't that the point? That they were all anti-heroes and not "good guys" that were easy to root for?

Steve shouldn't have worked as a character, but somehow he did. It helped that the actors had chemistry, but for all the OTT fairytale aspects the show indulged in, it was nice that they acknowledged that things like class differences exist and that it could be an issue in relationships. Steve had a job and made an okay living, but Miranda's lifestyle was way beyond him and once they started a relationship they needed to deal with that reality and mostly did. I also liked when they later on brought that "perfect on paper" dude for Miranda and she knew that she should want him and the "perfect life" he offered, but still felt more comfortable with Steve. That rang emotionally true, mostly because the actors really sold that level of comfort and trust between Miranda and Steve, for all their social and personality differences. Strangely, on rewatch Big and Carrie also get more interesting in their dysfunctionality? Yes, she's needy and dramatic and pushy and insecure and projects all her issues on him...but he does this withdrawn, stand-offish thing where in every conflict he can always fall back on "you're the crazy one" and stay superior and aloof. They really enabled some of each other's worst character traits, yet they also connected on some level and had great chemistry...so it's plausible that they fell back into that toxic mess again and again. There's also a class aspect here, I think, and it's even somewhat addressed. When Carrie compares herself and Natasha and how she'll never be as "classy"...so with the "right kind of parents, right kind of education, right kind of job, old money style" etc. And it's implied that at least subconsciously this is also Big's thinking, that he should marry that kind of woman and not someone like Carrie. But then he wrecks two marriages because he doesn't actually want that kind of "perfect on paper woman" and doesn't ever want to let go of Carrie either.

The newest Bourne reminded me: Vincent Cassel. Yeah, he's not pretty. But the way he carries himself, his physical grace and his particular intensity as an actor always struck me as attractive. He usually gets more interesting things to do in French movies, where he's a leading man, but even the typical Eurovillain roles he plays in English-speaking productions have a certain spark and charisma to them. Gives a good interview as well.

What's interesting in that context is Rory's self-perception. I'd argue that she herself had no understanding what it was like to be working-class, Lorelai struggled as a maid to make ends meet after she chose to leave her parents' house. But by the time we meet the girls in season 1, I'd say they're comfortably middle class. Lorelai needs a loan from her parents to get Rory into a fancy school, that's upper class aspiration. And once they reconcile with Emily and Richard, they have upper class connections and privileges restored (Rory mostly). Rory didn't need regular jobs in high school (helping out at the inn didn't seem like a big deal and like she was doing it every day, more like when she felt like it and wanted extra money) or at Yale, everything was paid for her. And she had access and enjoyed her grandparents' high society world. But she wanted to see herself as the underdog. She wasn't, though. She couldn't relate to Jess on that front, she viewed Dean's choices after high school with pity, she didn't relate to Marty's need to work to finance college, arguably she didn't relate to Lane and her problems either, she made that snooty comment about Lorelai never going to college. She was pretty comfortable in the world of the rich, yet wanted to pretend that she was better than them and that she had struggled for everything she achieved. It took Logan pointing out that she's just as privileged as all the people she was sneering at in her article to wake her up a bit.

I think this harkens back to Rory being so insecure about how to deal at Yale, away from Lorelai and SH and the support systems there. So she was already flailing on her own, with the demands of college, with her problems socializing and asserting herself in this new environment. And she was lonely. So she latched on to Logan as her next security blanket and as someone who would give her purpose and structure and affection and emotional support, no matter that he wasn't perhaps the best person for that. I'm with the posters who quite like Logan as a character for himself, but sorta side-eye the Rory/Logan relationship. And I don't think that Rory's catering to him and questionable decision making when they were together was "his fault", he had his issues and made plenty of mistakes but I thought he cared for her and respected her, tried his best to make the relationship work. Rory was just such a doormat at times, and a guy less kind and more selfish/malicious than Logan might have taken advantage of her behaviour. But that is more a thing of Rory and the problematic ways she tends to fall into as a girlfriend. With Jess and Dean she could also be passive and unable to assert herself. Come to think of it, in any kind of relationship, Rory tended to be passive and reluctant to assert herself. Logan just happened to be around when she was in a personal crisis and at her worst, but IMO he wasn't the reason for that. And in some ways he managed to be helpful and supportive and he also told her some truths about herself she didn't want to hear, so even though the mid-twenties version of the character wasn't really right for her as a "forever guy", I appreciated what he brought to the table when he was around.

I think what was also only ever partly addressed is Rory's dreams to be a journalist and how her personality structure plays into that. Jess was the first one to (IMO rightly) voice a bit of skepticism if being a foreign correspondent is really something Rory would excel at. Lorelai's extreme sheltering, her tendency to stay in denial about Rory's faults didn't help there either, they also never showed discussions between them a la "Ok, you want to be a journalist. Then you need to be very proactive, be able to organize yourself, be able to strike up connections with people on your own, be able to take very public criticism, be able to work in chaotic circumstances and with tight deadlines. Are you sure you can do that?" That never happened with Rory and Lorelai, at least it wasn't shown. Perhaps re-tooling into a different kind of journalism would have been better, but there's also drawbacks for someone like Rory. With the new media there are constantly fewer secure positions, hustling as a freelancer often is the norm, the competition is fierce, as reviewer or opinion writer you're constantly attacked for your articles (on social media in particular) as well. Could Rory deal with that if she already crumbled with the ballerina? Even though Mitchum didn't go about his criticism in the best way, I think his comment that she'd do well as an assistant wasn't so off base. As administrator or organizer somewhere in an institution or company, she'd have a level of external structure and security that for me alwas seemed necessary for Rory to be productive.

I think Lorelai was slightly weird with all three boyfriends, not that there's a magic formula how to deal with that anyway. IMO with Jess a few things contributed: He had an effect on Rory and by season 4 after their trainwreck relationship Lorelai was understandably angry that he hurt her feelings, Lorelai always had problems accepting that Rory made her own decisions so it was easier to blame Jess for "making" her do things Lorelai didn't like, Lorelai probably recognized some of her own teenage angry and self-destructive behaviour in Jess and wanted Rory far away from that, and...Jess didn't like her. Ever. I do think her ego was hurt that he never warmed up to her and she spitefully retaliated in kind. You could also speculate that to some degree...Jess' life with Liz seemed both emotionally and economically deprived, and Lorelai coming from privilege didn't really understand all the repercussions that might have on a person and how that's different from growing up with Emily and Richard. That said, apart from occasional skirmishes with Jess and the car crash freakout, she didn't go out of her way to be nasty to him. I think she herself recognized that not all her motives for her dislike of him were totally pure and that it would be way creepy if she tried to really make trouble for him (what with the power difference between established adult and disenfranchised teenager), so she was relatively restrained. That she tolerated Liz was mostly because Liz and TJ were supposed to be "wacky comic characters" (ugh), so as usual all sense went out the window in the scripts to accomodate that.

I think Swift is too powerful for this to really hurt her, but that Cosmopolitan article shows one aspect that might get a bit troublesome for her. She's built her brand so strongly on being "authentic" and a good role model and sharing her feelings diary-like with her fans, that some might feel alienated when they discover that this is carefully crafted persona hasn't much to do with "real Taylor" (whoever that is). She's cultivated this narrative of being relatable, and all her diss songs resulting from her being eternally wronged and getting her just revenge, of always having the moral high ground. And now she's in muddy waters. Will she continue with this pose forever? Nevermind this "scandal", it will blow over. But at a certain point this becomes artistically limiting, arguably it already is.

They were managed by Otto Rehhagel, nothing to do with the current Portugal coach Santos. The format was a different one, you can't compare at all with 2016. And IMO they were dire, an absolute destructive anti-football horror show. I'm usually rolling my eyes at complaints about defensive teams beating "flair teams" with better organization, that's always been a legitimate way of playing. What Greece were doing...their only aim was to murder any kind of flow in the game. And Portugal losing to them in 2004 at home was such heartbreak, very sad. The great Golden Generation around Figo and Rui Costa, a very young (18?) Cristiano Ronaldo coming into prominence and all of them devastated by the loss. Still, Greece were a rather small nation doing their best, hard to blame them for the way they played. In contrast, I think this Portugal team played all right. They were rather defensive and organized, but they kept the ball well, they structured well in defense and midfield, they had nice moments going forward. And they're such overachievers, a small, not very rich country...constantly making it to semis and finals in Euros. And it's not like anyone else was playing up a storm, France was inconsistent, saddled with a confused coach and only played well against Iceland and Germany, Germany has a striker problem, Italy played well but they don't have outrageous offensive talent at the moment, Spain looked a spent force, England were dire, Wales were shown up to not be quite there yet development wise by Portugal in the semis tbh, Croatia choked against Portugal, Belgium had no tactics. And the whole country seems so ecstatic with the win, probably one of their greatest sporting achievements ever? Many of the older players like Pepe, Nani, Quaresma, Ronaldo etc...they've seen so much disappointment with the NT and they've been toiling away for a decade or longer to make something happen after that traumatic loss in 2004, well done for finally winning it.

Because France didn't adapt to the change tactically and perhaps they also felt they could coast to a win now, though I think Deschamps has been questionable in his decision making all competition and here for the first time he was both found out and punished for it. Also, it was probably extra motivation for Portugal, particularly if they suspected that France did that deliberately and with malice (and judging by some of the reactions of the other Portugal players when Ronaldo had to leave the field, I think they did).

LOL, yeah those scenes can come across as...interesting. I think more charitably perhaps Lorelai's behaviour towards Dean could be read as projection and idealization because she thinks he's safe (and boy, doesn't that blow up in her face later)? There's the discussion why Lorelai doesn't do anything about Dean's arguably overly clingy and possessive behaviour, I think it's a mix of the writers not thinking it's that big a deal, Lorelai deliberately ignoring it a bit and also just the fact that she's not aware of some of the more extreme stuff Dean does ( she's mostly not directly present when he yells at Rory or does most of his more manipulative and controlling things). She also thinks he's a safe alternative to Jess, and the more concerned she's about Jess the more she tends to idealize Dean. Which isn't such a great thing in the long run, since first boyfriends seldom last. And she inadvertedly encourages Dean's depenence on them both. I think Dean likes the feeling of belonging to the GG mother/daugher unit just as much as he likes dating Rory, so when that breaks away it hits him harder than Rory and Lorelai.

I think they should have stopped with Dean way earlier. They kept bringing him back and back and back and he became worse and worse and worse. And sadly, because he wasn't a well-defined character, they could totally destroy him and make that come across as believable. First, they should have toned down his behaviour in season 2, but that was the usual problem with GG and thinking that OTT male tantrums weren't a big deal. And then he should have been out of there after season 3. As it was, you had this depressging sequence of events where arguably meeting Rory was one of the worst events of Dean's life, because it totally derailed him, he never got over her and made terrible and hurtful decisions that messed up his life. Personally, that also taints Dean in season 1 for me. I watch that now and think: "Run, Dean, get away as fast as you can!"

Totally agree with this. I think Liz is irredeemably hateful. I totally understood why Jess was such a ball of rage and misery. Look at Liz: She's so utterly self-absorbed and unable to see beyond herself and her own needs, you can't even have a proper argument with her! Like, it's not even that she doesn't take any kind of responsibility for anything she does and constantly takes advantage of other people, she doesn't even realize that what she's doing is bad and feels wronged when her selfishness and entitlement aren't accomodated. I can see constant situations in the past where her ever-changing boyfriends (one stole her TV! So funny! Not!), unsteady employment, drug use and general neglect created stress and insecurity for Jess, but anytime he tried to confront her on any of those things she would just start pouting like a twelve year old and tell him how mean he was. IMO the resigned way he deals with her shows that he's given up on ever getting through to her on anything, it was really sad to watch. I'd take TJ over her as well.

Season 4 is where the mix of Rory's natural personality and parts of her upbringing (the extreme sheltering she got from both Lorelai and her grandparents) really start to manifest in not so great ways. There were inklings of it in the first three seasons as well, but since she still went to high school it wasn't as obvious. She tends towards passivity, seems reluctant to take responsibility for her own actions and since she's used to constant praise she has trouble dealing with criticism. And so you get floundering and trying to hide behind Lorelai, grandparents, Paris, Logan, take your pick. Such a good potential storyline: Rory addressing these issues, but somehow it never really happened. IMO a missed opportunity. It's somewhat understandable that Rory turned out that way, she craved security and structure and everyone around her reinforced that and reinforced her people pleasing, head ducking and mostly docile ways. I think the aftermath of the Jess car crash is the most extreme example of basically everyone conspiring to deny her agency, and you see her unhappy and suffocating under it, but at the end resigning herself to the situation. I think that's one of the saddest episodes of the series, you can almost see all energy draining out of her. And I could perhaps see that there might have been smaller situations going in the same direction throughout the years. If your first instinct isn't "fight it out" anyway, as it's not for Rory, then positive reinforcement for keeping in line might play towards that timidity some more. And when Rory misbehaved or made wrong decisions, she ran away from that as well and didn't want to face the consequences.

Lorelai freaked and was insufferable in "Teach Me Tonight", but in general IMO she did her best not to let her personal hatred of Jess cloud her behaviour too much. Perhaps because she was self-aware enough to know that her dislike wasn't always driven by the best of motives and also because she was an adult and had way more power than him and using that power against him would have been somewhat disturbing. She stayed reasonably civil for the most part and also stayed away. Jess and Lorelai had a mutual dislike for each other and at a certain point I think both did the best they could not to let it escalate for Rory's sake.

I always sorta liked what they did with SH and Jess, because it struck me as realistic. This can be the other side of small towns like that, it's not all whimsy and fun, it can be controlling and judgemental and borderline creepy as well. Demonizing Jess and treating Rory like a porcelain doll was pretty disturbing behaviour, you also saw how deeply unhappy and upset it made Rory. Everyone was denying her agency and refused to grant her that she was a person who made decisions and not a brainless doll.

I always thought that once Jess' life had crashed down on him, getting out of there was probably the best thing for him long-term. The show always did a good job showing how absolutely miserable Jess was about anything relating to Stars Hollow and how much he hated living there, the only exceptions being Luke and Rory. He also resented the school structures. Having to re-do a year with Lorelai and Dean and the rest of the town taunting him, his relationship with Rory probably over, all that anger and misery escalating some more...I don't think that would have ended well. Instead, apparently he flailed around for a bit trying to get his bearings and figuring out what he wanted to do with his life. Probably with a series of low-paying jobs that allowed him to survive. He was 18/19 at the time, it's not like he's the only young person confused and struggling at that point. Okay, he didn't have the safety net of trust funds or parents/grandparents financing him "finding himself", but since he seemed all right with paying his own way...sure why not. Jess also never seemed like someone who wanted to go the traditional school, college route a la Rory, so I don't see how he lost out on much not finishing high school in Stars Hollow. And there's always the possibility of doing his GED later. He also got away from an environment that was probably pretty toxic for him, namely Stars Hollow, and could start from scratch. Since he never lacked drive or motivation once he was interested in something, it seemed pretty plausible that he'd be capable of writing and small-scale publishing a book and opening a small bookshop/printing press (?) with friends. It's not like he had outrageous success or anything, but he did well for someone in his early 20ies. Being self-employed was always most likely to make Jess happy.