Obvious Child is the most charming abortion movie you'll probably ever see

Obvious Child isn't afraid to "go there," to probe deeply into every detail of its story.  It does that right from the introduction of its protagonist, Donna Stern (Jenny Slate), a low-level comedian who spends most nights performing at open mics in Brooklyn.  Her act is heavily focused on her personal life: bodily functions, dating woes, anxieties, insecurities.  In fact, it leads to her getting dumped by her boyfriend (Paul Briganti) in the beginning of the film, after he gets fed up with the intimate details of their relationship being divulged onstage.

The movie could be considered a "romantic comedy," since it is funny and much of it deals with the state of Donna's love life.  Her breakup leaves her in a state of despair that causes her to sleep with the first decent guy she finds in the form of Max (Jake Lacy), a dorky computer programmer she meets after one of her sets.  However, director Gillian Robespierre (who co-wrote the screenplay with Karen Maine and Elisabeth Holm) avoids falling into the trappings of the genre, preferring honest, funny interactions over treacly cliches and narrative contrivances.  The romcom tendencies that the film does indulge in are subdued and restrained enough to still work.  Plus, the romantic angle takes a backseat once Donna realizes the her one night stand with Max has caused her to get pregnant.   Donna may be forthcoming about her issues in her comedy act, but is she ready to actually face them in real life?  Even Donna realizes that she's not prepared to handle being a mother, both from a financial and maturity standpoint.  She knows what she has to do.

What works the most about Obvious Child is that there's no moralizing involved.  None of the characters look down on Donna for her decision to have an abortion, and the movie itself doesn't either.  Nor does it use Donna's story as an opportunity to push hard in the other direction.  This is just about one person who made a choice about her life.  Its even-handedness comes through in one of the film's best scenes, where Donna's best friend Nellie (Gaby Hoffmann) talks about the abortion she got when she was a teenager.  She wistfully admits that it's something that she still occasionally gets sad about, but her decision is one that she's never regretted.

There's also an excellent sense of balance in the way that the movie effortlessly blends comedy and drama.  It takes on more dramatic weight around the point where Donna finds out she's pregnant, but it never becomes as dour as it could.  There are gentle bits of comedy that slip in throughout, and it's not hard to be charmed by the film, even given the gravity of Donna's situation.  Part of that comes from Jenny Slate, whose performance holds together and strengthens the entire film.  Given her pedigree in comedy, it should come as no surprise that she does a great job at making Donna a funny and likable character, skillfully delivering the script's anxious, aside-filled dialogue.  But when the time for a dramatic scene comes, she nails Donna's feelings of being untethered and unprepared just as well.

In the film's more flawed moments, Obvious Child feels very much like a first film.  At 83 minutes, the movie is already short, but Robespierre could've easily cut out the brief interlude where David Cross appears as a club owner who tries to seduce Donna.  It doesn't serve much purpose other than to add an ultimately pointless bump in the road for Donna and Max.  But it also has scenes, like the one where she visits her mother in a time of need, that stretch out beautifully and are filled with lovely little nuances.  It's hard not to consider the film a success for Robespierre -- it's a winsome and affecting debut that handles a tough topic with the perfect amount of grace.

My Emmy wish list ballot

I follow award shows, but I've never been one to get emotionally invested in them.  If a good show wins an award, it doesn't validate my tastes, and if a bad show wins something, I don't consider it a crime against humanity.  The Emmys are a weird beast -- the nominations are based on a very specific kind of buzz, and once the voters decide they like something, they tend to nominate that thing over and over again.  After a while of paying attention to them, you eventually start to realize that The Emmys are a pointless endeavor.  So what better way to celebrate a pointless award show than by making my own pointless nominations?

This year's awards will be honoring television that aired from June 1, 2013 to May 31, 2014.  That means, for example, that the season of Orange Is the New Black that's eligible is only the first season.  In formulating these wish list nominations, I took this very meaningless thing seriously by following the rules and going by the official ballot of eligibility in each category.

Now before getting into my nomination choices, let me just explain one thing that confuses most people: The Hanging Episodes Rule.  Obviously, there are many shows whose season runs right through the cutoff date.  For instance, Game of Thrones season four began in the eligibility window (April 6th) and ended outside of the window (June 15th).  The Hanging Episodes rule states that if half of the episodes in a season fall within the eligibility window, then the entire season is eligible, and any episode that hasn't aired at the time of nominations will be made available to voters.  Thus, all of Game of Thrones is fair game.

So is everybody up to speed on all things Emmy now?  Okay, let's dive into my personal picks (NOTE: the choices in each category are ordered from favorite to least favorite)...

Pilot Talk 2014: Tyrant

Every TV season, networks bring out a new crop of shows, in hopes that they'll be the next big hit.  Pilot Talk is devoted to figuring out whether these shows are worth your time based on the first episode.

Tuesdays at 10:00 PM on FX

It's tough to truly make a judgement on Tyrant after just one episode.  There's certainly potential for something interesting when you have a political drama set in the Middle East, created by some of the people who made Homeland.  (Early word says it's pretty mediocre though.)  The problem is that at every turn, the show smacks right into a giant wall of blandness.  It centers around Bassam "Barry" Al Fayeed, the son of a tyrannical leader of the fictional Abbudin, who left his home country 20 years ago to live in America.  Tyrant puts the politics on the backburner for the first 20 minutes, focusing on Barry's wife and kids.  This kind of slow-burning character building would be fine...if there was actually any character building.  But in those first scenes we don't learn much besides the fact that his wife is a wife, his daughter is a brat, and his son is a brat whose brattiness doesn't mesh well with his sister's brand of brattiness.

It doesn't get much better when the family travels to Abbudin to attend the wedding of Barry's nephew.  The half-sketched nature of the characters has nothing on this relatively nondescript country in the Middle East.  The impulse to shy away from using a real country is understandable, given the content that the show will be exploring, but it doesn't do a very good job of making Abbudin feel like an actual place.  It completely lacks any kind of texture, and aside from a reference or two to the nation's history and its relationship with other countries in the region, Abbudin might as well be California.  Compare that to the specificity with which another FX show, The Bridge, depicted the border between Juarez and El Paso, and Tyrant just comes off as Middle Eastern pastiche.

Nobody will mistake the pilot's script for being subtle either.  Almost every beat of the show feels like the writers making an assumption of what viewers want from their gritty dramas, but they either sap those elements of any kind of color or underline them with a bold pen.  We meet Barry's dad, but he's nothing more than a delivery system for run-of-the-mill daddy issues.  Barry's brother is a stock psychotic character, complete with a moment of sudden violence that's the show's most trite and perfunctory moment.  Throughout the episode, we get flashbacks of Barry's childhood in Abbudin, and the scenes might as well be shouting, "Dark past!" at the viewers.  The pilot's few interesting moments come from seeing how Barry fits into the world he left long ago, quickly flying into action to make a political decision that spares everyone of potential bloodshed.  Those intriguing tidbits, however, are few and far between.

Perhaps the biggest mistake made on the show's behalf is in trying to convince everyone that it's a serious drama.  There are some deliciously crazy beats that get hit in the last 10 minutes of the show, and if the writers can lean into that, then it could become something fun and pulpy.  Unfortunately, Tyrant doesn't seem aware of its own silliness, and by the end it comes back around to being brooding and morose.  It's going to have to get much better if audiences are going to take the show as seriously as it takes itself.

Grade: C

Jules and Monty brilliantly translates Shakespeare to a modern context

In the summer before I went to college, I became obsessed with this web series called Dorm Life.  It was sort of like The Office, except it took place on the floor of a freshman dorm instead of a paper company in Scranton, Pennsylvania.  I loved its homespun quality -- it was just a group of friends at UCLA coming together to make a little show.  It didn't have the budget of a TV show, so it took the fly-on-the-wall feeling and strong character development of mockumentary TV and condensed it into small bites of comedy.  Though it's been gone for a long time, I somehow still find myself thinking about it, and when I look back on my recently finished college experience, I become disappointed that I didn't build the kind of relationships that I loved in Dorm Life.

That series was an example of adapting a TV format to a strictly internet-based medium, but in recent years, web series have evolved enough to create shows that take on a format wholly unique to the internet: vlogs.  It has seen a recent explosion thanks in part to the Hank Green produced smash hit, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, and its spiritual successor, Emma Approved.  Those two series were notable because they were able to adapt classic works of literature -- Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Emma, respectively -- and transform them into a YouTube-friendly vlogging style.  Now there are tons of these kind of stories out there, and you can't go too far on YouTube without finding a modern version of War and Peace or something.

But the format has reached its peak with Jules and Monty, which recently ended its 18-episode narrative about a month ago.  Jules and Monty feels like a mixture of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries and Dorm Life.  It takes from the former in that it adapts a famous piece of literature -- Romeo and Juliet -- and from the latter by making its modern setting college.  The Italian city of Verona has become the University of Verona, a northeastern college with a toxic frat culture. Consequently, the warring families of Capulet and Montague are now rival fraternities, KAP and MTG.  The series tells the tale of Jules Caine, the younger sister of Cliff (their version of Lord Capulet), the leader of the KAP fraternity; and Romeo Montgomery (but everyone calls him Monty), a lower-level member of MTG.  Through a sequence of alternating vlogs for their Communications class, we see the process of them meeting and getting together, and the tragedy that ultimately ensues when their respective alliances are tested.

Jules and Monty was written and created by Imogen Browder and Edward Rosini, two theater students at Tufts University, during their sophomore year.  The idea came about as sort of a surprise, as Imogen messaged Ed in the previous year and said that she wanted to do a web series, and the two of them proceeded to script out an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet over the course of a summer via Facebook messages and Google Docs.  It was then filmed with the help of their friends in the theater program and the university production department during the fall semester of 2013.  But despite the shoestring budget and tiny crew, it doesn't look like a web series made by a group of college students.  The amount of passion put into the project shines through, because the whole thing feels incredibly polished and professional.

Imogen Browder and Edward Rosini also take on the lead roles of Jules and Monty, and reveal themselves to be capable actors in the process.  Browder is especially talented, possessing a screen presence and vulnerability that's as engaging as any actress playing Juliet that I've ever seen.  Whenever she's in a scene, it's hard not to be absolutely hypnotized by her incredible performance.  She takes Juliet, a character who could be seen as weak and lacking in agency in the source material, and turns her into the heart and soul of the entire story.  Just look at the way she nails one of the play's iconic passages.

Though its one of the most widely taught of Shakespeare's plays in middle and high school, Romeo and Juliet has its fair share of detractors.  There are some who find its story of two teenagers who fall in love over the course of a few days to be juvenile and shallow.  On the other side of the spectrum, there are others who consider Shakespeare's satirical look at young love kind of mean-spirited and cynical.  Jules and Monty being created by and focused on college students allows it to fall into an interesting middle ground.  They're old enough to recognize that the feelings these characters have aren't the end-all-be-all in the grand scheme of things, but young enough to still make the romance full of weight and sincerity.  This series strips away the original play's melodrama and grounds it in a sense of reality that seems to ask, "What would it be like if this happened to real people"?

The college setting helps sell the idea of these characters clashing with each other because of their constant proximity, and how drunkenness fuels many of their decisions.  But it also really understands the dynamics of the tight-knit friendships that develop at this age, especially through Jules and her best friend/roommate, Nancy.  The latter might be one of the greatest creations of the series, and is certainly the most original.  She's a riff on The Nurse, but gets transformed from the insubstantial character she is in Shakespeare's original play into what is essentially the story's third lead.  From the very first episode that we see her in, you get a good sense of her friendship with Jules, and how her more outgoing boldness compliments Juliet's sweet reservation.  All she wants is what she thinks is the best for Jules, and her arc, which results from that single motivation, is fascinating.  That the writers (and Evey Reidy, who plays her) are willing to make a character who could've merely been a minor player into a fully-formed human being just makes the series even more impressive.

One of the other things that makes it so accessible is its use of language.  Unlike many present day adaptations of classic literature, Jules and Monty actually incorporates bits and pieces of Shakespeare's dialogue within the modern speech.  The switch is very deliberate too -- characters usually lapse into heightened language during moments of passion or inebriation.  It emphasizes the emotions of each scene, but it also helps to make The Bard's oft-daunting writing more accessible, providing context by slotting it between chunks of regular college vernacular.

*Plot details for the end of Jules and Monty follow.  Skip the next two paragraphs to remain unspoiled*

The most notable and intelligent thing about the series is how it adapts the ending.  Monty gets expelled and has to move back home after an altercation with Tye (Tybalt) puts the latter in the hospital.  Then Nancy -- out of a desire to end the violence between MTG and KAP, and help Jules move on -- forges a letter from Monty that makes Jules believe he's broken up with her, then convinces Jules to block him on her phone and every form of social media.  With Monty out of her life, Jules falls into a deep depression, which causes her grades to drop.  Eventually Professor Lawrence (The Friar) advises her to transfer to another school in order to escape the bad memories and her abusive brother.  Monty makes a last ditch effort to try to win Jules back, but he sees her empty room when he returns to Verona, and assumes that she's already left.

So Jules and Monty doesn't end with a double suicide, just a missed connection.  By removing death from their misfortune of communication, it lowers the scale of the play's conclusion, but somehow makes its tragedy more crushing and real.  In the play, Romeo and Juliet die, convinced of each other's love at the very least.  In the web series, the pain and uncertainty lives on.  Jules moves away, never knowing that Monty still wants to be with her; and Monty never knows that if he would've just arrived a few seconds earlier or stayed a few seconds longer, then he would've seen Jules again.  Their lives will continue.  They will likely fall in love with other people.  But there will always be the ache of that "What if?" factor.  In retooling the ending, the series managed to perfectly capture the process of growing up and growing apart that many college students go through.  It's a devastating way to go out.

*End of spoilers*

A show like The Lizzie Bennet Diaries took full advantage of YouTube as a medium by having multiple side channels where you could see what characters like Lydia, Gigi, and Darcy were up to when they left Lizzie's orbit.  Those videos almost feel essential to getting the entire experience.  Jules and Monty plays out all in one main story, but the experience becomes so much richer if you watch the behind-the-scenes videos in between each episode, called "Vlog Vlog"s.  Just as you'll become endeared to the characters in the actual story, you'll also start to fall in love with the funny, affable people making the show.  Through these crew interviews and production vlogs, you get to see the process of a group of people coming together contrasted with the series they're making: a story about a group of people falling apart.  It makes for an interesting, engrossing binge-watching process.  

Most of all, I'm just in awe of the fact that a web series so smart and thoughtful could be made by people my age.  It seems like the crew wants the experience to last as much as the fans do, because even though the main story has concluded, the channel has been releasing weekly director's commentaries and extra behind-the-scenes videos.  Eventually it'll come to an end, which makes me sad, but Imogen and Ed have alluded to having another project in the works, and I anxiously await whatever it is.  Jules and Monty fills me with the same mouth-frothing, I-want-to-tell-everybody-I-know-about-this enthusiasm that I felt when I started watching Vlogbrothers videos, or discovered Five Awesome Girls, or binged on Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the first time.  I wish I was important enough for this blog post to give it the kind of audience it deserves, but for now I'll settle for tossing this praise out into the void and hoping it reaches whomever it can.  Start with episode one, I promise you'll be hooked.

The 100: TV's best sci-fi show comes from an unexpected place

It's time to stop writing off The CW.  Around the internet, it still gets treated as the annoying teen sibling of the rest of the major networks, and any new show that they put out is met with groans and skepticism.  But while it hasn't produced the next great drama yet, The CW has put out some decent shows over the last few years.  The Carrie Diaries was fun before it got cancelled.  Reign is super fun, while also being a bizarre mess.  The Vampire Diaries was known for its blistering plot momentum and jaw-dropping twists in its heyday.  I don't watch Arrow, but people never shut up about how good it is.  In most of those shows, you still have to deal with teen characters making moony-eyes at each other, but they're good despite that problem.  They still put out shows of questionable quality, to be sure, but even most of those are more mediocre than terrible.  And yet, as a whole, The CW doesn't get taken very seriously by many television fans.

Even I sort of dismissed The 100 when it first came around.  For the uninitiated, the show takes place 97 years after nuclear warfare has left the Earth uninhabitable, and the few thousands who were able to escape fled to a space station named The Ark.  Unfortunately, The Ark's oxygen supply is running low, to the point where there will be none left in six months, so the station's council decides to send 100 juveniles in their prison to Earth to see if it has become livable again.  I found the premise intriguing and enjoyed the pilot well enough (I never graded it for Pilot Talk, but I probably would've given it a B), but I decided not to continue with the show because some part of me thought, "This is a CW show.  It's not that important for me to keep watching."  After hearing from people I trust that the show had improved and gotten really good, I decided to binge on the 13-episode first season, and regretted giving up on it in the first place.

The 100 divides its story time between the teenage characters on Earth and the adults who remain on The Ark.  In the former section, the show bears some resemblance to Lost.  The group quickly discovers that they're not alone -- a mysterious group of people called The Grounders (this show's The Others) have somehow survived all of these years, and they don't seem too friendly.  But it's not just a human factor that the 100 have to deal with, there's also strange phenomena occurring all around, from a periodic toxic fog -- some might even call it a...smoke monster? -- to mutated two-headed animals roaming around.  In these earthbound sections, the show is about society trying to come together, and it effectively portrays the struggle of a group attempting to accomplish anything without rules or boundaries.  There's also a bit of angst and resentment from some in the group, who decide to take off the bracelets that monitor their vitals, in order to make the adults on The Ark who banished them think that they're dead.  Throughout the first season, the writers -- a staff that includes alumnae from prestigious shows like The Shield, Angel, Dollhouse, and Spartacus -- generate lots of tension from the fact that the teens on Earth have no idea what's going on up in The Ark, and vice versa.

In the portions of the show that take place in space, The 100 begins to take after Battlestar Galactica.  If the stuff on the ground is about society coming together, then the material in orbit provides a look at the last vestiges of a society that has fallen apart.  Because the oxygen supply is dwindling on The Ark (this show's version of BSG's final fleet), the council of leaders have to take desperate measures to conserve resources.  As a result, all crime is made punishable by death, people will have to be "floated" periodically (out into space, essentially being put to death as well) to keep the population manageable, and most citizens are left in the dark about the 100 being sent to Earth.  While the material with the teens can be leavened by the awe that the characters get from being in a wide open place they've only read about but never experienced, the scenes on The Ark don't shy away from the bleakness of the situation.  These are rough, dire circumstances, and the characters react appropriately.

So yes, The 100 cribs liberally from Lost and Battlestar Galactica in its early episodes -- and there's an element almost directly lifted from Firefly in the later episodes -- but it does so with confidence and aplomb.  It's obviously not as good as any of those influences, but it's still surprising that it's as good as it is.  And it goes to some dark places.  In just one season, it's already featured a child suicide, a brutal torture scene, and biological warfare.  But it also raises some surprisingly thought-provoking ideas along the way.  "Who we are and who need to be to survive aren't the same thing," a character says at one point, voicing the major theme of the show.  The 100 explores what it truly means to be a leader: the burdens they carry, the demons they have to live with, and the difficulty of choosing between what is right and what is good for the group.  Moral quandaries abound in the process.  Do I torture a prisoner to save my friend's life?  Do I let 1000+ people die to allow 700 to survive?  How do I retain my humanity in the face of great desperation?  And the show doesn't offer easy answers either.  One of the early crises of the show involves The Ark having to float 300 of their citizens to preserve more oxygen, unless they hear back from Earth and get confirmation that there are still people alive from the group they sent down.  The characters on Earth are able to send a signal to The Ark, but only after the deadline, and a section of people on the station still die because of it.

This being a CW show, you still have to sit through the obligatory romance storylines.  The love polygons don't have much spark, mostly due to wooden performances from some of the actors who play the teenage characters on Earth.  But it seems like the creators know this, and compensate by filling the adult cast with great sci-fi alums from Lost (Henry Ian Cusick), Battlestar Galactica (Alessandro Juliani, Kate Vernon), Person of Interest (Paige Turco), and Dollhouse (Dichen Lachman).  They also make up for it by having the teens be well-written, for the most part, so you pay less attention to the acting and more to the strong characterization.  The focus characters of the 100 all have clear motivations, and there's a substantial amount of conflict that comes from the moments when these various ideologies clash with one another.  Clarke (Eliza Taylor) and Bellamy (Bob Morley), the two main leaders, have particularly compelling arcs over the course of the season, as the responsibility of making the tough decisions inform the characters they grow into.

The first season does a good job of keeping the threats constant.  Some of it feels a little inorganic -- the way the council on The Ark continuously finds out that the amount of time they have left before the oxygen runs out was less than their calculations implied comes to mind -- but the dangers on Earth come along in natural and exciting ways.  It's well-paced from start to finish, climaxing with a finale that's chock full of major moments.  Its conclusion goes out on an exciting note that leaves me excited about the potential of season two.  The 100 might not seem like anything special at first, but it's got some strong characters, effectively bleak moments, and surprising plot turns.