In the 90s, every woman was a Miranda, Carrie, Samantha or Charlotte. ‘Sex and the City’ provided an identification matrix with which the entire female population of the Western World could be neatly categorized into one of four groups. What a time for feminism.

Thankfully, it is not the 90s anymore. Indeed, Carrie Fever has devolved into a series of tired movies kept afloat by menopausal soccer-moms who refuse to smile at the overpaid screenwriters’ desperately persistent wordsmithery for fear of angering the vengeful botox Gods. The time of ‘Sex and the City’ is passed; it is now, if modern media is to be believed, the golden age of HBO’s ‘Girls’.

The comparison between the two immensely popular televisions series is not altogether apt. ‘Girls’ is about the lives of newly emancipated twenty somethings who struggle to find a place for themselves in a world in which a liberal arts degree has exactly as much value as the (recycled) paper it was printed on. On the other hand, ‘Sex and the City’ was about the lives of inexplicably upwardly mobile thirty somethings who struggle to multitask the immensely complicated activities of buying shoes, having orgasms, asking pert, rhetorical questions and going to brunch.

Occasionally, each show strays into the territory of the other– ‘Girls’ spends a fair deal of time in its premiere season focusing on the meaningful and meaningless sexual activities of its central characters, just as ‘Sex and the City’ delved into Carrie’s dire, if fleeting, financial problems and at times, and with a surprising degree of sensitivity, handled some of the Big Issues (Miranda’s pregnancy, Samantha’s breast cancer, Charlotte’s divorce.) It is worth noting how progressive ‘Sex and the City’ was in its day.

On the whole, from the comfortable vantage point of a 21st Century American, one might be initially forgiven for thinking of ‘Girls’ as an uncomfortably realistic foil against the puffy, aged, formulaic sensationalism of ‘Sex and the City.’ However, it’s actually more complicated than that.

Where ‘Girls’ and ‘Sex and the City’ primarily overlap is that they both provide depictions of contemporary womanhood and specifically female friendship; creator and lead actress of ‘Girls’, Lena Dunham, chose the name of her show with intent. In one of the first scenes of the pilot episode, in fact, protagonist Hannah Horvath, a budding writer, wallows in the bathtub while she speaks to her uptight roommate and best friend, Marnie. With this intimate picture, Dunham establishes the idea that the friendship of these two characters, which is at the heart of the show, could only occur between two women. Furthermore, as actor, heart-throb and NYU alum, James Franco points out in an article for the Huffington Post, Dunham provides very little insight into the perspective of the male characters. This initial season of the show explores experiences that most people go through– unemployment, breakups, drug use, STDs– but somehow deftly anchors these experiences to a uniquely feminine perspective. Go figure: ‘Girls’ is about girls.

‘But what kind of girls is ‘Girls’ about?,’ you might ask. Well, on paper, the answer seems to be that ‘Girls’ is about girls like me: a middle-class, cisgendered, 22 year old University of Pennsylvania attendee, with a BAS in History and English and a group of close female friends, who is struggling to become a writer. Apart from my ethnicity and time spent in Australia, I meet all the necessary requirements for a Hannah Horvath. And yet, unlike ‘Sex and the City”s characterizations, I can’t but hope that I’m nothing like sensitive Hannah, or, for that matter, neurotic Marnie, or naïve Shoshanna or free-spirited Jessa.

Like ‘Sex and the City’, ‘Girls’ has its clearly defined female archetypes. However, Dunham is a significantly more talented writer than those who powered ‘Sex and the City’ for so many barren years, and, as such, there are shades of gray to her characters and their friendships that distort the paradigmatic boundaries of who she represents. Interestingly, for the most part, the primary way in which these shades of grey show themselves in the course of this season, though there is some indication that things will change in the next, is through the moulding of ‘Girls’ female characters into awful human beings to a magnitude that is alienating, rather than humanizing. The girls of ‘Girls’, to different extents, are selfish, narcissistic and inconsiderate.

By contrast, frankly put, the women of ‘Sex and the City’ are so consumed with embodying type A or type B– being Carrie, Samantha, Miranda or Charlotte– that they don’t have enough depth to be generally and basically, sordidly, awful. Lacking ambiguity, the characters of ‘Sex and the City’ are stellar examples of postcard cutouts of real people, 2 dimensional images that haven’t the volume to contain concepts of good or bad. But boy, do they ever seem better than the alternative.

Season one of ‘Girls’ is hilarious, confronting, beautiful, puzzling, difficult to watch, charming and well made, but is it about me? I hope not; I’ll stay a Samantha-Charlotte hybrid, please and thank-you.

Image Courtesy of  Girls

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Seductive, fearless and outrageous, Marina Abramović has been redefining the meaning of art for nearly 40 years. Using her own body as a vehicle, pushing herself beyond her limits, and at times risking her physical safety, she creates performances that challenge, shock and move.

From first-time director Matthew Akers, “Marina Abramović The Artist Is Present” follows “the grandmother of performance art” as she prepares for a major retrospective of her work at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 2010, highlighted by a new exhibit that is breathtaking in its simplicity: two chairs facing each other, with Abramović sitting in one and audience members taking turns sitting in the other, gazing into each other’s eyes in silence. In true Abramović style, she remains in the chair for seven and a half hours each day – every day the museum is open for three months – without eating, drinking or moving, a feat of mental and physical endurance that is challenging even for a veteran of such performances.

“Marina Abramović The Artist Is Present” debuts Monday, July 2 (9:00-10:45 p.m. ET/PT), exclusively on HBO, as part of the HBO Documentary Films summer series. The film had its world premiere at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.

Other HBO playdates: July 5 (12:45 a.m.), 10 (12:30 a.m.) and 18 (2:45 a.m.)

Other July films in the summer series include: “Hard Times: Lost on Long Island” (debuting July 9); “Birders: The Central Park Effect” (July 16); “The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom” (July 16); “Vito” (July 23); and “About Face: Supermodels Then and Now” (July 30).

Known for her extreme performance-art installations, many involving nudity and punishing bodily deprivation, Marina Abramović is one of the few artists of her generation still active in the field. A glamorous art-world icon, a lightning rod for controversy and a myth of her own making, she’s tired of the “alternative” label after four decades of skepticism, and happy that the retrospective is the crowning achievement of her career, providing her the best opportunity to put performance art on the mainstream map. “Performance art has never been a regular form of art,” she says. “It’s always been alternative since I was born, so I want it to be a real form of art and respected before I die.”

In addition to Abramović herself, the film features interviews and scenes with collaborators, art commentators, friends and fans, including: art critic Arthur Danto; Chrissie Iles, curator of the Whitney Museum of American Art; Abramović’s gallerist, Sean Kelly; writer Tom McEvilley; illusionist David Blaine; and actor James Franco.

Image Courtesey of  Andy Miah

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Rise of the Planet of the Apes is following the example of Avatar and using motion capture in the majority of the film. Instead of using all CGI apes, the director Rupert Wyatt wanted to use physical actors such as Andy Serkis (Gollum in the Lord of the Rings series).  Using Weta Digital, the special effects company responsible for Avatar, and King Kong will be an interesting movie to see when it releases on August 5, 2011.

I was sitting in the theatre watching the trailers when I heard the thump of a bass drum ring in my ears.  That is how the trailer to the prequel to Planet of the Apes started.  Watching the rest of the trailer I began to sink lower and lower in my chair.  I thought to myself, “not a prequel to Planet of the Apes!  The 2000 series was bad enough!”  When the trailer finished I did not have any interest of seeing the movie let alone another trailer.

However, when I looked deeper it spurred my interest in finding out more.  The movie is about a chimpanzee named Ceasar.  James franco’s character experiments on Caesar using a drug that is supposed to cure Alzheimer’s.  The chimp’s intellect grows until he has surpassed the intelligence of a human.  James Franco’s character has shown Ceasar the good side of humanity but when he has to give Ceasar up to another lab, Ceasar sees the evil inside humanity.  Freeing himself, he releases all the apes in cages and starts a revolution to overthrow the humans.

Rise is going for the gold with motion capture.  They did not want to use CGI apes in fear of them looking, unrealistic, and they did not want to use real chimpanzees for obvious reasons.  So, they opted for motion capture.

On set, actors were put in motion capture suits and  moved around as if they were chimps.  Andy Serkis gave an interview for Collider.com saying, “…its an entirely different role for us because chimpanzees move entirely different…[we have to watch] the time, the weight, the mindset and the rhythm of the orangutans and the chimps.”

If there is one effects company that can pull off making grown men in leotards look like real live chimps, its Weta Production, though it may be a daunting task.  There are multiple shots with more than a dozen of chimps on screen but looking at some of the stills, you could not tell that it was actually a man standing there.  What is also new is the use of facial feature cameras, which are cameras are attached to rigs on the actor’s head.  It then captures the movements of the face in order to be used as motion capture in post-production.

Rupert Wyatt came into the spotlight with The Escapist, a movie about an escape attempt from jail.  Wyatt was made director of Rise because Brian Cox (Braveheart) had highly recommended his visual style to the producer, Peter Chernin.  The direction will be interesting to see but the main focal point will be the acting of Andy Serkis, and the work of Terry Notary (cheographer of motion capture on Avatar).  Terry Notary will also act alongside Serkis and with his previous work with the recent Planet of the Apes, he should have the chimp movement down to a science.

At first glance, this movie does not seem to impress but once you go deeper into the process of it, it seems like this movie does have some redeeming qualities to it.  The physical acting of Serkis, and Notary should be entertaining, as well as what Weta does with the special effects.  This movie might not go down in the books along side the classics but it will be intriguing to see if Rise can create a better movie than the 2000s remakes.

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