Showing posts with label Lena Dunham. Show all posts

Monday, January 1, 2024

Carroll and Lena Dunham share five thoughts on epic sci-fi Strange Days

Carroll and Lena Dunham share fivethoughts on epic sci-fi Strange Days

By Scout Sabo

November 3, 2017

STRANGE DAYS (1995).

Carroll Dunham, the artist, and his daughter, writer/actress/director Lena Dunham, took over the Metrograph in New York City last night to promote Carroll’s new book Into Words: The Selected Writings of Carroll Dunham. “A lot of super confused girls are sitting at home after ordering it off my Insta-story being like, ‘Why am I reading art criticism of Jasper Johns?’” Lena joked at one point. In honor of their family’s multihyphenate creativity, which extends far beyond art books, Carroll and Lena decided to screen a favorite film of theirs: Strange Days (1995), directed by Kathryn Bigelow and starring Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Lewis, and Angela Bassett. The epic science fiction thriller takes place on New Year’s Eve before the turn of the century in Los Angeles, where a new, illegal form of technology has become rampant. Lena and Carroll offer a few insights on the film and why it has become a bonafide obsession of theirs.

The 50 best films of 2015 / Appropriate Behaviour / No 18

The 50 best films

of 2015

in the US

No 18

Appropriate Behaviour

Appropriate Behaviour review – funny, risky and in excitingly bad taste

4/5stars

Desiree Akhavan’s hip debut about New York twentysomethings is sexually candid and exhilarating, if slightly precious

Peter Bradshaw
Thursday 5 March 2015 22.45 GMT

ike Lena Dunham, debut film-maker Desiree Akhavan has showcased herself in web comedy and now in an impressively or oppressively hip indie movie about twentysomethings in New York. She also has a role in Dunham’s HBO TV comedy Girls. Appropriate Behaviour has an indulgent, slightly precious autobiographical feel – but it is funny, risky and in exhilaratingly bad taste.

Akhavan plays a version of herself, Shirin, the daughter of well-to-do Iranian expatriates who left after the 1979 revolution. She now lives in Brooklyn, teaching film to five-year-olds, of all the wackily improbable things. Having dated men, she is now in a tempestuous relationship with the severe, sexily bespectacled Maxine (Rebecca Henderson) and unsure how or if to come out to her parents as gay, or bisexual. As in Girls, there are references to Sex and the City (though none to Friends, or to Phoebe’s famous song: “Then there are bisexuals, though some just say they’re just kidding themselves…”), Akhavan is candid about sex, and she has a great scene when a three-way she’s involved in after a couple pick her up in a bar goes weirdly wrong because the man suspects his partner is into her in ways he doesn’t like. There is also a great moment when she is given self-esteem coaching by the assistant in a lingerie store who says she deserves a great bra: “Just because your breasts are small, it doesn’t mean they’re not legitimate.”

THE GUARDIAN