Change Your Image
amyjbelanger
Reviews
Shrill (2019)
I was all set to review positively, but then this happened
I watched all six episodes, and after a few episodes, I was experiencing it as a charming show with a good message about social stigma. Then came the episode where the heroine, who fights so righteously for her own dignity, overtly stigmatizes a quirky colleague. That would be the same colleague who is going out of her way to support Annie by tracking down her Internet troll. The colleague is a computer geek who works in the basement. She expresses empathy for Annie, sharing that she gets trolled, herself, by her fellow gamer geeks on the basis of her gender. When Annie and her work friend mention that they're going out to an event, the computer geek colleague shows that she's feeling lonely and excluded, as well, and might like to be invited. In return, Annie and her colleague roll their eyes, give that micro-aggressive expression that says, "Ew, we're better than you," and quickly leave. She's clearly used to filtering out such micro-aggressions, and accepting her plight, the same way Annie was in the beginning. So she swallows the insult and devotes herself to finding the troll, even though she's clearly overloaded with work. This scene instantly turned my opinion and my stomach. I'm not interested in following a series that's explicitly trying to raise consciousness about social stigma, and yet, without a hint of irony, makes it okay for the heroine to do exactly the same thing to someone else. Big Thumbs Down.
Disjointed (2017)
Hilariously Bad; Better High
This show is so bad, it's good. At least for those times when you want to be lightly amused and insulated from life's pressures for a bit. It's a satire of the laugh-track sitcoms from the 1990's, and unless you're in on the joke or high (or both), you won't be able to bear the canned laughter, painful pauses, and self-consciously dorky jokes. The plot unfolds in a pot dispensary in California, where the state has legalized it, but the Feds have not. So the characters operate in a legal and moral grey zone, where they can play hero, anti-hero, and dropout all in the same shot. Where else could you so intimately mingle aging hippies with Millennials in search of meaning (and marijuana)? For that reason alone, this silly show has multigenerational appeal. Baby boomers will get a kick out of the sixties counterculture references and characters (including Cheech & Chong!), and Millennials will dig the irony, the raunch, and the celebration of dorkdom. The bad acting is so deliberately bad that it makes fun of itself and invites the viewer to do the same. I'm guessing it's best enjoyed high.