#lies url

[yulinkuang]

Congratulations on your richly deserved Streamy! :-)

Thank you! I got to make a speech, wear a tiara, and drink with my friends on a grassy hill while the cool kids partied a few feet away by a wall of donuts. It was like I finally stepped into the climax of my own John Hughes movie.

[yulinkuang]

Are you tumbling b/c the go servers are down? B/c that's what I'm doing.

Haha, no, today is one of my designated off days from the app. I have a very addictive personality when it comes to my obsessions and I find this current addiction is too strong to allow myself unrestricted access to Pokemon Go. Can’t trust myself and have already found whole days just lost to the game / hours I was meant to be writing outside wasted because I was situated between two spinnable pokestops and a lure. *raises fist to the heavens* 

So if I’ve spent more than a certain number of hours playing the game one day, I have to not open the app until the fact that I’m not opening the app is no longer killing me, usually takes at least 2 days to detox myself.

It’s more easily enforceable on this particular obsession because even if I succumb to my weakness and open the app, absolutely nothing happens unless I go for a walk. So after a few mindless openings of the app and no mental reward, I give up and forget about it until I’m in a healthier place and go hunting with friends.

[yulinkuang]

I stopped watching girls after s3, I think. It just seemed to lose its hold on me. Would you recommend I give the rest another try?

I think this season (5) has been quite good and a bit of a departure from the past - partially because the girls are older now, and by necessity have done some growing up. Though there’s always the cringe scenes that make me go “agh whyyyy”, this season has also been full of moments that remind me of why I enjoyed the show to begin with. 

At its best, I think Girls casts a kind of magic glow over familiar scenes of your twenties - running into an old friend/flame and spending the day with them, bonding over heartbreak with your best friend’s mom, realizing you’ve made a horrible mistake and wtf are you doing here. And with the gorgeous cinematography / aesthetic of the show, it looks the way you feel like those moments should have looked, rather than how they probably actually looked. It gives you a weird sense of nostalgia for the shitty sloppy parts of your twenties, it makes all your mistakes and ugly parts seem romantic somehow, and that’s kinda nice to have in a TV show.

But then I’m just speaking for myself. I’ve found that Girls is one of those shows I watch that I can almost never find anyone to talk about with, because everyone’s immediate response is “Ugh, I can’t stand Lena Dunham / any of the people on that show / do we need really another show about entitled white girl privilege etc etc.” And I get that there’s a lot of valid reasons to not like the show. There’s a scene in the finale where Jessa points out, “Y’know, people hate me. I’m a hateable kind of person, I don’t know why, I can’t help it.” And I think the show is pretty hateable as well. But I enjoy it in spite of that, and I’m glad it exists, because it’s willing to fling itself whole-heartedly into the hatable ugly parts of itself and dig out something that I can connect with and sometimes didn’t recognize in myself until I saw it reflected back at me on the screen. Jenny Slate’s episode had one of my favorite monologues from the series / maybe ever, and Shosh and Marnie had two great standalone episodes as well that were great. 

I’m also a sucker for great musical choices + pretty cinematography and this show is dependable for ending episodes with those moments, so it may just all be sleight of hand.

[yulinkuang]

Haha. I haven't seen it yet (though I intend to soon). In the meantime I've been scrolling quickly past anything that turns up in my dash from it -- which means when a patented Yulin rabbit hole happened my scroll-y thumb got a real workout. :-)

Ack. I related to Judy Hopps a lot for obvious unsubtle reasons. “A bunny’s never been a cop before.” “Oh. Well I guess I’ll have to be the first one!” *hop hop hop* cut to me openly weeping into my popcorn.

[yulinkuang]

According to Twitter you literally stayed up all night watching The Bachelor.

Yes. I started writing a 500+ word essay about why, but then Tumblr ate my response. Too tired to attempt again right now. Short answer - the show is like if the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Experiment decided to get married and a 10-year-old girl from the 1990′s planned the televised wedding event. 

But that’s not why. The reason why is because IT’S BRILLIANT TELEVISION and no amount of after-the-fact intellectual think-piece essays (though if you want to read, here’s a good one) will make you smarter or better than the show. It’s not even sleight of hand trickery, it’s not trying to pull one over on you the viewer, it knows that you know all the tricks it has and yet they still all work somehow??? How??? 

Storytellers of all types should study this show. Actors should do these testimonials as monologues. 

It’s the fakest reality show there is and the mother of all reality television tropes and yet sometimes you see a tiny scab of something passing for real and it’s like… oh man. Because like, it’d be easy to say these things were scripted, but I think it’s more precise to call it contrived - the producers throw real and vulnerable humans into these incredibly convoluted circumstances and just… wait and see. It’s horrible and riveting because it’s a terrible mash up of real and not real happening to actually real people who exist. 

Like there’s a scene late in the season where The Guy takes two girls (Bubbly Blonde and The Villain) on a date where he’s going to eliminate one of them at the end, that’s just how the show works. And it’s at the Bahamas on a beautiful private island. And there’s storm brewing. And in a totally unexpected/expected moment, he dumps The Villain when she’s never been more sure of herself, and gives the Rose to the Bubbly Blonde. The Guy and Bubbly hop on a boat back to the mainland, leaving The Villain behind stranded on a rocky shore, waves crashing around her in epic fashion. The camera racks from them (happy, leaving) to her (totally blindsided, humiliated). Then we pull back to absurd drone footage - The Guy and Bubbly are long gone now, and we see The Villain is ALL ALONE on the island, a tiny human speck dressed in purple - they must have cleared all the camera crews out somehow, because she really is just all alone there, waiting for whatever happens next. And it’s almost impossible not to feel empathy towards her?? Because as horrid as she’s been, as fake and contrived as all this is and we all know another boat eventually comes to get her, you have to imagine what’s going on in that girl’s mind as the producers are like, “Okay, honey, we’re just gonna all clear out and get this one last shot of you alone on the island, just stay there while we fly a drone around the island for like 20 minutes and then we’ll get you, hopefully this storm that’s brewing doesn’t push us behind our shooting schedule.” And she’s just standing there, freshly hurting, letting this happen. And you have to wonder, like… why??? How??? OLIVIA YOU WERE SO STRONG BEFORE THIS.

The Lifetime (scripted) show UnREAL is a fabulously thoughtful and entertaining take on the behind the scenes of one of these types of shows, and when I started watching The Bachelor I told myself I was just enjoying it ironically / waiting for UnREAL to return. The series creator was a producer on The Bachelor back in the day - she talks about that here. What I find particularly fascinating is this thing she says - 

“Something we explore on UnREAL is the skill set of getting people who are not actors to perform without giving them scripts… It’s this really weird skill set that’s not only manipulating people into performing how you need them to, it’s even just having an ear for syntax as people describe their experiences and editing in your head so you can build a first-person narration from people who aren’t narrators.”

I loved UnREAL and recommended it to everyone when I watched it, and I still do - it has fascinating female characters, emotional payoff, Shiri Appleby, all the great things I love. But the truth is, even at its most entertaining and thoughtful, UnREAL still isn’t as addictive as its source material. 

The Bachelor has cracked some ungodly formula. I can’t in good conscience recommend it to anyone. But I can’t stop watching.

[yulinkuang]

Wow. All this time I'd had no idea you and Zack were once and were now again an item. It feels dumb to congratulate you, because that's a weird response anyway but also because it's not actually news except to me, but, well, congrats. Also: it would be awesome to hear more about whatever you have in the works if your over-sharing mood hasn't been all used up. Hope things are going great otherwise!

Haha, thanks!

As far as what I’m currently working on, there is one project in particular that I can’t announce yet but I’m very excited to shoot before the end of the year. It’s a collaboration with all of my favorite people behind the scenes and it’s the largest scale production I’ve ever creatively helmed as a writer/director. Plus it’s produced with a sponsor that I was a huge fan of growing up, so on a personal note, it’s an opportunity that means a lot to me. 

I’m not sure when it’ll be announced, but it’s shooting over the next couple weeks and I hope to be able to share our behind-the-scenes / production stills. 

This project is very different from anything I’ve tried to do in the past (it’s a musical!), which is scary and exciting. Mostly, I’m just glad to have my favorite people by my side on this endeavor, as well as the opportunity to collaborate with some very cool people who I’ve been a fan of for quite a while.

Beyond that, I have a couple projects in development shooting next year, but I’m superstitious and don’t like to talk about things until I know dates and plans and boring schedule details.

Hope all that vague-ness is enough to answer your question for now!

[yulinkuang]

btw, I was wrong. It wasn't a Vandenberg launch. It was a missile launch from a navy sub off the coast. Sorry to spread disinformation!

Haha you are just living up to your username then...

For a while it seemed like there were multiple official explanations, and when there are options, it’s kinda like... why not pick aliens! It’s the most fun one. Until the evil alien overlords exert their power over us and the dystopian future is nigh.

[yulinkuang]

Do you recommend Electrick Children?

I do! I found it on Netflix during my trying-to-catch-up-on-indie-movies-of-the-past-five-years kick and I really truly loved it. It's from a lady director/screenwriter (Rebecca Thomas) which is always a bonus for me, but that aside, the filmmaking is just lovely. 

Electrick Children is about a young Mormon girl who discovers she's pregnant and believes it's an immaculate conception caused by listening to a blue audio tape cover of Blondie's "Hanging on the Telephone". She then steals the family's truck and drives to Vegas to find the voice on the tape. It's intimate and sweet and way less judgmental than one might expect going into that premise. I think the screenwriter came from a Mormon background herself, which may be why the characters feel so dimensional and wonderfully familiar. It's visually poetic and bordering on magical realism at points according to some critics, and the ending is a bit more on the open ended side but I didn't mind it - it made me rewatch some parts of the film with a more critical eye. It felt a little like prose turned into film.

The cinematography and color grade is what I'm most drawn to in terms of the technical elements - there's been a trend in indie films of the past few years to go shaky handheld with low-contrast muted color grades, whereas Electrick Children has a floaty but steady look and a color grade somewhere between the cheap indie low-contrast and the orange-blue saturation of Hollywood studio films. It just really really appeals to me on an aesthetic level and I screencapped it like mad for reference.

That said, it's a bummer that pretty much everyone with a speaking role is white, but you can't have everything all the time and I'm excited enough to have found another lady director whose work I loved. 

If you wind up watching it, would love to hear your thoughts!