Year: 2017

It’s “What have you been watching?”, my chance to tell you what movies and TV I’ve been watching recently and your chance to recommend anything you’ve been watching.

You can definitely tell we’re between seasons at the moment, can’t you? Some new shows have started up (such as Famous In Love) and there are a lot more on the way, but this week, there have been very few of the regulars to watch, just The Americans, Doctor Who and the season finale of The Magicians, all of which I’ll talk about after the jump, as well as the return last night of Silicon Valley.

The rest of the time, I’ve been playing catch-up on Fortitude, which I’ll also talk about in a minute, as well as watching Seven Types of Ambiguity. I’m four episodes into that now, so I’ll a do a full season review later in the week once I’ve watched the remaining two, along with National Geographic’s Genius.

I did, however, take a glance at one other new show over the weekend:

Girlboss (Netflix)
Based on Sophia Amoruso’s book of (almost) the same name (#GirlBoss), this is a ‘loose… real loose’ reimagining of Amoruso’s climb from rags to riches in which Britt Robertson (Life Unexpected, Under The Dome) is a girl so down-and-out that she sleeps with men so she has somewhere to stay for the night and gets repeatedly fired from jobs because she doesn’t want to work for anyone. But what does she want to do? She doesn’t know, until one day she discovers she has a gift for spotting expensive second-hand clothes being given away for next to nothing. Before you know it, she’s setting up her own eBay fashion business, which will go on to be worth millions.

I actually already knew about Amaruso already, because her book was the subject of some Greek translation I had to do once, Amoruso being Greek/Italian-American (“Sofia often stole from shops, which Americans call ‘shoplifting’, for which we don’t have a specific word”). Turning Amaruso into the daughter of a rich WASP (a minor reunion for Robertson as it’s Breaking Bad/Under The Dome‘s Dean Norris) robs the story of some potential variety, as does shifting the action from the early 90s to the mid-00s. However, it still manages to maintain the main highlights of Amaruso’s career and (loose) dedication to anarchism, and be a moderately interesting story about a young woman’s journey to try to discover what she wants to do with her life and then learn how to start and run an ultimatly hugely successful business.

But it’s not great. Enjoyable enough, a different sort of story for young women from the standard current ‘handsome prince’ tales (eg Famous In Love) and Robertson is still very watchable, but neither bad nor great in its telling, just a bit average.

Continue reading “What have you been watching? Including Girlboss, Doctor Who, The Magicians and Fortitude”