Cinemorphosis

Tag: books

  • INTERROGATING THE ALTER EGO OF RACHEL BLOOM IN CRAZY EX-GIRLFRIEND

    INTERROGATING THE ALTER EGO OF RACHEL BLOOM IN CRAZY EX-GIRLFRIEND

    Rachel Bloom weaponizes her alter ego, Rebecca Bunch, to dissect her neuroses with surgical precision, laying bare her obsessions, compulsions, and complete disregard for boundaries. Rebecca isn’t just self-destructive—she’s a human wrecking ball, alienating friends, terrifying acquaintances, and steamrolling her own well-being with reckless abandon. And yet, despite all the chaos, she remains irresistibly lovable, armed with good intentions and a heart too big for her own good.

    Rebecca is a whip-smart New York attorney drowning in success-induced existential despair when fate—or perhaps something more deranged—intervenes. A chance sighting of her old summer camp crush, Josh Chan, sends her into a tailspin of romantic delusion. Suddenly, the only logical course of action isn’t therapy, self-reflection, or even a stiff drink—it’s packing up her entire life and moving to West Covina, California, in pursuit of a man who barely remembers her. What follows is less a fairytale romance and more an operatic descent into obsession, complete with full-blown musical numbers choreographed straight from the fevered depths of her subconscious.

    Once in West Covina, Rebecca lands in a delightfully dysfunctional law firm, where her brilliance is only matched by her ability to make everyone around her deeply uncomfortable. She barrels through life like a caffeinated hurricane, terrifying innocent bystanders with her intellect and intensity, all while chasing an idea of love that exists only in her own head. The show’s most poignant relationship, however, isn’t a romantic one—it’s her friendship with Paula, a sharp-witted, no-nonsense co-worker and mother who, in many ways, fills the maternal void in Rebecca’s life. Paula, trapped in the drudgery of domesticity, finds a thrilling (and slightly concerning) outlet in Rebecca’s increasingly unhinged escapades, turning their dynamic into the show’s emotional anchor.

    At its best, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend thrives on this friendship, an odd yet deeply affecting bond between two women clinging to each other for meaning and validation. But by season four, the show stumbles, bogged down by meandering storylines and an inexplicable reluctance to lean into its greatest strength—Rebecca and Paula’s relationship. The final season drags like an overlong curtain call, but even its missteps can’t erase the brilliance of what came before. At its core, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is an incisive, darkly hilarious exploration of self-sabotage, redemption, and the uphill battle of getting out of your own way.

  • DON’T GET TRAPPED IN A FLINTSTONES BACKGROUND LOOP

    DON’T GET TRAPPED IN A FLINTSTONES BACKGROUND LOOP

    In Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder, Arnold Schwarzenegger observes that bodybuilding is not merely a means toward self-improvement of the body. It opens other doors as well in business and other enterprises. I found that Arnold was right: My teenage years of toiling in the gym and amassing muscles finally paid off in 1979 when, at the tender age of seventeen, I landed the coveted position of bouncer at Maverick’s Disco in San Ramon, California. I was rolling in dough, earning a whopping ten cents over the minimum wage at three dollars an hour, while enjoying the luxurious perks of free soft drinks and peanuts. My nights were spent amidst a sea of polyester pantsuits and hairdos so heavily sprayed they constituted a legitimate fire hazard. I thought I had hit the jackpot, killing two birds with one stone: raking in the cash while strolling around the teenage disco, flexing my lats, and mingling with an endless parade of beautiful women. However, my dreams of disco glory were dashed when I encountered a cruel concept I’d later learn about in my college Abnormal Psychology class: the anhedonic response. This phenomenon numbs the brain to repeated stimulation, leading to a state of anhedonia, where happiness and pleasure are but distant memories. Thinking about anhedonia took me back to the moment when I stopped enjoying my beloved cartoon, The Flintstones. One day, as Fred and Barney drove their caveman car down the highway, I noticed the background—a series of trees, boulders, and buildings—repeating over and over. This revelation shattered the show’s illusion of reality, much like seeing how the sausage is made. Watching The Flintstones was never the same again. Maverick’s Disco was my Flintstones moment. Night after night, I watched customers flood the club with faces lit up with high expectations of excitement, glamour, and romantic connections. By closing time, those same faces were glazed over, tired, and disappointed. Yet, like clockwork, they returned the next weekend, ready to repeat the cycle. My life at the disco had become the monotonous wraparound background of The Flintstones. It was a sign that I needed to quit. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger, I needed to break out of a limited situation, spread my wings, and fly. 

  • LARRY SANDERS: WHEN YOUR ONLY MEASURE OF SELF-WORTH IS THE NIELSEN RATING

    LARRY SANDERS: WHEN YOUR ONLY MEASURE OF SELF-WORTH IS THE NIELSEN RATING

    The Larry Sanders Show is, at its core, a study in impoverishment—not financial, mind you, but emotional, existential, and spiritual. It’s a bleak yet hilarious portrait of men so starved for validation that their only measure of self-worth is the Nielsen rating. Without it, they might as well not exist. The three principals—Larry Sanders, Hank Kingsley, and Artie the producer—are all flailing in different shades of desperation, their egos so fragile they make pre-teen TikTok influencers look well-adjusted.

    What’s astonishing is that these men are emotional dumpster fires in a pre-social media era. Had they been forced to navigate Instagram, they’d have suffered full mental collapse long before season six. Larry, in particular, embodies this fragile insecurity perfectly: there he is, night after night, lying in bed with some beautiful woman, but his true lover is the TV screen, where he watches his own performance with a mix of self-loathing and obsessive scrutiny. His actual partner—flesh, blood, and pleading for his attention—might as well be a houseplant.

    Hank Kingsley, meanwhile, is a slow-motion trainwreck of envy and delusion. He loathes Larry with the fire of a thousand suns, seeing his role as sidekick as a cosmic insult to a man of his alleged grandeur. His existence is a never-ending, one-man King Lear, with far more Rogaine and far less dignity.

    Then there’s Artie, the producer, the closest thing the show has to a functional adult. He wrangles chaos with a cigarette in one hand and a whiskey in the other, managing to keep the circus running even as its ringleader is in freefall. But Artie, too, is an emotional casualty. He can juggle Larry’s neuroses and Hank’s tantrums with military precision, yet his own life is a shipwreck, his ability to maintain order confined strictly to the world of late-night television.

    Yet for all its cynicism, the show doesn’t just leave us gawking at these wrecked souls—it makes us care. We want them to wake up, to claw their way out of their vanity-driven stupor, to abandon the mirage of celebrity and seek something real. But they won’t. They can’t. They are too drunk on the high of public approval, too lost in the spectacle of show business, too incapable of self-awareness to change course. And so we watch them burn out in real time, laughing through the tragedy, absorbing its lessons like a cautionary tale wrapped in razor-sharp wit.

    In the end, The Larry Sanders Show is the perfect showbiz fable: hilarious, cutting, deeply sad, and just self-aware enough to let us laugh at the madness while secretly wondering if we, too, are addicted to the same empty validation.

  • LIZA TREYGER BELONGS ON STAGE

    LIZA TREYGER BELONGS ON STAGE

    In her Netflix stand-up special Night Owl, Liza Treyger unleashes an hour of manic brilliance, slicing through life’s absurdities with the gleeful energy of a woman who has long accepted—if not fully embraced—her own chaos. Smiling, effervescent, and naturally sarcastic, she delivers a rapid-fire confessional that feels less like a polished comedy routine and more like an open mic night inside her own hyperactive brain.

    She tells us she was born near the Chernobyl meltdown and now has a lifelong thyroid condition, that her attention span has been obliterated by her smartphone, that she’s forfeited all privacy in exchange for algorithm-curated animal videos, and that her Russian father has an uncanny ability to humiliate her by showing up to formal events in wildly inappropriate T-shirts. She doubts she has the temperament for marriage, children, or any relationship that lasts longer than a Bravo reality show season. She adores living in New York, even though she’s been mugged three times. She got an oversized butterfly tattoo—not because she wanted one, but because she was avoiding the soul-crushing task of changing her printer’s toner cartridge. She’s hungry for applause about losing forty pounds, even though she’s gained it all back. She’s openly critical of her therapist for being judgmental, yet she happily judges everyone around her. She has an encyclopedic knowledge of The Real Housewives franchise, capable of reciting random episodes in disturbingly granular detail. And, above all, she might be a bit of a misfit—too addicted to salacious gossip to maintain deep, lasting friendships.

    Treyger is intimidatingly sharp. I like to think I have a respectable level of intelligence, but I’m fairly certain she would find me basic and tedious—a conclusion I’ve already reached about myself, so no harm done. Watching Night Owl felt like a vacation from my own dullness, a thrilling rollercoaster ride through the mind of someone far wittier, sharper, and quicker than I could ever hope to be.

    For someone who claims to be a misfit, she fits perfectly on a comedy stage. The very qualities that alienate her in real life—her inability to stop talking, her obsession with gossip, her unfiltered, razor-sharp takes—are her greatest gifts in front of an audience. I’d listen to her anywhere.

  • An Unexpected Love Story in The Great

    An Unexpected Love Story in The Great

    If you had told me to watch a period drama about the turbulent love life of Peter III and Catherine the Great—one mostly confined to the gilded chambers of a Russian palace—I would have laughed, pointed to my rain gutters, and insisted I had more pressing matters to attend to. And yet, The Great did something miraculous: it took that seemingly dreary premise and spun it into one of the sharpest, most unexpected love stories I’ve ever seen on television.

    Elle Fanning’s Catherine enters the series practically vibrating with resentment, married off to a narcissistic, gluttonous man-child of an emperor played by Nicholas Hoult, whose Peter III treats ruling Russia like an all-you-can-eat buffet of debauchery. He’s selfish, crude, and revels in excess, while she’s a self-serious, idealistic reformer, convinced she’s been cursed with a fool for a husband. On paper, theirs should be a tale of mutual disdain, and indeed, for a while, it is. But then something bizarre and wonderful happens: they fall in love—not with doe-eyed, saccharine declarations, but in a way that feels both tragic and inevitable. They fall in love despite themselves.

    Peter, the arrogant peacock, starts showing unexpected flashes of vulnerability, betraying an almost boyish need to be seen and understood. Catherine, the self-righteous revolutionary, finds herself drawn to his wit, his strange charm, and his surprising capacity for change. They spar like intellectual gladiators, their verbal fencing as much foreplay as it is battle. This is where The Great sets itself apart from every predictable romance that’s ever clogged up a TV screen: the dialogue—crafted with Tony McNamara’s signature razor-sharp wit—isn’t just ornamental, it’s the very foundation of their attraction. They fall in love through language, through their relentless, biting exchanges that crackle with intelligence, irony, and reluctant admiration.

    Over three seasons, The Great delivers the most gut-wrenching, wickedly funny, and beautifully tragic love story I’ve ever seen—a romance built on war, wit, and the deeply human, utterly irrational act of loving someone against your better judgment.

  • WHY WE PREFERRED THE BRADY BUNCH OVER THE BUGALOOS

    WHY WE PREFERRED THE BRADY BUNCH OVER THE BUGALOOS

    Airing from 1969 to 1974, The Brady Bunch parachuted into a world where psychedelic counterculture wasn’t just in the streets—it was infiltrating children’s television like an unsupervised batch of bad acid. This was the golden age of Sid and Marty Krofft, the demented puppet masters behind some of the trippiest, most hallucinatory shows ever greenlit for kids who just wanted to eat their Froot Loops in peace.

    Take The Bugaloos, for instance. A gang of groovy humanoid insects pranced around Tranquility Forest, looking like Woodstock refugees who had lost a bet with Mother Nature. I.Q. the grasshopper, Harmony the bumblebee, and Joy the butterfly flitted through a kaleidoscopic fever dream, their wings flapping to the rhythm of some drugged-out sitar riff.

    Then there was H.R. Pufnstuf, a show that didn’t even pretend to hide its narcotic inspiration. The premise? A boy named Jimmy, possibly the first recorded victim of child abduction via talking boat, washes up on an island ruled by a towering, lisping dragon in a sash. He’s relentlessly hunted by a witch named Wilhelmina W. Witchiepoo, who cackles and screeches like she just took a bad hit of something cooked up in Timothy Leary’s basement. It was a surrealist nightmare wrapped in felt, and we just accepted it as part of our Saturday morning routine.

    And let’s not forget Lidsville, the unholy love child of Alice in Wonderland and a mescaline bender. A kid falls into a magician’s oversized hat and enters a world where—stay with me here—the hats are alive. Sentient bowler hats, deranged cowboy hats, and scheming top hats all vying for dominance in a dystopian headwear hierarchy. It was a concept so bizarre that it made H.R. Pufnstuf look like a Ken Burns documentary.

    Meanwhile, our parents had no idea what we were watching. They assumed we were parked in front of harmless Saturday morning cartoons, blissfully unaware that we were being force-fed a psychedelic trip disguised as children’s programming. Looking back, it’s no wonder an entire generation grew up with a slightly warped sense of reality—half of our formative years were spent under the subconscious influence of a neon-soaked acid carnival.

    But The Brady Bunch wanted no part of this trippy circus. Instead, Sherwood Schwartz’s creation pressed the rewind button, bypassing the counterculture entirely to resurrect a 1950s fantasyland straight out of Leave It to Beaver and Dennis the Menace. This was a world where no one dropped acid, but plenty of people dropped wholesome life lessons over dinner. ABC executives were spooked by the show’s aggressively retro vibe—after all, this was the era of protest marches and free love, not avocado-colored appliances and canned moral epiphanies. Yet America couldn’t resist the lure of a sanitized, hyper-organized utopia where the biggest crisis was Jan losing her glasses. The Brady home became a saccharine oasis, offering the myth of innocence to a country drowning in cultural upheaval. It was a fantasy so potent that, decades later, it would be skewered in Pleasantville—a reminder that even the shiniest mirage of perfection can’t hide the cracks in the human condition.

    I still remember a conversation from middle school that stuck like gum to the bottom of my brain. We were confessing how much we envied the kids with curfews. That’s right—curfews. Rules. Structure. While their parents were saying things like, “Be home by 9,” ours were basically saying, “Don’t set the house on fire.” The culture we grew up in was simple: adults did their thing (drink, argue, vanish), and we kids were left to figure out life on our own, like feral cats with no boundaries.

    Sure, we flirted with chaos, captivated for a hot minute by the surreal carnival of Sid and Marty Krofft’s fever-dream creations. Watching The Bugaloos or H.R. Pufnstuf was like peeking into a world designed by someone who’d eaten a bad batch of brownies. But the novelty wore off fast. You can only handle so many psychedelic forests and talking hats before you crave something—anything—that makes sense. That’s why we kept returning to The Brady Bunch and later Happy Days. Deep down, we knew that life imitating a bad acid trip wasn’t sustainable. Chaos might be entertaining, but it doesn’t tuck you in at night or teach you that everything can be neatly resolved in 30 minutes.

  • NOTHING TRIGGERED CHILDHOOD FOMO MORE THAN THE BRADY BUNCH

    NOTHING TRIGGERED CHILDHOOD FOMO MORE THAN THE BRADY BUNCH

    In the scorching summer of 1971, when I was nine and convinced that destiny owed me something spectacular, my family and four others carved out a rugged paradise on Mount Shasta. For two weeks, we fished, water-skied, dodged hornets, and lounged beneath the hypnotic drone of a massive battery-powered radio blasting The Doors, Paul McCartney, Carole King, and Three Dog Night. It should have been idyllic. It should have been.

    One morning, while the other families fried pancakes, prepped their fishing gear, and reveled in their pioneer fantasies, I was still wrapped in my sleeping bag, immersed in the most transcendent dream of my life. This wasn’t just a dream—it was a divine calling. I had met The Brady Bunch in downtown San Francisco, right beside a gleaming red cable car. Their smiles were radiant, practically angelic, and their body language said it all: I had been chosen. The adoption papers had already been signed in some conveniently located government office, and it was official—I was now a Brady.

    Questions swirled in my nine-year-old mind: Would I get my own room in their split-level suburban utopia, or would I have to bunk with Greg? More importantly, how soon would I appear on the show? Just as I was about to find out, reality crashed in like a wrecking ball. Mark and Tosh, my so-called friends, yanked me out of my blissful state, insisting it was time to go fishing. Fishing? Fishing?! I had just been welcomed into America’s most wholesome sitcom family, and now I was expected to slum it with worms and hooks?

    I sulked like a deposed prince. All day, I stomped around Mount Shasta, scowling like a kid exiled from paradise, my Brady Bunch dream stuck inside me like a splinter. I couldn’t tell anyone. What was I supposed to say? “Sorry, I can’t go fishing; I was about to move into a Technicolor utopia where the biggest problem is whether Marcia gets a date to the dance.” Yeah, that would go over well.

    “Get with the program!” my dad barked in his military tone. “We’re living in the wild!” The wild? I didn’t want the wild. I wanted avocado-green appliances, shag carpeting, and Alice the maid serving pork chops and applesauce. Instead, I got yellowjackets hovering over our food, a fishing pole, and a cold dose of reality. I was not a Brady, and the sting of it lingered longer than the mosquito bites.

    But here’s the punchline—my Brady Bunch fantasy wasn’t some rare stroke of delusion. Millions of kids across America were staring at that pastel-hued utopia, convinced that salvation came in the form of avocado-colored kitchens and polyester bell-bottoms. Creator Sherwood Schwartz was practically running a cult without knowing it—he received hundreds of letters from kids in broken homes, willing to renounce their possessions, hitchhike cross-country, and pledge fealty just for a shot at joining the sacred Brady fold. The show had become a sitcom Mecca, and nothing triggered childhood FOMO quite like realizing you weren’t born into that family.

    And here’s the cosmic joke—while we were glued to those 30-minute morality plays, dreaming of a world where even a busted nose got a feel-good resolution, the actors’ real lives were flaming train wrecks. Addiction, affairs, infighting—the Bradys weren’t living in a sitcom, they were trapped in a full-blown soap opera. Turns out, while America was fantasizing about swapping families, the actual Bradys probably wished they could swap out of their own.

    Should we have expected the actors to live the squeaky-clean fantasy they sold us? Of course not. Expecting that is like assuming Superman pays his taxes. Hollywood doesn’t run on truth—it runs on glossy façades, and The Brady Bunch was one of the greatest of them all. They spoon-fed us choreographed family bliss while drowning in off-screen dysfunction. And yet, we still crave that fantasy. Once you’ve had a taste of Brady-level wholesomeness, it’s like emotional junk food—artificial, saccharine, and utterly addictive.

    To this day, I still have dreams that I’m in that opening theme song, my face glowing in one of the squares, beaming at my Brady siblings. In that dream, I am forever young, forever safe, basking in the manufactured warmth of a world that never really existed.

  • THE TRIUMPH OF CAPTAIN KANGAROO

    THE TRIUMPH OF CAPTAIN KANGAROO

    I was five years old when I learned my first brutal lesson about the arms race of dominance. It happened in the treacherous, high-stakes jungle of the Flavet Villages Apartments in Gainesville, Florida—more specifically, in my treehouse. It wasn’t much, just a few wooden slats nailed to an old tree, but I ruled it like a king. One day, hoping to impress Tammy Whitmire, I dangled before her what I believed to be the ultimate prize: a box of Sun-Maid Raisins.

    And not just any raisins—these came in that iconic red box featuring the beaming Sun-Maid girl, her cherubic face framed by a halo of golden light, a bonnet perched on her head like a saintly crown. She cradled a bounty of grapes in her arms, promising sweetness, purity, and divine nourishment. I flashed that box like a high roller showing off a wad of cash. “Come up,” I told Tammy, “and these are all yours.”

    She was halfway up the wooden slats, eyes locked on my offering, when the unthinkable happened. From a rival treehouse, Zane Johnson’s smug little face emerged from a cluster of leaves. “Raisins?” he scoffed. “I’ve got Captain Kangaroo Cookies.”

    And just like that, I was dethroned. Tammy froze mid-climb, her expression shifting from hopeful delight to naked contempt. My raisins, once a gleaming beacon of temptation, now looked like a sad handful of shriveled failure. I watched, helpless, as she abandoned my tree and scrambled toward Zane’s perch with the urgency of a stockbroker chasing a hot tip. Within minutes, she and Zane were nestled together, giggling and feasting on his double-fudge, cream-filled cookie sandwiches—confections so decadent they made my raisins look like rations for an ascetic monk.

    As they licked chocolate from their fingers and cast pitying glances in my direction, I slumped in my treehouse, a rejected monarch in exile. At some point, I drifted into the sleep of the vanquished, only to be jolted awake by a fiery agony. Red ants—drawn, no doubt, by the scent of my untouched raisins—had swarmed my body, turning my sanctuary into a writhing hellscape. Screaming, I fled to my apartment, where my mother plunged me into a scalding bath, drowning dozens of ants still clinging to my welt-covered skin.

    As I soaked in that tub, covered in welts and drowning in existential despair, the brutal truth smacked me harder than a Captain Kangaroo cookie to the face: I was a loser. Not just in the Tammy Sweepstakes, but in the grander, merciless war of seduction and social dominance. The game wasn’t about charm, wit, or even strategic treehouse placement—it was about bait. And I had shown up to the high-stakes poker table of childhood courtship with a pathetic handful of raisins, while Zane waltzed in with a royal flush of double-fudge, cream-filled supremacy.

    That was the day the cold, reptilian logic of the universe seared itself into my brain: Raisins are for chumps. Cookies are for kings. And in the arms race of attraction, Captain Kangaroo doesn’t just win—he conquers.