The day I learned how to look at my internet history is one of the saddest of my life. Not because of what I looked at, per se, (although some days...) but because there's that tab for “Today”. You can see all the stuff you looked at JUST TODAY, and how this links to that, and which thread you followed - you can actually see the time being wasted. It's terrifying.
I don't look at that tab much, so I don't know how it was that this morning I discovered Jenna Von Oy has a mommy blog. You know, Six. She will always be Six. And now she has a mommy blog on PEOPLE, along with such celebrity mothers Josie Maran, Elisabeth Rohm, Lisa Loeb, Kimberly Van Der Beek (...celeb mom?), and Marla Sokoloff.
Gia from Full House has a baby?
Okay, so she's 31(she IS?), it's not that shocking. And the blogs are mostly about how judging moms is bad, and breastfeeding is hard. Pretty standard stuff (although the comments wind up pretty damn judgy anyway, so...I guess that's a wash).
What's interesting about it is that it's the second time Marla Sokoloff's name crossed my desk today.
In this epic interview with Alan Sepinwall, Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner unpick everything that could possibly have been said, noted, or criticized about Girls, and when James Franco comes up, they point out that of course he reacted to the guys on Girls not being cool, because he is impossibly cool, and “not everyone can have Marla Sokoloff from The Practice as their first girlfriend”.
Here's what's interesting - I didn't know that, first of all. Second, is that enough to make Franco cool? Thirdly, was that a bit snippy?
Overall, I didn't find the interview with Lena and Jenni bitchy. Self-congratulatory, maybe. They're pretty sure they are very smart about the show and, while they acknowledge some missteps, they're really happy about it, and so they should be. But they really, really soft-pedalled the James Franco stuff, and I started to wonder if the Sokoloff jibe was a way of sidestepping railing on him. Twice it came up, and twice it was sort of...”yeah, that was weird”, and ended with "Big Fan of James Franco over here". Because he's James Franco, and whether I like it or not, he's kind of a big deal still, AND they spend time talking about how epically wonderful Judd Apatow is in almost the next sentence.
Is it just too close, that relationship? Are they worried that they really might need him to do them a favour and can't risk offending him?
I mean, these are the trials. On the one hand you're supposed to be open and honest and authentic and really say what people want you to say, but on the other hand you have to be careful who you offend. Nobody talks sh*t about Jay Z and Beyonce, ever, even though I'm sure they piss people off sometimes. You're never sure when you're going to need people. So you can't really say what you want to say about snivelling idiots who make your show about women all about them, because it's just not smart. It's maybe completely dishonest, but that's the price you pay?
The epic interview has lots of goods, including that the Marnie character was created to have a character “that a guy could imagine taking out for dinner”. Oh really? The whole thing, in two parts, is here.
