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Last Week’S Review: Adam and Hannah Play Out A Fantasy As Jessa’s Nightmare Comes True

Love Her or Hate Her

This entire season has been about Hannah finding a new level of maturity knowing that a baby is on the way, but up until this episode she’s always assumed she’d have the baby and live with it in New York. With Elijah, probably, in their tiny two-bedroom apartment. But with the months closing in and no real financial options presenting themselves, Hannah had to wrestle with whether or not to accept a position “teaching the Internet” at a swanky school upstate (and work for guest star Ann Dowd!) or to stay where she was with no real options. It was obvious what she was going to do from the second she was offered the job, but it made for an interesting 24-hour period of coincidences and farewells.

Not everyone is sad to see the end of “Girls,” Lena Dunham’s meandering ensemble dramedy about four overly coddled, overly ambitious millennials. However, it’s an exercise in frustration when you consider “The Delusional Downtown Divas,” her two-season 2009 web series about a group of three fame-chasing twentysomethings who would stop at nothing in their dogged pursuit of art-world recognition — except make art.

Commissioned by Index Magazine when Dunham was fresh out of Oberlin College, the three Divas were an obvious precursor to the four “Girls.” However, they inhabited a much more specific world in the downtown New York art scene, where Dunham was raised. It was a subject ripe for parody, one that she was uniquely suited to lampoon. (Of note: The founder of Index was artist Peter Halley, father of “Divas” star Isabel Halley.) “Divas” struck a much sharper and funnier tone than the uneven soup of dissatisfied ennui that often hampered “Girls.

Shortly after 11 o’clock this morning, Lena Dunham offered the Austin Convention Center’s Vimeo Theater a holistic timeline of her rise from hostess-who-lived-with-her-parents to independent cinema’s most overanalyzed success story. Fresh from SNL and somehow running on fumes with the utmost effervescence (she claimed to have written her speech at 3 am), Dunham recounted her days as an aspiring filmmaker with candor and self-effacement. Even if, on the set of Tiny Furniture precursor “Delusional Downtown Divas,” she was “struggling how to turn on the camera,” it’s clear her preternatural drive has always been intact. A tireless maker and unabashed experimenter, Dunham consistently stressed the importance of […]...

Shortly after 11 o’clock this morning, Lena Dunham offered the Austin Convention Center’s Vimeo Theater a holistic timeline of her rise from hostess-who-lived-with-her-parents to independent cinema’s most overanalyzed success story. Fresh from SNL and somehow running on fumes with the utmost effervescence (she claimed to have written her speech at 3 am), Dunham recounted her days as an aspiring filmmaker with candor and self-effacement. Even if, on the set of Tiny Furniture precursor “Delusional Downtown Divas,” she was “struggling how to turn on the camera,” it’s clear her preternatural drive has always been intact. A tireless maker and unabashed experimenter, Dunham consistently stressed...

Director Adam Wingard has received rave reviews for his R-rated, home invasion horror-comedy You’re Next, which screened at several film festivals over the past couple of years and will be released August 23. But his often gore-drenched creative sensibility — and twisted sense of humor — is not everyone’s cup of Darjeeling. In the spring of 2007, for instance, the then just the 24-year-old Wingard appeared on the premiere episode of Fox TV’s On The Lot, a much-hyped but now little-remembered, Steven Spielberg-produced filmmakers’ competition with the first prize of a million-dollar development deal at Dreamworks. As Wingard recalls, he...

The second season of "Girls" may have just ended, but Lena Dunham has yet to take a breath. The ever-productive writer/director/actress just released a new short film promoting New York designer Rachel Antonoff's Fall 2013 line. She's the sister of Dunham's boyfriend Jack Antonoff, guitarist for the Grammy-winning band Fun. (The Nyt's power sibling profile is here.) In "Best Friends," Dunham directs sister Grace Dunham and Nyt fashion writer Alice Gregory as too-close gal pals who engage in private rituals, share the same opinions and know almost everything about each other, including how they take their toast. The short-film-commercial, narrated by Adam Driver (Adam on "Girls"), is more precious than Dunham's often uncomfortably frank series, recalling the ingenue days of her "Delusional Downtown Divas" webseries. But as with all her work, including the 2010 indie feature "Tiny Furniture," Dunham continues to explore the terrain of female dynamics. In the season finale of "Girls,...

As a way of celebrating this year's nominees for the Spirit Awards in the weeks leading up to the ceremony, we reached out to as many as we could in an effort to better understand what went into their films, what they've gotten out of the experience, and where they've found their inspiration, both in regards to their work and other works of art that might've inspired them from the past year. Their answers will be published on a daily basis throughout February.

Of all the things written about Lena Dunham in the past year, a span of 12 months that has included a New York Times piece on her ultra-low budget feature "Tiny Furniture"'s successful debut at SXSW in March and culminated with a lengthy profile in The New Yorker upon its release in November, the irony, which has surely not been lost on the actress/writer/director, has...