As someone who is somewhat obsessive about her Dumas, I did a little dance of joy upon hearing that not one but two remakes of The Three Musketeers are on the way.  I don’t particularly expect that these remakes will be good (helmed as they are by Paul W.S. Anderson and potentially the guy who made Marley and Me, although the guy behind Mr. & Mrs. Smith is apparently in the running and might do a good job), but I do expect that they will be highly, highly entertaining.  I tend not to hope for more in Dumas movies.  The material is wonderful, and wonderful on many levels, but Hollywood tends to content itself with lifting the beautifully choreographed intrigue and action, leaving a lot of the emotional resonance, especially when it comes to the close relationships between men, behind.  It’s the reason no one will ever make Twenty Years After: it’s impossible to capture the dissolution of D’Artagnan, Athos, Porthos and Aramis’s friendship if you never understood its value in the first place.

Janet Maslin may not have liked it, and I have a hard time blaming her for that since she is a Very Serious Critic, but I am extremely fond of the 1993 version of The Three Musketeers.  The movie itself is risible, of course: no one even tries for accents, and the comedy is very, very broad (see: Curry, Tim:

)

But the cast is just fantastic across the board: Curry, Oliver Platt and Keifer Sutherland slumming it as Cardinal Richelieu, Porthos and Athos respectively, Charlie Sheen in the period of his career when he was bearable as Aramis.  Julie Delphy is lovely as Constance, a pre-Burn Notice Gabrielle Anwar as Queen Anne, and Rebecca De Mornay as an archetypal Milady.  The writing’s ridiculous but delivered with a lot of panache.  The sight of Platt roaring “to be a proper Musketeer, you must be schooled in the manly art of wenching” at Chris O’Donnell in the height of his boy-toy summer, is so delightful that a friend and I briefly ran a blog titled “The Manly Art of Wenching” in college, which, considering our collective sexual experience, was even more hilarious than we thought it was.  I have a real weakness for movies like this, where the quality isn’t that high, but everyone’s having fun.  I hope these competing remakes at least meet that standard. 

I quite like Jon Krasinski, even though I tend to think The Office had aired a couple of seasons more than it ought to have.  I thought he was far and away the best thing about It’s Complicated: unlike the other actors who played Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin’s theoretically-grown children, he, as an in-law-to-be, was the only one who seemed like a plausible grown-up, while still managing to seem open and easy-going without being boring, which I think is a surprisingly hard sweet spot to get.

All of that said, though, he is not Captain America.  I mean, I don’t think Chace Crawford is either.  But I just think Krasinski is far too much of a relatable, regular guy to take up the shield as Steve Rogers.  I think that he’s into the running speaks to the body type that’s become so popular among young Hollywood actors today: the tall, almost willowy type that looks good in slim-fit suits.  Sam Worthington may be the only actor in this particular generation with a real jaw.  And he’s already overcommitted and in danger of overexposure.  We don’t need him to be Captain America, too.

So that new section at The Atlantic that I mentioned about a month ago?  It’s live, and my first column is up there too.  This time, I’m taking on the difficulties of doing sports commentary on the Olympics:

To take just one sport out of the 15 categories of events in this year’s Winter Olympics, commentators have to explain not only that it’s impressive that tiny girls can work up enough speed to do three spins in the air and land without falling down, but that it’s much harder to do that if you take off while going forwards as opposed to going backwards, and that you can earn more points if you launch yourself after the halfway point in your long program. And that breakdown doesn’t even get into the fact that the Russian and American men’s figure skating teams are sniping at each other over whether the only way to prove that you’re a real man is to spin yourself around in the air four times.

Even if you master figure skating, it doesn’t get you very far. Knowing that American two-time men’s figure skating gold medalist Dick Button thinks that Russian 2010 silver medalist Evgeni Plushenko looks like a movie villain will not unlock the mysteries of the Flying Tomato, Lindsay Vonn’s shin injury, or the Norwegian curling team’s now-famous harlequin pants.

I hope you’ll read it, and that you’ll click through and explore the rest of the new Culture channel.  My editor, the incomparable Eleanor Barkhorn, worked very hard to make it happen, and while the kinks are still being worked out I think, I think it’s wonderful that The Atlantic is making a big, aggressive investment in culture coverage.

What does that mean for you, dear readers?  More Star Wars blogging, as soon as I can tear through the books on the right (although I’m going to have to find another copy of Hero’s Trial, or skip it, since that turned out to be an audiobook, and one on cassette no less).  And that I’m going to be kind of obsessed with fictional U.S. Marshals for a bit.  There are many things to be said for FX, among them that their promotional materials sure are pretty.

At least, about the importance of popular culture, and its significance in his new show, Treme:

This is a story about culture and how American urban culture defines how we live. New Orleans is an extraordinary and unusual culture, but it comes from the same primal forces in American society of immigration and assimilation and non-assimilation and racism and post-racialism that really are the defining characteristics of this melting pot society. What is it about Americans that makes us Americans? The one thing we have unarguably given the world is African-American music. If you walk into a shebeen in South Africa, or whatever version of a bar they have in Kathmandu, if they have a jukebox, you’re going to find some Michael Jackson, some Otis Redding, some John Coltrane. It has gone around the world. That is the essential American contribution to worldwide culture. The combination of African rhythms and the pentatonic scale and European instrumentation and arrangement. That collision of the two happened in a 12-square block area of a city called New Orleans that had a near-death experience in 2005.

I’m still not sure how I think Simon is going to do with Treme, though of course I’m reserving judgment until I get I get a chance to watch the pilot a couple of times.  I’m just not sure how you replicate the knowledge of Baltimore that reporting gave Simon; reporting is part of what made Almost Famous great, too, when you think about it, Cameron Crowe knew his stuff.  But I’m feeling a bit warmer and fuzzier towards the show knowing that despite his bitterness about journalism, which I’m not sure I always think is accurate or helpful, Simon and I see the power and diffusion of pop culture as important in some of the same ways.

Also, the news that Dominic West’ll probably get a role if there’s a second season is enough to make me commit to the first.  What can I say?  I’m weak.

And this video from Vulture pretty much sums up why:

It might have been nice if all of this success had come to Renner earlier (and it might have saved The Unusuals, about which cancellation I remain bitter) but I think it must actually be nice to get famous later in life.  You don’t get scrutinized during the awkwardest period of your life.  You go into fame with a firm sense of who you are, and a well-rehearsed and adaptable set of talk-show anecdotes.  And perhaps most importantly, you know that you can survive not being famous, something that seems like death for a lot of celebutantes these days.  Going back to bagging groceries or putting makeup on cows might not be great, but you’d have done it before, and you’d know you could get by doing it again.  I think we live in an age when fame is an end in and of itself, when really, its value lies in the opportunities it opens up.

By which I mean stop whatever you’re doing right now, Star Wars fans, and check out this fantastic campaign to make Admiral Ackbar the new Ole Miss mascot.  There are so many reasons to adore this: the reinterpretation of the rebellions involved, the fact that Star Wars is sufficiently ingrained in our mass culture for a) someone to have had this idea and b) for it to be an actual, if not major, possibility.  American mythmaking at its finest, people.  This is wonderful.

I’m tied up on a crazy-intense day at work today, folks.  But I haven’t asked you guys in a while if there are things you’d like me to write about, or take a look at or listen to.  (I know I owe a couple of you emails from way back.)  Put requests in comments, and I’ll do a couple of special entries for y’all throughout the rest of the week.

And because we all deserve a little joy, here (Glee spoilers, if you’re not caught up, but if that’s the case, I can’t really help you):

Ian McShane as Blackbeard? Helllll, yeah.  Pirates should be genuinely–but performatively–terrifying in the way that Blackbeard was in real life, without relying on “But he’s Chinese / inscrutable” stereotypes, which cropped up a bit in the third movie.  McShane totally fits the bill.  And much more so than Keith Richards, or Bill Nighy (whom I adore, but was totally in camp mode), he could stare down Johnny Depp.

I am very, very excited about Waking Sleeping Beauty, a new documentary about the artists who are responsible for Disney’s second Golden Age:

How can you not be charmed by the sight of animators dancing like teapots in pitch meetings? The revelation that Tim Burton actually looked creepier before he had the money it takes to be extravagantly eccentric?

But the real question the movie raises for me is how has there not been a fantastic, Oscar-bait biopic of Walt Disney?  The truly sensible way to do this would be an upstairs-downstairs duo story, based on Bill Peet’s autobiography, which is both completely charming and eccentric, and a model of the genre.  Peet joined the company as a junior man during the making of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, rose to do all the creepy-crawlies in Sleeping Beauty (they were something of a speciality), and became Disney’s chief storyman, responsible for The Sword in the Stone and 101 Dalmations.  He quit the company after he and Walt Disney had a disagreement over the creative direction of The Jungle Book, but was devastated when Disney died.  It would be a productive relationship to explore: Peet is discerning but affectionate.  I wish someone would buy the rights and make it happen.

So, I caught The Devil Wears Prada last night, and you know what?  I kind of think Miranda Priestly was dramatically misunderstood.  There is a lot to be said for respecting women who work hard, and who help other women get jobs and move up in the world, even if the apprenticeship period is a nightmare.

As someone who quite literally worships Tony Kushner and sees Angels in America as a foundational text in my life as a writer and a reader, this piece about how plays with gay themes are deliberately getting less political kind of makes me sad, even as I understand the motivations behind it:

“I think we have a better chance of attracting straight and gay audience members with universal emotions, like love and loyalty, that touch the lives of these gay men and show how we are all equal, rather than do it through polarizing arguments,” said Richard Willis, one of the lead producers of “Next Fall,” which began previews on Tuesday.

I guess there’s an extent to which I think it’s really deeply unfortunate to reduce Angels to this kind of framework, or to treat the two plays that make up Angels as if they are confined to a class with anyone else’s work (I said worship.  I didn’t lie.).  I tend to think the overlooked genius of Angels in America is not necessarily as a gay polemic, but that it gives gayness a place in the pantheon of great American tsuris.  Jewishness plays as much of a role in Angels in America as gayness does, I tend to think, and the play’s description of ethnic Jewish grievance and grieving is so powerful it brings Ethel Rosenberg literally back from the dead to haunt Roy Cohn in his final days.  Lewis, one of the main characters, brings himself out of a crisis precipitated by his partner Prior’s AIDS diagnosis and his cowardly decision to leave Prior, by saying the Mourner’s Kaddish for Cohn.

And Jewishness isn’t the only major alternative identity conflict in Angels: there’s Mormonism, women’s sexual emancipation, and blackness. Gayness is a proud and equal part of this pantheon, but the message of the play is that history might be ending, and we are all, gay or straight, black, white, Jewish, Mormon, male, female, communist and capitalist in for a world of trouble.

I like this Jonah Weiner piece on Nicki Minaj, the chameleon-like Lil’ Kim semi-clone who’s been popping up as a guest on all sorts of tracks, mostly because it got me listening to her, and damn, girl is talented.  I always get mixed feelings with discoveries like this, because I end up regretting the number of times I failed to hit “replay” on a artist’s great tracks, even as I’m thrilled that I’ve found them.  But honestly, I have a hard time sharing Weiner’s authenticity concerns.  ”Is rapper Nicki Minaj really a gun-toting, bisexual, British madam—or just a theater enthusiast from Queens?” he asks in the piece’s deck.  But I just don’t really care.  Perhaps this is the result of a pop upbringing full of fake virgin and posing emoboys, maybe it’s growing up in an era when Jay-Z’s continuing to sing about slanging seems a little silly given his status as a respectable businessman and when Kanye West’s pretensions to street-ness were always precisely and self-consciously that.  But I’ve never assumed that artists were exactly, or even remotely, who they said they were.  I’ve always felt like I was buying a product.  Authenticity seems kind of…precious, whether in service of extreme toughness or extreme sensitivity.  I care about the truth in my personal relationships, and the quality of execution in my art.


Besides, I wish Weiner had mentioned Minaj’s “Still I Rise,” a track in which she flows like Cam’ron (the sonic similarities to “I Hate My Job” are stunning) and deconstructs her images–and criticism of it. (Warning, I’d listen to this with headphones in, and discussion of lyrics continues after the jump in the name of avoiding over-the-shoulder readers):

She rhymes, in the voice of one of her critics:


She said fuck Fendi but I think she was playin’
I heard she do them thangs
I think she fuckin’ Wayne
She call herself Lewinsky that means she give him brains*
She tryin’ be like Lil’ Kim her picture looks the same
Why didn’t she sign with G-Unit, she from Queens right?
And what’s her nationality, she’s Chinese right?
I mean she okay, but she ain’t all that
She ain’t the next bitch tell that bitch fall back
See I’m hater I go hard, listen let’s begin
You know her last name Minaj she a lesbian
And she ain’t never coming out, they could come and see 
That every time she do an interview you know I run and see
She get me so sick it make me vomit
That’s why I spend my time online leaving comments
And you know I got some more haters with me 


And sure, the chorus is Auto-Tuned to hell, but I kind of dig the shimmer in the sound, and the prize-fighter ethos.  The next verse is a veritable anthem for women who might follow her into the business, a frank explication of the economics of image, and of how women should use each other’s success to force more opportunities for themselves:


‘Cause every time a door open for me that means you,
Just got a better opportunity to do you
They don’t understand these labels, look at numbers and statistics
I lose you lose, ma its just logistics
Anyway, real bitches listen when I’m speaking,
cause if Nikki win, then all ya’ll gettin’ meetings.


The whole song is surprisingly straightforward, almost an inversion of Robyn’s “Curriculum Vitae,” pairing bravado with practicality.  I cannot stop listening to it.


*I generally dislike nasty humor at Monica Lewinsky’s expense, but damn is that a great rhyme.

My friend Alex Remington introduced me to classic, surrealist Nickelodeon kids’ show The Adventures of Pete & Pete a while back, and its awesomeness put it on my must-give list for every person I know under the age of eighteen.  Recently, he scored an interview Will McRobb, the show’s creator, and the two chatted about the show’s fantastic use of indie rock (literally everyone from Iggy Pop to Debbie Harry dropped by to guest):

“It was only partly about making kids watch shows, and partly making a place kids could call their own,” explains McRobb. “Back in those days, it seemed like Nick was the anti-Disney, trying capture what it’s really like to be a kid, and not be so sanitized or so structured.” And instead of cute animals singing songs, they had jangle-pop. “I forget why it was so easy to put in A-level indie rock,” but “anybody who saw the actual specials got to hear Yo La Tengo.”

This gets at a point I wanted to make in my last post over at Ta-Nehisi’s place.  I pretty firmly believe that making sure you provide appropriate content to children doesn’t remotely trade off with giving them things that are awesome.  There’s Cee-Lo I feel comfortable giving ten-year-olds.  But it’s definitely easier to default, and to provide children pop that’s blandly appropriate, rather that looking to challenge kids at appropriate rates.  I think the networks have latter defaulted to that former position, and it’s a real shame.

I’m still thinking hard about some of the representational issues I brought up yesterday about Gerard Depardieu’s casting as Alexandre Dumas, because the producers apparently didn’t think they could find a biracial or black actor who could a) handle the role and b) be as significant a box-office draw.  Part of it is that my friend Rich Byrne forwarded me Robyn and Jenny Wilson’s cover of Saul Williams’ “List of Demands (Reparations).”  Other than the line “I’m breaking out my noose,” and the title, the song is not particularly explicitly about race, or even about reparations on the surface.  But is it okay for two indie white girls to cover it?  Does some of the meaning get lost?  For comparison, here’s the original:

And here’s the cover:

I tend towards an ethos of generosity in these matters.  Unless Robyn and Jenny Wilson were in some way minimizing the suffering black people in America have experienced, which I absolutely don’t think they are doing, I don’t see an explicit problem with their decision to cover the piece (which has a gorgeous second verse about the desperation of love).  Is the meaning the same when two white girls perform the piece on a European television show?  Yes, unquestionably.  Is losing Williams’ political meaning a bad thing?  Possibly.  Could the performance be an act of solidarity?  Maybe.  It’s just so impossible to gauge intentions here.  All I can really discern is that both performances are pretty dope, but then, I don’t particularly have a stake in the reparations fight or a sense of ownership of Williams’ work and message.  I’m still thinking all of this stuff through.  If I figure it out, I’ll let you know.

I’ve always thought a full-on H.P. Lovecraft revival would be a lot of fun.  The Hellboy movies have made their contribution, of course.  There’s Lil’ Cthulhu.  It may just be because I’ve taken a field trip to the dude’s grave, but I think there’s plenty of space left over to explore both the depths of horror in Lovecraft’s work (the Great Old Ones are so much scarier than most other action-movie creations), and the goofiness of his vision (not to mention his, uh, deeply problematic racial views).  But as a result, even if it’s minor, and kind of dopey, this makes me pretty happy:

I’m sorry that the controversy over Gerard Depardieu’s casting to play Alexandre Dumas, who was biracial, is getting more coverage than the fact that the movie has the potential to be fantastic.  It’s focusing on the relationship between Dumas and one of his most significant collaborators, Auguste Maquet, who helped him write, among other works, The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers.  There’s significant, wonderful drama there: Maquet was excluded from the title pages of the works he helped Dumas with, a significant slight, but he ended up quite well-off, while Dumas died bankrupt after an extraordinarily, happily profligate life.


That said, the racial controversy over the casting decision is, I think, significant.  The producers, idiotically, said they didn’t think they could find a black or mixed-race actor who could both play Dumas and be as significant a draw as Depardieu.  Anytime someone says something like that, it’s pretty clear evidence that they’re not trying hard enough.  But I do think there are some interesting questions to consider about casting for biracial characters, something I think will be more and more common as racial lines continue to blur (and of course, there will be more mixed-race actors, too).  Dumas, for example, had blue eyes and a somewhat dark complexion.  Depardieu has blue eyes.  Would the situation be better if a black or mixed-race actor had been cast to play Dumas, but worn contacts? Would the controversy be less if Depardieu was tanning rather than wearing makeup?  

I don’t know that I have the answers to any of these questions.  But like Dumas, I agree that folks who make racial assumptions, whether it’s about the availability of qualified black actors, or about the abilities of a mixed-race author, only end up hurting themselves.  As Dumas once said to a man who insulted him on the basis of his race, “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.”

So, I like this post Dwayne Betts wrote at Ta-Nehisi’s place over the weekend about the fact that both the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac died at twenty-five.  But I’m not sure I agree with it.  Dwayne writes:

If you know hip-hop, then you know the story of Tupac Shakur and Christopher Wallace (Biggie Smalls). I’m getting older now, approaching the age where I can get a 30 and over club card. And sometimes I’m driving down I-295, and I hear a Pac song, or a Big song – and I pause. Both them cats died at 25. I was around 16 when the two passed. But the thing I find so frustrating, looking back at that time, and even thinking about it now – is that I don’t really remember people saying that it was tragic that they died at 25. I mean, what do you know at 25?

…

There’s a frailty in all of this. I’m thinking of father’s, and struggles and the loss of Big and Pac and the real thing I’m saying is what their deaths meant is that they wouldn’t be able to get the feeling of what it was to give someone what you’d missed. I write about prison a lot, too much for real. It’s my obsession and what I tell people is that if Milton could write about God his entire life (and be dope, I don’t deny the work Paradise Lost does) than I can make prison a metaphor for whatever. And once I wrote that I’d met my fathers in prison. I’ve had to talk about that line way too much – but what I’m saying is that there is a graveyard where the men older than me where. Maybe there are a rack of graveyards. And they were there for all kinds of reasons. But there, they dropped the jewels that living fifty years gives you. Mornings I wake up wondering about what Pac would say at 40. 

I’ve written about this some with Amy Winehouse and Courtney Love.  But I think you just can’t expect that Biggie and Pac would have still been writing and MCing, much less that they would have done so at the level that they were briefly, and brilliantly, in their youth.  I think it still remains to be seen whether hip-hop is going to produce elder statesmen, whether someone is going to step up and play the roles that folks like Paul McCartney, Neil Young, and Eric Clapton have, to name only a few, in rock.  And I don’t know if that’s just due to violent beefs, even if I can’t entirely put my fingers on the other factors.  Is it that flow is hard to sustain past thirty?  That guys (and women*) lose their edge?  Jay-Z might be the first guy to make it to late middle age and still be productive, innovative, and sharp.  Queen Latifah remains royalty, but she’s largely segued over to other media (though as this Lady Gaga remix she did shows, she can still spit with the best of ‘em).  In any case, I don’t think you can lament what might have been, with no guarantee that it would have happened.

First, thanks for putting up with my slower pace last week, you guys.  I missed you!  And for those of you coming in from Ta-Nehisi’s site, welcome!  It’s pretty friendly over here.  I hope you have fun.

So, I’m still burned about the unjust treatment of adorable Johnny Weir by the judges in the men’s figure-skating competition in Vancouver, but after Gawker turned up this:

I think it’s safe to say that Weir is number one in absurd, fabulous pop-influenced performances:

Tom Jones + Fake Muscle Outfit loses to Johnny Weir and “Poker Face” any day.  And if Weir wants to quit figure skating, I sort of feel like there might be an opening for him as creative director at the Haus of Gaga.