So, I am totally excited by the prospect of David Fincher making another violent, stylish murder mystery.  But given that folks made a movie of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo LAST YEAR, and that it even looks a little bit, visually, like Fincher’s style in Zodiac (I’m thinking particularly of the skies) even though it doesn’t look like it was shot on digital, it’s much less crisp, do we really need him to make another one for 2012?

I’m just saying.

Man, the things Trina’s video for “Million Dollar Girl” brings to mind.  How long it’s been since Diddy was part of a song I liked.  How Keri Hilson is so ridiculously gorgeous and tall.  And how rare it is to have a video like this where a female singer is really aggressively objectifying a man:

The song’s ostensibly Trina making the case for why she qualifies as a “million dollar girl.”  But really, it’s about her laying out precisely how awesome she is–and what kind of man she wants.  And boy, does she get, uh, unsubtle about it…”I’m in that pink Ferrari / I got a thing for Porsches / I like my men like my cars / Strong, and built like horses,” is the kind of verse that might make me very specifically uncomfortable if the  genders of the speaker and objects were reversed.  And the guys in the second setup in the video around the desk look genuinely kind of uncomfortable as she grabs their ties, crawls over them, and pushes their glasses back on their heads.  I was talking to Amanda Hess about this, and the fact that the right to objectify guys isn’t equality–it isn’t even necessarily progress.  But there is something enticing about a girl going there and getting hers, even if it’s not quite right.

Perhaps the first glimmering of this came last summer, when in the State of Play remake, the intrepid and principled junior reporter from the original British serial was transmuted into a blogger when the story was transferred to Washington, DC.  But I think we may have reached the tipping point where bloggers are replacing journalists on big and small screens.  Jude Law’s playing a scaremonger blogger in Stephen Soderbergh’s new movie, Contagion, about a deadly viral outbreak.  And Summer Glau’s going to play an investigative blogger helping out a superhero in a new NBC series, The Cape.  

I’ll be interested to see how these performances play out.  One of the great virtue of putting reporters on film is they’re great drivers of narrative.  They’ve got to go out into the world (even if there’s an extent to which that’s not reflective of actual reporting), whether they’re chasing the results of a toxicology report on a murder victim or a dizzy heiress on the run, and interact with new people pretty much all the time to do their jobs.  Movies and television shows about bloggers are going to have to find a replacement for that narrative momentum.

I can see them going in a couple of different direction.  First, if these characters are just representatives of the typical slam on bloggers as folks hiding out from the world in their mother’s basements, the character writing is going to have to be quite good, and the reach of those bloggers’ influences quite extensive, to give them heft and impact.  One way to do this might be to kind of borrow from hacker movies, and to turn bloggers into characters like Mr. Universe in Serenity (who is really basically a vlogger on some level) or Razor and Blade from Hackers: folks who have built structures to keep themselves secret, but still exert considerable influence.  Second, they can do what they seem to be doing with Glau, making folks blogger-reporters, so the means of information delivery changes, but the means of information gathering can stay essentially the same.  That was kind of what they did in State of Play, where Rachel McAdams’ blogger character learns the value of good, old-fashioned reporting (and maybe teaches Russell Crowe a thing or too).  Or third, they could focus on Gawker-style bloggers, and focus on the lives beyond the job, on the kinds of unique personalities that make folks uniquely good at that odd combination of gossip writing, personal reveals, and analysis.

Whatever direction television and movies begin to go in, though, I’d say the big-name bloggers should keep an eye out for appropriation, and maybe draw up contracts to their life rights.  Those things might be about to get valuable.

Dr. Seuss was hired to write the original script for Rebel Without a Cause and dropped out when his wife got sick.  For any of you who love the guy’s work as a children’s book author, I highly, highly recommend Dr. Seuss Goes to War, an anthology of his political cartoons, which are sometimes brilliant, and sometimes (especially when it comes to Japan) racist as hell.  Really worth the time, if only as a way to reconsider his later  career.

In a world where the movies are entirely too invested in either proving or bringing about the inevitable decency of their main characters, Nicole Holofcener’s movies are an oasis of believable unpleasantness.  I watched Friends With Money right before graduating from college, an experience that left me profoundly anxious: I wasn’t sure whether I was more worried that I’d end up as angry as Frances McDormand’s character, or as aimless as Jennifer Anniston’s.  Fortunately, four years out of college, I have neither screamed at anyone irrationally in a checkout line and stopped washing my hair, nor have I been asked to wear a French maid outfit while someone watches me clean a house, so I think I’m ready for Please Give, Holofcener’s next movie about a New York couple who really just wishes their neighbor would die so they can get their hands on her apartment:

And really, now that Holofcener’s done Los Angeles and New York, I’d love to see what she’d do with a movie about Washington, DC and the specific and pungent forms of unpleasantness so specific to this town.