I have a slightly irrational thing for Jonathan Rhys Meyers (so cute! and with those dead eyes and the alcohol problem, so scary!), so in the course of skimming through a number of television shows that have been languishing in my Netflix Instant Watch queue, I figured I might as well try out The Tudors.

It’s a vastly silly show, or at least the couple of episodes I watched seemed rather vastly silly. There are a lot of sex scenes, but not much eroticism, a lot of period costumes and skulking about but little conviction of the blood and dirt and differing mores of the time. Meyers is sort of wonderfully petty, but I’m bored by him as a man who, with very little variation, has gotten everything he ever wanted in life.

I think this is why I liked Wolf Hall so much, and why I like Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V so much. Exercising absolute power isn’t that difficult, and whim and irrationality aren’t terribly interesting. Staying alive under such a monarch, bending the arc of that capriciousness to reason, that’s what’s fascinating. And it means that the men who serve kings are inevitably more interesting than the kings themselves. The show has some promise of that, I suppose. I like Jeremy Northam (utterly excellent as Randolph Henry Ash in Posession) and James Frain both tremendously, and if there’s going to be a genuine clash of wills between them as More and Cromwell, I’ll stick around. But I’d rather be at Wolf Hall than see Henry get tarts delivered to his room and wreck staterooms. Children tire easily. Men are fascinating for the long game.

This is clearly not my week to be pleased with the movie-making universe:

Seriously, first off, this movie is based on the dumbest, ugliest pick-up ploy of all time. How many women in the world get turned on by married schlubs (in a universe where they don’t recognize said married schlub as Adam Sandler)? How can a woman who is as theoretically great as Brooklyn Decker’s character is supposed to be (and I assume the movie makes a nod at her being something in addition to hot, just for courtesy’s sake, since studios do tend to do that) be this stupid? Who are we supposed to sympathize with?

Adam Sandler’s been in sillier movies, for sure, but as goofy as 50 First Dates was, the concept was charming, born out of some genuine sense of affection and commitment without manipulation. This is up there with the ugly ones, though. This looks uglier and dumber than The Ugly Truth. Maybe Sandler just wants to test how far he can get with his brand. Maybe we’ll find him doing avant garde theater at some point. I only wish I could write this off as the result of a conscious experiment.

The big selling point of Pink’s video for “Raise Your Glass” was supposed to be the image of her officiating at a same-sex wedding. Instead, the video’s kind of a mess of mixed messages, and the one that comes through most clearly is actually one of animal-rights advocacy:

Pink has a tendency to do this: she likes to do mixed narratives with a party montage in which a theoretically representative sample of viewers stands in for her. This, I think, is one of her less successful efforts. I’m not necessarily on the same page with her when it comes to her PETA advocacy anyway, but I find the images of blindfolded women being milked to feed a calf coercive and off-putting rather than convincing (and I feel the same way about the briefer image of the matador’s execution.

I honestly think I would have minded less, though, had the images of the wedding not been so brief and mailed-in, and had it not been sold so heavily as a piece of marriage equality advocacy. I’m all for pop culture figures as advocates and as champions of the gay community. But I also tend to think that if you’re going to claim credit for political work, said work has to be effective. This isn’t. I hope she’ll do better in the future.