Former NWA member and “Are We There Yet?” star Ice Cube is set to appear in a film remake of 21 Jump Street with Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum. The idea of a rapper from a late eighties doing an adaptation of a show from the late eighties seems a little stale, but Cube had been doing movies for almost as long as he’s been a rapper, and he’s something of a box office draw. It’s been interesting to watch Cube go from jheri-curled militant to Hollywood hustler–he’s done some silly family films, but he’s also kept an eye on culture, producing race-centered reality show “Black. White.” and still putting out albums (for better or worse).

Well, someone’s finally gone and made a movie out of Atlas Shrugged–or at least half a movie.  At last, we are at a point in American culture where a critical mass of people can ignore the fact that 1) Ayn Rand probably would loathe them and 2) she died on welfare, evidently a parasite of the sort that she so loathed.  This despite the fact that her Number One Fanboi basically admitted that his and her ideas about market regulation were wrong.  Ideas die hard.

But that’s enough of me renouncing the fact that I’ve read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead twice, in my younger days, and editorializing about reality.  What can we tell from this trailer?  For one, the John Galt line is going to be a CGI high-speed passenger train, presumably since a new freight line in modern days (the apparent setting) wouldn’t go anywhere.  For another, the movie is sumptuously shot.  They are doing a lot right with the tailoring and colors in the menswear, and these lavish party scenes are gorgeous.  But while I can’t recall specific lines from the book, based on how flat and unrealistic the dialog in the trailer is, the screenwriters used a lot of Rand’s own lines.

But do you know what I’m getting tired of?  Casting overweight people as characters with moral failings.  It’s a cheap shortcut, and these filmmakers are using it in spades.  Dagny and Hank and Midas and the heroes are all gaunt and angular.  Skinny people, along with miracle inventions that solve intractable engineering problems, make the world go round.

In closing: I hope Johnny Depp plays Ragnar Danneskjold.  And I hope he does it in his Jack Sparrow costume.

It may be too much to ask of n+1 that it maintain consistent positions with regard to hipsterdom, but it would be nice to see its investigations at least reference one another. Christopher Glazek’s Hasids versus Hipsters is an entertaining account of a struggle over urban space between “hipster” bicyclists and the Satmar Hasidim of South Williamsburg. The hipsters come off as politically engaged but not fluent; even at its most confrontational, such as when they guerilla-re-paint a bike lane that the city has removed, their activism has a twee, ingratiating quality. That may be enough to earn it the dreaded h-epithet, but it’s also a high-stakes, committed bid for control over public resources.

However, in Mark Greif’s sweeping, scourging survey/eulogy, What Was The Hipster?, hipsterism is resolutely anti-political. “[H]ipsters have mixed with particular elements of anarchist, free, vegan, environmentalist, punk, and even anti-capitalist communities,” bike messengers among them, but the hipster “aligns himself both with rebel subculture and with the dominant class, and thus opens up a poisonous conduit between the two.”

Greif’s essay could be simply discounted as an exercise in No True Scotsman-ing. No True Hipster practices politics; Glazek’s bicycle hipsters practice politics. Therefore, they are not real hipsters. Maybe they are the “particular elements” that help open the “poisonous conduit.” I happen to think Greif’s sour take is an excellent starting point, but it would benefit from a less pre-constrained investigation of how politics plays out among hipsters as examined. (Start by adding Shepard Fairey to Greif’s hipster canon of Dave Eggers and Wes Anderson.) In the meantime, Dorothy at Cat and Girl still has the stronger take.

Cross-posted at Joshua Malbin

I think it’s very smart for Charlaine Harris to wrap up her Sookie Stackhouse books, and to know she needs to wrap them up. I’ve written often, and at some length, about how I think TV series in particular need to know what the conclusion of their story arcs are, and that more shows would benefit from announcing a set number of seasons or episodes and sticking to them. Of course, that’s true with books as well, and especially show for multi-platform blockbusters, where there are huge incentives, entirely independent of artistic integrity, for keeping stories going as long as possible.

For Harris, I imagine all of this is particularly true. She said to Hero Complex in the story I linked to above that Alan Ball’s show sometimes actualizes things she only hints at in a way that makes her slightly uncomfortable as a viewer. And I think the show hasn’t quite captured what makes Sookie appealing, rather than a hot piece of redneck ass, particularly her emphasis on self-education and economic self-determination. But because HBO owns all the development rights to Sookie-related material, Harris doesn’t have a lot of leverage to hope someone will get it better, or HBO will be forced to do it better. I can see why it might be time for her to move on.