So, judging by the first picture of the new Wonder Woman costume, Diana Prince is going to be Our Lady of Perpetual Crotch Sweat. I want to be hopeful about this show, I really do. It just looks incredibly cheap and shiny and dumb. I have a leaked version of the pilot script I haven’t even been able to bring myself to read because I’m too depressed about what I’m going to find there.

If I’m honest with myself, the prospect of a great female superhero movie is one I’ve kind of given up on. I’ve been beating this drum pretty much as long as I’ve been a professional writer, and even if my screeds in The American Prospect are not going to rock Hollywood’s world, I know I’m not alone. There is an audience for movies about superpowered women. Wonder Woman comics sell better among men than among women. A great superheroine movie could redefine both the superhero genre and the romcom in one stroke. There are fantastic commercial, artistic, and feminist reasons to give something decent a shot. Maybe I shouldn’t be shocked. If Hollywood can’t make decent female leads in everyday stories, how are the studios supposed to go above and beyond? Maybe that’s the soft bigotry of low expectations, but it’s hard to say it’s unearned.

I’d be really curious to hear how Julian Schnabel fans, or folks who know more about Palestinian feminism than I do, feel about Miral:

A couple of things make me feel a bit queasy about it. First, when we talk about problematic racial casting, it’s almost always in terms of white people getting roles that people of color ought to have, whether it’s Angelina Jolie playing a multiracial Mariane Pearl or white actors turning the multiracial cast of Avatar: The Last Airbender monotone in the live adaptation. But I’m just not sure how I feel about the decision to cast Frieda Pinto, an undeniably gorgeous Indian woman, as a Palestinian revolutionary. If Schnabel really wants the movie to be an act of Jewish solidarity with the cause of Palestinian independence, wouldn’t it be more useful to cast a Palestinian actress? Just because you’re non-white doesn’t mean you’re the same.

Second, something feels off to me about scoring this with a Tom Waits track alluding to “raising Cain.” Maybe the movie won’t be scored like this, but selling a movie like Miral through a sort of revolutionary chic aesthetic disagrees with me. Live goes on even in the worst struggles, the worst places, I’m sure there are belly dancers in silver, and beautiful women. But this feels less like a political act than an act of aestheticization that doesn’t strike me as appropriate or helpful to the circumstances.

I had a dinner over the weekend where the conversation turned, as it will, after the dessert plates are put away, to music. It turned out one of my guests had never listened to a Robbie Williams album all the way through, and I felt compelled to pull out Swing While You’re Winning, mostly because of the delightful strangeness of “I Will Talk and Hollywood Will Listen.” But I kept the album running while I did the dishes, and I found myself unexpectedly poleaxed by “It Was A Very Good Year.”

It’s not so much that Williams’ rendition is better than Sinatra’s, because of course it’s not, and I try to say stupid things on the internet as little as possible. But it struck me that “It Was A Very Good Year” is the kind of song that’s just impossible in today’s world, in today’s pop, and something about that made me incredibly sad.

“It Was a Very Good Year” was originally written for another band, but the album on which Sinatra made the song immortal came out when he was 50. Let’s pause and consider that for a minute. Despite its tempo, “It’s Was a Very Good Year” is resolutely pop, and it’s almost impossible to imagine someone that old recording a song that resonant today.

And how resonant it is. The song is incredibly rich in experience without being explicit or vulgar. The closest it gets to suggesting sex is the seventeen year olds hiding “from the lights / on the village green” or “and all that perfumed hair / it all came undone.”

There’s absolutely no regret in the song, something that’s would be impossible today, because people don’t make pop songs that are that reflective that are informed by wisdom. I realize I’m overstating and being a fogey, but we live in an era when life is so compressed, where if you haven’t hit it big by 25, there’s this wrongheaded sense that things are just over, all your opportunities are gone. I re-read Joan Didion’s “Goodbye To All That” recently and was struck by the fact that Didion’s crisis came when she was 28, and she didn’t publish Slouching Towards Bethlehem until she was 34. If only for the sake of our pop music, we need a longer arc. But it might be good for our mental health as well.