-The Bang Bang Club is a good movie. The guy whose memoir the movie’s based on is thoughtful and an amazing photographer.

-The Playstation Network needs a better customer service ethic.

-I met Dash Shaw once when he was my college buddy’s roomate. Now he’s a famous graphic novelist.

-China’s government and film industry want more coproductions with American companies. Looks like they might get their wish.

By Alyssa Rosenberg

After I saw The Bang Bang Club, a movie about combat photography in South Africa (reviewed here), I sat down with Greg Marinovich, whose 2001 memoir of the same name is the basis for the film to talk about the risks and highs of combat photography, the impact of amateur video on photojournalism, and his next book project. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

You mentioned that you, Ken [Oosterbroek] and Kevin [Carter, both photographers with whom Marinovich worked in South Africa] all did some military service. How did that experience impact your work as photographers?

We had such different experiences. Ken did his miltiary service and then continued to do…service in the townships. I processed old pictures of his after his death. He had piles and piles of rolls of film, black and white…They were fifteen years old. He’d never gotten around to processing them. So João [Silva, the New York Times photographer injured in Afghanistan last year, who is a long-time friend of Marinovich's], myself ,and Gary Bernard took to processing these. Because they were so old, we did lots of tests. You’re a photo buff, you know how much fun this was. And some of the pictures were from his time as a conscript in the townships. He’s got pictures of his fellow conscripts pulling down UDF posters in the townships, these guys in uniforms and armored vehicles…João missed military service. I don’t know how. He was telling me that he remembers his parents going to see a general in Praetoria. He’s not sure if money changed hands, or how, but he was not conscripted…Kevin got into a lot of trouble in the military, essentially by trying to combat the racism of his fellow conscripts. And I reckon thinking I didn’t have to work within the system. I was wrong. I had two years of absolute misery and chaos and accusations of being a communist and all that kind of stuff.

But did those experiences influence the kinds of pictures you shot, the things you looked for?

[The war in which Ken saw combat] was a border war. It was a guerilla war on the border war with armed people and against armed people, whereas what was happening in the 90s in the townships, was most of it unarmed, a lot of it unarmed. The combatants were essentially unarmed, one in a hundred people would have a weapon. So I don’t think that would have had an influence. It wasn’t a war in the sense of any kind of guerilla or formal war. It was, how does one describe it? How does one describe five thousand people coming out of a hostel in a traditional zulu regiment, some of them armed with weapons, but the rest of them with sticks, and machetes and stuff? I don’t think any kind of military training would prepare you for that. Read more

By Alyssa Rosenberg

I spoke with Greg Marinovich, the author of the memoir on which this movie is based, and its main character, yesterday. Our conversation is available here.

I heard that photographer Tim Hetherington had been killed in Libya last week as I was walking into a critics screening of The Bang Bang Club, which opens in Washington, DC today and has been playing in Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago since April 22. Hetherington’s death will probably prompt a great many people to watch Restrepo, the excellent documentary about an American platoon stationed in Afghanistan that he directed with journalist Sebastian Junger. But viewers who are curious about how photographers and videographers capture the kinds of images that make Restrepo so powerful, and the ethical and emotional complexities of photographing combatants, ought to check out The Bang Bang Club too. It’s an occasionally uneven movie, but often a beautiful one, and serious about the practice of journalism in a way little popular culture ever is.

The movie’s title comes most recently from a 2001 memoir by Greg Marinovich and João Silva, itself drawn from a joking nickname for the group of photographers who covered the undeclared war in South Africa in the leadup to the end of apartheid. Ryan Phillipe is Marinovich, South African actors Neels Van Jaarsveld and Frank Rautenbach play Silva and Ken Oosterbroek, and Friday Night Lights‘ Taylor Kitsch rounds out the group of photographers as glammed-up Kevin Carter.

The acting is imperfect: Malin Ackerman is clearly trying to establish her credentials as a serious actress by playing Star photo editor Robin Comley, but she’s mostly eye candy (as are the other female characters). Kitsch is very funny in one drug-addled scene, but it takes more than prettily downcast eyes to convey Carter’s combination of addiction, financial insecurity, and emotional strain. But Van Jaarsveld manages to be simultaneously belligerent and vulnerable as Silva. And Phillipe’s performance is a reminder, along with his tense FBI agent in Breach and his tormented soldier on the run in Stop-Loss, that he can be an unusually morally serious and thoughtful actor without being a dull one. A scene late in the movie where he runs back and forth across a road in the middle of a firefight to buy Cokes from a tuck stand is an impeccably staged action sequence, an exhibition of recklessness and humor. Read more

In the movie industry right now, one of the biggest challenges for the Motion Picture Association of America is balancing between theater owners, who are desperate to keep getting people in seats, and content providers ranging from Amazon to Netflix to Comcast, who by expanding the video-on-demand and streaming market, are making theaters increasingly irrelevant. It’s one of the reasons there’s such a huge push for 3-D, and for innovations like the ones that turn movies into theme park rides for movies like Super 8.

I think the problem for theaters is a matter of perception, rather than innovation. An adult, one-day ticket to Disney World is $82. But we’re conditioned to believe that Disney World is a special treat, perhaps a one-in-a-lifetime experience that’s worth the extravagance. Movies are reasonably competitively priced in comparison to Disney World tickets: if you spend $11-$20 for two hours, you’re paying $5.5-$10 per hour in comparison to the $10ish per hour you’ll get if you spend 8 straight hours at Disney World. But we’re conditioned to think of the movies as much more routine entertainment. What theaters need is a combination of innovation, good story-telling, and a Disney-level advertising campaign. No one’s going to beat back the demand for quicker and more multi-platform delivery, and that’s probably not a winning battle for theaters. They need to make the affirmative case for their medium.

This looks like a good exploration of the dark side of geek culture, but it also seems like an argument for why someone should make a movie adaptation of The Secret History:

Nikki Finke has doubts about its execution, but Fox’s decision to devote resources to an initiative incubating wholly original screenplays (remakes and literary adaptations are both out) by emerging screenwriters is a great idea. I’ll be curious to see the gender and racial mix of who they hire. Life experience matters in the kinds of stories people decide to tell, or decide are worth telling, and not in predictable ways. I don’t know that we’d have gotten District 9 from an American director.

The trailers for The Bully Project are undeniably moving:

But I feel like it how I feel about a lot of “issue” movies, maybe even more so. Having given us this information, what the hell are we supposed to do about any of it. Art like this demands some kind of moral response, but bullying is a particularly intractable issue. The only way to prevent it entirely is to raise kids who are homeschooled, cut off from the phone and internet, and entirely unexposed to any social situation, be it school, church, community activities, a generation of twenty-first-century boys and girls in bubbles. You can monitor your kids’ communications, but only for so-long. You can try to create an atmosphere where they’ll self-report, but it’s not clear how many kids will come-forward. You can try to raise children not to be homophobes, but how do you create compassion for kids who are physically awkward or not conventionally attractive, or the herd instinct kids seem to have to target someone? You can improve mental health services for kids (and goodness know we should do that at all levels of society), but then you have to overcome the stigma about use, and it’s a huge thing to try to do.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t do any of these things, or that the right response in the face of this kind of social problem art should be resignation. But I do find art like this frustrating, if only because watching it is not enough.

Did any of you watch the backdoor pilot for Fox’s Bones spinoff, The Finder, last week? It was…troubling, I thought, and a worrisome indication of what Hart Hanson thinks is good. Among the problems: casual homophobia (the assumption that someone is insecure, and because she’s insecure, she must be a lesbian, and because she’s a lesbian, it’s a good idea to send an operative over to seduce her buy buying her “something gay, like a slippery nipple), Michael Clarke Duncan as a legal-koan-spouting Magical Black Man, fat girl jokes, the obvious but oddly disgusting pandering of Geoff Stults going into a stranger’s house to investigate him and TAKING OFF ALL HIS CLOTHES.

The thing that works about Bones is there is a legit idea there, a use of science in service of an old, old story. This doesn’t appear to have an idea, just a collection of objectionable tics.

By Alyssa Rosenberg

Well, we know Zack Snyder won’t be able to resist a washed-out color palette or a lot of abs, but maybe he’ll make Henry Cavill less shouty as Superman than it appears he’s going to be as Theseus?

I find the minor trend of gods-interfering-in-human-affairs movies intriguing, both because it doesn’t appear that anyone has a good idea about how to do them well, and because they’re becoming a funny little step in credentialing promising young action stars. Mads Mikkelsen aside, Clash of the Titans felt like the result of a bunch of prestige actors getting left alone with a large supply of disposable pie tins, effects dudes, and high-grade weed. Troy is mostly a chance for Brian Cox to snark and Brad Pitt to be mean to little kids/naked with the ladies. Percy Jackson & The Olympians drags the gods down to the high school level rather than imbuing them with any real majesty.

There are two really obvious challenges in making gods-come-to-earth movies. First, while a lot of people believe in the work of the divine in the world these days, it’s less common to believe that the gods are dropping in for a date with the local hottie or to jump into conflict zones for the hell of it. It’s hard to resonate to the idea of gods who are not just approachable, but mercurial, interventionist. Second, superheroes have basically taken on the roles of Greek-style gods in our movies. And while we approach them with awe, we don’t exactly accord them reverence. It’s hard to code the difference between gods and superheroes when they’re doing essentially the same things on screen: kicking ass and getting chicks. And I wonder if that’s part of the problem Thor, Kenneth Branagh’s movie adaptation of the Marvel comic about the Norse-god-turned-superheroic-Avenger, has been having connecting with audiences overseas (of course, it could just be that Australians like watching Vin Diesel steal things and the Rock punch things, because who doesn’t). In a world where movie science can transform a nerdy teenager or replace a man’s broken heart and broken conscience, it’s hard to elevate audiences to an even higher level of wonder.

-I finally watched all of Parks and Recreation.

-I love hearing artists talk about other pieces of art they adore.

-Playstation is in for a world of hurt.

-I’m going to lose it watching the Young Snape and Young Lily stuff in Deathly Hallows 2.

By Alyssa Rosenberg

I’ve been meaning to do a marathon catch-up of Parks and Recreation for a while. Fortunately, Juliet Lapidos’s weird (though not in a Slate-y counterintuitive way) Slate piece about the show’s politics gave me an excuse to sit down and watch Parks and Rec straight through. Lapidos argues that the show is about Republican and Democratic views of neighborliness:

Liberals worry about the people they don’t know; conservatives worry about the people they do know. Alternatively: Democrats like helping people in the abstract but aren’t neighborly, while Republicans love their neighbors but don’t give a damn about strangers. I’ve been turning over these pat phrases recently for reasons that have nothing to do with politics. They’ve been on my mind because I finally got around to NBC’s Parks and Recreation, catching up with the first three seasons in an embarrassingly short amount of time. The abstract vs. personal take on liberals and conservatives, it seems to me, is the show’s guiding principle, or central cliché.

But the show isn’t actually about the competing social styles of Leslie Knope, an optimistic and sometimes naive city administrator, and Ron Swanson, a skeptical libertarian, and what those styles say about their commitment to their politics. Instead, Parks and Recreation asks a more fundamental and bipartisan question: can government accomplish anything meaningful?

Red state-blue state issues and political dynamics occasionally crop up around the edges of the show, but they generally pop up when an outsider injects them into the department’s operations. When Leslie accidentally gay-marries a couple of penguins in an effort to promote the Pawnee Zoo, she’s profoundly not trying to make a point, and becomes a symbol mostly because she enjoys the social attention—it’s gay rights groups who make her a hero, and a family values advocate who calls for her resignation. When a councilman gets caught an affair, it has no real impact on the department’s operations, except to set off an arms race of embarrassing-past discoveries between coworkers. “All I care about is Councilman Dexhart’s policies,” Leslie insists, trying to stay above the fray. “Not about whether he was high on nitrous and cocaine during the cave sex.” On the national level, of course there are debates about conservation, resource use, and funding for public programming. But on a local level, there’s no such thing as a Democratic or Republican stance on kids having fights with dog feces in the park or the existence of a Miss Pawnee competition. “That’s right. The head of the police is a ninth degree mason,” declares one of Leslie’s constituents at a town hall meeting. “But the music is so loud!” wails another, only to be followed by a plea to “Stop the graffiti, please. Please.”

That small-bore episode-by-episode focus on Pawnee’s problems clears the way for an ongoing exploration of the show’s real question: whether government can accomplish anything meaningful. Leslie and Ron represent the two extremes of the argument. Everyone else falls somewhere in between: after city planner Mark gets congratulated for a victory over a tenacious speed bump, he explains “I got it lowered two inches. Apparently, what I can achieve in government can literally be measured.” The fact that it takes Leslie forever to fill in the vacant pit behind Ann’s house is funny, but it’s also a good illustration of the challenges of getting something simple done—as is Leslie’s competition with Ron’s ex-wife, now the ruthless library director, over who gets to do something productive with the pit. Leslie may waste time mapping all the routes from a prank-prone teenager’s house to a statue he’s fond of defacing, but it’s emblematic of how hard she works on everything, nuisances or not.

But even though Leslie and Ron represent opposing visions of government, there’s something odd about Lapidos’s argument that their perspectives are actually competitive. Ron may be right about the fact that beef burgers beat schmancy turkey burgers any day, but he’s not really right about anything else. Parks and Recreation consistently argues that while Leslie’s enthusiasm may be overly intense, her devotion to public service is good for the community. Filling in the hole is a good idea, and not just because people in Pawnee tend to fall in it. Canceling a children’s concert might seem like an easy way to slash a budget, but it has a real impact on community families. The show’s second- and third-season budget-cutting arc ends up making the case for good government management rather than for smaller government: Ben Wyatt may be the only hero auditor in the history of television. And even Ron himself tends to acquiesce to Leslie’s view of government, fighting to save her park project, and even volunteering to give up his job to save hers. Leslie Knope’s cheerfulness turns out to be funny, but it’s Ron Swanson’s anti-government views that are Parks and Recreation‘s real joke.

I’m not a censorship advocate, or anything, but doesn’t it seem a little soon for Law & Order to be jumping on the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords and her staff and constituents as episode fodder? There is something a bit weird to me about an episode that will inevitably try to assign motivation to Jared Lee Loughner before his trial’s actually begun, before we know anything for real. It’s not so much that I think the show will impact the proceedings of the trial, but that figuring out what happened, how Loughner became the person that he is, how he decided to try to kill Giffords, and how he was able to accomplish it, these are all important things to actually discern and understand. Filling in the gaps with fiction won’t bring meaningful resolution or answers to the victims and their families, and it seems a bit odd to seize upon it.

Man, I was going to use this news as an excuse to push the delightfully strange video for Big Boi’s “The Way You Move,” except it’s apparently not readily available on YouTube anymore. So instead, have a mash-up of “The Way You Move” and “Push It,” which works surprisingly well!

All of which is a long way of saying I’m glad Fonzworth Bentley has taken enough time off from carrying around umbrellas or floating down from ceilings holding them to drop an actual mixtape. And I’m even gladder that it’s delightfully weird and good, and has a self-doubting Martin Luther King Jr. reference in the tradition of Cee-Lo Green.

I’ve been talking about this with folks at work, the fact that American pop culture is so solidly middle class these days. We’ve got rich people, sure, but everyone else is relatively financially comfortable, unless they’re the object of some well-intentioned white person’s salvation project (there are exceptions, of course, like Shameless). There aren’t really respectable, star-level blue-collar or working-poor characters, especially in television. I’ve long thought that American and British attitudes towards public housing. In the UK, council estates may be menacing, they may have the potential for violent unrest, but real people live in them, and real stories get told there:

I don’t think you’d ever get a movie like Attack the Block made in the U.S., at least without some sort of sub-plotline about an eventual reconciliation between people who live in public housing and the cops. The presence of public housing in American popular culture almost flips a genre switch, winnowing down the kind of stories that can be told there to heartwarming tales of rescue or tough-sounding stories of hardness. In the UK, you can tell a story where the residents of council estates aren’t just able to manage aliens, they’re the best possible people to stop an invasion because the estates are rough. Sure, that says something about what it means to grow up in council housing, but it manages to be comedy rather than primarily sociology. The message gets delivered, but there’s no particular exhausting need to dwell on it, and as a result, maybe it’s less easy to shake off or groan over.

-Paul Greengrass’s MLK assassination movie is delayed.

-Game of Thrones speaks to the difference in experience between reading and watching television.

-You should be more excited about World War Z than you were previously.

-I want to be Queen of Mars.

By Alyssa Rosenberg

The Hollywood Reporter observes that Hollywood, the Chinese film industry, and China’s central government would all like to see more movies that are co-produced by Chinese and American companies. The biggest obstacle to cooperation? Finding movies that will play in both Chinese and American markets, and that can make it past Chinese censors.

Obviously, script approval is a big deal. The MPAA is on record as saying the amount of time it takes to get a script approved in China scares off American investors. And the restrictions can be, to say the list, kind of odd. China recently banned time-travel movies on the grounds that they’re insufficiently respectful to historical figures (no Bill and Ted reboots for China, I guess!).

But finding the overlapping bit of the Ven diagram of Chinese and American tastes isn’t easy either. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which grossed $128 million in the United States, did only $85 million internationally, including in China. Romantic comedies are supposed to be reasonably big in China, but Disney’s remake of High School Musical for Chinese markets flopped. Chinese box office data isn’t reliably available in real time (the tracking sites like The-Numbers and Box Office Mojo seem to get their numbers through a variety of back-end sources, including the proprietors of streaming horror-movie sites), so it’s hard to see Chinese and American audiences reacting simultaneously to a mix of movies. And it would be hard to see that given even more reliable data, since China only accepts 20 American releases a year, so it’s hard to know if Battle: Los Angeles would be as popular in China as it is right now given other alternatives.

It’s possible that Nanjing Heroes, an upcoming Christian Bale-as-hunky-priest-is-a-hero-during-a-Japanese-massacre, will be the movie that hooks both American and Chinese audiences. Or the girl-learns-to-kick-ass-fairytale-rewrite that is Snow and the Seven. But until China accepts more foreign flicks, and until we’ve got more box office successes in both countries, we’re not going to have a good sense of what works on a massive scale in both markets. And that, not to mention the political complications of trying to navigate both the weirdness of the American market and the limitations of Chinese censorship, is going to make doing joint business hard.

Since Bob Greenblatt’s arrival at NBC, the network’s greenlit a number of comedy pilots with female stars. And now that word’s coming down that the network may be bringing in Tal Rabinowitz, who has been vice president for comedy at Sony (Greenblatt picked up The Big C, which she developed, while she was there), to head up its comedy programming. Together, these seem like signs that the network is doing something unusual: doubling down and investing in a brand centered around funny women. Maybe I’m overly optimistic, and misfires like Perfect Couples are illustrations of it’s possible to go badly wrong, or boringly typical, in show’s about women’s lives, women’s hopes, women’s desires. But women like Leslie Knope on Parks and Recreation are part of the future of comedy, as are women like Annie in Bridesmaids (about which more to come), and Annie Edison on Community, and I’d love to see NBC make a crazy gamble on figuring out the ways into that future. Maybe if they throw enough things on the wall, the entire enterprise will start to stick.

Well, Another Earth is more morally contemplative than it is scientifically imaginative (knowing there’s an identical earth out there, with identical people, doesn’t exactly open up new pathways in scientific development the same way first contact with another sentient species does unless they got there in entirely different ways than we did, and then it’s hard to imagine that they’d be the same as we are, really, but that’s a side issue). But it still looks dreamy, and powerful, and I’m glad the main person doing that moral contemplation is a woman, rather than a dude who has to get his girlfriend up a mountain or something (not that Deep Impact is really terrible, it’s just kind of typical):

I do wonder what the broader implications of having a double would be, though. Does knowing that there’s someone out there living your life make it less meaningful? Make you feel less alone? What are the implications of inevitability? What happens to your worlds if you decide to diverge?

By Alyssa Rosenberg*

Or at least, his retirement home. I’m doing some digging into Republican candidates’ positions on and involvement in the arts, so on a whim, I Nexised “Donald Trump donated.” Turns out the Donald ponied up $25,000 for the post-Katrina restoration of Beauvoir, Jefferson Davis’s retirement estate on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Given Haley Barbour’s decision not to run, and how some of theless-charming things he’s said about race played into his viability as a candidate, I can’t imagine this particular donation is going to play into Trump’s already-bizarre candidacy. To be fair to the Donald, he apparently made the donation at the recommendation of Richard Moe, then the president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Trump, of course, got substantial tax breaks by donating an easement on his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, to the Trust. (I’m not sure what he got out of donating space to the Rainbow PUSH coalition in the late 90s, but he did that, too. But then, Trump doesn’t have a record as a consistent, much less charitable, donor.)

*Since people have asked: I’m ThinkProgress’s resident culture nerd. Until some technical things get straightened out, I’ll be blogging here and on the ThinkProgress mainpage.

I was watching The Girlfriend Experience, and it struck me that it might have been a more interesting movie had it been primarily about the relationships between the trainer and his clients than the relationship between the escort and hers. The vulnerabilities of men and women in relationships, and the agonies about whether those relationships are real, or equitable, or sustainable, are well-trod territory, and the injection of money into it doesn’t actually change things that much. The relationship between men and their bodies seems like much less-plumbed territory. Even in movies or television shows where schlubby guys get hot girls, the anxiety about their looks is generalized rather than specific, it’s less about if-my-breasts-were-a-size-bigger-if-the-profile-of-my-nose-was-slimmer-if-my-feet-were-smaller the way it is for women than it is a general sense of resignation, and when good things happen, it’s a matter of luck rather than reform. I’d be curious to see a more detailed, uncomfortable movie about that.