Sometimes it seems like pop stars and Catholic League head Bill Donohue must have a promotional deal: they use controversial religious imagery, and he gets on television to complain about it. Today, in response to the totally unsurprising news that Lady Gaga will release the video to her newest single, “Judas” — in which she plays Mary Magdalene — on Easter Sunday, Donohue hit up Fox News to suggest that Gaga try targeting Muslims rather than Catholics:

DONOHUE: You can’t even show a depiction of Muhammad on TV, in the newspapers, and whatnot. And I’m not out there to say let’s have equality by dumping on the Muslims. I’m simply saying why does it take fear as a motivational ethic on the part of some people to respect Muslim rights? Do they want Catholics to pick up a machete in order for them to get their rights?

Watch it:

Suggesting that the openly bisexual singer go after another faith on the grounds that it will inspire a violent reaction, while simultaneously insisting that he’d never do such a thing? That’s the Easter spirit of redemption and renewal! But ever mindful of his duties, Donohue’s ready to offer some pastoral counseling on the grounds that Gaga’s spiritually confused: “You hang out with Bill Donohue, I’ll buy you a beer, honey, and maybe we can straighten you out,” he offered.

I finished the Hunger Games trilogy over the weekend (THERE BE SPOILERS AHEAD), and while I think it’s fairly effective Young Adult fiction, down to the Harry Potter-like epilogue (Do kids these days really need to be reassured that everyone gets married to the first person they ever loved and had adorable children? Really?), the story seems uniquely unsuited to the genre in which it’s set.

First, there’s the matter of the main characters themselves. They’re ultimately fairly simplistic. Katniss may go through a lot of trauma, but she capitulates to the cascade of events surrounding her. Collins makes a token sacrifice by killing Katniss’s sister Prim in Mockingjay, but it’ the kind of compromise death that readers will feel, but that they won’t necessarily be hideously wounded by, the same sort of decision J.K. Rowling made in killing off auxiliary characters but leaving her core trio intact. Peeta’s recovery is miraculous, and he doesn’t seem to have really changed when he’s recovered—Katniss is overwhelmed by his sweetness like she’s in sugar shock. He doesn’t have a personality other than goodness.

But really, the focus is just wrong. The tributes and victors are the dullest part of the story. Far more interesting are the Head Gammakers, the presidents of the Capitol and District 13, the drunk turned rebel leader. If the rebellion was engineered by the victors themselves, then the focus on them would make sense. But it’s not, and they’re not even militarily crucial. The series isn’t an incredibly insightful explication of what it means to be a political symbol, either, so the decision to make them the leads seems entirely a matter of attracting an appropriate audience, rather than serving the story best. Because the book does such a poor job of setting up Katniss as an acute observer of her society, or as an analyst or leader, her decision to kill President Coin really seemed like a bad one, rather than a redemptive, intelligent choice. It’s not a nuanced vision of war to pretend that things are black and white. President Coin’s impulse to hold a final Hunger Games might be morally disgusting, but it’s an understandable impulse, and her heroism in holding District 13 together is more important and more interesting to the actual evaluation of the war.

And ultimately, I think the trilogy fails at what it’s mostly about: providing a searing examination of what our reality television industry means not just for entertainment, but for society at large. We almost never get the reaction of anyone who watches the Hunger Games to the proceedings, and the novels never really explore the difference in audience between the districts and the Capitol. Part of what worked so well about The Truman Show was that the movie built a sense of audience investment. But if Collins wants to give readers a full-on portrait of a society, she needs to actually engage with people outside her set of main characters.

I’m not a huge 3D devotee myself, but 3net’s plans to make a Civil War documentary based on stereoscopic images from the conflict is just incredibly cool, and a use of an new technology to archival and educational ends. I hope the program is good, but even if the content is sort of nebulous, I can’t wait to get a look at the images.

By Alyssa Rosenberg

I was sorry to hear today that CBS is canceling Chaos, its hour-long CIA show. It’s not so much that that Chaos was fantastic, though Freddy Rodriguez is a charmer, and deserves a functional lead role in something. But in its semi-jokey approach to espionage, whether the agents are sneaking into North Korean in the guise of cranky dissident American filmmakers or subjecting themselves to unheated swimming pools to satisfy a crabby arms dealer’s sexy daughters, it had a whiff of Get Smart about it. And that’s a good thing, something we could use more of in a cultural moment when the zone is flooded with CIA and Homeland Security shows, when the closest we get to a parody of our security apparatus is some very tanned spies chilling in and shooting up Miami in Burn Notice or the oversexed agents of Archer. Read more

I’m glad to hear the movie adaptation of The Passage is finally underway, at least in so far as it has a director. The first major section of the book, from the discovery of the bats through the moment the virals (vampires, but oh so not Twilight-style) reach the mountains where two of our main characters are holed up to hide from the plague should be visually stunning, the kind of thing that is only partially realized in Justin Cronin’s prose.

But I have no idea how the hell they’re going to adapt the story. Whether it’s the time lapse between the first and second sections, which is absolutely critical for reasons of plot, or the long interstitials of primary source documents, the thing is a text-bound bear. Some of the primary sources, like the journey of an armored train across the country to a viral-free safe haven, could be filmed as flashbacks. But some, like the letters of the scientists, retain their menace in text in a way that they’d lose if they were translated on-screen. And frankly, the second half of the book could use a significant truncation (much like Kavalier and Clay, should it ever make it to the screen, really ought to lose the Antarctica section). The adaptation here is critical, and I’ll be curious to see how they pull it off.