Well, this looks pretty disastrous (Also, Redbanded. Don’t be stupid.)!

But this is unusual in that it’s the only movie I can think of where two dudes of comparable ages body-switch. Usually it’s two ladies who have issues to resolve, or dudes and ladies with sexual chemistry, or people’s past and future selves. Maybe two guys who are hetero dude-bros normally can’t switch bodies ’cause it leads to things like genital-shaving, and other-people’s-wives-sexing, and general bodily anxiety that is so not what hetero dude-bros do when they hang. I’m vastly curious who this movie is supposed to target, ’cause it isn’t me, and I’m not sure it’s any of the many dude-bros I know and love.

Even though I have precisely no idea if he can write or develop a show or movie, I’m glad Glee‘s Chris Colfer’s getting the chance to do precisely that. Not that gay writers or producers will necessarily make gay shows or movies, or more importantly good shows or movies, but the industry will be a better place the more kinds of people are represented in it. Young gay people who came of age in the early-to-mid aughts are an important transitional demographic. I’ll be curious to see how that plays out in Colfer’s viewpoint. And hopeful he’s more coherent than Ryan Murphy.

By Alyssa Rosenberg

I haven’t played video games in any sort of sustained way since I dabbled in Half Life and Counterstrike in high school. But when the Entertainment Software Rating Board announced that they’d be moving to a new system of determining ratings based on a questionnaire to keep up with the vast expansion of the gaming market, particularly games that are available through browsers, rather than through brick-and-mortar storefronts, I was intrigued. Rating entertainment is a notoriously tricky business, one that reveals weird political biases, generation gaps, and the unevenness of cultural norms and community standards. So I called Eliot Mizrachi, the director of communications at ESRB, to talk through how the new system works.

“What we’ve seen over the last few years is there’s been a significant increase in digitally delivered games,” he told me. “They tend to be more casual in nature, E-rated [for everyone], E 10-rated [for everyone ten or older], and lower-budget. They tend to be more like party games or puzzle games, or that sort of fare.” In other words, it’s not so much that there’s been a boom in overall gaming, but rather a boom in a kind of game that’s fairly easy to rate. Sure we can debate whether the Angry Birds are actually suicide bombers, but a questionnaire can quickly determine the fairly predictable level-to-level content and its impact on viewers. Read more

I heard about Tim Hetherington’s death in Libya as I was walking into a press screening of The Bang Bang Club yesterday, a movie about the four photographers who defined South Africa for the international press during the leadup to the end of apartheid. I think the movie, about which I’ll have more thoughts on ThinkProgress next week, would have had the same effect on me had I seen it divorced from that tragic news. But with this news in mind, it’s worth a reminder that all journalists stand in the shadows of our colleagues who risk their lives in conflict zones to report and document the truth. I am not that brave, but hope I can do homage to people like Hetherington where I can.