-I want to hear Lady Gaga and The Boss do a duet of her latest single.

-I do hope The Dark Tower comes through as a multi-media project, but it’s not looking good.

-I wonder if JDate’s new film club‘s going to include Keeping the Faith in the selections list.

-Kathryn Bigelow is going to send an Australian dude to kill (or perhaps fail to kill, if the script isn’t updated) Osama bin Laden.

-I’m reading a book that kind of explains why there are so many father-daughter crime movies all of a sudden, although I’m not sure that’s what Dr. Peggy Drexler intended me to take away from it.

Sarah Palin’s family has already seen two big paydays from their participation in reality television shows, and they’re about to add a third. The BIO Channel (currently airing four primetime hours of programming about American criminals) has signed Bristol Palin for ten episodes of a half-hour show chronicling her move to Los Angeles to room with her fellow Dancing with the Stars finalist and Disney star Kyle Massey and his brother Christopher.

Here’s what the Palins have raked in so far:

Sarah Palin’s Alaska, $2 million: TLC paid Palin $250,000 per episode for eight episodes of her nature-adjacent reality show, below the $1-$1.5 million per episode rate Palin was apparently looking for when she started shopping the program. When Sarah Palin’s Alaska premiered strong, the former Governor reportedly pursued a contract renewal that would have brought her up to the $1 million level. But after ratings declined significantly, and the show’s hunting scenes sparked controversy, TLC declined to renew it.

Dancing With the Stars, at least $365,000: Networks are loath to confirm reality show salaries publicly, but in 2009, Olympic gymnast Shawn Johnson’s contract with the show was leaked, providing a sense of the DWTS salary structure, which paid participants a base rate of $125,000 no matter how far they make it in the competition, and an escalating per-week rate as they survive elimination. Under the terms of that contract, Bristol Palin earned at least $365,000 for making the finals, and could have made more if the terms of the contract have been renegotiated more favorably since then.

Dan Silberman, BIO’s Vice President for Publicity, told ThinkProgress by email that the company won’t release details about Palin’s new salary. “It is a company policy that we do not disclose financial matters,” he said.

Bristol Palin’s reality salary is hard to calculate: she’ll come into her new show more famous and with more of a track record than people like the cast of the Real Housewives franchise, who make roughly $30,000 per episode, but not as famous as someone like Ozzy Osbourne, whose family started out their reality series with salaries of $5,000 per episode when the genre was still fairly new and ended up banking $1 million a pop. But a conservative estimate might put Bristol Palin at $50,000 per episode, the same as what Donald Trump made during his first two seasons with The Apprentice, bringing her $500,000 for the whole run of the show.

If our estimate is accurate, that would bring the Palin’s collective income from reality television alone to nearly $3 million since September 2010.

By Alyssa Rosenberg

Over the weekend, pursuant to both my thinking about what constitutes a racially progressive movie, and my general weakness for romantic comedies, my friend Tyler and I went to go see Jumping the Broom. As is often the case with these kinds of ensemble movies, the flick works better at the margins than at the center: Paula Patton and Laz Alonso are very attractive people without much in the way of discernable acting talent, but Loretta Devine and Angela Bassett go at their feud with terrific energy, Romeo has grown up cute and funny as a college guy with a taste for older women, particularly the warm and wry Tasha Smith.

The movie’s politics are fairly confused. The main character’s pledge that she won’t sleep with another man until she marries is more an excuse for megachurch pastor T.D. Jakes to give the movie his blessing (he marries Patton and Alonso on-screen) than the product of any real religious conviction. The wealthy family in the movie has secrets, but it’s the working-class one that actively causes the most trouble, whether Devine’s character is delivering a venomous non-blessing at a wedding rehearsal dinner or forcible unearthing buried family history. There’s something uncomfortable about a story that makes some obnoxious members of the talented tenth out to be the victim of a postal clerk who cares about preserving traditional elements of African-American wedding ceremonies.

But honestly, the most revealing thing for me about the movie was the mix of trailers before it played, which included Zoe Saldana’s revenge flick Colombiana; Courageous, the latest movie out of Sherwood Pictures, a production company that’s actually an outreach effort of Sherwood Baptist Church in Georgia; and Captain America. Which is to say it was a weirdly tonally uneven mix, attempting to appeal to wildly disparate impulses in the Mother’s Day crowd that showed up for a Christian-tinted romcom. There’s something weird about the fact that 12.6 percent of the American population somehow counts as a niche audience, that we’ve got enough superhero movies to fill the 15-odd minutes before the latest Marvel flick starts, but not enough movies with African-American stars and ensemble casts to produce a thematically coherent slate of trailers before a movie aimed at black people.

I’d like for More Than Frybread to be the Native American Best in Show:

I honestly don’t think I’ve seen a movie set in a native community of any sort since Smoke Signals (and now that I’ve IMDbed Smoke Signals, I know where I remember Adam Beach from) except Whale Rider, which is a combination of my fault for not seeking things out, and the market’s fault for not making things more available. But this doesn’t look that funny. Christopher Guest is a genuis at using exaggeration of clearly obvious types to show us the truth, and if More Than Frybread‘s going to work for a mass audience, it will have to delineate those types more clearly for said mass audience then it’s doing here. The jokes need to be able to land—and they need to be cleverer than suggesting it’s hilarious that a fat girl could rock a beauty pageant.

This might end up being mine:

It’s that perfect combination of kind of dumb, bouncy, and sonically shimmery that demands to be blasted out of a car window into some hot, muggy air. I am, of course, happy to take nominations for other candidates.

By Alyssa Rosenberg

Kriston Capps makes a provocative, and I think in some ways convincing, argument against the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s upcoming Art of Video Games exhibit. I don’t disagree that it’s an important curatorial mission to do more shows that focus on African-American art, or that gallery space is a precious resource (especially given its ability to confer legitimacy and prestige on an artist or a form of art), or even that the method of selecting the games included in the exhibition was not exactly rigorous. He writes:

Video games don’t need a museum half as much as the Smithsonian thinks it needs video games.

For the American Art Museum, “The Art of Video Games” will serve as one of those golden bricks from Super Mario Bros. that keeps pumping out coins. For the hordes of tourist families that this show draws, it will mean the same quest for the Triforce, the same renegade FOXHOUND nuclear threat, the same super monkey balls—but at a museum, which means education and (maybe) larger screens. If there is any scholarship to the exhibition, it takes a distinctly player-two role to the show’s family draw.

This, I think, is where we disagree. Frankly, if I was on the staff of a publicly-funded cultural institution staring down the existing political climate, and the role government support for the arts has the potential to play in the 2012 elections, I would want to enlist a passionate constituency of nerds and future nerds. Museum attendance has been up the last two years, but institutions still report that they’re facing significant economic strain. What they need is not just an attendance bump, but to convince new segments of the population that they’re deeply invested in the continued existence of museums. If talking families through the technology and technique of the games they play regularly as a way to get kids interested in art, that seems like a win, though it’s entirely dependent on how well the exhibit comes together. The Smithsonian may be overcompensating to reach these end goals, and the result may be a bad exhibit, but I don’t think the sense that the Smithsonian needs video games—and by extension, needs new, committed audiences—is wrong.

It seems sort of fitting that the trailer for Page One should come out while I’m hanging out at Yglesias’s place. One of the early things I wrote on this blog was a debate with him about whether journalism movies were inherently boring, with him affirming that proposition and me vigorously negating it. I’m not sure, however, that Page One is the movie to reinvigorate the genre:

The problem of the future of journalism is, of course, a momentous one, but it’s a systemic problem rather than a one-off that can be adequately addressed in two hours (or six, if we accept that State of Play is, along with Shattered Glass, the modern gold standard for journalism on television and film), be it a case of plagiarism or corporate censorship. I worry this risks looking a bit self-involved and potentially arc-less. Of course, word is that the documentary’s already being remade as a standard Hollywood production. What we need is not a remake of this particular set of ruminations but a good blogger v. traditional journalist movie, what the State of Play remake should have been, but wasn’t.

By Alyssa Rosenberg

As always, spoilery discussions are fine, just label them as such at the outset, please.

One of the things I like best about Game of Thrones is the way the series deals with people who don’t fit into the roles proscribes for them by society. Fantasy stories typically deal with people who are a little bit different, the girl who wants to fight like a man, the poor boy elevated to kingship, the power that feels like a curse but that turns out to be a gift. While achieving those dreams or adjusting to those unexpected transitions isn’t automatic, it’s generally relatively simple: you go on a quest, you achieve some sort of great feat, and people learn to tolerate your unusual ambitions, or even to embrace them.

But one of the things the Game of Thrones universe does best is to shake up the fantastical expectation that it’s reasonably easy for unusual people and people with unusual ambitions to make a place for themselves in rigid societies. The show insists that it’s difficult enough to fit into pre-approved roles if they’re available to you, and even harder to find a place for yourself if you’re unlucky enough not to slot into a pre-approved role at all.

There are all kinds of ways to be an outcast, of course. Jon Snow is an acknowledged bastard, but growing up as the shade of legitimate children has left him unable to function either as a nobleman or as an ordinary person. Gendry, the king’s bastard we meet in this episode, may be a mere blacksmith’s apprentice, but he’s not wracked with the discontent John feels. Samwell Tarly isn’t just his father’s legitimate son, he’s his heir, but his father hates him so much he tells Sam he has to take the black or “If you do not, he said, then we’ll have a hunt. And somewhere in these woods, your horse will stumble, and you’ll be thrown from your saddle to die. Or so I’ll tell your mother. Nothing would please me more.” It’s not enough to have your bloodlines intact, to be born into a role: you have to fit it exactly, or be cast out of it.

Even given all of that, if you’re illegitimate, awkward, fat, criminal, or cast out of polite society, there’s a place for you, a society you can integrate into, as long as you’re an able-bodied man. If you’re a dwarf like Tyrion Lannister, you can’t make another life for yourself as a hedge knight, or a man of the Night’s Watch, or an outlaw—things are expected of you, so you have to stay in polite society, but you can either claim your outcast status, or suffer through it. If you’re a woman like Sansa Stark, who takes well to the circumscribed role of a noble lady, you still have to live with the terror of the part of your role you can’t control: whether you’ll have children, and whether they’ll be the right kind of children. And if you’re a girl like Arya, you can say that it’s not for you to be the lady of a holdfast and bear knightly sons, but rejecting that leaves a big blank in your future. The show (and the books) have a real respect for all these dimensions of difficulty.