-I was really hoping Area 51 would be good.

-More work for Lizzy Caplan is always good news. It’s even better news when it means she’ll be on-screen with Martin Starr and Alison Brie.

-Beyond 3D, I’m curious what kinds of movies studios think they can convince audiences they have to see in theaters.

-I hope Glee doesn’t burn America out on covers, because these are pretty good!

-Edward Albee’s caused a fuss over whether gay artists should be producing art specifically for the gay community.

I don’t mean to be going super-hard on Sarah Palin today, but the news cycle wants what the news cycle wants. The new potential-campaign film about Sarah Palin, The Undefeated, from conservative documentarian Steve Bannon, has been the political equivalent of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life: its production was a huge secret, and people are desperate to see it to figure out What It All Means. Judging by a new clip that CNN’s got up today:

And a clip that rolled on Hannity a while back:

It looks pretty dull. The folks talking against blank backgrounds (as well as the disembodied waving finger) are straight out of bad, clip-show-assembled campaign ads. Palin had the advantage of surprise and freshness when she walked onto the national stage in 2008, but that’s gone now. Pieces like Josh Green’s meditation on what Palin might have been, had history and temperament proved different, can reframe known facts, but I’m not sure there are really new ones to reveal. If there was a genuinely new story to tell about Palin, this movie might be a smart, media-savvy way to launch her campaign. But since there isn’t, her presence either in or on the fringes of the campaign and the debate around it are just going to be the political and cultural equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Given that Michael Bay auditioned Megan Fox for the Transformers franchise by making her wash his Ferrari, it’s not particularly shocking that Fox got sick of working for the guy. And honestly, it’s not particularly surprising, though it is depressing, to watch Shia LeBeouf, her costar in those movies, simultaneously bash Fox for not liking the treatment, and declare Fox insufficiently rigorous in her feminism.

Let’s examine this line of argument, shall we?

1) LeBeouf says that Fox was overly sensitive about some of the things Bay asked her to do on-set:

Mike films women in a way that appeals to a 16-year-old sexuality. It’s summer. It’s Michael’s style. And I think [Fox] never got comfortable with it. This is a girl who was taken from complete obscurity and placed in a sex-driven role in front of the whole world and told she was the sexiest woman in America. And she had a hard time accepting it. When Mike would ask her to do specific things, there was no time for fluffy talk. We’re on the run. And the one thing Mike lacks is tact. There’s no time for ‘I would like you to just arch your back 70 degrees.

2) He goes on to add how great it is to work with a Victoria’s Secret model who is comfortable being his character’s surrogate mommy/housewifey:

Rosie comes with this Victoria’s Secret background, and she’s comfortable with it, so she can get down with Mike’s way of working and it makes the whole set vibe very different…Sam’s sort of frustrated. He has no purpose in life. When he was with the Autobots, he had purpose. He was needed. But he’s got this very supportive girl who’s having him go to these job interviews and trying to nurture him, get him back on his feet. It’s a different female energy than he experienced with Mikaela, who was a very cold biker chick. This woman’s more of a maternal, loving type. Sam wants a domestic, eggs-in-the-morning kind of a thing.

3) And then declares that Fox’s developing feelings about her sex-symbol status are shallow: “Megan developed this Spice Girl strength, this woman-empowerment [stuff] that made her feel awkward about her involvement with Michael.” One can assume the word subbed out after “this woman-empowerment” is actually “shit,” right?

I just can’t with this nonsense. Shia, a few lessons: Megan Fox has the right to make the difficult decisions that often face actresses trying to get into the industry and get cast by famous directors. She also has the right to decide those decisions were wrong or that she’s retroactively uncomfortable with them and uncomfortable with the work she’s doing now. Directors have a right to fire her or not hire if she doesn’t want to do certain kinds of work, but with that comes the right of everyone else to think they’re gross. You, with all your uber-feminist roles in noted films like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, have the right to make a damn fool of yourself, as well as to show some actual sympathy towards female coworkers who face choices you don’t.

Every Monday, progressive leaders from all parts of the movement, from the blogosphere to the Hill, take a break out of their schedules to tell us what they’re watching, reading, and listening to. Suggestions or requests? Email AlyssaObserves (at) gmail (dot) com.

This week, Mara Keisling, the founding Executive Director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, chronicled her pop culture consumption as she hopped across the country. In between stops at the Philly Transgender Health Conference and meetings about how to make sure Transgender people are counted appropriately in population studies, Mara explains why she loves Andrew Sullivan’s blog, reads her friends’ memoirs, remembers Freddy Mercury, and hits up the best vegan restaurant in the country.

Monday, May 30

I read my friend Sacha Scoblic’s new book, Unwasted. I am occasionally asked to read or review new and usually unpublished books. I never ask for the honor and I almost always decline even when I am asked by actual acquaintances. I just don’t want to hurt people’s feelings with anemic or impossible praise and I don’t want my name on a lie. But I really wanted to read Sacha’s book. Even though she hadn’t asked me, I wanted to read it, not because she uses the middle initial Z, which is of course cool, but because I had enjoyed her contributions to the New York Times‘ Proof column a year or so ago. Also, my dog Puffington and her dog SciFi (AKA Barky Boy) are either lovers or best friends; it’s hard to tell. I negotiated a proof copy from Sacha. Read more

I love the idea of a competition reality show based in hip-hop rather than the country-pop fusion that dominates American Idol. In reality, I have no idea how Snoop Dogg, if he gets the show he’s pitching off the ground, would actually execute the show. Idol works, in as much as it works, for the same reason Glee does: the audience is familiar with the songs they’re singing, so it’s all a matter of who can mount a persuasive reinterpretation.

It’s not that covers don’t exist in hip-hop—searching “A Milli” on YouTube brings up 60,400 results—just that the more productive territory in the genre tends to crop up in sampling, which is effectively what Lil Mama’s doing here semi-collaboratively with Avril Lavigne (The get-out-of-my-way declaration of “Eight bars and stop” as she starts a verse is awesome great. Can she and Rye-Rye please record together?):

and in radical lyrical revamps of existing hip-hop tracks, a la Lupe Fiasco’s amping up of the politics in Kanye’s “Diamonds from Sierra Leone,” complete with explanation of how bling is a depreciating asset:

But in terms of demonstrating competitors’ skills, I’m not sure it would make sense, for example, to ask competitors to recreate Eminem’s verse on “Forever.” And in terms of pulling a mass audience (as would, of course, be the goal if they put the show on a network rather than a niche channel) that might not be versed in hip-hop’s back catalogue, I wonder if you’d have to get artists freestyling over pop songs, like Queen Latifah does with “Poker Face” here, and hope it’s enough to jump demographics or bring in audiences who wouldn’t normally turn in to a singing competition show:

There’s something satisfying about having the Critics’ Choice Television Awards nominations come out the morning after the MTV Awards. I appreciate anything that gives Emma Stone and Ellen Page much-deserved love, but it’s always sort of amusing to see the generational clash between one voting pool that rates The Twilight Saga: Eclipse as the best movie of the year and another that’s determinedly beating the drum for very different kinds of art.

Of the best dramas on the Critics’ list, two are about charismatic criminals (Boardwalk Empire, Dexter), four are about highly unusual law enforcement officers or law enforcement officers in highly unusual situations up to and including zombie apocalypse (Fringe, Justified, The Killing, and The Walking Dead), one’s about a cheating politician’s wife (The Good Wife), one’s a skeptical look at coastal cultural elites (Mad Men), and another’s an anthem to middle-American values (Friday Night Lights). Moral complexity’s a good thing, particularly when it lets critics beat themselves up a little bit and mythologize the core audiences for the shows they write about.

In comedies, quirk rules too. Having NBC’s Thursday comedy block shows competing against each other is no big surprise. Actually, none of the nominations feel particularly shocking, from industry-favorite Louie, to crowd-pleaser Glee. It would actually be interesting to have a smaller pool of nominees to see how some of the more similar shows in the pool stack up against each other. Do people think Indiana-based The Middle, a family sitcom based around a couple who manage a quarry and work at a car dealership, is a better show than Modern Family, which features much wealthier families, but also works hard to normalize a gay couple? How do the nerds of The Big Bang Theory stack up against the pop-culture riffers of Community? Something like Louie or Archer doesn’t really exist in the same universe as Glee (though thank goodness both universes can exist simultaneously), and these awards shows are as much a weird way to single out expressions of values as they are to reward artistic merit.

I tend to think the fact that there’s an actual debate over Sarah Palin’s interpretation of Paul Revere’s ride is exactly the kind of Hollywoodization and trivialization of our politics that’s disastrous and exhausting. That said, I am in favor of anything that gives me an excuse to give props to the awesomeness that is Schoolhouse Rock‘s “America Rocks” series, particularly “Shot Heard Round The World,” which I have always loved for its shout-out to Hessian mercenaries and scrappy Continentals:

The adorable animated Massachusetts colonists of “Elbow Room” are pretty fantastic, too, as are the short jokes about Napoleon:

Obviously, Schoolhouse Rock is not a bastion of nuance or anything, but in terms of catchy ways to get kids to memorize basic facts in history and other disciplines, it’s pretty impressive. I still kind of hear the Preamble to the tune of the series’ song about it.

I saw, as I assume many of you did, X-Men: First Class over the weekend. The yawning void that is January Jones notwithstanding, it’s a stylish, fun movie without too much fat on it, with more fun in ten minutes than Thor had in its entirety. It’s an origin story not so much in that it’s introducing us to these characters for the first time, but in that it’s showing us why they behave the way they do towards each other in previous movies, whether it’s shading in the full cruelty of Magneto’s rejection of Mystique when her powers are stripped from her; setting up that Wolverine’s always been a dreadful grouch; or providing a fairly good reason for humanity to be as freaked out by mutants as they are at the beginning of X-Men. But most importantly, the movie’s a great gay rights metaphor with a lot to say about the intelligence community’s inability to adapt to new realities. Spoilers as to why in subsequent paragraphs.
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This week starts a countdown to a really unfortunate event in the arts: on Friday, the Kansas Arts Commission will cease to exist, making Kansas the only state without an arts agency, the commission members will be out of a job, and Kansas arts organizations will be looking for a new form of seed funding and programmatic support.

I mention it again not just because of that deadline, which I think is worth marking, but because I was poking around trying to see if there was a common backer behind the move in several states to entirely eliminate arts agencies. And unsurprisingly, the Kansas chapter of Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-funded political action group, is a big fan of eliminating the KAC and trusting private giving to take care of the arts. Similarly, Americans For Prosperity was quite happy to see Gov. Bob McDonnell veto what he said was Virginia public broadcasting funds—though what he actually cut was money for educational program development that’s shared across Virginia school districts as a cost-savings measure. None this is evidence that AFP is the source of the bills, and AFP chapters in a number of states, including South Carolina, where arts commissions are facing total elimination have been silent on this specific issue while pushing for budget cuts more generally.

But AFP’s positions on government arts funding, where it’s taken them, is particularly ironic given the Koch family’s recent experience in this field. David Koch, of course, is a noted lover of the arts, particularly opera—in 2008, he gave $100 million to renovate the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, home of the New York City Ballet and the New York City Opera. That donation was, of course, keeping in practice with the principles for arts funding laid out by Derrick Sontag, the Kansas State Director for Americans for Prosperity, in a recent statement insisting that the demise of the Arts Commission was no big deal, and that private donations would easily fill the gap.
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I floated the idea last week of doing a book club on Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, the first book in his three-part exploration of human colonization of the Red Planet and the attendant issues of climate change, relationships between Muslims and the West, and how we process culture change in a world of increasing longevity. Enough people seem to be in that we’re going for it, so this is how it’ll work. Let’s read parts 1 and 2—up to, but not including “The Crucible” for Friday. I’ll write a post outlining some issues during the day, and we’ll hash them out in comments.

As usual, spoilers through “The Pointy End” in this post. If you want to spoil beyond that in comments, please label your comment as such, but otherwise, feel free.

I feel like I’ve spend the last few episodes of Game of Thrones complaining bitterly about Ned Stark, so it’s a relief to have an episode focused on Westeros’s survivors rather than its sentimentalists. In that vein, it’s worth noting how well the casting for this series has worked out. George R.R. Martin can be a workmanlike writer, but he packs a lot of characterization behind a huge cast, and it’s hard to make sure all of those characters emerge, even in flashes, as an individual. It’s not surprising that Sean Bean would step easily back into tortured nobility, or that Peter Dinklage would take to one of the best roles ever written for a person with dwarfism. But Maisie Williams as Arya Stark, Emilia Clarke as Dany, Kit Harrington as Jon Snow, and John Bradley as Samwell Tarly (he is, hilariously, apparently starring in a lesser show about the Borgias) were all tremendous risks that have largely—and in some cases, handsomely—paid off. Even little throwaway characters like Septa Mordane are well-cast and nicely fleshed-out. With that said, on to the episode itself!

While last week’s episode was a major tipping-point for the grand strategy plot, I thought this episode was even better at showing individual characters making critical decisions that will pay off later. The first, of course, was Arya’s. She starts by taking her first step away from authority and on the long road that will lead her destiny when she obeys Syrio’s order to run away as he holds off the Lannister’s troops, answering his question “What do we say to the God of Death?” with a tentative but definite “Not today.” After that initial hesitation, she’s more decisive about her next step on that road, which happens to be her first kill. When she finally sticks another person with the pointy end of her sword, it goes in with incredible ease.

Tyrion, in the interests of survival, makes his first moves towards the destruction of the social structure that has both empowered him and belittled him. First, he sets off on the road with Bronn, declaring to him “Whatever their price, I’ll beat it. I like living.” Then, he takes up with a rough alliance of hillmen, presenting them to his father as his borrowers. Given that the show’s turned Osha into an Emo Wildling, I’m glad to see Shagga has his sense of humor intact, and that there will be something at least moderately rollicking about Tyrion Lannister’s voyage towards anarchy.

And perhaps most importantly, Dany makes her first genuinely controversial decisions and tests the limits of her power among the Dothraki. I’d be interested to see how feminist critics of the early episodes of the show feel about this moment, given that the issue she takes a stand on is rape as a weapon of war, and she takes it direct contravention of Dothraki custom, in a context where the Dothraki are already bending their traditions on her behalf. The show does a nice job of making Dany take responsibility for the plunder that she recoils from, having Jorah Mormont remind her that the Dothraki, who don’t normally plunder the lands they attack for money, reminding her that they are fulfilling her wishes, seeking “Gold to hire ships, princess. Ships to sail to Westeros.” Of all the explorations of leadership in the series, she’s the only person who goes from powerlessness to enormous power. I’m glad HBO is committed to showing her grow, and to showing us that their early decisions weren’t gratuitous, but calculated for a long-term payoff.