-Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim is starring Idris Elba? I may die of happiness.

-The movie adaptation of The Passage is underway.

-Is Justin Bieber a truly singular artist?

-Brian Lam would be a great get for The Atlantic now that he’s leaving Gizmodo.

-Ai Weiwei’s out of detention — let’s hope he stays that way.

-Is Hulu going to change owners and begin a real challenge to Netflix?

Apologies for burning ladies at the stake, dropping us down very tall hills, sleeping with our best friends, and performing lewd hip-hop songs about us accepted, but y’all probably don’t have to go this far (SFW if you’ve got earphones):

Last week in The Atlantic, Matt Gallagher asked why we don’t have a great novel about the War on Terror. I think he’s right that a general disconnection from the war has made war novels a harder sell to publishers, and the lack of a draft means people who aren’t already novelists aren’t getting shipped to the front in the way they might have been in World War I and World War II. But I also think it’s a matter of time—we haven’t decided what the dominant literary or cinematic narrative out of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are yet, and so our books and movies about the conflicts are still a bit diffuse.

That said, I just finished Lorraine Adams‘ novel The Room and the Chair, and while it’s flawed, it’s a striking and sometimes beautiful book about the institutions and people involved in our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The flaws first: the novel isn’t big enough for its story, which traces the staff of a newspaper, an Air Force Pilot, and a secretive intelligence operative through a plane crash, the release of a classified report, an accident in Afghanistan, and a secret mission into Iran. Adams use of vernacular can be inconsistent and ineffective, especially when she’s trying to embody the novel’s most unrealistic minor characters, a group of very young teenage prostitutes. But what’s novel, and what I think really works about about The Room and the Chair, is the way that it draws a connection between Washington elites’ failure to see the District of Columbia clearly and their inability to comprehend what’s going on in the war they’re covering.

In the newsroom of a paper that stands in for the Washington Post, Adam, the editor in chief and former rival of Don Grady, the character who stands in for Bob Woodward, seeks counsel he doesn’t often take from Stanley, the night editor, who is a black man passing for white, and mentoring Vera, a black journalist who has grown up in the district. Adam gives up hope of getting a good story out of a major intelligence report after a rival paper scoops them it, dismissing Mabel, Don’s wife and an obvious if more sympathetic stand-in for Sally Quinn, when she gets a copy of the report and tries to give it to him. The incident humiliates her and represents a journalistic failure for him: “It was a version of death, one in which a persona realizes that what they imagined about themselves, however unflattering, was not nearly as awful as how they were, by many other people, seen. [...] She could have saved the day, but no one, including herself, had taken her as someone who could have anything to contribute. Adam, the nicest guy alive, someone she’d thought had a longtime crush on her, just wanted her to go away.”
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The Guardian has broken the news that Pottermore, the top-secret J.K. Rowling project that’s been percolating on the internet for days, is a game folks can play online that will lead them to prizes, including wizard’s wands, in the real world (though a possibility remains that it’s a marketing campaign for another product). I have to admit, if this is the case, I’m sort of disappointed.

I don’t really want any more Harry Potter novels. The story is completed, and I want to see what J.K. Rowling’s going to do next with her fairly prodigious world-building talents. But if she can’t just let the universe go, I was hoping that Rowling would follow in George Lucas’s steps and announce Harry Potter Expanded Universe in the vein of the Star Wars novels and games. Obviously, works would have to be vetted, licensed, and to observe a strict central continuity (if Star Wars’ continuity index is the Holocron, I wonder what they would call one for the Potterverse?). This kind of arrangement would provide a release valve for the demand for more Potter-related content, which is considerable, while leaving Rowling free to do other things. She could give all of her licensing profits to Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International. And she could pretty much walk away.

Whatever J.K. Rowling’s going to do next is going to be hugely successful, no matter its quality. That’s a tremendously rare position for an author to be in. The Harry Potter books are not masterpieces of prose, and they can be morally simplistic (though certainly less so in the later novels), but Rowling did an impressive job of using fiction to advocate for her central ideals of equality, human and non-human rights and dignity, and opposition to torture. If she can fashion another international hit on those themes, she’d do a lot of good even as she makes a lot of money.

Fans of the history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, Michael Fassbender, Viggo Mortensen, Vincent Cassel, moustaches, and the prospect of Keira Knightley gone wild, this one’s for you (trailer SFW if your work can accomodate spanking and Vincent Cassel getting handsy with a laundress):

All of that said, I do hope Knightley’s character is an actual person instead of the Hysterical Russian Broad Who Gets Between A Couple of Historical Bros. Between this and Sucker Punch, we’re one movie shy of a Crazy Ladies trend. I thought Sucker Punch was a hot mess, but it also had more ideas going for it than most critics acknowledged, including an acknowledgement of how insanely flawed our mental health system was so recently; an accurate depiction of the cavalierness with which people performed lobotomies; and an emphasis on female friendship and self-sacrifice that was depicted in a flawed way but still a welcome departure from the incentive structure of most action movies. My sense is that I’ll feel a similar ambivalence about A Dangerous Method, just directed differently. Sucker Punch tried to get inside women’s heads, even if it failed. In A Dangerous Method, Jung and Freud may care more about the welfare of the young woman in question, but the risk is that the only thing anyone will try to get inside is her body.

Normally, I don’t particularly think it’s worth it to get verklempt about decisions entertainment companies make. But I do think it’s worth highlighting the spectacular crassness of the raise NBC just gave Donald Trump. For his hosting and production work, he’ll make $65 million a year over two years, a sum that’s apparently a “substantial increase.”

I understand the economics of The Apprentice. It’s incredibly cheap to produce; it’s a dream of product placement. But its ad rates are down considerably. And while ratings for the season, an average of 8.8 million per episode were up from the last celebrity edition of The Apprentice, which averaged 7.4 million viewers per episode, it’s nowhere near the first-season high of 20.7 million viewers per episode, or the 11 million viewers who tuned in to an average episode of the first edition of Celebrity Apprentice in 2008. And even if ratings were up this season, the ratings for the finale were lower in 2011 than they were last year when Bret Michaels took home the previous Celebrity Apprentice crown. This is just not a show that’s dramatically trending upwards. At some point, even if it’s not this season or next season, NBC’s going to have to come up with a replacement for The Apprentice. Whatever comes next will almost inevitably cost more to produce, but if it’s something like The Voice, which has higher ratings than The Apprentice, and comes with a built-in alternative revenue stream, it might well be worth it.

And what did Trump do to boost ratings this season? He embarked on a presidential campaign in which he insulted gay people, joined the ranks of climate change deniers, and perpetrated a racist conspiracy theory about the president’s birth. Fortunately, he’s probably not going to be able to do that in subsequent seasons. But even if he was, is that really the kind of business NBC wants to be in?

I’ve written before that I’ve got some level of sympathy for the folks whose job it is to fit our entertainment into ratings systems. It’s essentially impossible to both assign ratings that are responsive to community values and that avoid ratings creep — whether it’s standards language or the increasing acceptance of gay people and gay relationships (not to mention interracial ones), we can’t reconcile movie ratings across the whole time the medium’s existed, and ditto for television, music, and video games.

But I am intrigued by the concept of a universal ratings system, which GamePolitics says research indicates parents want:

The research, which gathered the responses of 2,300 adults from three different surveys found that most parents were generally satisfied with ratings related to television, movies, video games, music, and handheld devices. Nevertheless, a majority of surveyed felt there should be some sort of universal rating system for all media, including web sites, music CDs, and games played on handheld devices. Some parents also said that the differences in the ratings systems for different types of media were often inconsistent and confusing, though most complained about television ratings that didn’t properly convey what kinds of content a given program contained.

Given that I believe that parents should exercise discretion and make informed decisions about what their children are consuming, I’m all in favor of a system that gives them more detailed information in exchange for folks to stop calling for things to be censored. Obviously, different media forms have different dimensions, and a universal ratings system would have to account for that — if being the person who carries out an act in a video game adds intensity points to the rating, does that mean the identical murder in, say, Grand Theft Auto, would carry a higher rating than that murder portrayed on a small screen and with no interactivity on The Wire? Consistency has multiple dimensions. I also wonder how it would work — would raters catch assignments from all the different pools of media? And would we stick to a letter system, or have a more detailed description of what each piece of content contains?

This would be difficult to design and coordinate: there are a lot of factors to consider, and a lot of organizations to wrangle. But I think it’s a reasonable intriguing concept, and it merits some consideration. I’d love to know what the video game designers in comments think of this.

Megan Angelo is right that Hollywood will likely go absolutely insane for the rights to the book Gabrielle Giffords and Mark Kelly have just agreed to write. Back in April, there was word that Law & Order: Los Angeles was going to do a Giffords-themed episode, though I’m not sure it ever came to fruition, and the show was cancelled in May. I’m certainly glad Giffords and Kelly are going to be able to make some money to help with what, even with congressional health insurance and general community support, has probably been and will continue to be huge medical bills. But I’m curious as to how the book — and an inevitable movie adaptation — will shake out.

Part of the question is how the story ends. Giffords’ survival, and her survival as someone who can communicate, albeit in a limited way, is an astonishing act of fortune. But it’s not clear to me that she’s going to be able to be an active member of Congress, much less work, ever again, so it may be hard to tell this as a straightforward story of triumph.

And it’s not that every story has to be a straightforward narrative of triumph over obstacles. But I hate the possibility of Giffords being reduced, in an adaptation of her own story, to an incapacitated woman being cared for by her remarkably devoted husband. We’ve already got a movie like that coming out soon:

What’s interesting about Giffords and Kelly is the tender stuff, sure, but the spiky stuff, too, the making it work over distance and between two people with crazy-ambitious careers, the fact that he went back to training for his final space flight even after she was shot, her trip to see him go away from her. And before she was a shooting victim, Gabby Giffords was a good progressive lawmaker who was a solar energy advocate, an opponent of the immigration law Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law, someone who stood strong against Medicaid cuts. She is more than what Jared Lee Loughner did to her, and I would hope that anyone who jumps on the story with a mind to adapt it remembers that.

Because spending on political advertising for the 2012 election might go up as much as 18 percent from a 2010 base of $2.3 billion. That is a lot of airtime, people! Most of which will be spent on really stupid, visually static, misleading, and grating video. I really hope Jon Huntsman stays in the race long enough for Fred Smith to cut an entire series of videos that reveal that the mild-mannered former governor of Utah and ambassador to China is actually Ghostrider:

Tomorrow from Jon Huntsman Jr. on Vimeo.

Clearly, Huntsman will end the War on Terror by jumping a football field’s-worth of semis: