I approach remakes with a healthy distrust, but for reasons of policy and politics, I’m actually fairly intrigued by the prospects of the proposed remake of Annie. The project on the table sounds kind of deeply strange and wonderful, if it happens. Will Smith is apparently negotiating with Emma Thompson to adapt a screenplay musical that would have Willow Smith in the starring role. I say wonderful because I think Thompson’s adaptation of Sense and Sensibility is one of the best expansions on and cleaning up of a text ever (not to mention her equally marvelous performance in it). But I am also wondering how her very British sensibility will translate to a story that’s American and ethnic in its origins, and that with Smith behind it, might require a very different urban and racial sensibility. At the same time, I’d really love to see a black Daddy Warbucks. Jay-Z, of course, already has his audition reel in:

But more importantly, since Annie‘s supposed to be a universal American story, I would really like to see a simple, uncomplicated statement that African-Americans, and particularly black men, can be the vehicles for that story. If we can have Jay-Z in gruff mogul mode having his heart melted by a gawky, adorable Willow Smith without having a debate about the state of black fatherhood, or hedging his right to parent her in any way, I think there would be something lovely about that.

-The Broship of the Ring is pretty excellent, particularly the Nagzul on a fixed-gear bike.

-Interesting backstory on the SEALs movies under development.

-Both excited and scared about the prospects of a Brian Wilson biopic.

-Does Whitey Bulger know who did the Gardener Museum caper?

-If Wilfred rakes in better ratings for Louie, I guess I’m all for it.

What’s everyone going to see this weekend? I’ve already got tickets to Midnight in Paris, and am hoping to fit in Bad Teacher and Green Lantern.

There will be spoilers through the first five sections of Red Mars in this post and in comments, so venture there at your peril if you’re concerned about that. If you want to spoil beyond those sections in comments, go ahead, but label spoilers as such. The first part of this book club appears here, the second here. For next week, let’s read “Guns Under the Table.”

For all that I don’t particularly enjoy spending time in Michel’s and John’s heads, these are two sections of the book that I think do a lovely job of laying out the central debates of the novel: how much can we change Mars? How much can we change ourselves? And once we’ve established these capacities, or maybe even beforehand, how much should we alter the planet or ourselves and our societies? What’s valuable? What should we let go? And what sort of unintended consequences will result when we succeed at engineering one factor in a way that radically changes all of our calculations.

Not only does it pose these questions quite well, but in laying them out, upsets our understandings of who’s on what side, who is a radical, and who is a conservative. Is Ann a conservative because she’s the purest Red out there? Or is she a revolutionary for being willing to accomodate her whole life to the preservation of a harsh, originalist Mars? Is Hiroko a revolutionary for running off to create her own society? Or a conservative for essentially abandoning engagement with the wider Mars? Is Nadia the architect of a new society, or a homesick Siberian recreating the trees of her memories? Once the power to do actual alchemical work, or to radically reengineer human DNA becomes routine, is doing that work esoteric, and mysterious, and powerful? Or does radical change itself become routine? To deal with everything posed in these sections, I’m going to divide the discussion into three sections:
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Apparently, we’re getting Minerva McGonagall’s backstory, which I hope will come in a fleshed-out form rather than simple declarative statements like J.K. Rowling’s not unexpected but not particularly developed statement on Albus Dumbledore’s sexual orientation. I’d love a novella version of McGonagall’s life if only to see the Harry Potter universe through a different perspective. Harry’s view of it, especially as someone who wasn’t raised in the wizarding world and as such, still doesn’t know a ton of custom and tradition by the end of the seventh novel, is necessarily limited.

But I’d also really love to learn more about the Ministry of Magic. Rowling does a nice job with something British pop culture does fairly frequently, which is building up elected officials as weak reeds, overly dependent on public opinion, and contrasting them with a brave and forward-thinking bureaucracy. The Harry Potter books take a fairly uniformly dim view of Minister-level officials (a side note, the wizarding world doesn’t operate on strictly British lines of government, but the Wizengamot functions as a wizarding parliament, so I think the metaphor stands). Cornelius Fudge is historically wrong about everything, from falling for Peter Pettigrew’s ruse to frame Sirius Black, to imprisoning Hagrid, to making reckless use of Dementors, to refusing to believe in Voldemort’s return. He basically sells out to the Malfoys, who are the wizarding world’s equivalent of big donors, in the matter of Buckbeak. His beliefs and policy decisions are based almost entirely on public sentiment and the most convenient narrative, rather than fact or logic. Rufus Scrimgeour is more realistic about the threat Voldemort presents, but he responds to it with security theater rather than with actual prudent security measures, and it costs him his life and the lives of a great many other people.

By contrast, wizarding bureaucrats are often more heroic. Arthur Weasley may head a semi-irrelevant office in the Ministry, but he’s a living argument for wizard tolerance towards Muggles (and as the character who perhaps best embodies the values of curiosity and wonder, a great representative of the reader in the novels). The Magical Law Enforcement Patrol bravely confronts crabby wizards who are dabbling in dark magic and abusing their female relatives. The Aurors are considered generally unimpeachable, and totally badass. There are exceptions, of course: Bartemius Crouch Sr. may be a ruthlessly effective enforcer, but he ends up manipulated by his own son (though he dies fighting the Imperius curse and trying to tell Dumbledore the truth). But it’s presented as a great tragedy in Deathly Hallows when Voldemort’s takeover corrupts the Ministry of Magic, particularly by the infiltration of the bureaucratic infrastructure by people like Dolores Umbridge. When word comes down after the Battle of Hogwarts that Kingsley Shacklebolt is acting as Minister of Magic, it’s as if order’s been restored: not only have the bureaucratic ranks of the Ministry been cleansed, but the political governance of the wizarding world’s been taken over by a career law enforcement officer.

If you care about small, critically acclaimed science fiction shows, or about smart summer superhero blockbusters, you should care about Zack Stentz. He’s written and produced Fringe and Terminator: The Sarah Chronicles among other television shows, and this summer alone, he and his writing partner Ashley Edward Miller wrote the screenplays for Thor and X-Men: First Class. After we ended up talking about First Class as a metaphor for gay rights, Zack was kind enough to take the time to answer some of my questions about both of those movies, the future of the superhero genre, and the difference between writing for small, fanatically devoted audiences and big, mass-market ones. Our conversation appears below.

Both X-Men: First Class and Thor have villains who at times — if not for the whole movie — are more compelling than the movies’ heroes. Was that intentional?

In Thor, from the very beginning we had the goal of putting the Thor-Loki-Odin relationship at the heart of the film, and in discussions with Ken Branagh and Marvel, decided that it would be compelling to send the two brothers on parallel but opposite journeys. And we were really drawn to the version of Loki who isn’t a cackling evildoer from the beginning, but a complex, tortured character who — like Magneto in the X-Men mythology — is completely convinced that he’s the good guy.

In X-Men: First Class, I’d like to think we stretched the definition of “villain” even further. While you have Sebastian Shaw and the Hellfire Club throughout the story as the bad guys, through most of the movie, Erik/Magneto is the co-hero with Charles. You catch him at a moment of his life where he has the possibility of going either way — toward Charles’ vision of mutants as a valued part of human society, or Shaw’s plans for mutants lording over the human race. But because of external events as well as Erik’s inability to move past the trauma that’s been inflicted on him, you see him move ever more toward embracing that darkness.

Do you think audiences want more moral complexity in their superhero movies and their action movies in generally?

I’m not sure what audiences want, but I know that my writing partner Ash [Ashley Edward Miller] and I are drawn toward ambiguity and moral complexity when we write those movies. It’s just more interesting and dramatically compelling. If you’re going to have the mano a mano faceoff at the end of your big action movie, isn’t there more juice in seeing two people fighting who love each other rather than two people who hate each other? Or the obligatory “hero fights a bigger, even more powerful version of himself” beat? And isn’t it more interesting if the ostensible bad guy has a point of view that can’t be easily dismissed?

Relatedly, there’s been some discussion of the fall-off in superhero box office, particularly as audiences resist 3D conversions. Are people simply wearing on characters in costumes?

I think the danger of saturating the market with costumed crimefighters is definitely there, but I don’t think there are enough data points to draw the conclusion that we’re at that place yet. Thor did very well at the box office, especially for a character with such an oddball mythology behind him. X-Men: First Class isn’t racking up the huge numbers of its predecessors, but the studio is happy with it because they feel like it’s rebuilding the brand and audience goodwill after the last two installments drew more…shall we say mixed reactions. And we still need to see how Green Lantern and Captain America shake out.
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There are two ways to look at Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop, which opens today in limited release. The first is as the story of a guy, who upon receiving a $33 million severance package when he left his old job ($12 million was shared among his staff), and went on tour with friends as diverse as Andy Richter, Jack White, and Jim Carrey to make himself feel better. The second is as a close look at the compulsion to perform, and the uncomfortable ways comedians work out their material not just by saying occasionally horrifying things in public that fall flat as jokes, but by needling the people in their private lives. Because it’s fairly hard to enjoy the movie, which is often quite good, if you take the former approach, so in watching it, I mostly tried to stick to the latter.

The movie starts a bit unevenly. In a nice zeitgeist-tapping device, it outlines the basic conflict that led to Conan’s departure from NBC in Taiwanese animation, only to bog down in a bunch of questions that get at things the rest of the movie will articulate in much more spontaneous and funny ways. But fortunately that interlude is brief, and once it gets going, Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop really zips. Once the idea for a tour is conceived, tickets sell out, and Conan gets to work trying out jokes, casting a couple of very attractive women as backup dancers, rewriting songs to be about his battle with NBC. In retrospect, the agita about whether the show will succeed is a little forced, but these sequences show a guy putting himself together again in a way that’s interesting to watch, especially because it’s on a much grander scale that carries with it much larger consequences, than anything most ordinary people do to get over something really terribly traumatic.
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The usual warning: this post contains spoilers through the first episode of the second season of Louie.

The thing I love about Louie is that it’s a fundamentally decent show, without clear, or even any, villains. It’s like a sadder-key version of Parks and Recreation if tone if not in conception. It’s also, in its own way, a really good primer on Feminism for Guys, and this night’s episode, in which Louie dealt with father-daughter relationships and brother-sister relationships, was a wonderful illustration of that.

The episode begins with a fundamental challenge to that decency, that fragile equilibrium, when, while brushing her teeth, Louie’s youngest daughter tells her father, “I like Mama’s better. I like Mama’s better because she makes good food. And I love her more. So I like being there more…I like being here too, just not as better.” It’s a horrible thing for anyone to say, but she’s a child, so Louie just tells her, “Okay. Alright, baby,” and puts her to bed. It’s an illustration of how buffeting the world can be.

And that decency gets challenged again when, making what looks like a beautiful dinner for his children the following night (presumably in reaction to his daughter’s criticism of his cooking), Louie gives her older sister a mango pop, and then refuses to give her anything. It looks like an act of petty tyranny, of overreach in trying to teach a child that her sister is “a separate person from you. You’re never going to get the same things as other people.” But then he turns it around, trying to make the story a lesson about compassion, telling his daughter “The only time you look in your neighbor’s bowl is to make sure they have enough,” before making her share her chocolates with her sister. It may be, as Louie says in his stand-up routine, that “The five-year-old, not much good at anything, really. Not to put her down, she’s five. But she’s shitty at pretty much everything.” Turns out, though, that she and her father are kind of bad at the same things, including consistency, clarity, and not hurting each other.

Even as the episode starts with an anecdote about the pain of being a parent, it ends with a story about how awful it could be not to be one. I loved the conversation between Louie and his sister about her miscarriages, which while not protracted, I thought was usefully frank and sad and real. “When we lost the last one, we just went through too much,” Gretchen tells Louie. “It got ugly. He left. And I said screw it. I’m in my forties. I’m fatter than shit. I don’t want a man. I want to be a mom. You know, Mom is the only person I ever admired.” That kind of foregrounding means that when she freaks out over a gas attack, she’s not some dumb hysterical broad (and it says a lot that Louie manages to show vastly more respect for women who don’t look like supermodels than mainstream movies ever manage to show for most gorgeous ingénues). Her terror is understandable, as is Louie’s concern for her. He genuinely loves his sister enough to leave his kids with his newly discovered, profoundly decent gay neighbors, one of whom promises him, “If we steal your kids, come knock on our door and we’ll give them back.” And there’s actually something sort of beautiful about watching Louie’s concern for Gretchen, the purity of his love and fear, enlist a miniature army of neighbors, cab drivers, and doctors, all of whom assemble around Gretchen’s bed.

And in a way, that love, that decency, that’s scarier than isolation and abandonment because it can go away. Your little daughters can find you wanting. Your neighbors might not want to be your friends any more. But the thing that’s beautiful, even radical, about Louie is that the show and the comedian don’t really suggest that you can be anything other than open to the world. It’s a real rebuke to ideals of stoic masculinity. And I dig that.

Wilfred, which premiered on FX last night, strikes me as an odd combination of Harvey, Pineapple Express, Donnie Darko, and…maybe Old School, or some other movie in which a fussy and neurotic male protagonist is at least temporarily liberated by acting wildly out of control. I tuned in because I’m interested in the trend of unmotivated male protagonists, and I wanted to see if the show had something new to say in that vein.

It does, in that Elijah Wood’s Ryan is clearly established as depressed, rather than simply a slacker. We first meet him printing out a suicide note (clearly labeled as the third revision of said missive) and looking like Frodo post-Mount Doom but pre-Valinor, as if maybe he had gotten a haircut and was still trying to hack it in the Shire as a gainfully employed hobbit. The problem is, we don’t really have a clear idea of why Ryan’s so depressed, why he’s so terrible to the sister who is trying to help him find a job, or what dreadful thing he’s been through to make hanging out with a horny, scatological, pot-smoking personified dog look like a better alternative to figuring out how to be a plausible adult.

The thing that makes the show work for me to the extent that it does is that the show seems aware of its own untenable premise. “Wilfred, how is this going to end?” Ryan asks his new dog friend after a day of smoking weed, humping waitresses (“Do you always feed your dog nachos?” “No, but he worked out today.”), stealing a closet’s worth of cannabis plants, and defecating in their neighbor’s boots. But some of the crassness of the show just feels like it’s reaching, like when Ryan’s sister declares of a delivery she performed earlier in the day “She wasn’t Asian American, Ryan. She was real Asian. I had to do so much slicing and dicing down there, it looks like a goddamn Benihana.” Wilfred probably shouldn’t try to be Louie, since I’m not sure it has a sense of the truths it wants to tell in the same way Louis C.K. does. It’s better at the moments when it’s more genuinely strange, like when Wilfred gets anxious about whether his real owner will come to reclaim him, and when the show emphasizes his non-humanness. Whether it can make that oddness a strength, rather than falling into derivative weakness, remains an open question.

A quick programming note: since we’re having recaps of Louie and Burn Notice starting this week, the Louie open thread will go up around 11, and theRed Mars book club will go up later this afternoon. This episode contains spoilers through the first episode of the fifth season of Burn Notice.

I have to admit I’ve watched Burn Notice, mostly in marathons and, to a certain extent, out of order, but I thought last night’s episode did a nice job of moving the series forward on the momentum of issues that have been building up over the last four seasons. Namely, that while Michael being burned is bad for him, it’s actually been a good thing for Sam and Fiona, putting him in a situation where he has to reconnect with them and rely on them. What may have started out as an inconvenience has become meaningful to them. The central problem of the season, it seems, is going to be what extent Michael can balance his renewed relationship with the CIA with the surrogate agency he’s built in the CIA’s absence from his life—and to what extent he wants to.

That tension’s evident from the moment of his reunion with Fiona after a CIA mission, when she throws him to the floor in a combination of a fit of passion and well-honed combat instincts. Over pillow talk, she complains “It doesn’t seem fair that he should get to have all the fun.” But when Michael tells her, “It had to be someone, Fee. The agency wasn’t just going to let me go out there alone,” he’s kind of missing the point. It’s not that Fiona cares that Michael is palling around with CIA agents. It’s that those missions trade off with his work with her.

Even when Michael negotiates to have Sam and Fiona as his team in South America, it’s not enough for them simply to be there. “Operational security? What happened to the way we do things?” Fiona asks Michael at one point, only to have him tell her, “It’s their show, Fee.” But Sam’s there, reminding him, “It’s our show too, brother” — that the partnership Michael built with Fiona and Sam was a good thing independent of whether it achieved Michael’s goal of getting revenge on the people who burned him and getting himself reinstated.

There’s the usual complement of Michael sniping at an agent who “bombed the embassy in Albania, you lost the glasses and bleached your hair” and mixing sensible aphorisms about intelligence-gathering with advice about how to use a fan to distract a bunch of gunmen. And I liked the way they handled an interrogation that should have turned rough, having Michael roll up his sleeves as he tells us “”the biggest obstacle you can face in an interrogation is yourself…the stronger your feelings are, the hotter your hate burns, the more important it is to put it aside,” even as he picks up a chair such that it looks like he might be able to beat a suspect, keeping what happens a surprise until he puts the chair down, sits on it, and tells the guy he’s not going to hurt him. Having fictional CIA agents denounce torture doesn’t stop real ones from doing it. But there’s something refreshing about a clearheaded affirmation that it’s not just wrong but ineffective.