As with Midnight in Paris (this was not a good moviegoing weekend for me), I really wanted to like Bad Teacher, if only because I agree with my friend and editor Eleanor Barkhorn that the movie’s a refreshing diversion from the idea that a saintly single educator changes everything. The movie’s jokes about substitute teacher Scott (Justin Timberlake) dry-humping Elizabeth (Cameron Diaz) on a school field trip, or Elizabeth giving a seventh-grader her bra to help him win back some cool points, aren’t as shocking as writers Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg might have imagined they were. And the movie has a big, gooey candy center: despite smoking a lot of pot, dreaming of breast implants, giving another teacher hideous facial poison ivy, and stealing state test results, Elizabeth ends up dating the obvious nice guy in her orbit and finding her niche in giving kids advice on how to acclimate (if not more of her bras).

That said, the middle section of the movie provides a surprisingly balanced look at the question of what role performance pay and testing should play in education — along with the movie’s most successful sustained dramatic and comedic tension. When Elizabeth, who has previously gotten by showing her class Stand and Deliver and sleeping through lessons, learns that if her students get the highest scores on an Illinois State performance test, she gets a $5,700 bonus that would allow her to afford her dreamed-of breast implants, she engages as a teacher for the first time (one thing the movie does nicely is keep salaries realistic, and makes clear that $5,700 would be a game-changer for Elizabeth). Her teaching methods, including abusing her class with dodgeballs and writing the world’s meanest test comments, are unorthodox, but her students do appear to learn something. The problem is, performance pay is too much of an incentive. Worried they aren’t learning fast enough, Elizabeth dons a Little Orphan Annie wig from the school play, tells a state Education Department official she’s a reporter writing about racial biases in testing for the Chicago Tribune (“Orientals test better,” he tells her.), drugs him, and snaffles the test. Her kids ace the test, and after many hijinks, Elizabeth’s rival for the bonus check and Scott’s affections is effectively deported to a hard-case school, where her cheerful approach to teaching will presumably get her absolutely annihilated.

That realism about the uses and dangers of incentives is refreshing — performance pay is neither a panacea nor a means of destroying teachers’ pay and benefits. At one point, the school principal frets over what the teachers’ union would do to him if he demanded that Elizabeth be drug-tested with what he thinks is insufficient evidence — of course, she would be totally busted — but the union isn’t there as a malign force, either, forcing a good principal to do bad things. He’s just cowed by it, to the point of avoiding conflict that might have been worth the risk. And while the movie is clear that Elizabeth shouldn’t be teaching anyone — and by the end of the movie, she’s not — Bad Teacher does suggest that she’s good at something test scores don’t measure: helping kids acclimate to their surroundings. In this sense, the movie is kin to School of Rock, a generally warmer if less pointed movie, in arguing that obsessions with achievement, whether they come from education bureaucracies or parents, are missing the point. It’s kids’ social lives and individual growth that matter. Which means that even if one teacher isn’t the key to that growth, Bad Teacher still shares a general educational philosophy with Dangerous Minds and all the good teacher movies that have gone before it.

-Hiring a Victoria’s Secret model to be in an action movie produces predictable results.

-Will the Ninth Doctor play the first in line to the Iron Throne?

-The Yippies’ FBI files.

-Perhaps the best use of a cutout of a sulky vampire ever.

-Really want Zombie John Wayne to exact revenge on Michele Bachmann for this.

On Mondays, 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.

Irin Carmon writes about everything from the Rwandan genocide to the meanings of Cameron Diaz vehicle Bad Teacher for Jezebel, Gawker Media’s blog for women. She’s covered media and luxury industries for Women’s Wear Daily and written a travel column for the Boston Globe. Today, she takes us through her week in culture, from art exhibits and movie screenings at Gawker HQ, to salsa in Prospect Park, to a Father’s Day cruise on Jamaica Bay

Monday

To offset the hyper plugged-in nature of my job (ten hours of blogging, Twitter-while-walking), am reading the classics on my Kindle. Today: The Tempest, in advance of tonight’s performance. Upon arrival, Gawker Media headquarters are hung with employees’ portraits, by Mark Mann, which he shot on a Graflex 1950s camera. “It’s a very tough camera to lie to,” he writes. “I think these pictures show that.” Mine is right by the bathroom.
At a pre-theater dinner, my father implores me to stop writing about “penises and vaginas,” saying ominously, “It will haunt you.” I reply that so far it’s only haunting him.

The production, at Juilliard, is a mishmash of selections from The Tempest and 17th century music on original instruments. We came for Derek Jacobi (my anti-blog/analog plan has me on track for five Shakespeare productions this year so far, counting Measure for Measure next week, and Jacobi in Lear a few weeks ago, the best production of anything I’ve seen, I think) but it doesn’t quite hang together. In the car, we listen to the GOP debate and read the funniest tweets aloud. Later, I watch The Daily Show and Colbert while catching up on the Internet.
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I’ve been waiting anxiously all day on the trailer for Brave, Pixar’s first movie with a female lead, and it’s finally here. And it looks dandy:

More representation for strong girls and women in pop culture is always a good thing, but for Pixar, it’s particularly important. The company’s earned its outstanding track record by putting out movies that beautifully encapsulate universal human values and experience: loneliness, aging, love, ambition. And until now, the person who has always been the vehicle for those universal and powerful human conditions, for that powerful audience response, has been a man or a boy. It’s long overdue to have a woman take on that role. Having her embody courage makes up for that lag a little bit.

Much of the attention to the Supreme Court’s 7-2 decision today striking down California’s ban on violent video games will focus on the affirmation that video games are an equivalent art form to literature, the Court’s dismissal of the studies that purport to show links between video games and violence, the free speech implications of the case, or speculation over just what Justice Alito’s “considerable independent research to identify video games in which ‘the violence is astounding’” consisted of. But what I’m most struck by is watching Justice Scalia, who wrote the majority opinion, and Justice Thomas, who wrote one of two dissents, square off over the history of children’s and young adult literature and the rights of minors.

Thomas draws a draconian line in the sand, saying that children have no right to read or access any material or speech without obtaining their parents’ approval first: “The historical evidence shows that the founding generation believed parents had absolute authority over their minor children and expected parents to use that authority to direct the proper development of their children. It would be absurd to suggest that such a society understood ‘the freedom of speech’ to include a right to speak to minors (or a corresponding right of minors to access speech) without going through the minors’ parents.”

And it’s a delight to see Scalia utterly dismantle his total disregard for the rights of minors in a footnote, saying:

Justice Thomas ignores the holding of Erznoznik, and denies that persons under 18 have any constitutional right to speak or be spoken to without their parents’ consent. He cites no case, state or federal, supporting this view, and to our knowledge there is none. [...] It does not follow that the state has the power to prevent children from hearing or saying anything without their parents’ prior consent. The
latter would mean, for example, that it could be made criminal to admit persons under 18 to a political rally without their parents’ prior written consent — even a political rally in support of laws against corporal punishment of children, or laws in favor of greater rights for minors. [...] In the absence of any precedent for state control, uninvited by the parents, over a child’s speech and religion (Justice Thomas cites none), and in the absence of any justification for such control that would satisfy strict scrutiny, those laws must be unconstitutional.

But where the clashing decisions get really interesting is in Thomas and Scalia’s alternate histories of children’s and young adults’ literature and culture. Thomas takes the same position as the scolds who said this newfangled thing called the novel would rot women’s brains, and sides with contemporary worrywarts like Meghan Cox Gurdon who recently and infamously complained about the “darkness” of young adult literature in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, using American literary history and moral anxiety to argue that contemporary parents’ ought to protect their children from the undue influence of everything from Grimm’s Fairy Tales to talking animals as providers of wisdom. I’ll summarize the whole thing because it’s just too astonishing to ignore:
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New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie appears to have a severe case of Vizzini syndrome, and by that I don’t mean that you should never go up against an Irish-Sicilian governor when budget cuts are on the line. Rather, I don’t think the word “Soviet” means what he thinks it means.

This weekend, Christie, speaking to New York public radio station WNYC, defended his attempts to sell off the New Jersey Network (to, hilariously, another public broadcaster just one state over) by saying, “I really believed that the state-owned operation of media ended with the Soviet Union.” Which is really just sort of goofy, because Russia continues to operate a bunch of state media through the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company, because public broadcasting continues to operate cheerfully on every continent on the planet, and because state-owned media’s really useful if you want to do anything from producing cost-saving educational programming to turning out one of the more artistically impressive streaks of shows in the English-speaking world. This kind of crudeness and lack of nuance isn’t exactly atypical for Christie, but I think it’s worth calling out, given that his crudeness and theoretical dedication to truth-telling is one of the things that’s helped make him a national political contender.

All of this is even more hilarious because in the same interview, as my colleage Zaid points out, Christie may not think public broadcasting is an appropriate governmental function, but bailing out a large mall project is. And you know who was pretty good at building the giant department stores that were precursors to malls? Soviets! Also Communist China! As a side note, I’m really sort of sad that the Beijing Friendship Store is going to get updated. It’s obviously incredibly overpriced, and it’s deeply eerie to wander around a place where it seems like you’ve been the only customer in years, but the whole thing is a sort of delightful time capsule, and I bought some really adorable cloisonné pigs there, one of which still sits on my desk.

As the minutes ticked down to the final vote that gave gay and lesbian New Yorkers equal marriage rights on Friday night, my thoughts turned to In & Out. The 1997 movie about Howard Brackett (Kevin Klein), an Indiana English teacher who finds himself at the center of a national media frenzy after a former student says he’s gay during an Oscar telecast on the eve of his wedding may have been the first time I saw an image of two men looking like they were about to exchange vows. And though the movie’s been overtaken by a tide of social and political change, it remains a surprisingly humane and funny film.

Much of the movie’s cultural resonance comes from the fact that it’s a great satire on popular culture that still works today. As the Oscar ceremony where it all goes down commences, viewers in Indiana mull over their ballots, voting for “something about Polish mineworkers and their struggle to be free,” and Glenn Close reads off the nominations for Best Actor, including “Paul Newman for Coot, Clint Eastwood for Codger, Michael Douglas for Primary Urges, and Steven Seagal for Snowball in Hell.” To Serve and Protect, the movie that earns Cameron Drake (Matt Dillon) his Academy Award, is a pitch-perfect joke on both Forrest Gump and Philadelphia, which preceded it, and the prestigious gay movies like Brokeback Mountain and Milk that would follow in the next decade. The scene in the fake movie where Dillon’s obvious dolt character asks if a fellow soldier loves him “You mean as a friend?…You mean as a brother?…As a cousin?…You mean as a penpal?” alone is worth the price of admission. And seeing supermodel Shalom Harlow, as Drake’s ditzy model girlfriend, complain that she can’t go to Indiana because “I have to shower and vomit” is a nicely self-aware stab at the heroin chic look then at its height.
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I finally saw Midnight in Paris this weekend, which I liked much less than I had hoped, if not expected, to. The movie, about a dissatisfied screenwriter who would rather be a novelist and begins to time travel back to Paris in the ’20s while in the city with his awful fiancee and her even more awful parents, is essentially an adaptation of two Allen short stories: “The Kugelmass Episode,” in which a bored New Yorker pays a magician to send him into a novel so he can cheat on his wife with Emma Bovary, and “A Twenties Memory,” a rather more cutting story about what it would be like to hang out with Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway in Paris.

There are two basic problems with the movie. The first is the idea that Owen Wilson, who was much better playing a pretender to literary genius in The Royal Tenenbaums than he is here, playing the real thing, could plausibly have written a novel that would knock Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway on their collective keisters. It’s a real waste to have Kathy Bates play Gertrude Stein and then have her be nice. (Some of the other collected impersonations, among them Alison Pill as Zelda Fitzgerald and Corey Stoll as Hemingway are quite good, but it’s a schtick rather than an actual period piece, cheap laughs rather than profound ones).

But even more annoying is the fact that Wilson and Rachel McAdams’ characters are just never a plausible couple, and the way Allen signals that McAdams and her parents are Bad, Terrible People is to reach back to 2003 and to pretend they’re Republicans who still hate the French over the war in Iraq. Her father, John, is a man who would have insisted on ordering Freedom Fries in 2003, but because he’s in the wrong socio-economic class, spends a lot of time saying things like “I will always take a California wine [over a French one] but the Napa Valley’s 6,000 miles away,” or complaining that “I didn’t like his remark about Tea Party Republicans…They are decent people trying to rescue the country, not cryptofascists.” This, despite the fact that Wilson’s character does things like gratuitously insult his future father-in-law’s politics over dinner. And when Wilson’s character steals a pair of McAdams’ character’s earrings, hoping to give them to the woman in ’20s Paris he intends to sleep with, he gets caught, but tries to make sure she doesn’t blame the theft on their maid, only to have McAdams respond, “You always take the side of the help. That’s why Daddy says you’re a Communist!”

I say this not to defend Republicans, but to note that this idea of Republicans is the smuggest, most self-satisfied liberal conception possible. And that, as much as Allen’s recycling of his own material, that shows the filmmaker’s age. Nothing about Midnight in Paris is illuminating or morally searching in the way either Match Point or Vicky Cristina Barcelona were. It’s an old filmmaker relaxing into ideas and biases that feel comfortable for him, and apparently for a lot of other moviegoers.

This post contains spoilers through the first episode of the fourth season of True Blood, which along with Breaking Bad, Burn Notice, and Louie are the shows I’ll be recapping this summer. If you want to spoil beyond the events of this episode with reference to references to Charlaine Harris’s novels, go ahead, but flag your comments as such.

I read Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire novels before I ever watched True Blood, so I should be clear I’ll inevitably see True Blood in relation to its source material. In general, I enjoy what Alan Ball’s done to diverge from the texts, though I have some objections to the ways in which Sookie’s become a simpler character, less a self-educated person trying to make up for the disadvantages life has bestowed on her, and more a slightly irritating ingenue, and I have real concerns about the transformation of the faerie storyline from something subtle that makes Sookie’s life up until this point make more sense into something cartoony and goofy-lookin’.

All of those disclaimers aside, it looks like this season of True Blood‘s going to be all about the cognitive dissonance of good and evil when they wear bodies we don’t expect. We learn that early, when apples in the land of Faerie fade from gold to rot. And that uncertainty is everywhere in this episode as Sookie returns home from what she thought was 15 minutes in Faerie that turned out to be 13 months in Bon Temps. And they were 13 consequential months, or so it seems.
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