I’ve been thinking a lot about movie remakes that turn white characters into African-Americans for a side project, so I’ve been keeping Clint Eastwood’s A Star is Born remake in my peripheral vision. I’m not the world’s biggest Beyonce fan (I’ve got a thing for her much more uneven but much more interesting sister Solange), so the prospect of a story about her rise to awesomeness wasn’t incredibly high on my list.

But my interest is nominally piqued by the rumor that Leonardo DiCaprio might be jumping into the Norman Maine role, as the older addicted actor who helps our starlet on her rise to glory, then kills himself to force her to go on with her career rather than spending all her time taking care of him. It might not come to pass. And I hesitate to declare that interracial relationships are inherently cinematically interesting. The goal, after all, is for there to be enough depictions of interracial couples — and gay couples — in popular culture that some stories can be about the specific issues those couples face, and some stories can be about the challenges of raising your adorable adopted daughter.

But the specific contours of this very old story do make me curious about what an interracial dynamic would lend to the central relationship, which already has a lot of interesting tensions around gender, ambition, and power. And it would be in keeping with Eastwood’s last decade or so of directorial work, much of which has focused on themes of racial reconciliation, whether it’s sport bringing together a war-torn country in Invictus, the relationship between a Korean War vet and his Hmong neighbors in Gran Torino, or the dual perspectives of Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. Shrinking that stage down to an intimate relationship would be a new way to get at that perspective. And frankly, the movie would be interestingly meta at this particular moment in the discussion about representation and popular culture. A movie that’s about the struggle to get a female actress to really hit the big time, much less what it’s like to have a black female actress take up an Angelina Jolie- or Hillary Swank-like role in the Hollywood of today (not to mention if the damn thing ends up being a period piece) would speak directly to tough, ongoing conversations about why movies and television underrepresent women and people of color.

Maybe it’s condescending of me, but there’s something awfully sweet — and kind of limited — about the New York Rangers’ Sean Avery’s hope that the National Hockey League will broadly advocate for progressive issues after his experience supporting the passage of the state’s equal marriage law last friday. He told the New York Post:

I understand that the NHL represents 30 different owners who come from different backgrounds and hold different viewpoints, but I think it would be meaningful for Gary [commissioner Bettman] and the Board of Governors to open themselves up for conversation about this issue…The support I received from the Garden, Mr. [James] Dolan, Glen [Rangers general manager Sather] and [president of MSG Sports] Scott O’Neil meant everything to me, but it was a little disappointing not to have heard from anyone connected with the league…It would be great for the NHL to take the lead among professional sports leagues in terms of social equality and justice and be out front and progressive regarding issues like this.

Now, obviously equal marriage rights are an issue where the traditional political boundaries are increasingly starting to blur. A bunch of traditionally Republican hedge funders shelled out to help make marriage equality a reality in New York. And obviously it could be quite helpful to have a bunch of professional athletes speaking out in favor of gay equality, among other issues. But the idea that NHL owners are going to line up behind other issues of “social equality and justice” — well, it is laughable. Increasingly, it’s socially unacceptable to be a homophobe. But if you want to perpetrate the pay gap between men and women, or insist that anyone can make it in the economy if they just try hard enough, my sense is that you still get invited to all of the good parties. As David Frum and others have discovered (no matter how long it took them), granting gay people the right to get married doesn’t actually involve an upheaval of the social order, and might even serve to reinforce it. Other social justice issues might involve some actual discomfort if they’re going to produce actual change.

I know that the current pop culture obsession with young adult fiction can seem exhausting, sometimes. Paulie and other folks have tweaked me occasionally in comments, suggesting that something’s wrong when adults are spending as much time and energy as we are on fiction written for people with more limited reading comprehension and life experience. But I think Lois Lowry’s seminal and disturbing dystopian YA classic, The Giver, which Jeff Bridges just bought the movie rights to, with plans to play the adult lead, is a great example of why the genre has fans outside of its target age group.

The Giver is ostensibly similar to a bunch of the other YA adaptations either wrapping up or under way: it features a young protagonist in a science fictional society who awakens to the realities of the structures that prop up that society and the choices and compromises that shape it. But unlike Katniss Everdeen, who becomes the figurehead of a rebellion in The Hunger Games books, or Harry Potter, who is the hope of an entire society in J.K. Rowling’s series coming to a close this summer, The Giver is a much more inward-looking book. It’s based in a society that isn’t outwardly noxious, just tamped down: its residents have traded away emotions and sexual attraction for security. The main character, Jonas, becomes an unusual figure in his community when he’s assigned to succeed the Giver, a figure in his community who is a repository of memories of things other people have left behind, ranging from the ability to see color to sexual desire. In other words, it’s a story about what it’s like to develop a moral imagination.

But it’s also, necessarily, an interior story. Because Jonas and the Giver are the only two people who can see their world for what it is, there’s no real hope that they’ll be able to spark any sort of rebellion. In fact, the very position and experience that gives them power also marginalizes them from the rest of their community — they may be the most alive people in it, but they’re cut off from the world in which they live. As a result, it’s a quieter and less dramatic story, but it’s also more analogous to the actual experience of the target readers, who are old enough to start seeing and understanding the systems and structures that govern their lives, and to be feeling the sting of social isolation. I think the fact that the book’s about a world where an absurdly optimistic victory is impossible is one of the reasons it’s endured so well for almost 20 years: Lowry understands what teenagers are going through, but doesn’t offer the childlike comfort of a happy ending. It’s a book built to help readers look, clear-eyed, forward into adulthood, rather than readers of all ages to peer wistfully back into the past.

So, I don’t know if anyone’s told Paul W.S. Anderson, but the reason The Three Musketeers is an immortal story is not because there were dirigibles, cross-bowed ninjas, and a bungee jumping Milady involved:

It’s because 17th century France was actually a reasonably interesting place, and the real Comte d’Artagnan, Charles Ogier de Batz de Castelmore, was actually a reasonably interesting person. And that doesn’t even take into account Cardinal Richelieu. I’m sort of surprised Showtime hasn’t knocked off The Three Musketeers and Aldous Huxley’s Grey Eminence and done a saucy behind-the-scenes look at the old Cardinal.

In any case, when you’ve made the 1993 adaptation of The Three Musketeers starring Keifer Sutherland, Oliver Platt (who declares at one point: “If you’re to be a true Musketeer, boy, you must excel at the manyly art of wenching.”), Charlie Sheen, and Chris O’Donnell look dignified, you’ve really accomplished something.

-Bridesmaids is going to be the most profitable movie Judd Apatow’s ever been involved with.

-Something else we can blame Michael Bay for: giving Tyrese Gibson PTSD.

-You Don’t Mess With the Zohan is surprisingly funny, also not in violation of copyright law.

-Rob Thomas, please stop torturing me with promises of a Party Down movie.

-I’d be much more excited for the new Mission Impossible movie if it was about Jeremy Renner and Simon Pegg teaming up to take down Tom Cruise:

Following in the footsteps of Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R), South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) yesterday vetoed the state Legislature’s appropriations for the South Carolina Arts Commission. If the Legislature can’t override her veto, South Carolina would become the second state in the country without an arts agency. As Ian David Moss points out, the South Carolina Legislature overrode a number of former Gov. Mark Sanford’s budget vetoes last year, including one gutting much of the Arts Commission’s funding, but it’s a new governor and a new political climate. If state lawmakers are going to buck the governor on anything, it strikes me as more likely that they’ll spend political capital to fund the South Carolina presidential primary elections, which also fell victim to Haley’s veto pen.

As was the case in Kansas, the funding for the South Carolina Arts Commission wasn’t the difference between a balanced budget and a deficit. Instead, Brownback and Haley had both pushed to eliminate their arts commissions, and when their legislatures disagreed with them on the wisdom of cutting small programs that support a wide range of arts endeavors across their states, they eliminated the agencies through executive action. The South Carolina Arts Commission was required to spend 70 percent of its funding on grants, so most of the funds that Haley vetoed would have gone directly to arts projects rather than to administration.

Government support isn’t necessary a litmus test for Republicans, but it’s certainly becoming a way for Republican governors to prove their small-government credentials in the run-up to a presidential election. Along the way, they may end up dismantling a lot of valuable infrastructure, review processes for grants, and funding organizations used to leverage donations from the private sector. We can hope that individual donors and foundations make up the gap. But it’s still unattractive to watch Republican candidates earn their spurs by cutting jobs and eliminating small but useful organizations.

Deadline’s Tim Adler sat down with a bunch of international television executives at the Monte Carlo Television Awards to find out why international audiences like American police and medical procedural shows so much. The answers weren’t as revealing as I might have liked — with the exception of the beautifully stereotypical explanation that “what appeals to the French about House and The Mentalist is that lead characters Dr. Gregory House and Patrick Jane are irreverent.”

Most of the executives mentioned higher production values in American shows than in a variety of domestic competitors. Thomas Bellut, the head of programming for ZDF, the non-profit German public television broadcaster, apparently thinks that German audiences don’t like watching shows that don’t resolve problems within a single programming hour on television, and that the’re more likely to watch something like Lost or Damages when they can consume a lot of episodes in a row, via DVD or another method (as a side note, I’d love to know how more complex, non-procedural shows do in countries like Chile, where something like the telenovela wars require audiences to tune in every night for months). But other than talking about the comfort-food, one-off factor, none of the executives said anything about cultural or values factors.

There’s no denying that shows that you don’t have to make a major commitment to are very effective at gaining casual viewers, be it Ace of Cakes or Law & Order. But police and medical procedurals also are a very effective way to get American audiences to reconcile their conflicting feelings about authority. Procedurals don’t just demonstrate police or medical effectiveness within the hour; they also let audiences acknowledge that police brutality and bullying patients are bad things while making the argument that it’s worth accepting those behaviors as long as they contribute to someone ending up behind bars or not dying of an incredibly baroque disease. In that respect, procedurals are a conservative genre: they undermine arguments for reform, suggesting that reforms might upset the efficacy of the status quo. But I have no idea how those arguments play abroad, whether they’re part of the appeal of American procedurals, or a limiting factor, and what they mean for how other countries think about justice in America.

Sarah Palin apparently hadn’t known that a lot of people in the entertainment industry don’t like her very much before last night, when after she saw The Undefeated, Steve Bannon’s documentary about her, she told the Hollywood Reporter she couldn’t understand why the celebrities who bash her in the movie’s opening montage can’t stand her:

It makes you want to reach out to some of these folks and say, What’s your problem? And what was the problem? And what is the problem? What would make a celebrity, like you saw on screen, so hate someone that they’d seek their destruction, their death, the death of their children? What would make someone be so full of hate and, I guess, a sense of being threatened that they would want to see that person destroyed?

I don’t imagine a national unity and reconciliation tour is going to follow. Sarah Palin is the Tinkerbell of American politics, drinking up the poison meant for Peter Pan to keep our energy away from the actual Republican candidates until later in the game, and she’s found an alternative energy source to hand claps. We could, collectively, let her light go out. People who think insult, or even reasoned argument, are going to dismantle her and her political prospects are entirely missing the point. Weirdly, you’d think folks in Hollywood, where the worst kind of negative attention can get you your own reality show or a sold-out so-called comedy tour, would understand this better than most folks.