Robert Farley is totally right about how our ambivalence about China plays out in our movies:

Later this year, a remake of Red Dawn will hit the screens in the United States. Initially, the producers had planned to replace the original version’s coalition of Russian, Nicaraguan and Cuban soldiers with Chinese invaders. Unfortunately, a sense of commercial viability prevailed over the studio: Reports now indicate that the remake’s invaders will be the even less realistic North Koreans, a change designed to preserve the film’s marketability to the ever-growing Chinese movie-going audience.

In 1984, no one needed to worry about the preferences of Russian movie viewers. The Kremlin hated Red Dawn — as well as Rocky IV, in which an American boxer defeats a steroid-laden Soviet stereotype to the cheers of a Russian crowd — but no one in Hollywood cared. The Russian market was irrelevant to the United States, both in terms of film specifically, and in terms of trade more generally. Such is not the case with the United States and China, however. On virtually every conceivable set of economic metrics, the United States and the People’s Republic of China are tightly integrated. For the international system, this is probably a good thing, as hopefully the potential costs of conflict to both sides render war unimaginable.

It’s better for world peace to have a great power rivalry defined by economic competition and interdependence, but it’s not so great for pop culture, generally. The (unusually timely) solution is, of course, to have American and Chinese forces team up to stop the external forces, among them comically media moguls, who want to bait them into World War III:

That, or have Christian Bale stop the Nanjing massacre.

The news that Nikki Finke and the team at Deadline Hollywood Daily have partnered with Facebook to create a how-to-succeed-in-Hollywood game where players have to adjust their decisions based on breaking industry news, put me on the hunt for the last video game I played with any degree of sustained dedication, a presidential campaign simulator called President Forever. Looking it up, it seems that the game’s only available for PCs, which is unfortunate: I’d like to be able to play it all the way through again.

What I remember as being fun and tense about it was precisely the breaking news angle that Deadline’s incorporating here. The game wasn’t responsive to actual breaking news, but President Forever was pretty good at dropping something plausible and anxiety-producing, like a foreign policy crisis or a natural disaster, that you had to have your candidate respond to. And that was on top of all the other factors you had to juggle, balancing fundraising days, timing policy speeches and setting them in certain states, setting up a humane travel schedule, and making sure your candidate got to rest so they didn’t collapse on the trail. It was a good illustration of how hard it is to keep it together on a modern campaign trail, and why our focus on gaffes is stupid. Running for president is an insane, exhausting process. People are going to mess up.

Which, of course, is even more true for the presidency itself. Games like American Public Media’s cute little Budget Hero hint at the fact that if you’re commander-in-chief, you have to make a lot of choices, but I think this doesn’t even get close to to the four- or eight-year vortex that is executive decision-making:

If there’s a game out there that approximates the kind of pressure-cooker (and that I could play on the Mac, maybe preferably on Steam), I’d love the gamers in the audience to recommend one so I can check it out. My sense is that the political simulator games do fine but aren’t an insanely profitable part of the business, perhaps because the real work of being president is kind of exhausting and depressing and doesn’t produce the visceral thrills of first-person shooters, but I could be wrong.

Not all Persians are Muslims, of course, though I sort of doubt that Ryan Seacrest’s new show, Shahs of Sunset, is going to be a serious religious study of Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, and the Bahá’í Faith. Instead, it’s supposed to be a look at “the opulent lives of young adults who together navigate their post-college lives, careers, families and traditions.”

If we’re going to have a show with an all-Persian cast, I guess maybe it’s moderately better to have a show on Bravo, which likes its tacky to be at least moderately high end and about the disconnect between its characters’ stated classiness and their actual behavior, than it is to have a Persian Jersey Shore clone, which was apparently in the works at some point. And it’s worthwhile to have characters who demonstrate what ought to be an obvious lesson, that being Muslim (or having Middle Eastern ancestry) isn’t incompatible with liking America, whether it’s American pop culture in the case of Community‘s Abed, or American consumerism, as appears will be the case here. But if we’re looking for a Muslim archetype that could be useful if replicated frequently in pop culture as a way of selling folks on the idea that minority groups bring added value to the societies that accept them, I think the idea that Persians or Arabs are fabulously wealthy is probably not going to cut it.

On the other hand, I may totally change my mind if it turns out Asa Soltan’s involved in this. ‘Cause she’s kind of awesome:

We’ve been talking a lot over the past few days about the interaction between quality storytelling and politics. So there’s something fitting about the fact that this week saw the announcement of a live action Captain Planet movie, because holy elemental power rings, folks, is that a franchise that sacrifices storytelling and plausibility for didactic politics:

It’s interesting to think about how the geopolitical realignments might affect how the Planeteer’s powers get realigned. It probably makes more sense to have a Planeteer from China rather than Japan, for example. And given China’s status as the largest coal consumer on the planet (though it’s also got the biggest hydroelectric projects in the world), maybe that Planeteer should have the ability to heal the earth or the air, rather than to control water? I don’t know if you can have metaphors for coal without having metaphors for oil in this sort of thing, so it would be interesting to have either a Middle Eastern Planeteer, or have the African one be from an oil-rich country like Nigeria. I do kind of love the crankiness of Wheeler, who complains about being a “cut-rate superhero” and can’t figure out why he — or more broadly, the U.S., should care about pollution clean-up (I sort of doubt we’ll see any character, Soviet or none, respond to that question with: “Because we care, my sweet imperialist dog.”) and generally serves as the person who provides opportunities for Gaia and Captain Planet to provide environmental lessons to the team.

But the larger problem is figuring out what story the movie’s going to tell, and picking one that isn’t totally unrealistic about what it takes to stop pollution, or the fact that environmental degradation is an ongoing problem rather than a one-off fix. Honestly, some of the original scenarios, like Captain Planet just sucking the oil from an offshore drilling site back into the well, are just dangerously unrealistic and un-useful:

When it comes to the environment, worshipping at the Church of Wouldn’t-It-Be-Pretty-To-Think-So is worse than having no pop cultural messages about the environment at all. It’s great that the message is “the power is yours,” but not so great that the idea is that Captain Planet can “take pollution down to zero,” which is just not possible. What’s interesting is that a lot of the original storylines have problems that clearly have systemic sources. Verminous Skumm grew up in a toxic waste dump, but rather than seeing cleanup as an option, he’s continuing to pollute so other people suffer the way he did:

Similarly, Rigger, Hoggish Greedly’s sidekick, works for the rapacious industrialist because he doesn’t have a lot of other career opportunities. Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to fund an environmental justice group for Skumm to work in, and to hook Rigger up with Gemesa, the Spanish wind turbines company that’s converting U.S. Steel factories so they can build turbines here? It seems like it might make sense to have a two-part movie that’s initially about mitigating, rather than magically solving, an environmental catastrophe, and then becomes a heist or double-cross movie about co-opting the villains’ sidekicks and undermining their environmentally unfriendly enterprises.

But I sort of doubt if they’ll be that smart. There’s a clear audience for environmentally themed movies, whether it’s Avatar cracking the $2 billion market at the box office, or Wall-E taking home a Best Animated Feature Academy Award and $500 million despite being a stinging indictment of American consumerism. But I wonder if a badly-executed Captain Planet could be too on the nose. It would be unfortunate to have a dumb, obvious movie set back the effort to make environmentalism seem aspirational and important.

I’ve been saying for years that I want a television show that pits the COINTELPRO team against the Weather Underground. Now, it turns out, I’m getting something similar to that, and I have to deal with the fact that Shia LeBoeuf is involved with it. Robert Redford has just announced that he’s going to direct The Company You Keep, in which he’ll play a member of the Weather Underground who successfully concealed his identity for three decades who gets unmasked by an obnoxious young reporter played by LeBoeuf. Then, because apparently this is a world where nobody negotiates peaceful surrenders when they come out of the underground, Redford’s character goes on the run.

I’m a bit anxious about this, if only because Redford’s turned out a series of really leaden political stories. But I still think this is an important story to have in conversation. It’s obviously a good thing for the stability of American democracy that acting to overthrow the government is not an acceptable form of political behavior. But as the nonsense over Barack Obama’s contact with Bill Ayers shows, we also marginalize, particularly on the left, both people who want to overthrow the government, which is fine, and people who believe that the government is irretrievably broken, is doing disastrous things as a result, and feel some real agony about it. Which I think is less fine. There are obviously people for whom the government just doesn’t work, and ignoring that is both willfully oblivious and dangerous. One of the reasons that The Weather Underground is such a great documentary is that it manages to separate those two ideas, which are so often conflated, and show some real sympathy for, say, Mark Rudd’s clear emotional pain over what the U.S. government was doing in Vietnam, while also making incredibly clear, in the words of former Weathermen, how disastrous their approach was:

Fiction should be a good tool for that kind of parsing. I don’t know that The Company You Keep will be able to keep up that balance, and I think if it ends up being Weatherman apologia it’ll be both a terrible movie and really politically unhelpful. But I’ll read the novel it’s based on, and have hope that the adaptation will be good.

-Are TV watchers sick of shows that rely on guest stars?

-”A toy to an executive is an avatar to a child. And connecting those two mind-sets is key to storytelling as a screenwriting grown-up.”

-If this NFL brain injury lawsuit makes it into open court, it’s going to be brutal.

-The competition between Amazon Prime and Netflix gets more intense.

-I’m curious to see whether the Hunger Games movies can avoid PG-13 ratings, and if so, how many parents will make exceptions to let their kids see them:

Rep. Allen West (R-FL) appears to have some fairly strong opinions about what it takes to act like a lady, and he expressed them in an email to his colleague, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) yesterday. “You are the most vile, unprofessional, and despicable member of the US House of Representatives. If you have something to say to me, stop being a coward and say it to my face, otherwise, shut the heck up,” he wrote to her. “You have proven repeatedly that you are not a Lady, therefore, shall not be afforded due respect from me!” Given the restrictiveness of Mr. West’s vision of ladylike conduct, I thought it was important to provide him with a primer on things ladies are allowed to do.

1. Put one over on clueless heirs to beer fortunes, trick them into marriage, blow their minds with the fact that you have an actual sexual history, and then seduce them all over again:

2. Provide vicious rhetorical beatdowns to young ladies of inappropriate class backgrounds who seem in imminent danger of marrying your nephew:

3. Decide that a fully realized sexual life is an integral part of being human:

4. Understand that position’s all well and good, but that it ultimately can’t stand in the way of modernity:

and

5. Never, never, never surrender, even if it means that people decide you’re a pushy, capitalist tramp.

6. Stand up for their sisters’ honor:

It’s not surprising that West made the mistake of assuming that being a lady means a pliant, adorable cream puff. Lots of folks do. But Debbie Wasserman Schultz is heir to the best part of the lady tradition: the tough as nails one.

With arts and public broadcast issues percolating on the edge of the race for the 2012 presidential race, I thought it made sense to look at where the declared and prospective candidates for president have stood on arts issues throughout their careers. Their views on everything from arts education to intellectual property rights to support for local artistic traditions say a lot about how they value culture — but also about how they think about the role of government.

Michigan Rep. Thaddeus McCotter may rock a star-spangled Telecaster and play it for American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. But as an elected official, he’s got a somewhat sparse record on the arts, where he mostly parrots conventional Republican positions (though he doesn’t demagogue as aggressively on arts funding as some of his rivals do):

2000: While a Michigan state senator, McCotter introduced a bill pushing for Michigan to appoint a poet laureate. At the time, the state was one of 13 that didn’t have a poet acting as ambassador for the arts. “We’re a hardworking Midwestern state, but we’re smart, too,” he said, suggesting Bob Seger be the initial laureate.

2004: McCotter got on the broadcast decency bandwagon after Justin Timberlake exposed Janet Jackson’s breast at the Super Bowl, supporting the Broadcast Decency Act of 2004, which would have increased FCC fines to as much as $500,000 per incident. That bill didn’t pass, though similar legislation was enacted in 2009. At the time, McCotter said, “We have to have a safe haven so parents don’t get any surprises…we don’t really know what’s safe for our kids to watch.”

2005: As isn’t particularly surprising for a Michigan lawmaker, McCotter’s been skeptical about the American trade relationship with China. As he wrote to President Bush that year, “As you know, China, despite strong action taken by Congress, continues to pirate intellectual property; produce counterfeit goods; dump these and other products into our markets; and engage in currency manipulation.”

2007: While in Congress, he co-sponsored a resolution that supported music education on the grounds that it helps boost test scores and develop students socially.

2009: McCotter was one of the Republican leaders who held a joint press conference opposing President Obama’s budget, objecting to items ranging from dog park funding to the National Endowment for the Arts. Their reaction was, he said, “the result of the American people across this country finding out what is in that bill and in their infinite common sense they understand that there is no relationship between billions in this bill and their chance of keeping their job or finding a new one.”

McCotter’s challenge on the arts and intellectual property issues is the same on many others — he’s a relatively undefined candidate, and in a crowded field, he may not be able to show off much in the way of meaningful differences.

Kevin Keller, the gay character introduced to the franchise, isn’t just challenging Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Readers will get to see him married next year in the comics that focus on the characters’ adult lives — and the cover of the first edition of his spin-off book shows him imagining himself as everything from a best-selling author to president (he’ll be student council president in the spin-off).

I know this may seem really whitebread and milquetoast. But in a presidential election where saying things like that being gay “leads to the personal enslavement of individuals. Because if you’re involved in the gay and lesbian lifestyle, it’s bondage. Personal bondage, personal despair, and personal enslavement. And that’s why this is so dangerous,” isn’t disqualifyingly crazy, and in fact, can help you become the leading candidate for the Republican nomination, insisting that gay people can participate in American life to the fullest extent possible is still a radical, and radically important, act.