And I thought it was some goofy-lookin’ nonsense about Daniel Craig and a very expensive piece of jewelry. Jon Favreau tells io9:

We’re not revisionist historians here. There is a lot of talk about people killing people and the Apaches and the scalps. We started off with images from the Blood Meridian right off the top. It’s a dark world. Harrison Ford’s story about what he witnessed as a child with the atrocities committed upon the settlers and the Indians are saying all these terrible things have come from the white people … and they’re [both] right.

Instead of making it like they’re all playing nice together and they happen to be friends right off the bat … even Harrison Ford and Adam Beach — who clearly have a very strong bond, stronger in many ways than he does with his own son — he’s conflicted about that feeling. But yet, in his heart, he still looked after him like a son and is seen as such.

Who knew? After a summer where race is left out of a movie about the struggles of the ’60s, and Captain America blithely ignores the unintegrated realities of the American Army in World War II, it’s refreshing to hear a director call revisionism by its name and express hopes of avoiding it. I don’t think this movie, or every movie, has to be about aggressively forcing viewers to confront the difficult truths in America’s past, but accepting the truth for what it is and building your fictional world in response to it and in acknowledgement of it is good practice, and good storytelling. Conflict is generally more interesting than whitewash.

On the NAACP Convention agenda this year? The lack of roles for black actors and the odd lack of space for stories about black characters in the vast sea of the media market. I don’t think anyone particularly disagrees that it would be a good thing for people of color if they were more accurately represented in our popular culture, and that it’s a good thing for people of all backgrounds to have more original stories in the mix. So the question, I think, is less, should we do this? and more how do we convince people to do this?

The threshhold that had to be crossed to get a lot of projects by, and about, funny women in development for film and television appears to have been the $164 million domestic gross for Bridesmaids. Why it wasn’t, say, the $153 million domestic gross for Sex and the City, is one of the secrets of the dark art of box office alchemy that’s probably better left unexamined lest Nikki Finke and Harvey Weinstein end up examining one’s entrails on a sound stage covered with pentagrams and candles. But whatever it was, there was a clear and repeated demonstration that women had money and would spend it on movies that depicted characters that they either identified with or saw as aspirational figures, and at some point, the studios were confident that this was a thing that they could do that would consistently make enough money to allow them to swim, Scrooge McDuck-like, in vast swimming pools of lady-riches.

So what’s the tipping point for movies about and starring people of color? Clearly, the streak Will Smith had between 2004 and 2008, when Shark Tale, Hitch, The Pursuit of Happyness, I Am Legend, and Hancock all made more than $150 million domestically and more than $350 million abroad, doesn’t seem to have done it. Or maybe it’s just that if an individual African-American actor generates enough revenue, rather than taking that as proof of the ability of African-American actors to be broadly appealing to audiences, studios instead start to see those individual actors as black rather than green. Tyler Perry’s movies have done fine — $50 million for Diary of a Mad Black Woman, $55 million for Why Did I Get Married? and $60 million for Why Did I Get Married Too?, $31 million for Daddy’s Little Girls — but either Perry isn’t that interested in moving beyond his core audience, as is his right, or even though he has his own studio, he’d have trouble finding distribution for a movie that’s meant to go beyond that core audience. I’d like to think the $603,625,827 that Fast Five‘s made so far worldwide would be enough money to make studios think about every aspect of it, rather than simply the fact that it’s the next installment in a successful franchise, and we’ll have to see.

If you don’t control an industry, it’s not surprising that you might have to work harder to succeed in it, however unfair that seems. But I’d love to know what counts as success for people of color? And at what profit point does the industry count black audiences, Latino audiences, Asian audiences, and white audiences who don’t only want to see white faces on screen as mainstream?

In the midst of the delightfully distracting debate over whether the Treasury Department could solve the debt ceiling crisis by minting a couple of trillion-dollar coins, Jon Chait suggests that such a scenario lends itself to a whole bunch of wacky movie ideas:

I actually feel like this plan could, in addition to rescuing the economy, provide the spark our film industry requires. I could sit here for ten minutes and rattle off a half-dozen great film concepts based on this story.

Bank caper: a dashing Clooney-esque figure assembles a team to steal the trillion dollar coin.

Comedy: a bumbling assistant Treasury Secretary played by Jack Black accidentally picks up the trillion dollar coin and spends it on a Mountain Dew, sending the entire government into a mad scramble for the coin before the world economy collapses.

Noir: Regular person somehow acquires the coin, and is slowly twisted.

Action: Super-villain plots to destroy the coin and bring the economy to its knees, from which he stands to profit due to a nefariously brilliant hedge he has prepared. Maybe we’ll call him “Eric Cantor.”

I like these, but I have some doubts about the first idea. A lot of what makes heist movies fun is the brilliant solutions to the logistical challenges of moving the loot. We’d never have the sheer joy of the Mini Cooper chase scene in The Italian Job if all we had to move was a couple of little coins:

On the other hand, you could do a gorgeous, high-level three card monte, like the climax of the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, one of my favorite movie sequences for pure fun and style (the clip spoils the end of the movie):

In addition to the misery of the debt ceiling showdown, this week brought the unfortunate news that I, as a Patriots fan, am apparently supposed to root for Chad Ochocinco and Albert Haynesworth. Ochocinco’s really mostly a harmless diva, and I can live with him, especially if the team lets Aaron Hernandez keep jersey number 85. But Albert Haynesworth is an unprofessional brat — and worse, his trial for misdemeanor sexual assault charges starts on Tuesday. For those unfamiliar with the details behind the case, Haynesworth stands accused of asking a waitress if he could put his credit card in her blouse when he settled his check, and interpreting her consent to that as permission to fondle her breasts. When interviewed by the police, he told a detective that “I know what this is about, she is just upset that I have a white girlfriend. I couldn’t tell you the last time I dated a black girl. She was trying to get with me.” Charming.

Obviously Haynesworth is innocent until proven guilty. And because I believe in reintegrating people into society after they serve the penalties meted out to them by the justice system, Haynesworth will have every right in the world to keep playing football if he’s convicted and serves out whatever fine or community service he’s sentenced to, just as Michael Vick has every right in the world to continue to earn a living as a quarterback now that he’s served his jail sentence. But there’s a lot of ground between not blocking someone from getting a job or a place to live after they’re found guilty in a court of law, and cheering for them on a national stage, between the neutrality of acceptance and the affirmation of respect.

And I don’t want to cheer for Albert Haynesworth. I didn’t want to cheer for Julio Lugo, either, during his time with the Red Sox, even though his wife recanted her original version of events in a 2003 domestic violence case and he was acquitted. Haynesworth didn’t grope me in public, Lugo didn’t beat me up while trying to throw me out of our mutual house, and I am obviously not the Texas cheerleader who was kicked off her squad for refusing to cheer for the player who raped her and plead out to lesser charges, lost her case in court, and was ordered to pay her school district’s legal fees. But I can’t ignore these things just because they didn’t happen to me. The cognitive dissonance is just too jarring.

Teams take character into consideration to a limited extent in considering who they hire, because at the end of the day, being the kind of jerk who blames assault charges on black women being upset that he dates white women has nothing to do with how hard you hit quarterbacks. But tickets and television rights to games are only part of what sports franchises sell. They want us to buy all manner of merchandise, to wear these men’s names across our backs. Their profit depends on our level of identification and emotional involvement with the team as an entity and the players as individuals. There’s a reason almost every single athlete in the country has some sort of charitable foundation, and it’s not entirely out of the goodness of their hearts. I’d really love to see a day where assaulting a woman, be she wife or cocktail waitress, will be as commercially damaging to a team and to a player’s individual brand as, say, declaring that you hate the Jimmy Fund and all those kids with cancer can shove it. But until we get there, female fans are going to be stuck with uncomfortable decisions about when to rise with the crowd, and when a great play can only be greeted with the sound of one and a half hands clapping.

This post contains spoilers through the July 28 episode of Louie.

One of the things I find really interesting about Louie, and Louis C.K. in general, is the question of how much judging yourself absolutely without mercy earns you the right to judge other people and be up front about your discomfort with other people. I know I would be uncomfortable if a homeless man took off a lot of his clothes in a subway station and prepared to rinse himself from a bottle of spring water, and I know I would be struck by the juxtaposition of a very gifted violinist playing in the space between me and that homeless man, but I’m not sure how comfortable I am watching Louis put that discomfort on display.

Societal rules tend to dictate that when we witness behavior that makes us uncomfortable, but that doesn’t threaten us, and that we’re powerless to change, whether because someone is mentally ill, or because it’s inappropriate because we aren’t their parents, is generally to sit tight. If you’re caught judging, you’re an asshole, a racist, potentially classist, or whatever the relevant -ism is. And you can’t really solve any of the things that make you uncomfortable, which is precisely why Louis’ fantasy of becoming a subway Sir Walter Raleigh and cleaning up the mysterious brown liquid on the seat is so compelling and so impossible. Cleaning it up wouldn’t win him the admiration of middle-aged African-American women and the desire of sexy young blonde ladies. It would make everyone else uncomfortable because it would force them to acknowledge it was there in the first place.

And this episode feels both artistically interesting to me as a critic and uncomfortable to me as an invested viewer because Louis’ affections for Pamela, who I don’t think much of, make me feel less good about Louis. Pamela may be some people’s ideal of a tough-talking, honest female friend, but I always feel awful and awkward when she’s on screen, mostly because of how terrible she is to Louis, whether she’s cooking an omelette for a guy who is occupying an apartment Louis’ thinking about buying, or calling her son a “little bitch” because he’s scared of amusement park rides. “Why did you want to come here? Did you want to take me here because it’s Frenchy and cool-looking?” she asks him, in a scene that feels like decency and friendship malpractice to me. “You picked it out because you thought I would think you would cool, which you’re not. You’re very, very uncool, Louie, and you’re very boring…You think I’m awesome, and I think you’re okay.” And yet, Louis confesses his love to her in a flea market, telling her “You’re fun, and you shit all over me, and you make fun of me, and you’re real. I don’t have enough time in any day to think about you enough…I’m crazy about you, Pamela. I don’t want to be with anybody else.”

And I think maybe this is the genius of Louie, that it convinces us to have an affinity with this guy, and that he’s kind of great despite his bad luck. And then it smacks us, hard, with the insecurities that make a woman like Pamela his ideal, or the passivity that leads him to stick around to spank an obviously damaged parent of a kid in his daughter’s elementary school class. And then it asks you to keep going because this damaged person is our main character, in fact, our only constant character, and there’s no way he can switch jobs and cities, or get beheaded, or move to Los Angeles and disappear. Louie asks us to attach to a character who is one of the closest things we have to an actual person. And while that’s almost always entertaining, it’s not always fun.

-New Frank Ocean is always a cause for celebration.

-Ah, the days when computers were young and Cosmopolitan spent time convincing readers that programming was just like planning a dinner party.

-Attack the Block promises it’s The Wire with aliens, if you needed convincing to watch it.

-I would absolutely take a political science class taught by Martin Starr.

-I love how whoever cut the teaser trailer for The Avengers can’t resist lingering on Chris Hemsworth’s ripped Thor arms:

This post contains spoilers through the first four chapters of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. If you want to spoil beyond that, feel free, just label your comment as such. For next week, let’s read through the end of Part I (up to, but not beyond, chapter 9. I should note, by the way, that I’m reading the original rather than the re-released author’s preferred text.

One of the things I love about American Gods, and that I think is true of the best of Neil Gaiman’s work, is the way he establishes the human tendency towards myth, and the Gods’ tendencies towards mundanity. And while American Gods is not precisely a social problem novel, I appreciate that he starts laying that groundwork in a story about prison culture and the way it makes it harder for ex-cons to re-acclimate:

The upshot of it all was that Johnnie Larch never actually made it to Seattle, and he spent the next couple of days in town in bars, and when his one hundred dollars was gone he held up a gas station with a toy gun for money to keep drinking, and the police finally picked him up for pissing in the street. Pretty soon he was back inside serving the rest of his sentence and a little extra for the gas station job. And the moral of this story, according to Johnnie Larch, was this: don’t piss off people who work in airports.

‘Are you sure it’s not something like ‘The kind of behavior that works in a specialized environment, such as prison, can fail to work and in fact ecome harmful when used outside such an environment’?” said Shadow, when Johnnie Larch told him the story.

But even though we have a tendency to make myths out of our lives, that doesn’t mean we can accept the extraordinary. What lets Bilquis get away with her seductions is the fact that her clients can’t believe what’s happening to them. And Mr. Wednesday’s pose as a two-bit con artist not only lets him support himself, but it disguises his extraordinariness. Gods don’t turn tricks or scams, because why would they? In the world of American Gods, Americans can’t quite conceive of the Gods as small, but that doesn’t mean they can appreciate them in all their profound strangeness and power either, as Shadow begins to find out in a series of disturbing dreams:
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It’s grimly hilarious and depressing that, just as House Republicans are using the debt ceiling fight to go after Pell Grants, the need-based college assistance program, they also decided to use this moment of national tension to try to cut $10.6 million out of the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts. This is rearranging deck chairs on the Titantic, but with extreme malice. Fortunately, 55 Republicans stood up and voted with all of their Democratic colleagues to preserve the funding. I’m obviously supportive of public funding for the arts. But I’m also just depressed by these public displays of unseriousness and pettiness. $10.6 million in cuts will not save the nation, but it would halt a lot of revenue- and salary-generating projects.

This post contains spoilers through the July 28 episode of Burn Notice.

Confession: like in Bones, I find myself at a point in Burn Notice where I find it almost impossible to pay attention to the case of the week because I’m so vastly more interested in the larger narrative, and because frankly, the faux-louchness of Michael Westen’s Miami is starting to feel a little contrived. At the rate Michael and company burn through drug dealers, arms dealers, flesh peddlers, and assorted lower-level ne’er-do-wells, the larger Miami area’s going to end up with a desperate surplus of white suits and a seriously depressed underground economy. More than that, I worry about the way that the show’s handling the larger arc of the season.

It’s not so much that I worry about Michael being back to square three or four with the people who burned him and his tense relationship with the CIA. I just worry that it’s getting cliche rather than prickly and interesting. “It’s been personal since Max bled out in my arms, since he told me to say goodbye to his wife,” Michael declares at the beginning of the episode, when his cohorts point out how hard whoever framed him worked to make the setup plausible. It’s a dreadfully cliche line, and delivered without any particular sense of conviction, and of course it’s false, because the burning was always personal.

And it’s not just that we’re stuck in retreads. Last week, Pearce, Michael’s new CIA liaison, was talking about what a tough bitch she was. Now, she’s dissolving into tears at the thought of blowing an asset because “They do that, and my asset gets killed…The guy coaches soccer and he’s got a life…This happened to me before…he was more than an asset. We were getting married when it was over. The brass got impatient…I buried him a month before our wedding day.” All of which serves as a setup for Michael to shout at a couple of squeaky, patently fake CIA functionaries that he’s not flip because “I put my friend in the field,” by which he means he had Fiona scrape up Sam’s face with a zester so he’ll look like he got grazed with a bullet and let him be taken into the uncertain custody of a volatile Miami drug dealer. Which…whatever, we’re back in the haze of Miami corruption.

But I think the show needs to figure out what it thinks about the CIA. Is it a desirable, competent, admirable organization to belong to, or is it just the only thing Michael can visualize as a goal, so he, and we, are expected to overlook the expendable handlers and squeaky bureaucrats who are totally out of keeping with the styling and presentation of the show? Is being loyal to Michael worth it? As Fiona notes about Michael’s decision-making tonight “He knew it was dangerous. He knew it. And now Sam is in real trouble.” If the show wants us to believe that there are serious consequences for Michael’s singlemindedness, it might be worth it to start demonstrating that, rather than playing another round of Michael’s-loyal-to-Sam-and-Fiona-but-the-CIA-couldn’t-care-less-but-Michael-wants-to-rejoin-the-CIA. Michael doesn’t need a lecture from his mother on why not to play with fire. He needs to get burned, but in a whole different way. Burn Notice has succeeded by being fizzy and sunny and not exceptionally substantive. But it’s time for the show to actually start laying down some value judgements and using them to drive characterization.