If, in fact, a threatened filibuster materializes tonight as the Senate prepares to vote on the debt ceiling compromise, said filibuster will keep a lot of Washington up late. It will also be exceedingly boring. American lawmakers may be good at a number of things, among them raising money, asking leading questions in hearings, and appearing on cable television, but almost none of them are even close to entertaining for more than a few minutes at a time. So if we’re going to have to suffer monologues, here are six people I’d rather see yielded time than any of our representatives in Congress.

1. Ian McShane, now and forever. Whether he’s reconciling God, evolution, and breakfast on Kings:

Or explaining the importance of calm to conquering the difficulties of life on Deadwood (which, NSFW unless you put your headphones in):

I would listen to McShane talk forever, and unlike most members of Congress, consider it a privilege to pay him to do it.

2. If you want to go full-bore crazy to match the circumstances, Tom Wilkinson, in Michael Clayton, does it better just about anyone else.

3. Or, if you want people to forget they’re being kept from the business at hand, bring in Emma Thompson, who can do inspired impressions all night long:

4. If the goal is to depress both yourselves and the journalists monitoring you, bring in Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs:

Then, he can cheer everyone up and creep everyone out by telling Truman Capote stories.

5. Or to talk your colleagues into economic stimulus, Gary Oldman in Fifth Element mode is always a good bet:

6. Meryl Streep, on sweaters. On anything:

I had some high hopes for Cowboys and Aliens. I don’t think it’s a particularly good movie, though it does fulfill at least some of Jon Favreau’s promises to make a non-revisionist movie about the Blood Meridian. But mostly it made me wish that rather than mashing up two genres, Favreau had left science fiction on the table and made a straightforward, racially-aware Western.

The aliens half of the movie isn’t particularly interesting. The main titular extraterrestrials turn out to be just another set of periodic table aliens — this time, the element they’re after, for no particularly discernable reason other than that it’s thematically appropriate, is gold. The extra creature from another planet in the mix, of course, turns out to be Olivia Wilde, who is neither motivated by precious metals nor encumbered, as it turns out, by the laws of mortality. Her motivations rest on a few lines of dialogue, and the invaders are only slightly more detailed, though we do know that they’re awfully good at building multi-purpose mining and defense vehicles that blend in with rock formations in the American Southwest. Similarly, Daniel Craig remains one of our great action heroes, a man who can plausibly take as much as he dishes out, but there just isn’t much to him. In a sense, both he and the aliens are a distraction from the much better plain Western going on around them.

The Western bits fare better, if imperfectly, because they tell a few basic stories, that of a boy and his dog, a man and a shotgun, and of a father and his two sons. The first is perfunctory: from the minute Col. Dolarhyde hands young Emmett Taggart a blade and tells him “Take the knife, be a man,” we know he will earn a place in his community through the more contemporarily acceptable method of stabbing the hell out of an alien, rather than an Indian. Much in the same way, the town’s emasculated barkeep, Doc, who is married to a Mexican woman, starts the movie humiliated before the entire town, his glasses literally kicked in the dust, and ends it a confident shot and a confident husband.

The third storyline is the most moving, and the most socially relevant of those three strains. Though Col. Dolarhyde goes a bit too quickly from a brutal cattle rancher to a hometown hero, his storyline poses an interesting question: what happens if you love the son you adopt better than the one of your blood? Particularly if he’s of another race? The movie’s momentum begins when the colonel’s blood son, Percy, wanders into town and starts shooting the place up, with special emphasis on humiliating Doc. When he goes too far, Nat, an Apache man who is part of Dolarhyde’s circle, tries to step up to keep Percy out of custody, and fails. And when the feckless, brutal Percy is snapped up by the alien invaders, Nat steps up to help the townsfolk go after him and everyone else who was taken.
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I was flipping through Amazon’s gift guides, and it turns out they have a Geek category of suggestions for what to get your friendly neighborhood enthusiast. The subcategories include:

-Cult Movies on DVD (a little Doctor Who and Star Wars heavy, and I have mixed feelings about seeing rape revenge flick I Spit On Your Grave here, but I appreciate the inclusion of the Man With No Name trilogy)
-Robotic Vacuums
-Digital SLRs
-Webcams
-High-end Espresso Machines
-Freestanding Beverage Chillers
-Upper-body Coverage
-Video Games
-Macintosh Software
-Gags and Practical Jokes
-Cocktail Shakers
-Microwaves
-Caffeinated Energy Drinks
-Table Tennis
-Air Hockey
-Manga (someone more versed than me in both this genre and Anime would have to assess the lists)
-Anime
-Blu-ray Disc Players

I’m surprised there isn’t a comics category. But otherwise, this is kind of a perfect distillation of how corporate America sees the range of geekdom. No matter how much Amazon may claim “Gone are the days of floods and pocket protectors. High-tech brainiacs now rule the world,” there’s still that suspicion that geeks are the kind of people who don’t want to work out with their shirts off.

This post contains spoilers through the July 31 episode of True Blood.

While I’ve spent much of this season of True Blood thinking about the newly spiky triangle of Sookie, Bill, and Eric, tonight the minor characters stepped forward, and the show took a look at what happens when you swap identities. Because gosh was there a lot of that going on, as Jason prepared for his first change; Pam contemplated Bill’s personality now that he’s king of Louisiana; Lafayette got shamanistic; Tara explained her secret life to her lover; Marnie finally gave up her body to a medieval witch who was tortured and murdered by vampires; V is turning Andy into the man he wishes he was; and Tommy is actually taking on Sam’s skin — perhaps with disastrous consequences.

In the most touching examination of what happens when your identity changes, Jason and Jessica stay up all night, waiting to see if he’ll change into a werepanther for the first time. It’s a change Jason’s been dreading: “What I like being better is a regular old American human,” he tells Sookie earlier in the episode. But sitting on the grass outside Merlotte’s with Jessica, who’s found herself summoned to him by the blood connection they forged after his escape from Hotshot, Jason finds himself wondering if his impending transformation might not be that bad. “The night I got made was the scariest night of my life,” Jessica tells him, explaining that no matter how difficult it’s been, she doesn’t regret that terror given what she’s gained. “My old world was about that big. And now it’s endless.”

I also liked the juxtaposition between Lafayette’s storyline and Tara’s. Lafayette doesn’t necessarily want to be different, but Jesus seems to value his power as much as himself, and he’s being dragged off to strange lands, and I don’t only mean Mexico. I’ll be curious to see what happens if Lafayette channels his power on his own, rather than acting as a vessel. By contrast, Tara very deliberately became something else, explaining to her angry girlfriend that everyone in Bon Temps thought she’d inevitably become like her mother, “Drunk. Crazy. Alone…It was building up inside me.” And now that she’s come clean to her girlfriend, it turns out her girlfriend might like Bon Temps Tara better, the girl who doesn’t smoke, and who tended bar at the place she once called a dump. Change doesn’t always accomplish what you want it to, especially when it’s unsustainable.
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-Your complete guide to bin Laden death movies.

-Decent pictures of Tom Hardy as Bane.

-Karma for Lars Von Trier?

-Steve Levitan is right that we should have better data on digital viewership of television shows.

-In what will be a theme for this week, MTV takes a look at the Internet, warning “the hypersensitive, the humor-impaired, and puritans of every type” to stay away, with bonus Newt Gingrich commentary on internet porn:

I’ve been pretty harsh in the past about Ben Stiller’s sourness. But there is one thing I think it’s perfect for: a movie about robbing Bernie Madoff.

I have some reservations here, particularly the plot device of a bunch of pasty white boys hiring a black man to advise them in how to commit felonies, which I thought, even with a twist, was the weakest part of Horrible Bosses. But on the whole, I’m actually more optimistic about this than I thought I would be. There’s an admirable frankness to things like a conversation between two luxury apartment building employees, where one says, “You know what these people are really buying?” and the other responds, “White neighbors?” Or the withering condescension with which the movie treats Alan Alda’s declaration that “I may have my own private island in Belize, but deep down, I’m just an Astoria boy like Josh here,” when he’s really someone who believes that “You people are working stiffs. Clock punchers. Easily replaced.”

Our popular culture spends a lot of time treating the decadence and myopias of the very rich as if they’re admirable, or at worst, an amusing excuse for judgement. There’s something refreshing about a movie that upsets that assumption, and suggests that its characters tear down that false idol rather than aspire to it. That’s much blunter than the class politics of American pop culture normally get, a rebuke to the industry from within the industry itself — whether it’s self-aware or not.

I have some quibbles with TIME’s 30-best music videos list, most notably, the total OutKast lockout, but I am grateful that it reminded me of how fantastic Gnarls Barkley’s video for “Going On” is:

Is there any group who produced so many brilliant videos out of such a small pool of songs? There’s a density to their accomplishment, and also a wonderful coherence to Gnarls Barkley’s videos, which tend to introduce an element of the strange or unsettling into a familiar door. What works so well about the video for “Going On” is the way it adds depth and power to a song that otherwise doesn’t have very specific lyrics, the total commitment of the actors to the concept — when the two main characters exchange a look before they run through their portal, the significance of their decision to cross over is clear.

The same thing was true of the video for “Crazy,” the first single off Gnarls Barkley’s first album. Rorschach blots are sort of definitionally unsettling, but they’re general, vague. “Crazy” added an eerie specificity to the images, which by turn provided unsettling shadows to the real people who were represented in them.

Then, there’s perhaps my favorite Gnarls Barkley video, the one for “Smiley Faces.” It’s much more whimsical than the previous two I’ve mentioned, an alternative history of American music (among other things) that sneaks Cee Lo Green and Danger Mouse into as many frames as possible:

The past is different when you recognize the people in the pictures. Or, in the case of the video for “Run,” the cheesy ’80s dance shows:

This is pretty clearly a hallmark of Cee Lo’s — if there was one thing that was clear about his performances and his coaching on The Voice, it was how much he loves to invoke different eras.

In stark contrast to the period throwbacks, another one of their staples seems to be body horror, delivered in variable doses. There’s the delightfully weird “Who’s Gonna Save My Soul,” which manages to take the cliche of an awkward couple in a diner and do something really strange and wonderful with it — I’d love to watch a romantic comedy this sad and frank. And Gnarls Barkley did something similarly body-horror-y in the clip for “Gone Daddy Gone,” where we’re expected to sympathize with insects and dust mites (I don’t think this is nearly as much of an accomplishment as the others, but the colors are fun, as is the inversion of the annoyingly perfect housewife trope):

I don’t know if that’s something that comes from Danger Mouse, though the video for Broken Bells’ “The Ghost Inside” derives a lot of its power from forcing us to watch Christina Hendricks dismantle her own body:

Obviously, much credit is due to the directors of all of these videos. But it’s still really impressive to see how hot Gnarls Barkley’s streak was there for a while.

This post contains spoilers through the third episode of the fourth season of Breaking Bad.

One of the things I’ve found interesting about Breaking Bad, and one reason I don’t always like the characters, though I think they’re realistic, is that I think some of the key players in the story aren’t very good at thinking things through.

Take Skylar and Walt this week. Walt is shocked and annoyed to find out that Gus has had security cameras installed in the lab, and then doubly irritated when Jesse is entirely matter-of-fact about the new development, telling Walt he always assumed the place was bugged. His nonchalance leaves Walt sputtering, “I don’t like it. Violation of the workspace,” even though it’s fairly logical that if you’re running a large criminal enterprise and the man you’ve hired to run it is very good at fabricating explosives and chemical poisons, and he’s discussed killing you with one of your other employees, you might want to keep an eye on him. Similarly, Skylar panics when Walt buys a $320 bottle of champagne to celebrate them wresting the car wash where Walt was once so humiliated away from its former owner, worrying that the splurge will reveal that they have an income source other than the one they’re supposed to have. “I’m not asking you to apologize. I’m asking you be smart,” she tells him. “I mean, look at Watergate.” But of course, the thing that’s going to look obvious and weird to their neighbors isn’t the $320 bottle of champagne: it’s the $800,000 small business, unless they can keep their ownership of it awfully quiet.

Similarly, Hank and Marie are tearing themselves apart over little things. Hank, it seems, can’t resist tearing Marie apart whenever she tries to do something considerate for him, ripping her for bringing him Fritos instead of Cheetos and complaining that the magazine she’s brought him on the football draft is useless, since it’s two months away. Then, when she’s caught shoplifting from houses on the market she’s cased by pretending to be someone, anyone else, a new divorcee with a pre-school aged son, a wife of a high-powered man on the verge of retirement, a woman with a brother in the Peace Corps, Hank wants to know why she’s doing this to him, unable to see or acknowledge how vicious he’s been to her, that maybe she’s doing this to herself, to have some control of her own pain.

Only Jesse seems to have a sense of what’s going on around him, and the extent to which he’s directly responsible for it. As his house party descends further and further into chaos, bloody scratches on a man’s back, insane paintings on the wall, twitchy rantings from the guests, Jesse’s running an uncontrolled experiment exploring how far you can create hell on earth. When he throws a stack of money in the air and sits down to smoke a cigarette and watch his guests degenerate further, there’s a real sense of moral reckoning. Jesse’s been incredibly quiet this season, doling out words like the have the value that money has clearly ceased to have for him. And I think that’s why I like him. Unlike Walt and Skylar who are trying to build a paradise in a madhouse so they don’t have to see it for what it is, Jesse knows their whole enterprise is insane. What form that reckoning takes, whether it’s Gus’s boxcutter, guns in the hands of children, someone like Tuco’s fists, or simply the inevitability of the law if Hank finds his way back to himself by catching Walt, the end is nigh.