A programming note: I’m finally on the list for movie screenings in the DC area, so expect more reviews. And feel free to treat these reviews both as guidance on whether or not to go see something, and as open threads for discussion over the weekend.

I went to see Colombiana, a movie about the CIA’s involvement in drug trafficking, the moral justifications for assassinating Bernie Madoff, and Zoe Saldana’s naughty bits, hoping for a slickly nasty little late-summer action movie in a year that’s been somewhat short on female heroines, and on gleeful darkness. There are bits and pieces of an entertaining film here, notably an interagency rivalry between the CIA and the FBI and a downturn revenge fantasy. But Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, who wrote the movie, and the delightfully named Olivier Megaton, who directed it, are probably right to trust that the sight of Saldana dancing braless in her apartment or setting off plastic explosives in her skivvies are selling points in and of themselves.

The movie begins with a reasonably promising, if somewhat overacted, premise. After watching her family murdered by a drug cartel, a young Cataleya (a promising Amanda Stenberg, who has a key role in the movie adaptation of The Hunger Games and is a welcome reminder that not only white little girls can get tough) gets herself to Chicago and into the home of her uncle Emilio. “I used to want to be Xena: Warrior Princess,” she tells him. “I want to be a killer. Will you help me?” “Sure,” he promises, rather jauntily. I was hoping we might be on the road to a non-white version of Big Daddy and Hit Girl’s relationship in Kick-Ass, a gleefully twisted but genuinely loving father-daughter training movie. But after buying her way into a private school and shooting up a passing car to illustrate why she should attend classes, the movie skips forward 15 years, denying us the privilege of seeing Cataleya learn her stuff, and into the much less creative pleasures of letting us see her deploy it as she goes after Don Luis, the man who had her family killed, and the people who worked for and with him.
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Commenter Carolyn tells me I should keep in mind that “Yes, their lifestyles can be mundane and shallow, but let’s not forget how it started. They left their lives in Queens, NY in order to help Vince become an actor in LA.”

I actually think the show would be a lot more interesting if it was a bit more directly about what it’s like to be not just upwardly mobile but explosively upwardly mobile. There are bits and pieces of their past in there: Vince saying he doesn’t need the toys he has but acknowledging that he likes them and would prefer not to live without them; the constant teasing about whether Eric’s community college experience is worth anything, particularly in comparison to Ari’s Ivy League education; the juxtaposition between Vince and Drama’s mother at home in Queens and her son calling from a radio studio in California to ask her to come to his premiere; Drama’s anxiety as he sees old colleagues working in catering, Party Down from a different perspective. But none of it’s exceptionally well-developed.

Ta-Nehisi wrote, about the main characters’ sexual conquests, that “It’s just that my fantasies don’t usually involve scooping the crumbs off the table from my better looking friends–or having a group of loser friends who would do the same with me. It’s really a buzzkill for the whole “hunter” aspect of male mythology. Indeed it replaces the ‘hunter,’ with the ‘moocher.’ If we’re talking about realism, and not fantasy, then I can get with that. But we aren’t, so I can’t.” But I feel like this is also true of the show’s depiction of upward mobility. Is it really that compelling to float along than to be demonstrably excellent, to have things come easy because you’re skillful not because you’re mooching? Maybe I’m a workaholic, and maybe this would be fun for a year, but it doesn’t seem like much of a fantasy for a life. It’s not as if the core characters escaped some sort of life of toil or crushing poverty. They might have been working-class, but it doesn’t seem like any of them every went dramatically without, and the characters are too young to have their present indolence be a reward for years of misery and debt. This isn’t retirement.

So it’s no mistake, now that I’m in the third season, that my favorite character is Lloyd, whose pep talk to Ari immediately after his boss’s epic defenestration is the single most meaningful thing in the entire show:

I’ve worked 18 hours a day to save up the money to put myself through Stanford Business School. While I was there, I cleaned the cafeteria during the hours I wasn’t studying and still graduated top of my class, only to take a job delivering mail to unappreciative overpaid little cocksuckers. And I finally get the big promotion that would allow me to answer your phones and be both racially and sexually harassed for the next nine months. But I know the end game. And you, Ari God, you are it. So stop your fucking whining…and figure out how you’re going to make both of our lives happen tomorrow.

Lloyd’s compromises are the most interesting thing in Entourage right now, his willingness to trade Ari’s insults based on the fact that he’s Asian and gay for apologies afterwards and the opportunity to continue to rise up in the world, to get to another kind of 18-hour days, and as far away from those cafeterias as possible. That scene hints at lost possibilities. Poor gay Asian guys deserve their fantasies, their dreams of glory, just as much as straight, white, and profligate ones do.

I was sorry that Diane Keaton’s show Tilda, in which she was set to play a Nikki Finke-like blogger terrorizing Hollywood, never went forward at HBO, and now that I’m watching Entourage, I’m even more sorry that we’re not getting an insider-y looking entertainment industry story from a woman’s perspective.

But I regret even more that this show, written by Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s Marti Noxon, where Keaton was supposed to play “an old-guard feminist leader who tries to give new spark to the cause by starting a sexually frank women’s magazine,” never happened. It would have been the most explicitly feminist show since Maude, right? And even more so since it’s about doing the work of feminism, not simply living by and advocating its tenets. It’s one thing to air a documentary about Gloria Steinem and her role in the second-wave feminist movement and to treat it like history, and another to do a show that acknowledges that the work of that movement is far from finished, and that dives straight into the challenges of the transition from the second wave to the third wave.

I’m not remotely shocked that this show didn’t happen. But I am sort of depressed by the fact that it counts as a good thing that HBO actually considered it.

Spencer Ackerman, in the world’s most generous takedown of my review of A Dance With Dragons (warning, copious spoilers to follow), argues that I’m wrong to see Jon Snow as a visionary for redefining the realms of men by letting the wildlings settle in the Gift, and trying to save the Night’s Watch by bringing them, men and women alike, into his brotherhood. I’m going to return the complement by saying I think Spencer may actually have a more optimistic vision of George R.R. Martin’s project than I do. He writes:

But there’s a lesson in the stabbing of Jon Snow. (No one really thinks he’s dead, right?) The Realm, like the world, is made of institutions. If you wish to change the realm, you have to engage in the painful, arduous task of building legitimacy through these recognized institutions so that your changes don’t inspire the backlash that undoes them all. One of the strengths of George R.R. Martin is that he’s brutally consistent here. The same hubris that runs through Cersei when she cynically reconstitutes a group of religious warriors runs through Jon and Dany when they admirably attempt to focus on the White Walkers or banish slavery from Meereen. As a wise woman once exclaimed in a different story, “It’s Baltimore, Cedric!”

My understanding of much of A Song of Fire and Ice is as an inquiry into how you tell when institutions are so rotten that they need a radical regutting or replacement, and how to carry out that process. I do agree with Spencer that Martin’s consistent in this regard. Cersei’s reinstatement of the Warrior’s Sons is an error and an act of hubris that eventually turns against her because she’s foisting reform on an institution that is self-governing effectively, and doesn’t need external alteration. Similarly, Dany’s quest against slavery may be moral, but she disrupts institutions that however brutal they were, worked effectively from a pragmatic perspective, and were the lynchpin of a continent’s economy. Dany is a practical and a moral failure. She totally misunderstands the institutions she’s attacking and fails to replace them with viable alternatives, guaranteeing upheaval because she’s wrecked trade in the region. And her failure to rebuild those brace struts of society means she’s failed to provide the basis of a state that can exist without slavery or any moral investment in a vision of that world.

I think that Jon, by contrast, is dealing with an organization that’s wholly shattered. The Night’s Watch doesn’t have enough people to serve its function, and its mechanisms to bring more into it no longer function to bring either the numbers or quality in that the organization needs. The internal discipline and obedience to the hierarchies of the Watch are totally broken after Jorah Mormont’s murder, which would be the equivalent of fragging a general in deployed in Afghanistan. That the Watch manages to hold an election might be a sign that it has some respect for its own rituals left, though Sam only manages to force a resolution through trickery—he tries to build legitimacy through recognized processes and institutions, and his efforts help break the organization he’s trying to preserve. If the Watch was meant to be a neutral force that stood between the wildlings and the Realm, prioritizing the interests of the Realm, that relationship has become polarized in the face of a greater threat. A gradualist, reformist approach to rebuilding the Watch to serve its original purpose would be suicidal. I think Spencer is right about the process President Obama took to accustom the American military to the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, but I’m curious if thinks the existence of that policy means the American military was as shattered, illegitimate, and underresourced as the Night’s Watch appears to be.

So far Martin hasn’t given us a definitive answer for how we know if an institution has failed, and what we do if it has. The implication is that you need dragons and dreams to scorch a realm clean. But we haven’t yet seen proof of that, and we have no certainty that this story has a happy ending.

The post contains spoilers for Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. Voting for the next book club will begin on Monday.

I don’t think it comes as a surprise to anyone who’s read along with this book club so far that I don’t think this is a terribly successful novel. Gaiman tells far more frequently than he shows, doesn’t do nearly as much as he could with an utterly fascinating concept, and relies heavily on a twist ending that, while obvious, still leaches some of the pleasure from the journey and absolves him of actually having to resolve the conflict that he’s set up, because surprise, it doesn’t matter! That said, I think some of the best things in the novel happen in these final sections.

First, is the idea we’ve been waiting for all along: gods don’t survive well in America because America is itself a deity, and the rise of fall of gods in America is itself a sacrifice to the land that Whiskey Jack explains to Shadow after his vigil for Mr. Wednesday and his trip through the underworld, which as trips through the underworld go is a real snoozefest. That stuff should wrench, man. As Jack puts it:

I’m a culture hero. We do the same shit gods do we just screw up more and nobody worships us. They tell stories about us, but they tell the ones that make us look bad along with the ones where we came out fairly okay…This is not a good country for gods. My people figured that out early on. There are creator spirits who found the arth or made it or shit it out, but you think about it: who’s going to worship Coyote? He made love to Porcupine Woman and got his dick shot through with more needles than a pincushion. He’d argue with rocks and the rocks would win. So yeah, my people figured that maybe there’s something at the back of it all, a creator, a great spirit, and so we say thank you to it, because it’s always good to say thank you. But we never built churches. We didn’t need to. The land was the church. The land was the religion. The land was older and wiser than the people who walked on it.

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The bridge is yours.

-Oh, hey, adding ladies to groups might do more than give dudes cooties.

-Equal marriage rights come to The Elder Scrolls.

-The people behind Friday Night Lights are giving us a lady-centric Western. I demand the return of Calamity Jane.

-Adam muses on A Dance With Dragons and institutions, about which more to come this afternoon.

-Yup, Johnny Depp is still Hunter S. Thompson:

This post contains spoilers through the Aug. 25 episode of Louie, but read it anyway. I want to talk to you guys about this.

Let it be said, before I get into any of the substance of this episode, that if the high point of this extraordinary season of Louie is seeing Louis C.K. find a baby duck in his luggage in a war zone, then I will be satisfied. It’s the kind of thing that I should have seen coming from the moment Jane’s teacher presented him with a ventilated cardboard box, but I was still surprised, and got an incredible amount of pure pleasure from it. Louie doesn’t operate in the key of joy very often, but one of the profoundly exciting things about this season is seeing C.K. pick new challenges and tonal modes for himself, in this case, cornpone American patriotism, and proving he can absolutely nail it.

I realized as Louis launched into his first routine that I was tense about how the audience of servicemen was going to respond. It made me realize I tend to think of both the comedian and the show as the property of a certain narrow cultural perspective, which is to a certain extent the truth. Those of us who are critics and fans recognize that something extraordinary is happening here, but not that many people watch this show, between 725,000 and a million on any given week. So I was anxious about how the routine would play outside what I think of C.K.’s target audience. And of course the episode was set up precisely to mess with those expectations.

Louis’ mournful routine is a hit, cracking up young soldiers with his lament that “I work out to keep this. That’s the best that I can hope for. I’ll always have this belly…Women get to be elegant during sex. They get to lie back with their hair arranged on the pillow…They get to go for a ride…We have to be disgusting.”

And then in the mess hall, he achieves a breakthrough with the cheerleader he was making awkward smalltalk with earlier, in exchanges like “We’re not allowed to date football players.” “Do you ever do it anyway?” She’s annoyed by his routine, wanting to know “Why can’t you say Christian things and be funny?” Louis’ mystified, in a way that’s a stand-in for our skepticism, when he gets the inspiration to show her the duck, explaining that “my daughter put it in my bag. She said to keep me safe. It’s not going to help against an RPG, but it’s a pretty badass duckling.”

But he’s been through this territory before, most notably in the episode where he spends time with an abstinence advocate, and he was clearly revisiting it to set us up for something bigger. And that moment comes when the genre of the episode switches again as the chopper stars wobbling and has to land, only to have a bunch of armed Afghans showed up, the servicemembers on the chopper to react by tensely ordering them to disarm, and it looks like the situation could turn bad. But then the duck gets loose, and Louis saves the situation with the simplest, most universal humor: the pratfall. And miraculously, this awkward, middle-aged white guy, burning under Afghanistan’s sun, and terrified that he’s going to become the first USO performer to die on the job has united American soldiers, a country singer, a crew of cheerleaders, and a bunch of rural Afghans.

In recent years, comedy’s often been a signifier of subcultural difference. Dane Cook represents bros, Jeff Dunham has middle America, Dave Chapelle was a signifier for white audiences who wanted to show off their racial sophistication. But increasingly this year, Louie feels like a conversation with audiences about our assumptions and their limitations that’s among the most politically and emotionally sophisticated things I’ve ever seen. There are no victims here for our benefits, and no easy outs for us that will let us leave with our assumptions intact. Louis C.K.’s humor is operating at a level where he can redeem Dane Cook, make us appreciate abstinence experts, and where he can make us laugh at the same things as people we’re fighting a war against. Someone in Hollywood should give him a movie deal. And the State Department might want to sign him up as a cultural diplomat. What’s happening in this show isn’t just important because it’s artistically astonishing. It’s meaningful, to me at least, beyond metaphor and allusion.

This Hollywood Reporter story about the abuses of the reality television industry in the wake of Russell Armstrong’s suicide does a really useful job of laying out the ways in which networks treat participants in this kind of programming badly, whether they’re dramatically underpaying them; showcasing their pathologies and mental illnesses without providing follow-up treatment beyond the duration; or encouraging them to showcase increasingly baroque and vulnerable parts of their lives without concern for whether participants truly understand what they’re consenting to. But one thing the piece doesn’t engage with at all is the question of whether there’s any remedy for this kind of behavior that doesn’t rely on the compassion and decency of studios, which is not likely to be forthcoming.

I did a little digging, and it’s not clear that reality show participants are entitled to receive even a minimum wage, which seems kind of astonishing. That and compliance with overtime rules really do seem like they should be mandatory. The shows will still be cheap, even if they’re somewhat less cost-effective. We might not be able to stop people from selling their experiences, or from valuing their own lives at the immediate prize of zero, but we should still set a minimum value on them by asserting that appearing on reality television is work and should be treated as such.

This post contains spoilers through the Aug. 25 episode of Burn Notice.

One of the things I find most interesting about a season of Burn Notice in which my interest is fading is the role of Madeline, his mother, in Michael’s life and in his operations. Particularly after he and Jesse get her involved in an operation where they dramatically underestimate the intensity of the crime being planned and the willingness of the people committing it to employ fairly extreme violence.

Maybe my favorite episode was the one, earlier this summer, in which Michael enlists her in an operation where she has to pretend to be a nurse treating a Yakuza agent Michael’s captured. As the situation escalates, Michael and Madeline act out the abusive dynamic between Madeline and Michael’s father. She’s both necessary to the operation, and the operation provides a setting where she and Michael can work out some deeper-seated psychological issues. It was a nice little bidirectional bit of plotting.

It’s interesting that an older woman without preexisting criminal tendencies would not only turn a blind eye to the activities of her son and his associates, but actively enlist in them for things like simple photographic surveillance, when it could risk her spending her retirement years in prison. Certainly Michael, for all of his extralegal activities, is the more functional of her two sons, and it makes sense that she would want to be close to Michael, even to understand better the son who left her at 17 by involving herself in his work. In this case, it seems like she might have taken an assignment from Jesse, her surrogate son, because it makes her feel valued by someone other than her preoccupied boy. And there’s no denying that by comforting hostages or duping criminals, she gets a kind of power and influence that would be otherwise unavailable to women in her life situation.

But it can be risky to have her there, as when she blows his cover trying to convince the hostages that Michael is credible and has a plan for their escape so they shouldn’t surrender. At some point, he’s going to get her in enough danger that he will have to make a choice and compromise an operation, or one of his other cohorts — or the show risks getting incredibly boring. Right now, Fiona can outrun cops chasing a guy under house arrest. Jesse can walk into a federal facility and impersonate an FBI official. Even vicious criminals never pull the trigger before getting taken out themselves. Burn Notice‘s lawless Miami-Dade County is increasingly uncomplicated, and as a result, uninteresting. It’s time for the characters to face some real costs, and I don’t mean murdered semi-anonymous CIA contacts.