So, it looks like in their ongoing quest to shut down The Playboy Club, the Parents Television Council may have overstated the number of advertisers who are pulling out of NBC’s period drama. Kraft and P.F. Chang’s confirmed to AdWeek that they haven’t dropped their advertising contracts with the show — instead, they just had episodic ad buys. I still think the chances of the show vanishing from airwaves soon are relatively high — the already low ratings dropped by a million for the second episode. But I don’t really think it’ll be over morality concerns. The show isn’t actually sexy enough to ruffle feathers.

They fill out this survey that DC Comics has asked Nielsen to do for them about whether or not the New 52 has fulfilled its mission. As one retailer the Mary Sue quotes says, “As they made clear from the beginning, their goal was to expand the market by appealing to new/lapsed readers. They believe this has happened, but now they’d like feedback from the fanbase and comic shop retailers about where to go next.” Our discussions here have been awesome, and enlightening for me. You should share them with DC, as a reminder of what they say about making assumptions.

Via io9, Forbes has an interesting piece about David Maisel, the former Marvel executive who helped engineer the DNA that animates the current crop of superhero movies, and his turn to video game movies, asking if he can mainstream them in the same way.

I hope this is the case. I’m continuing to play my very pokey way through Portal, but given how low my skill level is and how long it’s taking me, it’s going to be ages before I’m remotely ready to play something like World of Warcraft or Halo in a way that would actually allow me to enjoy it and get something out of it. But I’m incredibly interested in the mythologies of those worlds, Halo in particular, to the extent that I’ve actually considered buying some of the novels set in that universe (if anyone’s read them, give a holler and let me know if they’re good). And I’d love an alternate path into them. Because I mean, seriously: theocratic aliens? A souped-up United Nations? A futuristic Africa? This stuff is so right up my alley it hurts.

I understand there are a lot of challenges to making these good movies. There are big complex continuities that have to be dealt with, high special effects costs that will have to be made back by bigger sales at lower prices. But it would be nice for folks to figure out video game movies, and for some day, for the funding for a Neill Blomkamp Halo movie to hold together. Big mythologies that start in books, like Harry Potter, generally end up in game space sooner or later, even if it’s only to give players the option to explore the world rather than to extend the core narrative. I’d love to see that dynamic work in the opposite direction, too. These are big, powerful stories if they’re leaching into the collective imagination of even those of us who are terrible at video games.

It would be delightful to dismiss Frank Miller’s dreadful new graphic novel, Holy Terror, as a simple but significant misfire by a once-talented artist. But the viciously Islamophobic sentiments and sexualization of torture that permeate the book aren’t fringe beliefs that we can ignore because they have no chance of taking hold. Instead, variants of these sentiments have guided American foreign policy and domestic sentiments in disastrous directions and fuel a wide-ranging industry.

To be clear, even without its noxious politics, Holy Terror wouldn’t be a good book. Much of the story takes place on a rainy night, and the cross-hatching meant to indicate the storm adds a muddy quality to the images. The images of bodies may not reach Rob Liefeld levels of offensiveness, but only because they lack any of the specificity to be distinct, much less disgustingly sexist, though an early image of our purported heroine Natalie’s rear end is about as specific as things get. When she and the Fixer, ostensibly her enemy, her occasional lover, and in the course of the book, her soulmate, have sex on a roof, they’re an indistinct black mass. The story operates on a level of assertion rather than demonstration. For a story about a terrorist attack, it’s deeply dull.

When it’s not downright disgusting. Miller’s clearly working from a framework that assumes that on September 11, everything changes. Our Natalie, a sneak thief, finds the experience of getting a nail through the leg from a bomb packed with them clarifying:

They knew where to hit us. They knew exactly where to hit us. All my life, there’s been something wrong. Something missing. A sense that everything I’m seeing around me isn’t entirely true. That this seemingly orderly world of laws and logic and reason is nothing but a shroud, a chimera. A mask. But every once in a long while, the mask falls away. Every once in a long while, the whole world makes perfect sense. The world reveals itself. I am at peace. And at war.

Read more

For the second time this year, Russia drew unwanted worldwide scrutiny recently when Brazilian soccer player Roberto Carlos had a banana thrown at him by fans during a league match, prompting the superstar defender to walk off the field in tears. Carlos even said he considered retiring rather than continue to deal with such racist taunts, which have proven to be anything but isolated incidents in Russia.

Though stories of racism in sports are depressingly common, the episodes in Russia bear particular importance because they were selected to host the 2018 World Cup. Similarly, the 2022 World Cup was handed to Qatar, a country whose treatment of women and gays have left many uncomfortable.

Which leads us to the question: should we be awarding the World Cup to countries with less-than-stellar records on women’s and minority rights?
Read more

The bridge is yours.

-George Harrison’s son looks a lot like him.

-We’re getting a futuristic Jungle Book because why not?

-Podcasts are saving comedy.

-Kurtzman and Orci go socially conscious.

-Still trying to decide how I feel about Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close:

The awesome Feminist Frequency presents the latest in their Tropes vs. Women series, a look at Straw Feminists in popular culture, characters whose feminism is presented as so extreme or irrational that their presentation discredits feminists and feminism:

Getting so upset over a name feels silly sometimes, but if you can get people to reject membership in a group, you’re a step closer to getting them to not make more substantive gestures of membership, like, say, donating time and money to Planned Parenthood. Of course, it doesn’t help that awesome feminist creators may put strong women on screen, or situations that explore the systematic oppression of women, but neglect to (or carefully avoid to) name feminism for what it is. Correct me if I’m wrong, but does anyone ever explicitly label themselves a feminist or call sexism by its name in Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Though I will say, hearing Anya, talking through her wedding vows, declare that “I, Anya, promise to… love you, to cherish you, to honor you, but not to obey you, of course, because that’s anachronistic and misogynistic and who do you think you are, like a sea captain or something?” is awesome.

Gavin Polone has a great, but I think, incomplete piece up in Vulture on network (and to a certain extent cable) television’s absolute aversion to the use of the word “fuck,” especially given everything else they allow:

Whom are we protecting by not allowing fuck on broadcast and basic cable TV? I love the word fuck. Words with hard consonants are so much superior to other words. And what does fuck mean, anyway? Sometimes it is a synonym for darn; sometimes it is used in a phrase like “fuck you” (and I don’t really even know what that means, I just know it’s aggressive and useful when driving in Los Angeles); and sometimes it’s used as a verb to mean copulating. But even in that last context, it is far less evocative of a visual image than what I had heard on 2 Broke Girls or the nation’s favorite comedy, Two and a Half Men.

It’s always been fascinating to me that “fuck” is verboten while “bitch” isn’t just permitted, it’s used with gusto. Unlike “fuck,” which as Polone points out, can be used in a variety of contexts, and with a variety of intentions, “bitch” has essentially no uses except to degrade people. If a woman is powerful, if she’s mean to someone, if she doesn’t want to have sex with you or the character who is standing in for you, if a woman is in any way non-compliant, she’s not just a bad person, she’s a stupid animal. If a man is weak, or grating, or obstructionist, or available to be dominated, it’s not just that he’s a bad person. It’s that he gets demoted a gender level, and then a species level. “Bitch” is a far more hostile term than “fuck.” The fact that the former’s permitted while the latter’s banned says a mouthful.

The character descriptions for Gavin Hood’s adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s sci-fi classic Ender’s Game are out, and while some of them sound a little emotionally simplistic, they also sound generally true to the book, which is promising.

And they also made me realize that all I want for Christmas* is for Abigail Breslin or Chloe Moretz to play Valentine Wiggin. One of the things that’s been most exciting for me about the past couple of years is realizing what a wonderful, strong group of young actresses we have coming up in the wings. Breslin has grown from an odd little girl in Little Miss Sunshine to a warm, funny young person in movies like Definitely, Maybe and No Reservations. Chloe Moretz is rawer — despite the fact that she’s a year younger than Breslin, she’s taken on slightly older-themed roles like Hit Girl in Kick-Ass and the vampire in Let Me In. And Saoirse Ronan’s proved that she can do both the action thing with Hanna and a more delicate kind of girlhood in The Lovely Bones, which I think was flawed but very interesting and sometimes moving. And they’ve all coming up playing well-developed and defined characters, while also avoiding kiddie romance stuff. All of them, but particularly the first two who I think are a bit more age appropriate, would be wonderful at playing a fiercely concentrated and multi-dimensional young blogger, Tavi with a genius for research and geopolitics rather than fashion and girl culture.

On the other hand, I have no real idea about who should play Ender. Maybe it’s just that the girls have gotten more attention or, in what would be a shocking turn of events, there have been a spate of better roles for women than for men. But it seems like there’s a bit of a gender gap for talent in the mid-teen years. And as much as I love me some Valentine (and would love a stand-alone movie about a light-speed traveling activist historian), a great Ender will be key to making this movie work. A great Peter, too.

*We’ll talk my birthday separately.