This post contains spoilers through the October 30 episode of Boardwalk Empire.

Boardwalk Empire may still have a lot of elaborately bloody maneuvering over control of the liquor trade, but it’s become about larger themes of guilt, innocence, and responsibility. And tonight, those pressures culminated in two confessions, one voluntary and complete if unclear, one coerced and honest, but incomplete. The state of Margaret and Nelson’s souls, and the pressures put on the United States Attorney General, make Nucky’s problems out as the minor distractions that they are.

Nelson’s confession to Rose is prompted by two events. First, there’s the unnerving sense that he’s settled into something like domestic tranquility with Lucy. When she whines that she can’t get comfortable, saying “I’m sorry, Daddy. It’s just…I want to be done with this,” Nelson may chide her first, reminding her of his colleague who remains horribly burned in hospital, but he says he’ll get her the lemons that are feeding her craving anyway. Then, when he visits said colleague (telling another agent that he’s alive because “He loves the lord, sir,” only to have that man remark that “It seems a pretty one-sided relationship.”) Van Alden said he thinks the man is accusing him from his hospital bed and calls Rose in a panic, saying he’s not worthy of her or his badge.
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By Kate Linnea Welsh

The Good Wife takes on issues of diplomatic immunity as two college-age sons of diplomats – one Dutch, one Taiwanese – are accused of raping and murdering a young woman at a stoplight party on a booze cruise. (Quick term definition for those as old and out-of-touch as I am: on the booze cruise, passengers paid $50 for unlimited beer, and the “stoplight party” means that passengers choose cup colors based on their relationship status: red means “in a relationship,” yellow means “choosy,” and green means “open.”) Diplomatic immunity is often portrayed as something all-encompassing and very cut-and-dry, but Cary, in his zeal to prosecute, manages to find a variety of loopholes. He surprises everyone by taking the young men into custody, arguing that he’s allowed to investigate the crime, just not to prosecute them. Presumably the technicality here is that if they were cleared, Cary would know to look for other suspects, but he never seriously looks at anyone else. Once he’s forced to let the Dutch suspect go, he points out that he can prosecute the other suspect because Taiwan is the one country that doesn’t enjoy diplomatic immunity, because of the One-China policy. As happens so often on this show, what first appears to be a philosophical question ends up being decided based on who has more influence and connections: Eli first uses his ex-wife’s connections at the State Department to have them push for dismissal, but then one of Cary’s colleagues uses her own family connections to have this position reversed. And Cary finally discovers that the Dutch suspect is no longer a full-time student, so he doesn’t actually have immunity through his father in the first place.

The cases of the week are becoming still less central on the show, though, and this week, we don’t even see the final courtroom showdown – Cary just mentions in a throwaway line that he won. Instead, the cases are designed to illuminate things about the characters and their relationships, and one of the focuses this week was on jockeying for position, especially among the newer attorneys at both the State’s Attorney’s office and at Lockhart/Gardner. Cary thinks his supervisor is out to get him – but at the end of the episode he instead gets a promotion from Peter. Meanwhile, Alicia is dealing with Caitlin, the new associate she was forced to hire last week. Caitlin is pretty naive, and doesn’t know what she’s doing, but Alicia seems to like her more than expected. Caitlin also seems to be flirting with Will – or maybe she’s acting as a spy for her uncle? Either way, Alicia is a bit territorial, but she shouldn’t worry, because Will’s not biting. And when Caitlin blithely comments that everyone at Lockhart/Gardner is just so nice, Will deadpans: “Yeah. Lawyers. Nicest people in the world.”
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Ta-Nehisi, Adam Serwer, and Jamelle Bouie have been having an interesting conversation about Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino’s slavery revenge flick, and whether, if we need revenge, what sort of form it ought to take.

Adam looks at the rise of Jewish revenge flicks and searches for a parallel:

In Jeffrey Goldberg’s review of Inglorious Basterds, he writes about dreaming about killin’ NAZees as a kid, delighting in Quentin Tarantino’s “story of emotionally uncomplicated, physically threatening, non-morally-anguished Jews dealing out spaghetti-Western justice to their would-be exterminators.” His initial anecdote helps explain that Inglorious Basterds is not primarily a film about killing Adolf Hitler, although that’s the form that catharsis takes. The true “revenge” of Inglorious Basterds is in the banishment of a particular stereotype, the idea of the weak, fearful Jew who goes helplessly into the ovens. The film Defiance, about a group of Jewish partisans in a forest in Belarus during World War II, has a similar aim—in the woods, the manly, unintellectual Jews played be Liev Schriber and Daniel Craig suddenly become leadership material, while the nebbish former academics are portrayed as contemptuous weaklings. And I suppose what has always bugged me about both of those films is that somewhere deep inside they see Jews the way anti-Semites see Jews, and are actively working to convince not just the world but themselves otherwise.

And Jamelle riffs on a secondary point Adam makes about the extent to which Django Unchained would serve a similar purpose:

The problem with Django Unchained is that African Americans have never had a problem with being portrayed as aggressive and prone to violence. Indeed, that’s the stereotype we’ve worked to reject. As Adam notes, “[A] film in which a slave kills his masters may vicariously avenge a historical injustice, but it lacks the catharsis of defying the accepted narrative that narrowly limits what being black is supposed to mean.” In his eyes, a real black revenge story isn’t Django Unchained, it’s The Cosby Show.

I don’t disagree! But I think Adam is a little too neat in dismissing the value of a film like Django Unchained could have in subverting other expectations. The thing about Nazis is that they’re the usual sortof villains – few people sympathize with them, and even fewer people see their legacy as something worthwhile. No one likes them, and so it’s easy to kill them en masse. The same isn’t true of antebellum and Civil War-era America. With few exceptions, Confederates are glorified in Hollywood – either as the honorable losers of a war, or as vengence-seeking crusaders. It’s a variation on the Lost Cause mythology – slavery plays only a bit part in most popular depictions of the Confederacy, and Confederates are almost always portrayed as tragic figures.

Relatedly, I’m curious how the movie’s going to handle gender and relationships between men and women, because one of the acts that inspires Django’s revenge is the brutal rape of his wife, played by Kerry Washington, who’s then turned over to an owner who may be even worse. It seems like there’s been a spike in really strange and disturbing commentary about black men, black women, and marriage recently, and it’s hard to imagine that, intentional or not, this movie won’t play into that conversation. It is, after all, about a black man who aggressively defends a black woman — and we won’t know until the movie’s under production whether that woman gets to aid in her own defense or not — standing up for the sanctity of a marriage that wouldn’t have been recognized by law or custom.

I’m obviously not on board with the idea that marriage is for white people, or that black men are either pathetic or pathological. And I have no idea if Django Unchained will be liberating or exploitative. But if nothing else, I suppose it’ll be something different in an industry that creates very few roles for black actors and very few stories about black families and often sticks to a few very circumscribed narrative arcs.

This post contains spoilers through the Oct. 30 episode of The Walking Dead.

I have to admit that I’m getting sort of exhausted by The Walking Dead, especially now that the cast is settled in and around the farm. Every week, people have debates about whether life is worth living in a zombie-infested wasteland. Every week, shambling hordes provide a gross-out moment that our heroes, such as they are, escape only by the skin of their teeth. If the show is going to provide an actual conflicting worldview, there should be miraculous things that happen, moments like the deer that aren’t interrupted by disasters like Carl getting shot. There needs to be an argument that the world is, if not better, different in ways that justify continuing on, argue for it, show that it’s possible to build new things, and new ways of interacting.

Otherwise, Lori’s nihilism, her sense that “Maybe this isn’t a world for children anymore…maybe this is how it’s supposed to be,” seems pretty convincing. There’s something sickening about Rick’s optimism in general, his insistence in the absence of any evidence that “It isn’t all death out there. It can’t be. We just have to be strong enough after everything we’ve seen to still believe that…He talked about the deer, Lori. He talked about the deer.” There’s a fine line between having the sensibility to see beauty in horror and being deeply in denial. And when it comes to Shane in particular, Rick’s denial is glaring. “What you said before, you’re right. Shane will make it back with what the doctor needs,” Rick tells everyone at the beginning of the episode.

But he doesn’t see the price of that return, the man Shane has to kill to distract the zombies that would otherwise kill them both, the bloody patches on his scalp and shoulder, the torture of Lori refusing to let him go. Is Rick’s extreme goodness a luxury that the others have to make up for? Or is he the only thing keeping them elevated above the beastliness everyone else fears they’ll descend into?

I think Maureen Ryan is exactly right on why it’s so disappointing that FX has decided to pick up Charlie Sheen’s new show, an adaptation of the movie franchise Anger Management, even in a world where we expect Hollywood to be ruthlessly pragmatic:

Let me be clear: I agree with critic James Poniewozik, who wrote that it’s not necessarily Hollywood’s job to punish Charlie Sheen for his actions and his past. But I do find it disheartening to be reminded of the double standard that still exists when it comes to rule-breaking public figures who get in trouble with the law: If they’re men, they’re usually seen as dangerous, edgy bad boys; if they’re women, they’re usually derided as awful human beings who deserve all the calumny thrown at them.

Charlie Sheen’s history of violence against women has been consistently ignored or waved away like it’s no big deal, and he has been continually rewarded for attitudes and actions that depress the hell out of many people out here in the real world. A significant percentage of the public does not find his actions humorous but loathsome and creepy.

I’d add that part of what makes this worse is the show itself, a hackneyed premise that will find a way to turn Sheen’s monstrous, and endemic, behavior into part of the joke. FX has been particularly good at fielding tough, lacerating shows about masculinity, from Louie‘s examinations of Louis C.K.’s own patheticness and vulnerabilities; to Tommy Gavin’s alcoholism, post-traumatic stress, and difficult relationships with women on Rescue Me; Raylan Givens’ time-lapsed cowboy act in Justified; Vic Mackey’s brutality in The Shield; the nutty sports fans of The League who use fantasy football to work out their unresolved issues; and the bar gang from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia who are nothing but unresolved issues. In this context, salivating after Sheen seems particularly hackish, pathetic, middle-brow. FX may revel in male dysfunction, but it recognizes it for what it is.

The bridge is yours.

-If you’re in Washington today, go get a cupcake from Kerry Washington and support Americans for the Arts!

-Conservatives and progressives agree: Homeland is awesome. What we may not agree on: the reasons why.

-Going on vacation in fictional places.

-Using anti-gay slurs at convention presentations: probably not good for business!

-Happy Halloween! I’m giving trick-or-treaters these deleted scenes from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows:

Some commenters felt like I came down a little hard on, or unsympathetic to, men who have a genuine desire to learn to interact more productively with women in last Wednesday’s post on romantic comedy scenarios where women play Virgil to men who are clueless about or resentful of the norms of dating. As a nerd in recovery, and as someone who’s invested in the idea that men need to be full participants in feminism, I certainly don’t want to suggest that guys shouldn’t try to do better and that women shouldn’t play a role in that. But what I object to is a sort of Platonic Manic Pixie Dream Girl ideal where a woman (or Will Smith in the case of Hitch) descends from the heavens to demystify the impenetrable realm of women to dudes who have been unfairly denied their due — and it’s part of larger problems I have with these sorts of stories.

This is true of romantic comedies with both male and female protagonists: they tend to be about the relationships that are the end results of a tremendous amount of hard work and romantic failures. They romanticize the ultimate result of that work rather than the work itself, and no matter how much we’re told that a character dates people who are bad for them or to them, they obscure the process—and the fact that it often takes a lot of repetitions of the same mistake to learn what the mistake is. As my friend J.P. writes:

Look, the training montage may work for Rocky, but it really doesn’t work for emotional development — which is what we’re really talking about when we’re looking at how someone becomes prepared to have an adult, mature relationship…

Not many recent movies capture this well and when it’s captured, it’s boring. High Fidelity is one of the few films that gets it. But it also gets boring an hour in, because you’re tired of watching the protagonist make the same mistake over and over. EXCEPT THAT’S THE POINT.

When Cusack’s character is making yet another mix tape for yet another love interest, he finally throws down his headphones and essentially cries out, “When is this gonna stop?!” This follows an entire film dedicated to cataloging the outcomes of failed relationships, and what made them such disasters. Cusack’s character realizes that there’s one factor that persists in his relationships: His own failure to grow up and settle down. He was pursuing people who weren’t interested in what he was interested in. He was always halfway out the door.

I actually think that High Fidelity is more entertaining than that in part because it’s about archaeology: if we were just watching Rob make the same mistakes repeatedly, it would be genuinely miserable, but instead, each encounter moves him forward. It may not be the world’s most rapid progress, but it’s there. And at the end, after he’s learned everything, we see Rob about to make the same mistake again after reuniting with his girlfriend. When that happens, there are real stakes because we know his history, and we know what messing up this relationship before cost him and cost Laura — it’s a late and subtle climax, but a deeply felt one, and it’s a profound relief when he chooses correctly.

Similarly, When Harry Met Sally takes the long arc perspective: when the two characters meet, they’re not really fit to be with anybody. And over time, they grow into their capacity for relationships and into each other. But the message of the movie is that it’s work to get there, and involves mistakes, and the risk that you’ll hurt each other badly along the way. This might be even scarier than the idea that you have do a lot of work before you get good at dating and then before those skills help you find someone: the prospect that even when you find that person, you can blow it up and do each other harm.

So in the end, I suppose I object to the idea of a Girl Guide as part of a large distaste for the idea of romantic miracle cures. Whether it’s the idea of the right person, the right tactic (something that’s expertly deconstructed by Harris O’Malley of Dr. Nerdlove), or the right advice-giver, there’s something dangerous and delusional about the idea that love isn’t constant effort. That doesn’t mean that a lot of that effort isn’t sexy, romantic, and emotionally rewarding, but it’s still work. Even if you find someone will love you for who you are, that kind of love may not happen instantly — most of us tell stories about ourselves that evolve over time, becoming deeper, richer, and more vulnerable. And it doesn’t mean that you’ll never fight with the person who loves you, that you won’t continue to grow, and change, and maybe even compromise.

I wanted to like Grimm, because I’m a total sucker for fractured fairy tales. And there are some good things in the show, most notably a Big Bad Wolf who’s cranky over the historic misrepresentation of his people, and who seems likely to end up guiding our somewhat bland hero through his new calling. But one thing that really bothered me was the show’s apparently fantastical approach to the basics of police work: Nick spends a lot of time crashing in places without warrants and setting up surveillance on folks without approval.

It’s good to have that part of the job depicted accurately on television both because it’s a good thing that they exist in the real world, and because they make for more compelling storytelling. We don’t live in a Minority Report kind of world — if Nick just keeps storming into suspected child kidnappers’ houses, at some point he’s going to violate the rights of someone innocent and supernatural who will be totally within their rights to be thermonuclearly angry with him. And more importantly, it would be interesting to see Nick try to get warrants based on information he’s getting from supernatural sources a la Beka Cooper, trying to reconcile magic and the rationality of police work. If the show isn’t going to play with that tension at all, why not just make him a private investigator? Creating concepts like cops who can see magic are interesting when they let us play with tropes and our ideas about the real world, not when they let us abandon our sense of the rules entirely.

This post contains spoilers through the Oct. 30 episode of Homeland.

Homeland is thick with complex relationships we’re encountering long after they initially began, from Brody’s friendship with Mike; to David and Carrie’s professional relationship, affair, and present uneasy collegiality; to Carrie’s relationship with Saul. The network’s so complex that the show could be forgiven for some duplication for the sake of emotional signaling — implying affairs between both Carrie and David and Carrie and Saul, for example, which would establish that Carrie has a pattern. But it’s a mark of the great show Homeland is becoming that it doesn’t take those shortcuts, and that all the backstories have a rich specificity. And tonight’s episode explored two relationships in the same mold: the father and daughter relationship between Carrie and the man who gave her life and Carrie and the man who gave her a professional identity.

Having seen Carrie with her sister, it’s nice to see her with her father — especially because it seems that the mental illness that stalks her might be hereditary. “Sometimes you feel like you’re spinning out of control when they bring you up instead of down,” Carrie tells her father, explaining that she understands the impact that his medication has on him. Much as her sister keeps Carrie coming back with the promise of more pills, her father, it seems, keeps their tie with food, making her a sandwich, wrapping it up to go in a show of understanding, and when she has to go, telling her, “Drive safe. And fuck the CIA,” with his daughter joining in a chorus on the second sentence.

She’s not as fortunate with Saul, who shuts her down again when after David lets Brody visit his former captor (Brody tells him “I need to be physically and mentally ready to honor my duties as a Marine and as a man. But first I have to close the book on this chapter of my life.), Hamid commits suicide with a razor shard Carrie doesn’t believe he could have hidden on himself previously. When she comes to see him at home, complaining that “I’m over your whole detached routine,” totally unaware that Saul’s girlfriend may have just broken up with him, Saul is of course within his rights to tell Carrie, “You’re out of line. You’re in my home.” But she may be right that he’s lost his nerve, that he’s no longer in a place where he can see an investigation all the way through and be as tough as he needs to be. Even so, Carrie still needs his affirmation. When he tells her, “Take some boxes with you. You’ll need them when you clean out your desk,” it sends her, hysterical, to her sister’s house. Babbling out of control, she tells her sister, “I think I just quit my job. I’m serious. I’m done. I’m done. I’ve had it up to here…You were so right, you were so fucking right when you told me my job would kill me one day.”
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The numbers may be somewhat inflated by his penchant for silly action movies where he plays supporting roles, but Samuel L. Jackson’s movies have grossed more than any other star’s oeuvre, according that most redoubtable of resources, the Guinness Book of World Records. In any case, it’s another statistic to throw on the pile of evidence that black actors are not inherently box office poison. I remain vastly curious what the tipping point for Hollywood will be, when they realize that the elements around actors and the quality of their performances are probably more determinative than the race of the actors themselves. If you put self-aware black actors in big, glossy, funny action flicks, those movies will likely make money, and not be harmed by the fact that Samuel L. Jackson is showing up with a purple lightsaber or an eye patch. But I really would love to see an executive name the metric after which they’ll be comfortable with the idea that black actors are not box-office poison.

Spencer Ackerman is, of course, an ace defense reporter, but I really love it when he writes about culture. And I particularly appreciated this meditation on the New York punk club that was critically important to him growing up, because I think it reflects, to come back to a perpetual hobby-horse, the kind of norm-building it would be great to do in fan communities and at conventions:

Above my desk I keep a photograph that my wife bought for me of ABC No Rio. ABC No Rio is a punk club and (former?) squat on Rivington Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan where every Saturday afternoon a motley assortment of bands perform. I think of it as the punk rock version of the Boys & Girls Club, because that was the role it played for me as a teenager…it was supposed to be a place where you would be made to feel unwelcome if you groped someone in the pit; if you made a homophobic or racist remark; or if you engaged in otherwise destructive behavior.

You could be drunk or high and have sex — you weren’t supposed to be, but no one was really going to stop you — but if that translated into behavior that threatened others, your ass would be kicked out. It was filled with contradictions — a scene that supposedly glorified nihilism and free expression being so rigid? — but they were resolved, intellectually speaking, according to the baseline principle that those were the basic social responsibilities needed for the world in which we wanted to live to exist, a haven from the aggravating bullshit around us.

Again, these principles were never fully realized. I know women who were abused at ABC No Rio. I am thinking in particular of one individual who got away with it, probably because of his scene cred. I cringe at the idea that this piece will come across as treacly or sanitized. These are the reflections of a straight white boy who came up in the mid-90s and who went on to do all manner of bad things in his life. Your mileage may vary.

But it was important that these were the basic values that you were expected to adopt if you wanted to be part of what ABC No Rio was.

When I wrote about my experience at New York Comic Con, I noted how level the crowd seemed, how there were no particular signifiers of coolness. It also didn’t feel, for me, at least, like an unsafe space. The female cosplayers I saw getting their pictures taken mostly seemed to be objects of admiration because their costumes were completely and utterly awesome, less because they were intensely sexual or revealing. And almost no vendors were employing booth babes, perhaps in a sign that strategy is played out, though we’ll see when I hit San Diego Comic Con next year.

But despite that generally neutral atmosphere, it would still be great if there was a way to sell en masse the idea the dominant culture at cons was inclusive and oriented against harassment. Some changes, like panelists making a conscious effort to treat questioners who raise issues of representation and inclusiveness in art with respect, even if the questions are tough, would be relatively easy. Others, like adopting sexual harassment policies and training staff to enforce them, would take slightly more effort. But none of this is impossible. And even if enforcement’s inconsistent, the effort is important.

This post contains spoilers through the Oct. 27 episode of Community.

As much fun as this episode and the previous one were, I remain somewhat concerned that Community is treading water. While these shows have given us some good insight into the way the characters see each other and feel about their patterns of interaction, they haven’t really done anything to move the ball forward. And the study group is halfway through college, at this point. It’s time for some momentum, and some bad-but-more-informed-than-freshman-year decision-making.

The thing that struck me most about tonight’s episode was the politics apparent in the way the characters think of each other. “I’m entitled to sex,” Britta imagines Jeff saying to her in her horror-movie version of their relationship, casting our one-time hero as a much less subtle meathead than he actually is. And Annie imagines Britta as the willing victim of a vampire, dragged out of the closet to satisfy Jeff’s lusts and to explain to Annie, “Do not judge me for my weakness…I’m fine with this.” Are we still stuck in a dynamic where Annie thinks Britta’s a slut, Britta thinks Annie is a tease, and stereotypes of ladies fighting and undermining each other go round and round? Because if so, I’m tired of it.

Abed, by contrast, uses politics to inject logic into an inherently illogical horror movie situation. “I guess they shouldn’t have cut corners, though it is understandable given the economic downturn,” his imaginary love interest version of Britta tells him, clarifying why a local mental institution’s cut its security force. And Shirley whips out some more conservative — or at least more decisively conservative — views that we’ve seen from her before, imagining a demonic version of the Dean chainsawing the study group’s sinners to death forever while cackling “Gay marriage!” at the top of his lungs. I suppose the anecdote as meant to illustrate that Shirley thinks her classmates see her in cheap and reductive terms that make assumptions about her Christianity, but given that the story had more the feeling of a revenge flick than an actual way of working through Shirley’s concerns, it felt a little disconcertingly judgmental. That said, Pierce’s vision of Troy as Coolio and Abed as Flava Flav was genuinely funny, showing that Pierce is both something of a racist and doesn’t know the cultural contexts for either figure, a well-crafted double joke on him.

But I felt like the final scene, showing us that Abed had the only normal psychology score (or perhaps the only wildly abnormal one) felt a little too on the nose to me. Wired’s profile of Dan Harmon explains that in the course of making the show, Harmon came to identify with Abed and to be diagnosed as lying somewhere on the same part of the autism spectrum that the character does. Which is great for him, but doesn’t mean that Community is a better show for making Abed — or any one character in particular — the hero. Given the caustic way a lot of the characters have behaved this season, we need reasons to like them again, rather than simply being told that we should.

In Time, a mediocre action movie in which Justin Timberlake plays a poor boy turned revolutionary and Amanda Seyfried plays Patty Hearst, or close enough to it, is not a great film. It’s awkwardly written, its worldbuilding is incomplete, and its action scenarios are mundane and the setups that lead to them are ridiculous. But all that aside, In Time is a fascinating illustration of what we — and Hollywood in particular — refuse to speak aloud about income inequality in mass-market entertainment. And especially at a moment when Americans are literally being beaten in the streets for raging against vast wealth disparities, In Time feels almost revolutionary in its insistence that redistribution is the only option — it’s the rare movie that outflanks me from the left. In Time is a fascinating, flawed movie, and one I’ll be thinking about for a long time to come. (It should be noted that no plot twists in this movie that you couldn’t discern from trailers appear in this review.)

In Time follows Will (Timberlake) a factory worker literally working for the time he needs to survive the day, after he obtains a large and unexpected amount of time and uses it first to gain access to upper-crust society, then to return to his own world with an heiress, Sylvia (Seyfriend) in tow. At first, she’s a hostage, but as her experience living in poverty and in constant risk of running out of time changes her, she becomes Will’s partner in a revolutionary crime spree, stealing and redistributing time from her father’s own company. Too anxious, perhaps, about the risk of being mistaken for a talky movie of ideas, In Time relies heavily on action sequences that work best when they comment on themselves and stall when played straight. “It went off! I was trying to help!” yelps Sylvia after she shoots a cop, in a nice little parody of mysteriously competent female action heroines. “Unfuckingbelievable,” Will mutters crankily after a ridiculous number of rounds have failed to dislodge that same cop from an interminable rooftop chase. But when the movie wants us to accept various transparently ridiculous ploys Will and Sylvia pull off — and when it expects us to buy that after a series of highly successful heists, Sylvia hasn’t bothered to pick up a decent pair of running shoes — it becomes just as silly as the tropes it’s riffing off. In one sequence, where the camera lovingly follows Will and Sylvia wrecking a gorgeous car in slow-motion, my screening companion leaned over and whispered “movie over” in my ear. I was hard-pressed to disagree. There’s a lot of showing rather than telling and general movie silliness about Seyfried’s outfits, though the movie’s depiction of eternal youth raises queasy implications of sexual confusion.

But for all the sound and fury the movie subjects us to, In Time has a vastly better claim than any movie I’ve seen in ages to using loud, attractive nonsense to deliver a message that otherwise would be confined to art house theaters. Avatar may have given us heartwarming visions of environmental interconnectedness, and Wall-E offered a disconcerting commentary on a world where we’ve destroyed ourselves and our planet through consumerism. But both of those movies displace their messages to the distant future and offer salvation through empathy. In Time may be in the future, but it’s a close one, in a world that looks disconcertingly like our own. And brutal confrontations with reality and revolution are what writer and director Andrew Niccol has on offer as solutions.
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The bridge is yours.

-We might get a sequel to The Incredibles. Which I sort of hope would focus on Frozone.

-Has NBC’s self-mythologizing created some of its problems?

-Has the economic downturn helped push producers out the door?

-AFTRA and SAG are asking IMDb to pull birthdates.

-Happy Friday! Have a documentary about The Phantom Tollbooth!

This post contains spoilers through “Day 7″ of Neal Stephenson’s Reamde. If you want to spoil beyond that in comments, feel free, but please label your comment as such. And for next week, let’s read through “Day 17.”

Given the time that Stephenson’s spent explicating his manly ideals, and showing us various people doing crazy things like stealing credit card numbers and shooting terrorists on Chinese docks in the name of love, it was inevitable that we’d get to sex eventually. And to sexual assault. Wartime can produce some hot temporary romances, like the one between Olivia and Sokolov. But it also provides a space in which people like Khalid can justify sexual violence.

One of the things that’s interesting about the way Stephenson frames Khalid’s attack against Zula is that it sets up a sympathy between us and Richard. Before he breaks into his niece’s apartment, Richard pauses for a moment to steel himself against what he might find: “Growing up on a farm had exposed him to a few sudden and unpleasant sights that he had never been able to clear from his memory. But Zula stabbed or strangled on the floor of her apartment would, he knew, be the last thing that came into his mind’s eye at the moment of his death; and between now and then it would come to him unbidden at unforeseeable moments.” He can’t bear the idea of witnessing violence against Zula, but he must. And as we get more attached to her, the prospect of seeing something bad happens to her becomes increasingly uncomfortable — though we see more than he does, though less than everything, because we’re seeing through Zula’s eyes, and at some point, so closes them.

I’m trying to decide how I feel about Stephenson’s decision to describe Khalid’s assault on Zula and Zula’s self-defense in as much detail as he does. It’s not as if the step-by-step narration of the event is out of keeping with the rest of the novel — Stephenson spends a lot of time on all sorts of details here — and they’re not notably prurient. We’re told that Zula’s vulva is exposed, but Stephenson doesn’t get descriptive, and even his lingering on Khalid’s penis for a sentence is a logistical meditation, not a sexual one, though it does serve to establish Zula’s level of sexual experience in a way that seems like it’s supposed to make Khalid’s assault more heinous: “Zula was not a huge penis expert, but she knew it took at least a little bit of time for one of them to get that hard, which made her realize that Khalid must have been standing outside the door for a while, getting himself ready for this.”
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In my quest to read all of David Liss’s novels, I finally finished The Coffee Trader, a companion novel of sorts or prequel to his Benjamin Weaver novels that explain how Benjamin’s uncle, Miguel Lienzo, became the man of consequence he is. Like all of Liss’ novels, it’s a useful explanation of some part of the financial system — in this case, commodity markets — and why it should be regulated in general (though not in this case, because that would prevent our hero from triumphing over an unworthy enemy). But it’s also a great meditation on the rise of personal productivity.

After drinking coffee for the first time, Miguel reflects:

How many times, after conducting business in taverns, had Miguel’s wits suffered with each tankard of beer? How many times had he wished he had the concentration for another hour’s clarity with the week’s pricing sheets?…The coffee’s scent began to make him light-headed with something like desire. No, not desire. Greed. Geertruid had stumbled upon something, and Miguel felt her infectious eagerness swelling in his chest. It was like panic or jubilance or something else, but he wanted to leap from his seat.

Similarly, coffee for Hannah unleashes a sense of potential, the idea that she should be able to learn more about Jewish law, that she should be able to read. The berries and the drink give both of them the sense that they’re not bounded by fate and the limitations of the body; that they can, if not entirely conquer tiredness, push it back for a time; that they can reach for greater clarity than that normally available to them. Their success in personal and private life is incumbent on them, not on God’s favor, and if they are clever enough, not the approval of their community or their adherence to artificially imposed norms.

As we know from discussions of the current recession, productivity is not a cure-all if we don’t have the resources to consume. If the workforce as a whole is much more productive, tapping into your full productivity doesn’t actually give you the sort of advantage that Miguel Lienzo got from drinking coffee (and, of course, from working as an independent operator rather than for a firm). So there’s something sort of wistful about a look back to a time when the new standards seemed full of nigh-magical promise and opportunity.

This post contains spoilers through the Oct. 26 episode of Parks and Recreation.

In a way, I’m glad we discussed whether Leslie Knope was corrupt or not, because last night’s episode was all about what happens when politicians and business get too cozy. The answer? Disaster, and Tom Haverford bribing the Chamber of Commerce with hair clippers to give Leslie a second chance.

But before we get to that image, it’s important to take a moment to discuss what I think is a core upcoming challenge for Parks and Recreation. The show found its stride when it stumbled upon a balance where people kept underestimating Leslie, who responded by continuing to prove herself almost freakishly competent. It became trenchant commentary on expectations for women in politics, even when the things Leslie was proving herself ninja-like at were throwing Harvest Festivals or moderating horse funerals. But what happens when people are broadly asked to buy into the legend of Leslie Knope? Will she still be bearable? If Leslie’s the kind of person who, when presented with a hagiography, declares “I’m going to watch it ever day for the rest of my life, and when I die, I’m going to project it on my tombstone,” will she be bearable anymore? I’d hate to lose my bureaucratic heroine to typical politician-like self-regard.
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So, good news! Remember this post I wrote a couple of months ago about creating Muslim cultural archetypes that could be integrated into a wide range of shows and movies? We’re turning it into a SXSW panel. Details about the speakers on the panel, the day and time, etc., are forthcoming. But given how much y’all have helped shape my thinking, I hope some of you will be there. And let me know if you’ll be coming. There will definitely be Austin-based drinking. Locals should advise so we can plan the best cavalcade mee-tup ever.

I was lucky enough to go to a storytelling event run by The Moth and the USA Network’s Characters Unite program last night. It wasn’t just that the stories were excellent, which they were, but it was a nice reminder of the power of an art form that I don’t have access to very often — and why faking memoirs is besides the point when the truth can produce the most amazing details.

Two of the first three storytellers, Jeffery Rudell and Greg Walloch were an almost perfect illustration of that latter point. Rudell told the story of how his mother, after he came out to his parents, gathered every artifact of his life, from his bed to his collection of Interview magazines, put them in the front yard and set them on fire, burning down a maple tree that had been in the family for generations. Walloch told the story of wandering into a evangelical Georgia church where a pastor tried to heal him of his cerebral palsy, and wondering why the minister had chosen that instead of his other problems: “Can you make me less neurotic? Can you get me a better job? Can you find me the perfect boyfriend?” But he was surprised when he found himself unexpectedly struck by the idea that his cynicism might have denied him the opportunity for a miracle cure. You can’t make moments like that up. Not everyone will be as vivid a framer of their own stories, and not everyone will live a life that provides as rich material. But that’s why not everyone should write a memoir.

And the event was also a reminder of why spoilers sometimes don’t matter. I knew almost from the moment that Kevin Jacobsen began telling a story about his son Kameron that the story would end in the revelation of Kameron’s suicide. But that didn’t take anything away from the power of the moment when Jacobsen told us about running upstairs in response to his wife’s scream and finding that “I couldn’t get him down. And then I couldn’t revive him.” Instead, knowing what was coming lent a dreadful anticipation to the telling.

The night may have been less bipartisan than the organizers planned: a combination of stories about gay rights, Texas racism, the importance of anti-bullying legislation, and Meghan McCain laying down a marker declaring that “There is so much hate in Laura Ingraham and Glenn Beck’s voices,” isn’t the kind of studied even-handedness that the city’s accustomed to. But that’s kind of a relief. True balance doesn’t mean treating all ideas as if they’re equally compelling. It means giving everyone a chance to make the case and letting the listeners decide.

Editor’s Note: We at ThinkProgress are supportive of efforts to use the arts to explain policy, and welcome Gwen Moore’s experiment in this space. Also, someone should auto-tune this.

As income disparity continues to climb, Thinkprogress ventured to Capitol Hill to find

A voice for the middle class and poor, and we happened upon Wisconsin’s Rep. Gwen Moore (D).

Noting how inequality holds the economy back, Moore spoke up against the “class warfare” attack.

If the GOP wants to take every nickel and dime, from the struggling 99

Moore thought she’d call out their crime by offering up her take in rhyme.

With our apologies for terrible poetry, here is the much better “Job Creators: A Poem” by Rep. Gwen Moore:

– with Karl Singer