The Raven looks like a profoundly silly movie, but it continues the proud tradition of weird and wonderful cinematic things happening in Charm City:

Seriously, is there a small American city (ones other than New York, Chicago, Los Angeles or Boston) that’s been better or more eccentrically served by film and television? In between the collected projects of John Waters, Barry Levinson, David Simon, 12 Monkeys, Sleepless in Seattle, Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie, and Silence of the Lambs to name only the major stuff, that is a lot of Baltimore in popular culture and in good popular culture. I don’t know if it’s a self-perpetuating cycle, Poe’s horrific giving rise to Hannibal Lecter, Simon and Walters plumbing endlessly referential wells, or what. But there’s something nice about the fact that there’s a constantly refreshing Baltimore of the mind even if some of the entries are inevitably cheesy and ignoble.

And as a side note, wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a movie that pitted the two Edgar Allan Poes, the poet and the Maryland attorney general, against each other? If you’re going to do crazy supernatural junk, you might as well go all the way.

With news that the NBA will cancel the first two weeks (and possibly all) of its 2011-12 season, many irate fans are appalled that the players and owners can’t reach an agreement in the labor dispute to keep the league running. Memphis Business Journal reporter Michael Sheffield summed up the sentiment as “NBA lockout: Why can’t millionaires and billionaires just get along?”

Conflating the two groups as similarly-placed economic royalists, neither of whom deserve sympathy from an American public grappling with a depressed economy, is understandable. But to create an equivalency between millionaire players and billionaire owners obscures a scarier picture regarding the players’ long-term economic prospects.

To be certain, little sympathy exists for millionaire athletes, particularly as the American public suffers through a struggling economy. This article is not meant to defend rich NBA players who frivolously squander away their money, such as Latrell Sprewell who complained about a $21 million contract because it was hardly enough to “feed my family,” all the while spending millions on real estate and an Italian yacht.

But for every Sprewell, there are dozens of no-name players who for a multitude of reasons go broke shortly after retirement. In fact, a 2009 Sports Illustrated investigation found that approximately 60 percent of NBA players enter bankruptcy within five years of exiting the league. For NFL players, that level stands at 80 percent.

Sports Illustrated discusses a number of contributing factors, including poor investment decisions, dishonest financial advisers, high rates of divorce, and leeching friends. Many of these reasons stem from a single root cause: for most professional athletes, this is all they ever trained to do. College athletics – to say nothing of professional sports – is so cutthroat that in order to have even a chance at success, athletes had to have devoted nearly every waking moment to honing their skills. Top NBA prospects are typically perfecting their free throws, not learning to live on a budget or developing marketable job skills for when they turn 40.
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This weekend Ides of March, the George Clooney-directed political drama based on the Beau Willimon play Farragut North, opened across the country. Lots of folks says feminist pinup boy Ryan Gosling delivers an excellent performance — and I agree, but I want to focus this post on Marisa Tomei’s character — or should I say archetype — in the film. Tomei, in a departure from her usual aging stripper role, plays a New York Times reporter named Ida Horowicz.

Tomei’s character is part of an increasing archetype in modern film — particularly thrillers and political dramas: the plucky/intrepid female reporter/blogger. While this archetype was typically fulfilled in the past by a balding, middle-aged, overweight, sloppy white guy, it is a role that is becoming increasingly modernized through better fashion, more technology, and, yes, the presence of women in the newsroom.

In other words, female journalists can breathe a sigh of relief that they’re no longer relegated to portrayals of ladymag journalists in which they use their own love lives as writing material a la Kate Hudson in 10 Things I Hate About You. While it’s great to see serious political reporters increasingly played by women, writers of these scripts seem to fall all too often seem to sub in some of the same basic characteristics over and over again.

They flirt with male sources to get information. Tomei, in Ides of March, alternates telling Gosling she “loves him” and “hates him” depending on what information she gets out of him. Later, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character Paul universalizes this love/hate media relationship, but it’s hard to deny that Tomei plays this off as a flirtatious scene. I think lots of female reporters find this pattern a bit, um, irritating. After all, throwing in the flirting sends a message that female reporters can’t cover a serious beat without using sex appeal to get the information. I’m not going to say it never happens, but I’d like to think that all those female journalists didn’t rely on flirting for every big story. And why don’t female journalists ever call up female sources in on television or in film?

They’re usually depicted as “bloggers,” sometimes with a joke about how blogging isn’t real journalism thrown in. This was, perhaps, one of the most-discussed aspects of the American adaptation of State of Play. (Alyssa herself wrote about it back when the film first came out for the Atlantic.) Rachel McAdams was depicted as a blogger/reporter Della Frye for the paper, which was deemed lower on the totem pole than grizzled reporter Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe). And let’s face it: McAdams’ character was sometimes portrayed as naïve at best, incompetent at worst. Crowe’s character threw in plenty of snide comments about blogging as somehow separate from journalism, which, for a film released in 2009, just felt dated.

They tend to focus on the scandalous. It’s hard to shake the reporter, Petra Moritz (Lily Rabe), in last season’s The Good Wife as she hunted down the truth on whether Peter Florrick (Chris North) had had another affair. That scene depicting the phone call between her and Alicia (Julianna Margulies), as she kept pushing the personal details — “Have you had an AIDS test?” — is downright uncomfortable and makes the Petra character come off as scummy.

They’re usually white. Unfortunately, this stereotype is becoming truer and truer as newsroom diversity drops (it’s hard to say  if this is true with new media, since online newsrooms rarely fill out the diversity survey). And while the number of female reporters is on the rise, perhaps reflected in the prevalence of the plucky female reporter on television and in film, real-life female reporters usually have male bosses. According to a Reuters report released this year, only 23 percent of top-level management postions are held by women.

So, props to Hollywood for acknowledging that women can be hard-nosed reporter types, but it seems that, sadly, they still need some diversity and character development.

Because I am an inveterate online shopper, and my colleagues do a bang-up job of monitoring Glenn Beck’s other pronouncements, I figured I would do my part by signing up for the email list for his 1791 clothing line. This made me privy not only to the roll-out of the line in my inbox yesterday, but to the announcement that the funds from the clothes will support a new relief organization that will be “self-funded and uniquely American. It will be a hand up, not a hand out,” and that the clothes, in keeping with Beck’s position as a huge Spider-Man fan will serve as a reminder that “we haven’t’ forgotten that with those rights enshrined in that historic year comes great responsibility”:

The clothes are basically J. Crew-meets-Ed Hardy-by-way-of-Etsy. There are lots of polo shirts and fleeces (interestingly, no women’s apparel) with radiant hearts, snakes, and skulls-and-crossbones declaring “Death to Tyranny.” As popping-your-collar-and-getting-annoyed-about-government gear goes, it’s fine, though unlikely to ignite a fashion revolution, particularly when the polos start at $65 and the fleeces at $85 (you can get a t-shirt for as little as $25). And I’m not wildly optimistic that 1791′s going to spark a revolution in American-made textiles, though the idea of Glenn Beck in period clothing hectoring Lowell Mill Girls seems strangely apt.

Beck is quite a marketer, and it remains to be seen if, particularly at those recession-unfriendly prices, the 1791 line will generate the kind of revenue that can support a nation-wide self-help movement. What, precisely, Beck wants for this new organization, is not wildly clear from the video announcement, which says it’ll:

Be a constant reminder that our solutions do not reside in Washington, bt they reside within you and me…this will be a grassroots effort that in reality will only be as big as our American imagination and ingenuity will still allow it to become. It will not be funded by taxpayer dollars, and will look for other ways besides charitable donations to survive…Capitalism is only a reflection of the values of those who use it. It’s neither good nor bad. It’s simply what you make of it.

I’m not in principal opposed to the idea that it would be great to simultaneously create jobs and raise funds for good causes. But I think Paul Newman, who Beck (surprisingly, without jabbing at Newman’s Hollywood liberalism) cites as a direct inspiration, was probably closer to a successful model with a product you can buy for $3, that is demonstrably superior to its competitors, and that’s easily available in grocery stores, than Beck is.

First, I’d like to thank Alyssa for having me here this week. Hello! Secondly, I’d also like to thank her for providing the inspiration for my first post here.

Recently, our host expressed interest in being able to experience the best of the epic stories gaming has to offer, without needing the fast-action reflexes so many modern games call for. As someone who didn’t actually learn how to make a character walk with a console controller until late 2008 (and who still tends to steer into walls), I deeply sympathize.

There’s a better way to experience what games have to offer than bad film adaptations, though, so I promised Alyssa a list of appropriately epic stories that wouldn’t take hair-trigger action, a broad knowledge of ammo types, or 40 hours of “game over” screens. She asked me to guest post not long after, so I thought the first pass at a list would be a great way to start.

Luckily, not all games require a controller at all. A whole era of point-and-click adventure games existed, and continues to exist. Ask any fan of the genre which is the best, and The Longest Journey shows up near the top of the list. Not only does it have a sprawling, worlds-saving story to catch the player’s attention, but features one of the best female protagonists in gaming and supports her with a surprisingly diverse (ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, age, physical ability, socioeconomic class) narrative world. The puzzles are mostly intuitive and make sense; for the ones that don’t, well, there’s Google. (The sequel, Dreamfall, is not as good but stands up pretty well as another deep story featuring a convincingly-written leading lady.)

Other entries in the adventure game genre include the Gabriel Knight series, the Syberia games, the Broken Sword series, and the Myst games.  Not all have aged equally well, but some (Syberia) are still fascinating to explore, and others (Gabriel Knight) are amazingly fun to play with a friend and give the MST3K treatment. And while the Monkey Island games don’t have particularly epic, sweeping, or deep stories attached, they’re also my favorites of all time and so of course come highly recommended.
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The bridge is yours.

-Jane Austen + time travel: this can only end in tears.

-Yay community arts journalism!

-Comic book style icons.

-Does Occupy Wall Street need a better slogan?

-Avengers assemble!

I tend to be an optimist and to trust that when people make big, momentous decisions, they have a plan, until proven clearly otherwise. So I was willing to believe that Netflix was making a painful but necessary transition to get head of an inevitable trend in the market in splitting into two companies. Until it became clear that, uh, they weren’t. As Alexis Madrigal writes:

The seemingly hasty decision came after the company’s share price had fallen from over $300 to $155 at the time of the Qwikster announcement. Hastings seemed eager to stanch the flow of investors from his company. But no one was buying. From September 19 to Friday’s stock market close, Netflix’s shares were down almost 25 percent.

My favorite evisceration of the plan among the hundreds to choose from came courtesy of Sarah Pavis’ at Netflixwatercooler. She entitled her post, “Parallel Universe in Which Netflix Becoming Qwikster Makes Sense.” The point is: in our universe, Qwikster never did.

I still think streaming is essentially the future, whether it’s because it’ll get harder and more expensive to deliver discs as Postal Service delivery contracts; because if tablets take off, people will want to carry less stuff; and as clouds become standard and televisions become less central, discs will seem like even more of an anachronism. Netflix’ retreat may eventually bolster the value of the company in the short term (though it appears to have had a rocky first day out). But I do think the real point is that whoever figures out the multiple-device, fairly-timely-for-new-episodes, well-licensed-for-old-content streaming solution is going to dominate the market.

By Tyler Lewis

I want to thank Alyssa for inviting me to guest post this week. Truly an honor. I will try to be as thoughtful, interesting, and amazing as she so often is here.

I have always had complicated feelings for the film, The Best Man. In terms of sheer enjoyment, it’s one of the finest black films of its type. It’s filled with characters that feel real, played by gifted actors (Taye Diggs, Nia Long, Morris Chestnut and Terrence Howard, to name a few) who have rarely had the opportunity before or since to be glamorous and human at the same time.

The film has those rare screen moments that stick with you long after the film is over and are just as pleasurable upon repeated viewings. That first shot introducing Morris Chestnut as Lance Sullivan. When Terrence Howard turns the guitar upside down and keeps playing it, never missing a beat. Harold Perrineau’s reaction to Regina Hall’s striptease. So many great moments.

But it’s an extremely sexist film. Almost retrogressive in its depiction of black women and the way black men don’t see women as human beings. I mean, the film hinges on the fact that a total slut like Lance Sullivan is such a chauvinist that the very idea of his bride having a sexual past sends him into a blind rage and makes him question whether or not she’s worthy of him. It’s a film that continues to suggest that driven career black women are unworthy of love. Career woman Jordan Armstrong (played by Long), is the only woman to ends the film alone, even as the stripper with the heart of gold and the emasculating shrew each end up with a man.

Worse, none of the women in The Best Man are terribly well-drawn. This is by design since each woman is a type – the not-so innocent innocent, the emasculating shrew, and, yes, the stripper with the heart of gold – that exists solely to receive the men when they grow up just enough to deserve them.

So if it is true that Malcolm D. Lee is making a sequel to the film, I really hope he does better by the female characters and the actresses who portray them this time around by fleshing them out so they are real, flesh-and-blood black women. But, man, if Jordan is still alone – and her singledom is solely because she’s got a job and doesn’t “need a man” – that would be truly awful. And it wouldn’t be worth Nia Long’s time to reprise the role. If Lee is smart, he’ll make the sequel about Jordan.

I promised you an all-star team, and here they are!

Jess Zimmerman, author of last week’s awesome Doctor Who post, an editor at Grist.org, and contributor to xoJane.com.

Tyler Lewis, a Washington, DC-based writer who has written for PopMatters, an international pop culture online magazine, and blogs at …on whatever crosses my mind.

Kate Cox writes about games, gaming, and gamer culture at yyour-critic.com. Her background is in film studies and in being a geek-at-large. A gamer since 1986 and a blogger since 2010, she now lives in the DC area with her husband and their cat, Guybrush.

Kay Steiger is the online managing editor at Washingtonian magazine. She’s written for a bunch of places, like Jezebel, The Atlantic, AlterNet, The American Prospect, Campus Progress, and some others. She blogs pretty much daily here. And you should buy a book of essays called Triumph of The Walking Dead, which features her work and will be out in November.

Various and sundry other ThinkProgress staffers will also be helping out. It goes without saying, but be especially nice to these people who are helping me keep you entertained while I’m running around conference centers in Washington and New York! I’ll still be answering emails and tweets and things, so contact away if you need anything.