Malcolm Johnson, acid and brilliant, on my five non-Western myths, fairy tales, and religious figures who would make great movies:

Hey, Alyssa. We got your memo in Development, and…well, I’m afraid we’re going to have to pass on all of these movies. First off, some of this stuff sounds kinda Foreign, making it real impossible to get available locations here in L.A. (psst, actually I meant Vancouver, but don’t tell the local Unions that).

Second, I have to question whether or not there are any bankable stars we have that could make any of these work. Brad Pitt? Angelina? Well, maybe. But some serious reworking of these stories would have to be done in order to get them to sell to an American audience. (And I think you know what I mean). Plus, do you remember how much work we had to do in order to convert Red Tails into a movie that featured all white people before George took his ball and went home? Don’t want to relive that again.

What was that? You wanted to put actual “actors of color” to be in these movies?

Alyssa, this is Hollywood. We don’t do that.

Moving on to Marketing. They’re concerned about a lack of viable merchandizing tie-ins. Yeah, sure we could sell a couple of children’s book tie-ins, but where’s the action figure going to come out of that Ananzi thing? I mean what? Doesn’t that guy just whisper stories in people’s ears all day? I mean, at least transform into a car or something. Plus, Hasbro has called and expressed some doubt that they’d generate any sales for this stuff in the South. After all, these characters are hardly Christians.

Plus with the amount of Special Effects these movies would require…

Hmm? What? These stories don’t require that many effects? Ehhhh, I gotta pass anyway, and yes I sticking wtih CGI expense as the reason.

Look, next time you got something with Fighting Robots (of any size) come on into the office and pitch it. Better luck next time.

The hurdles are very, very high. But I have to believe that with a combination of shame, killer marketing plans, and empirical evidence, they will eventually be surmountable. We’ll win because we’re right. And because our ideas make for better entertainment.

GamePolitics notes that presidential campaigns are increasingly interested in turning the work of running for office into games. This isn’t exactly a new idea: Howard Dean’s campaign had a Dean for Iowa game, where you could allocate campaign resources, canvas, and wave signs for your candidate. But things like this are a shadow of actual engagement — they don’t actually get voters registered or voters out on election day — and they produce a shadow of the feeling of actually being part of a movement. If you want to turn campaigns into games that people are meaningfully invested in, you’ve got to go real-world rather than virtual, and to change the way you manage volunteers on the ground, or to provide alternate opportunities for volunteers. I’m no Jane McGonigal, but you could set up competitions to register the most voters with the fewest registration cards thrown out for problems with signatures or addresses, or do scavenger hunts where you only get clues if you’ve registered enough votes along the way. Any game would have to be organized to place high value on compliance with election law, and to provide appropriate training to player-volunteers. The problem with campaign work is that a lot of it is difficult and dull, oriented towards compliance rather than innovation — and for good reason, electoral law is not unimportant. So finding ways to innovate while also taking advantage of the experience and knowledge of folks who have kept the flame alive will be key not just to good experiences for new volunteers, but to keeping the process running in a way that’s genuinely useful to campaigns.

I still think Glee is a wildly inconsistent, and frequently shallow show—”Leprechaun,” for example, in which stupid-smart cheerleader Brittany became convinced an Irish exchange student was a magical creature, was so offensively stupid that everyone involved in it should spend time in television jail. But I’m increasingly convinced that Naya Rivera should be nominated for an Emmy for her performance as closeted lesbian cheerleader Santana.

She’s perhaps the most complete player in the show’s cast: Rivera may have been underused in prior seasons, but then the show was smart enough to realize that she had a delightful alto that she can put to work channeling everyone from Amy Winehouse to Christine McVie. She can dance—if not as well as Heather Morris, who can’t match her voice or her performance. And she’s acted the hell out of a nuanced transition from pure mean girl cheerleader to hugely vulnerable, lovelorn mortal girl.

There’s no question that Chris Colfer’s performance as Kurt Hummel has been charming, and an important landmark for gay teenagers during a disturbing outbreak of vicious bullying. But the character also has its limitations—Kurt is overwhelmingly, obviously, unquestionably gay. His coming out story was inevitable, as his trajectory towards a bigger city. It’s not a bad stereotype—and neither is the football player who eventually comes out, transfers schools, and ends his reign as a bully. But these stories have been told before, whether in the form of Larry Blaisdell, the gay football player on Buffy the Vampire Slayer who dies defending Sunnydale from the Mayor on Graduation Day to the many coming-out-in-and-living-more-fully in the big city stories from Ellen to Will and Grace.

Santana’s story isn’t just a coming-out narrative: it’s a story of self-realization. The character’s most prominent characteristic in the first season of the show was the fact that she’d had sex with lots of male characters, whether wiling away time with Puck or divesting Finn of his virginity. Her acknowledgement that she’s in love with Brittany, her best friend, has been the product of multiple seasons and a lot of very hard character work. And it looks like her road to coming out could be much more difficult than Kurt’s. While there’s no question that bullying is a serious issue and Glee presented it as such, Kurt’s revelation wasn’t a surprise to most people, and he’s been vigorously backed up by his father. Santana, instead, is about to become the object of a political attack ad—and it’s not clear how her parents will react. And even if they’re fine, even if, as Finn puts it, her fellow students don’t care, Santana is going to be exposed to a wider, less friendly world. Her hesitance to publicly embrace Brittany may cost her that relationship, and it seems entirely possible that being forced to come clean may not, in the short term, actually be worth it. And unlike Kurt, there isn’t a clear plan to get Santana out of Lima and into a bigger, broader-minded world that will embrace her. That’s a harder, less satisfying story to tell, but it’s an important one, and Rivera’s nailed it. If she keeps this up, she should absolutely be in contention for a Best Supporting Actress Emmy—and Glee‘s showrunners should resist their tendency towards the absolutely bananas and continue giving her this kind of material.

I think we’re going to see a lot more advertising like this trailer for House of Lies, which describes a management consulting firm run by Don Cheadle, Veronica Mars, and Jean-Ralphio by telling us that “They’re the one percent, sticking it to the one percent”:

The 99 percent/1 percent dichotomy is valuable, in art as in politics, because it’s clarifying. Labeling someone a member of the 1 percent is suddenly an easy way to tag them as a villain. The term doesn’t just imply wealth—after all, we have a lot of culture that suggests the benevolence of wealth, the rich are using their money to stock Batman’s arsenal or having revelations and giving it away—it implies a kind of inherent callousness. The messaging of the political movement suggests that the 1 percent will run roughshod over the rest of America, so it’s not that much of a leap to believe they’d turn on each other. It’s that assumption—without the labeling—that’s at the core of Revenge, in which only immense wealth lets Amanda take revenge on all of the classes of society, from investors, to social climbers, to politicians, who framed her father—and did wrong by the rest of us. And it’s interesting to see the circle of 1 Percent villains widen out in House of Lies from the investment bankers of Margin Call and the wealth of Tower Heist to management consultants, a profession that’s quite efficiently captured a large chunk of elite college graduates, in part by selling the idea that you can become a member of the 1 percent by gaining skills you’ll later use to do good for the 99 percent.

Asserting that you’re a member of the 99 percent is less obviously indicative—there is a lot of difference between being in the bottom 1 percent and being just below that 1 percent—but asserting membership in the 99 percent is shorthand way of asserting a worldview and a set of priorities. That kind of affinity is powerful, so it’s not remotely surprising to see folks like Jay-Z try to bandwagon it, with Rocawear’s quickly-pulled Occupy Wall Street t-shirts, which the mogul planned to use to capitalize on a trend without, of course, contributing anything to it.

Programming note: I know a lot of folks will be going out of town for Thanksgiving, so let’s do Last Dance for Wednesday, Nov. 30.

Monster is less a movie about the death penalty than a portrait of American misery. But Aileen Wuronos is, in Patty Jenkins’ masterful and disturbing movie, simultaneously the most unnerving and maybe the most deserving of pity guilty murderer we’ve explored in this series.

One of the things that’s striking about the story of her deprivation and abandonment is how it emerges through the movie. While we see her bathing and drying her hair in a public bathroom, trying to buy herself a few more minutes to get ready for the day, we don’t know until nearly the end of the movie that she had and gave up a baby at 13, or that she was repeatedly raped as a child. She tells us about the ferris wheel she loved as a child — “They called it the Monster. As a kid, I thought it was about the coolest thing I’d ever seen.” — in essentially the same tone that she delivers off-hand accounts from an absolutely brutalized life. When she and Selby, a feckless young girl who takes her in, have their first real date at a roller rink, kissing for the first time to “Don’t Stop Believing,” it’s a brilliant use of the song because it’s so sick given what’s to follow, and the basic desperation of Aileen’s existence. There isn’t a single trauma that’s a signpost in her life, a moment that fractured an otherwise peaceful existence. Murder may be a step up for her, but people have done everything to her other than murder her. “I loved her,” Aileen explains after her lover Selby has helped capture her confession on a wiretap. “And the thing that no one either realized about me, or believed, was that I could learn.” But it takes much more than one successful relationship, especially where one partner is urging the other to keep working as a prostitute to support her, to give someone the skills she needs to survive in society, or a reasonable expectation that society will protect her. “Where there’s life, there’s hope. They gotta tell you something,” Aileen tells us as she’s being led out of court after being sentenced to death.
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The bridge is yours.

-Advice for Hollywood from Bollywood.

-The state of NBC.

-The best prison breaks in science fiction and fantasy.

-Action stars and protected bat habitats seem like an inherently bad combination.

-Maureen Ryan is right about everything.

I just finished W. Scott Poole’s Monsters in America, and while I think the book has an unfortunate tendency to wander away from its central thesis (and as a result to not entirely prove it), the premise is interesting enough to merit further consideration. Essentially he argues that “the narrative of American history can be read as a tale of monsters slain and monsters beloved” — and more specifically that in the United States, monsters exist not just as engines of social control and reflections of our anxiety, but as things that we define ourselves by conquering. Poole describes one delightful example, the arrival of what a lot of people thought was a large sea serpent off the coast of Massachusetts:

Numerous New Englanders claimed to have seen it, and everyone tried to invest it with meaning. The Gloucester serpent quickly, in fact almost immediately, mae its way into political discussion. The anxious maritime entrepreneurs of Gloucester gave their sea monster the nickname “Embargo,” a reference to the controversial Embargo of 1807…The 1817 Boston broadside certainly makes it clear that destroying the monster in Gloucester harbor was the community’s first priority. On the first day of the sighting, ‘a number of our sharp-shooters’ were in pursuit, firing muskets at the serpent. There seems to have been no public discussion of this effort. It was assumed that killing the monster was the only possible course. The men of the New England coast killed giant sea creatures for a living, and this particular wonder would receive the same treatment. The monster in American history is not simply that which destroys. It is a being that must be destroyed.

Poole doesn’t spend a lot of time explaining how that American mindset is different from that of other countries, mostly asserting that it’s the case, even though I think he might have built a stronger one. The Puritans’ commitment to destroying monsters didn’t stop at self-control: Cotton Mather and others were all too eager to visit bodily destruction on the people who they believed had become monstrous in the country they’d come to subdue. The transformation of slaves who rebelled against their treatment into monsters in the canon of American mythology certainly had real-world consequences in the militarized mindset of the pre-Civil War mindset, and the treatment of fugitive slaves. But there’s no question that America is very good at mobilizing swiftly to absolutely destroy the kinds of things we’ve decided are monstrous, whether they’re New England sea serpents or al Qaeda.

It would be interesting to consider whether there’s a distinctly American approach to monsters that originate elsewhere. The edit and reframing that produced the American version of Godzilla turns the monster’s death from a tragedy and ominous warning into a triumph. In Europe, we desperately need Van Helsing to corner Dracula. Here, apparently, teenage girls can dispatch them either by slaying or seduction. The mark of real victory over a monster is when you don’t need to be afraid of it any more. America hasn’t defeated all of its monsters, and it never will. But to a certain extent, it can’t. It’s hard to remain exceptional if there’s nothing left to stand against, no way to distinguish yourself by the victories you can achieve that no one else can.

I’m not sure that Lil B actually, as the title of his song “I Got AIDS” suggests, is actually HIV-positive — a lot of his recent work’s been about making declarations designed to get people to show their worst selves in their reactions, as he did when he announced that the title of his last album would be “I’m Gay,” which he later changed to “I’m Gay (I’m Happy).” But even if he’s not, there’s something sort of weird about ?uestlove’s snarking at him for it, declaring “2007-12 the ‘Post Modern Ye-ified Narcissist-Histrionic disorder’.” It’s pretty bizarre that rappers regularly get praised and defended for taking on alternate personas in order to give them cover to say wildly anti-social things, but that if one does it in order to tweak his peers about homophobia and safe sex, it’s histrionic. The song itself is fine, nothing special, sort of melancholic:

And it’s nowhere near as clever as Salt-n-Pepa’s realtalk about the limitations of the pill in “Let’s Talk About Sex”:

But that’s okay. Songs serve different purposes. Lil B may be self-aggrandizing, but he’s serving a pretty valuable social purpose along the way.

If anyone’s been worried that The Iron Lady would try to play down Margaret Thatcher’s conservativism, I think that needn’t be a concern — the full-length trailer that’s just been released doesn’t stint much, and I’m curious as to how images of protestors being beaten in the U.K. in the ’80s will play against the continuing clashes between Occupy Wall Street protestors and the police:

I don’t know how much the movie will get into her foreign policy other than the Falklands — her policies on South Africa and Cambodia at the U.N. were less than admirable — or how it’ll assess her shutdowns of U.K. coal mines, a move to both break unions and get England headed towards renewable energy, but that may have simply been faster than was practical. The trailer certainly suggests that the movie will have a lot of psychology, whether Thatcher’s wrestling with her ambition and her sense of family responsibility, or asserting that the fight against sexism means she has the experience to know what the Falklands War will cost. And I’m all for portraying the impact of sexism, how women in positions of leadership have to structure everything from their haircuts to their position papers to protect themselves from its impact as much as possible.

But not everything is psychology, and not all political decisions are determined by what might be the dominant day-to-day conflict in someone’s life. I’ve felt this with Homeland, too, that as tempting as it is to reduce the roles people play in world-historical conflicts to personalities, ideology is powerful too.