The Atlantic Wire suggests that moviegoers are sick of Hollywood’s efforts to soak them by revisiting the same old concepts:

The numbers are in, and they show what studio execs likely feared and movie-goers likely suspected all along: Not a lot of people went to the movies this year. Box-office tracker Hollywood.com says that “an estimated 1.275 billion tickets sold” in 2011, a 4.8 percent decrease from 2010 making for “the smallest movie audience since 1995,” reports the AP. A hodgepodge of reasons for the sour showing were cited in the AP and ABC News reports. Among them: Too many sequels, too many kids movies, too many distracting gadgets, the bad economy, high ticket prices, and, something being called an “‘Avatar’ hangover” from 2010.

I’m not entirely convinced. Seven of the top-grossing movies in 2011 are sequels, and one, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, is simultaneously a reboot of and a prequel to a popular franchise. The two that fall into neither category, Thor and Captain America, are part of Marvel’s grand Avengers product, and so while they were both handsome movies, are not exactly proof of Americans seeking out fresh concepts. You have to go all the way down to the 12th movie on the list, Bridesmaids, to find a feature that is wholly new, not based on a book, or unlinked to an existing project or franchise. Rio, Super 8, Rango, and Horrible Bosses are the only other movies in the top 20. Clearly, Hollywood’s having some real trouble selling original stories to American audiences, or for whatever, reason, finding original stories that it feels comfortable trying to sell.

The presence of Rio and Rango on that list also suggests that family movies aren’t completely the kiss of death—it’s that other movies weren’t catching hold with the teen and adult audiences in a way that would have pushed those family films further down the list. It makes sense that terrible kids’ movies like Mars Needs Moms would flop, and it’s always nice to see the market recognize stupidity when it sees it as happened there. But it’s really too bad to see a terrific family film like Hugo struggling to make back its production costs: the movie took $155 million to make, and thus far has hauled in just north of $45 million, and I wonder if a lot of that is because people are so sick of paying extra for 3D movies that aren’t particularly worth it that they’re turning away from a movie where 3D is used to brilliant, lovely effect.

It would be nice to believe that the two-year box office slump we’re seeing has an easily diagnosable cause, that studios could just sit up and say “Huh, audiences aren’t loving 3D. Let’s ditch the glasses and everyone will come back.” But there seems like a failure to connect on a more fundamental level. I don’t know that the formula for something like Fast Five is easy to distill and make use of in original features, though I will always take more movies with multiracial casts in which Dwanye Johnson acts somewhat hyperreal. And I don’t know what the best way to get audiences in theaters for some great movies that just went so wholly overlooked, like A Better Life. What Hollywood—and those of us in the seats need isn’t necessarily more blockbusters. It’s more deeply compelling mid-budget, mid-gross flicks.

George R.R. Martin, continuing his campaign to torture us with good things that are still far off, has a selection from The Winds of Winter online. There’s nothing exceptionally surprising about the information that’s revealed in it, but I appreciate the fact that we’re still going to be spending time in Theon’s point of view, however painful it is to be there:

My sister, Theon thought, my sweet sister. Though he had lost all feeling in his arms, he felt the twisting in his gut, the same as when that bloodless Braavosi banker presented him to Asha as a ‘gift.’ The memory still rankled. The burly, balding knight who’d been with her had wasted no time shouting for help, so they’d had no more than a few moments before Theon was dragged away to face the king. That was long enough. He had hated the look on Asha’s face when she realized who he was; the shock in her eyes, the pity in her voice, the way her mouth twisted in disgust. Instead of rushing forward to embrace him, she had taken half a step backwards. “Did the Bastard do this to you?” she had asked.

“Don’t you call him that.” Then the words came spilling out of Theon in a rush. He tried to tell her all of it, about Reek and the Dreadfort and Kyra and the keys, how Lord Ramsay never took anything but skin unless you begged for it. He told her how he’d saved the girl, leaping from the castle wall into the snow. “We flew. Let Abel make a song of that, we flew.” Then he had to say who Abel was, and talk about the washerwomen who weren’t truly washerwomen. By then Theon knew how strange and incoherent all this sounded, yet somehow the words would not stop. He was cold and sick and tired… and weak, so weak, so very weak.

She has to understand. She is my sister. He never wanted to do any harm to Bran or Rickon. Reek made him kill those boys, not him Reek but the other one. “I am no kinslayer,” he insisted. He told her how he bedded down with Ramsay’s bitches, warned her that Winterfell was full of ghosts. “The swords were gone. Four, I think, or five. I don’t recall. The stone kings are angry.” He was shaking by then, trembling like an autumn leaf. “The heart tree knew my name. The old gods. Theon, I heard them whisper. There was no wind but the leaves were moving. Theon, they said. My name is Theon.” It was good to say the name. The more he said it, the less like he was to forget. “You have to know your name,” he’d told his sister. “You… you told me you were Esgred, but that was a lie. Your name is Asha.”

I initially hated Theon—and it was hard not to. He was the character who was perhaps most invested in both the lies of the path and in the idea that the path to glory lies through conquest. But he’s become a moving testament to the lasting impact of brutality. And in this passage, he’s an illustration of how history gets mangled. It’s hard for people to believe the things that Theon is telling them about Ramsay Bolton because they’re too terrible, they’re the kinds of events and behavior that we all want to believe can’t be true. And living through the worst events of history can turn our most direct eyewitnesses into wrecks other people consider unreliable narrators.

I’ve sung the praises of A Better Life here before, but I really think that to appreciate it, you should watch it with Miss Bala, a terrific movie out of Mexico based on the true story of a beauty queen who became the pawn of a drug cartel. As I explain in The Atlantic this week:

In Carlos’s case, the efficient machinery set up by the United States government to deport undocumented workers has essentially no room for appeal. The volunteer lawyer who visits him recognizes that Carlos has all the makings of a solid citizen, but none of the resources to fight for an incredibly rare exemption to the rules that say he must be returned to Mexico. The most the system can bend is to give Carlos a moment with his son before shipping the gardener off in shackles.

If a state with something to offer citizens its citizens can afford this kind of callousness, a state that couldn’t care less about its people can be all the more harsh and arbitrary. And it turns out not to matter to the Mexican government that Laura’s been coerced, threatened with death, and raped. Treating her as a collaborator with the cartel makes for a more interesting news story, so after she tips off a powerful general of a coming attack, she’s imprisoned, trotted out before the news cameras, and ultimately abandoned on the streets of Baja California

Miss Bala is a great, unnerving story about Mexico, but it’s also a fascinating antidote to the Strong Female Character trope. Laura does tremendously brave things, and survives through intense violence, but instead of a cool, detached competence, we feel the terror that would be ours if we found ourselves in the same situation. There’s a morality to feeling the horror of the bad things you do to stay alive because you have no other choice.

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Is this…really what this movie is like?

I respect Adrien Brody and all, and maybe this trailer is a poor representation, but this movie seems so far along the sincerity spectrum, so totally unaware of the genre it’s working within, that it’s come out the other side, and not in a good, loony, gleaming Parks and Recreation kind of way. I admire teachers who are dedicated in the long term to troubled schools, but having absolutely no self-awareness does not seem like an admirable thing. Neither does valorizing teachers who cross the line with vulnerable female students even if they have awesomesauce pure intentions.

Sen. Tom Coburn is displeased that a museum that charges admission is getting federal money to preserve old video games for future study. In his annual list of wasteful government projects, he complains:

According to the grant notification, the $113,277 in federal funds will be used to ―conduct a detailed conservation survey of approximately 6,900 of the 17,000 e-games in [the museum‘s] collection to determine the current condition of both the physical artifacts and their virtual content. The study is designed to ―better position the museum to make its International Center for the History of Electronic Games collection available to visitors, researchers, and a broad public audience by providing images, videos of e-game play, and interpretation of the collection via exhibits and the Online Collections feature of its Web site. Admission to the museum costs an adult $13.

Things like this drive me crazy for two reasons. First, they don’t assume that there are new investment costs a museum might want to make, like storage equipment and facilities, that might not be covered by an admissions fee that covers operating costs. Building storage that actually preserves artifacts, rather than sticking stuff on Ikea shelves, costs money. As does cataloguing. As does bringing in researchers. As does designing exhibits. And second, just because video games are comparatively new doesn’t mean that they’re not worth studying. There’s technology there that’s applicable elsewhere. There’s interesting storytelling and visual art. And if nothing else, there’s the question of what it was that fueled a big industry and took up a lot of Americans’ time. That all sounds like a pretty reasonable use of $113,277.

It turns out that poor, pokey NBC, home of much beloved, wildly creative sitcoms like Community and Parks and Recreation, is the network most willing to trade product placement for financial support for its shows. And while I suppose I should be up in arms about the marching corporatization of our entertainment, I can’t say that the supposed evils of product placement are at the top of my list.

First, there’s a difference between using product placement to make already-cheap shows cheaper, as is the case with reality television as NBC does with The Biggest Loser and The Celebrity Apprentice, and using product placement to subsidize quality but low-rated programming as NBC has done with Friday Night Lights and Chuck. Using donated products to carry out the same repetitive rituals doesn’t actually make the formula of a predictable competition show any more predictable, or the emotional arc of the show any less manufactured. And the small but dedicated audiences for those other kinds of shows are aware enough to recognize artifice when they see it, and to appreciate that they’re enjoying something that’s been kept alive by something other than pure audience size. Better Chuck with the Subway references than no Chuck at all, I guess.

More to the point, the assumption that characters wouldn’t use brands and talk about products actually runs counter to reality. We all have irrational brand loyalties, and talk about products, and recommend stuff to each other. It’s not some dramatic distortion of the universe of the show, as long as the characters aren’t Amish or live in a socialist future, for characters to talk about the things they buy and why they like them.

And finally, for the most part, we’re not dumb. People know what product integration is, and that it’s being done to them. Not every show is going to be 30 Rock and laugh at the concept even as it uses it:

But even if people end up buying a Snapple because Liz Lemon likes it, or shampoo because it makes Robin’s hair look fantastic on How I Met Your Mother (I just started watching, and her hair), or test-driving a car because the main character on Castle does it, this is hardly the worst thing to happen. And for the most part, I suspect people know why they’re doing what they’re doing. It may be foolish to think that I can ever look like Jennifer Morrison without a set full of dresses, extensive plastic surgery, and a magical application of extra tallness. But if I spend a few dollars occasionally because I dig her eye shadow, no harm, no foul, in the indulgence of the fantasy and its immediate debunking.

There’s something a bit odd about this GOOD piece about two Christian hipsters who make influential conspiracy-theory oriented viral videos promoting everything from birtherism to Uganda’s anti-gay laws, and have what sounds like a wildly inflammatory anti-abortion movie coming out in February that they’re hoping will catch on because it has a majority-black cast:

Jason “Molotov” Mitchell and his wife, Patricia “DJ Dolce” Mitchell, look like hipsters. She wears a stylish dress and nose stud, her dark hair angled sharply around her face. Jason, who goes by Molotov both socially and professionally, sports a landscaped beard and a tattoo on his forearm that reads “zealot.” They are in tip-top physical condition, they say, because they teach krav maga, an Israeli Defense Force-perfected form of martial arts.

They are charismatic and engaging…I struggle to reconcile this information with the pleasant people I just met…Despite the violent rhetoric, the Mitchells are the friendliest—and some of the savviest—people I have ever interviewed. Avid followers of popular culture, they are not Quiverfull-style Christians who isolate themselves from outside influences. They want to emulate the Biblical mandate to “be in the world but not of it.” So they laugh at The Daily Show and mention that they would enjoy hanging out with Jon Stewart, whom they consider a political foe. Molotov says he wants to emulate Jesus, who, he says, spoke harshly before crowds but showed compassion when people approached him one-on-one.

After all, Christian hipsters have been getting the anthropological treatment at least since Jeff Sharlet wrote about the “New Virgin Army” in Rolling Stone in 2005, the same year the New York Times profiled Jay Bakker. Earlier this year, the paper looked at a hipster-tinged Lower East Side evangelical church. In other words, it’s not really news that people who have tattoos, piercings, good haircuts and cool clothes believe that Christ is their savior and adopt hipster aesthetics to reach their target audiences. Thinking like this is one of the reasons I think progressives need not to get lazy about culture: it’s not enough to assume that our aesthetics and narrative power are just going to keep automatically bringing people over to support good policies and progressive worldviews.

And these things that we think are alluring and convincing, like humor, and storytelling, and multiethnic casting, and chunky glasses, and tattoos, or whatever? We are not alone, and we are not the only people who will figure out how to deploy them. It’s time to stop staring in wonder at the possibility that Cool Kids could think that Obama wasn’t born in the United States or that they’re not having sex until marriage and figure out how to make our own viral videos tighter, our own feature films more compelling to audiences who aren’t getting served by mainstream movies, and our novels more convincing.

There’s a lot of talk about the quality of Julianne Moore’s Sarah Palin impersonation in the trailer for Game Change, the adaptation of the juicy-if-thinly-sourced 2008 campaign chronicle (my take: she’s fine, if no Tina Fey). But I think the real question is whether HBO’S is telling the right story in focusing on Palin:

Ultimately, McCain’s selection of Palin only changed the game in that it made McCain look like a gambler. The selection didn’t actually chane the dynamic of the race, and Palin has essentially retreated into the small-town Alaska from whence she came in the years since. The selection of her didn’t even stem from particularly novel thinking, unless playing women and people of color off against each other counts. Not to go all Slim Charles on it, but the game was the same–it just got more fierce.

The story I’d really like to see out of that book, actually, is the one about John and Elizabeth Edwards, Rielle Hunter, and the fact that he went ahead with the 2008 campaign despite the mess in his personal life. Hubris and denial aren’t emotions that can be fit into rationality, which makes them particularly interesting. What happened behind the scenes in Palin’s brief, dizzying ascent has been done to death. The Edwards’ follies and tragedies are still somewhat inexplicable. And in a country where we’ve only ever had one divorced President, the idea that you could totally escape the expectations Americans have for the private lives of presidential candidates (Clinton, at least, only ever had Chelsea with Hillary) is a kind of magical thinking.

I was unexpectedly sad two days before Christmas to learn that John Lawrence, the plaintiff Lawrence v. Texas, which overturned sodomy laws in the United States, had died in late November virtually unnoticed by the country he helped change, and to learn from that obituary that Tyron Garner, with whom he was arrested for having sex (though both men said they were never intimate) had died in 2006. The news touched me not just because I was volunteering for Freedom to Marry Massachusetts the summer the Lawrence decision came down, and so felt it as a victory in a battle I was engaged in, but because it made me think about what happens to people after they do their part to make history and memory and its failures.

Biopics of very famous people have become an extremely reliable way for acclaimed actors to finally claim the hardware that has eluded them for other parts, or to claim more hardware and a confirmation of their greatness. But we don’t really need a biopic about Margaret Thatcher, whose life and legacy seem sufficiently understood. Even a figure like Ronald Reagan, whose life and legacy are distorted almost continually, doesn’t seem particularly needy: the myths and corrections are issued quickly and forcefully. There will be no authoritative version of his life in film or otherwise—partisans on both sides are sure they have the truth already. Sometimes, a biopic does the interesting thing of illuminating a very great and famous person through someone who played a pivotal role in their life. The King’s Speech may have seemed to some people an unworthy trifle to bring in such a haul earlier this year, but it has the virtues of being a fine film about class and medicine in addition to an illumination of a king.

But how about the people who were the real sparks to history themselves—after all, if there hadn’t been Lionel Logue, there would have been someone else, and more importantly, there still would have been the speech—but are forgotten. We’ve done a better job of remembering the Little Rock Nine than we have James Lawrence and Tyron Garner, even though they’re further in the distance, but even then, we see them as elements in a collective image. We don’t know very much about what makes them decide to integrate a school. And we don’t know very much about what made a Texas medical technician decide he could carry forth as the representative of a difficult cause, and how it came to be that one of his lawyers didn’t even know he’d died after their great victory. Good biopics should do more than affirm the greatness of the great. They should tell us something about history, particularly when it fails us and fails us quickly.

We’ll do All the King’s Men, which came in a close second, after that, and then revisit the question of Old Man’s War and The City and The City. In the mean time, let’s start A Vist From the Goon Squad on January 6, reading through section 7 for discussion.

For those of you who celebrate Christmas, and even those who don’t, John McCutcheon’s “Christmas In the Trenches” absolutely slays me every year:

It’s an amazing act of narrative songwriting. And more importantly, a critical call for cross-cultural understanding and peace in our time. I don’t believe that a single act of cultural exchange can turn back the machinery of the state, or reverse the fact that, as McCutcheon puts it, “the one who call the shots won’t be among the dead and lame.” But I do believe that engaging deeply with culture helps us understand what we have in common and builds curiosity about and appreciation for the things that differentiate us from each other.

So for all of you who are celebrating Christmas this weekend, I hope you have a wonderful, restful holiday. For those of you midway through Hanukkah, may your celebrations be full of light. And for all of us, a hope for peace in the new year.

Emily Nussbaum points to an interview with Homeland showrunner Alex Gansa that contains this interesting tidbit about a network that banned any suggestion that police could ever disagree:

Well, I recently did a police procedural for a major broadcast network. And the note came down from the network time and time again that there could be no conflict among the police officers and detectives who were trying to solve the crime. In other words, they didn’t want any dissention in the ranks among the good guys. Because if you showed dissention among the ranks, then people would begin to question if they were actually doing their jobs properly. And, of course, that robbed every single scene in the precinct of any drama whatsoever. They had to get along. They became just mouthpieces of exposition instead of real people.
And it was infuriating on a weekly basis to get that note. They couldn’t disagree. They couldn’t be wrong. They had to always be on the straight and narrow. And it was impossible to construct stories under those kinds of conditions.

There’s no conflict? I mean, that’s the first thing I ever learned as a writer in television. You know, you have to have conflict for any kind of drama. And this particular network just believed that there was enough drama in the good guys catching the bad guys, so that you didn’t have to muddy the good guys in any way, shape, or form. They just had to be right all of the time, and they had to be in sync all of the time. I mean, it was absurd.

And Kate Arthur from The Daily Beast notes that “There’s at least one another network that has the rule that doctors can never be wrong.”

This doesn’t just make for bad storytelling: it’s an actively dangerous endorsement of the idea that we should never question people in positions of power. It would be ridiculous to present a vision of a police department where no one ever commits an act of wrongdoing or negligence during an investigation. And it would be worse to present a department where, say, mistreatment of suspects, lying about what you’d witnessed, or God forbid, using pepper spray or live ammunition on the public went unquestioned.

Similarly, having television deliver the collective message “trust me, I’m a doctor” carries considerable risk with it. We live in a country where medical professionals have sterilized black women, lied about providing treatment to people with sexually transmitted diseases, and massively overdosed infants on blood-thinning drugs. Not to mention the fact that perhaps the most prominent doctor on television routinely abuses and harasses his patients. We need stories that encourage patients to be informed about their health, and to be their own advocates in the doctor’s office.

Obviously, living in a society is grand, and I appreciate the police keeping my neighborhood safe. I find the rise of vaccine deniers who refuse to accept the consensus of the medical establishment and are making the rest of us less safe really disturbing. But there has to be space between giving doctors and the police absolute authority and no authority, for narrative, and for our own safety.

My original choice for Valentine Wiggin would have been Chloe Moretz: thanks to Hit-Girl and Let The Right One In, we know she can play awfully tough when necessary while still retaining her girlishness. Plus, she and Asa Butterfield’s developed a really nice dynamic in Hugo.

But failing that, I’m delighted to hear that Abigail Breslin will be playing the part. Since her debut in Little Miss Sunshine, she’s been doing a series of roles that are solid but have none of the oddity, vulnerability, and conviction of that breakout part. Now, she has one.

I’m sure I’m not the only lady blogger, or lady nerd blogger, to feel like Valentine Wiggin is part of the reason we do what we do. I had no desire to manipulate the players in the Cold War when I was as young as she is. But the idea of finding a place where you can have a running conversation with anyone you want? Starting off playing pretend and finding your own voice–and then learning other people find it powerful? That’s a compelling pitch, particularly when you take away the potential-serial-killer-turned-world-leader older brother and the younger brother the state wants you to manipulate into committing xenocide.

One thing I’ve always liked about the Alien franchise is that it’s part of that subgenre of science fiction that’s concerned with the rise of corporate power. The Mars novels may be my favorite example of this, but work in the space tends to assume that the future might not be so shiny and happy after all, and plots get kicked off not when utopia is shattered, but when something threatens to upend what fragile balance we’ve achieved. So I’m pretty curious to see if the research team in Prometheus, for which we finally, oh joy, have a trailer, turn out to be independent or corporate-funded. Skewing results for the sake of pleasing your backers could make for some really nice tension.

Reader and novelist pal Max Gladstone continues our conversation from Monday about Batman and the 99 percent by passing along the likely results of a confrontation between Bruce Wayne and the 1 percent:

I’m only surprised the Bat doesn’t insist talk about how his war on crime and role as an innovator makes him a job creator.

I’m headed off on vacation, but I’ll be around, though at a reduced rate, over the next week and a half. I promise not to do what I did over Thanksgiving and get too sick to do anything but read The Diana Chronicles and drink tea!

And for those of you celebrating the second night of Hanukkah, have nerdy Jews riffing on Taio Cruz:

Because if there are two things this blog loves, it’s colorblocking and deeply cheesy pop.

In my column for The Loop 21, I revisited John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me 50 years after he published his account of going undercover as a black man in the South. I was particularly interested in the way contemporary critics treated the project, which has queasy elements of blackface read today, even if it produced interesting moral revelations:

That basic challenge for the project isn’t something that’s simply evident now. In 1964, Brendan Gill wrote a scathing review in the New Yorker of the movie based on Griffin’s novel, arguing:

He is…rather simple-minded, for though he intends to turn his findings into a series of sensational pieces in a national magazine, he considers his ‘passing’ less a journalistic stunt than a self-imposed spiritual ordeal, the harsh consequences of which, in middle age and with many years of reporting behind him, he surely had little reason to be astonished by…he makes considerable trouble for his new-found Negro friends in the course of a masquerade that necessarily takes greater advantage of them than it does of whites, and that, in the end, merely confirms what has been a fact accepted for generations, however little it may have been acted on: that life for the Negro in a small Southern town is made tolerable only by his extraordinary feats of accommodation, most of them continuously humiliating.

But Dan Wakefield, in a New York Times review of the book published on October 22, 1961, suggested that such understanding wasn’t nearly as widespread as the New Yorker would suggest four years later. He wrote:

The daily indignities of living as a Negro in America are not ‘news’ and are seldom written about. Dramatic outbreaks of racial conflict make the front-page stories, but in order to begin to understand them—and what lies behind them—it is necessary first to be aware of the routine torments of discrimination as they plague the everyday life of particular individuals.

If fifty years has convinced some people that putting on blackface is an innocuous act, it hasn’t lessened the desire to see what happens when white and black Americans switch roles. FX repeated Griffin’s experiment and fused it with reality television in 2006 in a six-part series, Black.White., that not only had a black and white family exchange races, but had them live together in a more sedate version of a Real World house.

It may be easier to be a tourist in someone else’s life today than it was during John Howard Griffin’s expedition, and there may still be uncomfortable truths to be gleaned from those experiences. But all these experiments assume that visiting another country—even if it’s your own—will actually teach you what it means to live there. Sometimes the greatest possible act of sympathy is to acknowledge that you can’t understand the entirety of someone else’s experiences.

There’s something interesting about the fact that we’ve gone from blackface as an act of sympathy with a despised class to blackface as act of cultural appropriation. But gaining cultural capital doesn’t mean you’ve beaten discrimination. And assigning cultural capital can be a form of treating people as a monolith rather than individuals.

My friend Rhome Anderson has an intriguing piece up on the Root about Common’s latest dilemma. The rapper, who’s struggled to reconcile his conscious and club-friendly sides, asked Maya Angelou to contribute a verse to a song on his new album. And unshockingly, the doyenne was apparently distressed by the use of the word “nigger” in the song, though she released a statement late yesterday explaining that “I will not be divided from Common. By anybody’s imagination, he is brilliant and even genius, maybe…But certainly smarter than us to know that he’s in process…It may even take two or three weeks, or a month. But I’m not going to be separated from him.” Rhome points out that absorbing Angelou into a semi-predictable declaration-of-greatnesss banger is part of a larger challenge:

Why can’t a reasonable individual enjoy both books and booty — or spiritual pursuits and pursuit of spirits — and channel them into his or her music? In a post-Outkast-and-Kanye West world, that tired question shouldn’t have to be asked anymore. But In the case of The Dreamer/The Believer, the integration isn’t working. Common doesn’t sound as if he’s sharing the naturally variant facets of who he is; he sounds like he’s trying too hard to convince the listener of their plausibility.

Earlier, Common regularly mixed raw couplets with his thoughtful ones and rarely struck an awkward note, at least not until a pair of unfortunate clunkers that he delivered on Kid Cudi’s 2009 “Make Her Say,” when he instructs a sexual conquest to “get up on this conscious d–k.” Today Common is struggling more acutely with topical tone deafness.

Now it’s true that no matter the genre, we tend to see artists in terms of their key concerns, whether it’s Cameron Crowe’s Manic Visionary Dream Boys, Roman Polanski’s obsession with claustrophobic spaces, Neal Stephenson’s tech geniuses, Neil Gaiman’s deities, Michael Chabon’s angsty Jews. But we also tend to appreciate artists who can successfully jump genres or obsessions. We like Joan Didion because she can do boardrooms and squats and murder scenes and her own husband’s death. If someone tries to make that leap and fails, it’s one thing, but if they can do it successfully, that would seem to be praiseworthy rather than an identity crisis.

I also wonder if the perceived kerfuffle between Angelou and Common has anything to do with shifting norms in hip-hop. I’m not any sort of expert on how this works behind the scenes, and would welcome input if anyone out there wants to offer it. But is the sense when Angelou does a guest verse, or Rihanna shows up to sing the hook on “All of the Lights” that they have input in the overall shape of the song? Or is it just a matter of the main rapper engineering rather than searching for the perfect sample? I’ve always been interested in whether the replacement of samples of women’s voices with women singing hooks specific to new songs gave women any more actual voice in the production of individual tracks.

Tim Carmody on NBC’s announcement that they’ll live-stream the Super Bowl for those unwilling or unable to gather around a truly giant flatscreen and risk stroke for the big day:

Last week, when the NFL announced renewed multimillion dollar broadcast deals with NBC, CBS and FOX, league commissioner Roger Goodell promised more digital innovation from the NFL and its TV partners. “The networks will continue their outstanding coverage of the NFL,” Goodell said, “while also helping to deliver more football to more fans using the best and most current technology.”

“We don’t want to limit ourselves to people not in front of the TV,” NBC Sports VP Rick Cordella said in a story for NBCSports.com. “The playoffs are appointment viewing,” Cordella added. “People schedule their day around it.”

If NBC’s Super Bowl experiment is a success, what other tentpole events could benefit from the same treatment? Besides other sports staples like the World Series, Wimbledon or the World Cup, you could also imagine popular interactive events like the American Idol finale or must-see award shows like the Oscars migrating to viewers’ iPads.

Remember two years ago, when ABC and Cablevision’s brinkmanship in a dispute over broadcast fees nearly kept the Oscars off the air for millions of New York-area cable customers? That entire dispute could have changed completely if ABC had simulcast the awards show online.

I still think that most viewers who actually consider these events appointment viewing will try to be in front of big screens. But if big events producers want their stuff streamed online (and I assume they’d be starting to build those demand into contracts, though I could be wrong), it’ll be a good spur for networks to build out their apps, websites, and capacity to handle significant simultaneous traffic. Not to mention, a great hook for audiences who might not have been watching online to get introduced to well-built, legal ways to get access to the content that they want.

We’ll resume on January 4 with Judgment at Nuremberg.

12 Angry Men is a wonderful movie, from the way it captures conversational rhythms (“That’s not bad, considering marmalade.”), to the careful way the jurors break down the case. But it’s a film that’s much more frightening than it is affirming. Lots of people have bad lawyers. Not everyone has an architect in white sweep into the jury room like an angel and do the work that defense lawyers and judges don’t. And it’s an illustration of how our assumptions about justice have become twisted, and how to reverse them a bit at a time.

It’s fascinating to watch Juror 8, a typically magnificent Henry Fonda, prosecute his case and to reverse his fellow jurors’ assumptions. When the jurors fist vote, a number of them don’t vote guilty until they see how the trend is going among their fellow jurors. They think it would be hard to be alone, but Juror 8 suggests that they’re doing the more difficult thing by consenting, telling them: “It’s not easy to raise my hand and send a boy off to die without talking about it first.” Then, there’s the assumption that doing due diligence as jurors is a form of sappiness rather than responsibility or sign of strength. “Why don’t you donate $5 to the cause and maybe it’ll make you feel better,” one of his impatient fellows grumbles at Juror 8, while another suggests that a jury trial is a privilege not to be expected: “He got a fair trial. What do you think that trial cost? He’s lucky to get it.” But eventually, Juror 11, a naturalized American, articulates why doing their jobs is a powerful thing. “That we are notified by mail to come down to this place to decide the guilt or innocence of a man we have never met before,” he tells his fellow deliberators. “This is one of the reasons we are strong. This is not a personal thing.” Gradually, almost all of them begin looking for clues, a critical turn in the case coming when the timid little man who goes along with the crowd notices the glasses marks on a fellow juror’s face that discredits the last piece of evidence standing.

And on a higher level, 12 Angry Men does a tremendously powerful job of making the desire to execute our fellow citizens, no matter their offenses, look perverse and unreliable rather than admirable, particularly in the climactic exchange between Juror 8 and Juror 3. “Are you his executioner?” Juror 8 asks the man who is most determined to convict no matter the evidence. “I’m one of them,” Juror 3 says, and when Juror 8 asks if he wants to pull the switch on the electric chair himself, insists, “For this kid, you bet I would.” Juror 8′s contempt is withering: “I feel sorry for you. What it must feel like to want to pull the switch. Ever since you walked into this room you’ve been acting like a self-appointed public avenger. You want this boy to die because you personally want it, not because of the facts. You’re a sadist.” I worry that a speech like this today would come across as the rankest liberal condescension. But it’s a critical point to make, that bloodlust isn’t admirable. Even if a dispassionate examination of the facts reveals someone to be guilty, there’s nothing attractive about wanting to kill them.

I have mixed feelings about the way the movie ultimately treats Juror 3. Humanizing him may make it easier for death penalty opponents to sympathize with him and his conversion. But not everyone who gets irrationally enthusiastic about the prospect of executions has a reason, however specious, for that sentiment. If it was just victims or parents of criminals who enthusiastically supported the death penalty, there would be a rationality to it. But it’s rooted in something broader in our culture, something less explicable, and less easy to contain. “Administration of justice is the firmest power of good,” is inscribed over the courthouse where the trial and deliberation take place. But it’s not necessarily clear that we believe it, much less that we’re willing to remove obstacles to that administration.