A nice year-end supercut, designed to be a comment on movies themselves:

There is something weird about the way the movie year is stacked, a dismal beginning in the early months, wild rides in the middle, and a rush of almost overwhelming quality and sometimes, bliss, towards the end. The nominations lists that have come out over the past couple of days have been disconcerting, but I do think they speak to the fact that we had a lot of truly enjoyable movies and television this year. Watching this, I’m struck by how much fun I had even at movies that I didn’t think were spectacular. There’s a fair bit of dreck out there. But a lot to be grateful for.

There’s something nice about the idea that Joe Simon’s big life included the opportunity this summer to see his most famous creation, Captain America, in a handsome big-screen adaptation with a forties heart and a forties sense of style, honor, and propriety. And as we remember Captain America’s creator today after his death at 98, it’s worth thinking of two other things.

First, we’re in the midst of a tough national conversation about copyright and how best to protect it, fueled by substantial corporate profits on both sides of the debate. Simon was a strong advocate for the rights of creators to retain copyright of their own work—he tried to get copyright on Captain America back (his partner Jack Kirby’s estate also fought Marvel for the rights in court and lost) and held on to the copyright to other characters he’d created subsequently. There’s no question that large studios need financial incentives to produce big-budget pictures. But if we’re talking about pure individual creativity, fans are probably going to be more compelled by calls like Louis C.K.’s to please pay for rather than steal his independently-distributed special (at least 100,000 of them have heeded it, netting him $200,000 in profit) than by a call to protect Dreamworks so it can keep making bank off robots fighting with each other.

Second, Simon and Kirby may have made their bones in superhero comics, but they also essentially founded the genre of romance comics with the launch of their Young Romance magazine. They may have moved into the field (and horror comics as well) during a downturn in the superhero market. But it’s a reminder that just because you draw tough dudes in tights doesn’t mean you can’t empathize with women, or that there isn’t money to be made telling stories for them. It’d be a shame if Simon’s legacy was only one star-spangled superhero when there’s so much more to celebrate about him.

On many of your recommendations after our discussion some time back about the comparative visibility of Christian-influenced fantasy in comparison to fantasy that draws its concepts from other faiths, I just finished The Lions of Al-Rassan. I quite enjoyed it, though I think it has perhaps a reverse George R. R. Martin problem—there are a lot of fascinating concepts there that feel wildly underdeveloped, like a Reconstructionist-sounding strain of Kindath theology, or the actual mechanisms of reconquest, and I wish there’d been more room to explore them. But as an exploration of the weaknesses of theocratic governance, it’s a convincing argument with all sorts of resonance today.

I’d say there’s a stupidity to what Almalik does to Ishak after performing the world’s most successful cesarean section on Zabira, the king’s chief concubine: “he had ordered the physician’s eyes put out and his tongue cut off at the root, that the forbidden sight of an Asharite woman’s nakedness be atoned for, that no man might ever heard a description of Zabira’s milk-white splendor from the Kindath doctor who had exposed her to his cold glance and his scalpel.” But the Kindath don’t have power in Al-Rassan such that they can squander it being appalled. And religion doesn’t only lead to individual bad acts of state: it guarantees a constant cycle of escalation, whether it’s Alvar’s mother getting hyped up to send him off to war by visiting Vasca’s shrine and reaffirming her sense that non-believers need to be annihilated, or providing an enormous list of slights that seem to need avenging:

At certain moments, Jehane thought, in the presence of men like Husari ibn Musa or young Alvar, or Rodrigo Belmonte, it was actually possible to imagine a future for this peninsula that left room for hope. Men and women could change, could cross boundaries, give and take, each from the other…given enough time, enough good will, intelligence. There was a world for the making in Esperana, in Al-Rassan, one world made of the two—or perhaps, if one were to dream, made of the three. Sun, stars and the moon. Then you remembered Orvilla, the Day of the Moat. You looked into the eyes of the Muwardis, or paused on a street corner and heard a wadji demanding death for the foul Kindath sorcerer ben Avren, who drank the blood of Asharite infants torn from their mothers’ arms.

It also makes people unpredictable and irrational. The governor of Fezana gets frustrated because “being deeply cautious by nature, couldn’t quite believe that Ramiro of Valledo would be so foolish enough to come and make war here, laying a siege so far form his own lands. Valledo was being paid parias from Fezana twice a year. Why would any rational man risk life and his kingdom’s stability to conquer a city that was already filling his coffers with gold.” Choices like this, or the destruction of Sorenica aren’t good for the peninsula’s economy and social stability, something its new rulers recognize when they ask the Kindath to resettle and rebuild their shattered city.
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Fortunately for my sanity and good cheer I consumed far more culture that I liked in 2011 than culture that raised my blood pressure. But there were some things that got me really irritated, whether because they’re noxious on their own or because they’re wasted opportunities. Here are ten of them:

1. Red Riding Hood is miserably conventional: The previews implied that Catherine Hardwicke’s Twilight follow-up twist on a fairy tale would have Red Riding hood be the wolf, a parable of the violence of female desire and a throwing off of restriction. Instead, it featured a totally traditional love triangle, some impressively terrible dialogue, and a torture elephant. Good lord.

2. Lady Gaga’s incredibly terrible immigration reform song “Americano”: I love me some Gaga, one of the few major stars with any sense of how to use her platform to advance political goals. But this song was a hot, condescending mess. If she wants to dip back into these waters, she might want to take notes from Emma’s Revolution’s “If I Give Your Name.”

3. True Blood goes racist, incoherent:: Alan Ball should know that just because you say your show isn’t a political metaphor doesn’t mean you’re not responsible for the ideas your show expresses. And he should be pretty embarrassed by the way his show handled rape, gender identity, and the South’s racial history this season.

4. Colombiana is totally incoherent: Man, I want to adore Zoe Saldana as a badass tiny action heroine, but this movie featured laughable dialogue, fueled the idea that Ponzi schemers are solely responsible for the recession, and had what is possibly the least plausible romance on screens this year.
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The bridge is yours.

-Get banned from Modern Warfare 3, come back in 13.5 years.

-Howard Stern will helpfully inform us who has talent.

-Hey NPR, antiheroes aren’t a sudden new trend.

-If you win the Millenium Falcon in a game of sabacc, I guess you get to give it as a Christmas present.

-Gary Busey deals Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign a critical blow.

-Woo Wild Flag!

Wesley Morris’s piece on the rise of nerd fashion in the NBA is fascinating, but I’m kind of surprised he doesn’t mention David Stern’s dress code until the third-to-last paragraph of the piece:

When David Stern imposed the league’s reductive dress code six years ago, all this role-playing, reinvention, and experimentation didn’t seem a likely outcome. We all feared Today’s Man. But the players — and the stylists — were being challenged to think creatively about dismantling Stern’s black-male stereotyping. The upside of all this intentionality is that these guys are trying stuff out to see what works. Which can be exciting. No sport has undergone such a radical shift of self-expression and self-understanding, wearing the clothes of both the boys it once mocked and the men it desires to be.

I’d actually be really curious to hear more about the stylists in these equations, the people who mediate between the league’s expectations of the men who are the key to their profits, and those men’s expectations of themselves. If the rise of Kanye West and nerd hip-hop hadn’t coincided with the ban, what might the prevailing riff on the code have looked like? What inspirations would they have turned to—and because fashion evolves, where might they turn next? Malcolm X wore himself some crisply-cut but patterned suits back in the day is all I’m saying.

Apparently, Natalie Portman is furious that Patty Jenkins is off Thor 2—and the studio is worried about keeping her happy in finding a replacement:

While the parties spun the Dec. 6 parting as an amicable split over creative differences, sources say Jenkins was fired without warning from a job that would have made her the first woman to direct a superhero tentpole. The news was out before anyone had told Portman, who had strongly urged Marvel to hire the director of 2003’s Monster (a film that won Charlize Theron her Oscar). According to sources, Portman had begun to question whether she wanted to continue acting at all right now — possibly for several years — because she wants to spend time with her baby boy, who was born last June. Portman was said to be re-engaged in Thor 2 because of Jenkins’ involvement and especially proud that she would have played a role in opening the door for a woman to direct such a film. The Oscar winner is contractually obligated to stay with the project and Marvel studio is now said to be working overtime to smooth over the situation by including her in discussions about whom to hire as a replacement.

I hope she uses that influence to push Marvel to hire a woman as Jenkins’ replacement. Kathryn Bigelow is probably too busy with her bin Laden project and other commitments, but if she could be tempted, it would be amazing. Maybe the entertainment universe could make it up to Mary Harron for the American Psycho remake by giving her a job? Failing that, Mimi Leder, who directed the final episode of HBO’s Luck?

I have to say, I also appreciate the fact that this piece doesn’t treat the studio insiders’ allegations that Jenkins was “indecisive” or that her decisions displayed a “a lack of overall clarity” as if they’re facts. “Exactly how Jenkins should have acted more decisively is unclear since no script was in place,” author Kim Masters points out. And she also reports that a Jenkins insider says that “Jenkins was so explicit about her vision for the film that she didn’t expect to be hired in the first place.” There’s a lot of call to not treat assertions as if they’re equal in political reporting when one side is misrepresenting facts. But we could use a lot more of it in entertainment journalism as well. In between this and Masters’ piece on the durability of the glass ceiling in Hollywood, color me impressed.

Kayak’s chief marketing officer, Robert Birge, writes a blog post entitled “We Handled This Poorly” intended to address the company’s decision not to continue advertising on All-American Muslim—and then proceeds to handle things poorly again. The chain of argument is genuinely bizarre:

First, our approach to advertising decisions is to choose advertising based on who watches it, not the political leaning of the program…The first thing I discovered was that TLC was not upfront with us about the nature of this show. As I said, it’s a worthy topic, but any reasonable person would know that this topic is a particular lightning rod. We believe TLC went out of their way to pick a fight on this, and they didn’t let us know their intentions. That’s not a business practice that generally gets repeat business from us. I also believe that it did this subject a grave disservice. Sadly, TLC is now enjoying the attention from this controversy…Lastly, I watched the first two episodes. Mostly, I just thought the show sucked. Based on our dealings with TLC and the simple assessment of the show, I decided we should put our money elsewhere. Apologies again.

I’m really curious as to what Birge thinks TLC promised him. Did he expect a show like 19 and Counting or Kate Plus 8, which presented the families involved straight but with the full expectation that the audience would judge them and treat them with almost anthropological detachment? Did he think it would be servicey, whether of the actual advice variety a la Extreme Couponing, or psychologically, like Freaky Eaters, Strange Sex, or Hoarding: Buried Alive? Or did he, as some of his language suggests, expect a show that endorsed the idea that Islam is in some way strange or other or lesser, rather than affirming that Muslims are very much part of the American community? There is no possible way to interpret All-American Muslim as a show that the network “went out of their way to pick a fight” with, unless you believe the idea that Muslims express their faith in different ways that are compatible with and even reinforce the values of American good citizenship is “a particular lightning rod.”

It really is amazing. There’s a fortune to be made in corporate crisis PR, it seems. Or from distributing large charts about the consuming habits and capacity of Muslim consumers—not to mention their allies of other faiths and no faith. I was on a conference call with a number of the cast members of the show yesterday afternoon, and it sounds like they’re holding up well. “The emails and support I’ve received from Jewish and Christian Americans has been absolutely overwhelming,” Dearborn deputy sheriff Mike Jafaar said. It’s a mystery to me why someone wouldn’t want their brand associated with that kind of classiness—and that kind of market power.