It looks gorgeous:

I think the main question for me will be how they handle the encounter between Gollum and Bilbo. Gollum’s origin story in the Lord of the Rings trilogy is perhaps the finest cinematic depiction of the Fall. Bilbo is less corrupted by the Ring, of course—it’s a gentler story. But it’s not an unimportant one for the fact that he has less far to tumble.

We’ve talked a lot about mental illness and Homeland here, and as a corollary (and possible pick-me-up), I wanted to recommend Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover‘s Gingerbread Girl.

The short graphic novel follows Annah Billups, a 26 year old who insists that she has a missing sister. And not just any sister: her Penfield homunculus, which she says her father removed from her brain during her parents divorce, grew into a full-sized sister for her, and who subsequently appeared, only to seem to be avoiding Annah in the city where she lives and loves. As a result of that surgery and loss, Annah claims to feel things less, both physically and emotionally, an excuse for her to behave less than admirably. She schedules two dates for a single night and goes out with the woman who shows up first, is sexually manipulative, and often generally inconsiderate. But she’s still charming and compelling: damage is not incompatible with charisma, and in fact, the two can go together quite handily.

So is Annah insane? It’s never clarified: a Penfield homunculus is, of course, a way of illustrating brain functions rather than a real thing. But the story of her missing sister Annah has a certain magical quality to it that’s a lovely representation of the divorce from self. Annah wants to feel normal and whole again, but Ginger doesn’t want to see her, she dashes around corners and runs out of stores. And while Homeland gives us a Cassandra rendered explicable and admirable to us even as she’s stigmatized by the people around her on-screen, Gingerbread Girl is told significantly from the perspective of the people Annah hurts and loves, from the people (and in several cases animals) she encounters along the way, who are more inclined to be charitable with her than we might be.

It’s also a good way of illustrating the challenges of treatment. It’s one thing to massively reset your brain with ECT therapy. It’s another to have a problem that’s magical rather than scientific. We’re making advances in brain science, but we’re still not far enough along for true cures to depression and dementia, as in Rise of the Planet of the Apes to seem like the provenance of fantasy or science fiction.

I really hope all of the people who complained vociferously about Emily Browning’s cover of “Sweet Dreams” in Sucker-Punch are happy now, because this one is so much worse:

There is no way the ancient Greeks were this freakin’ tacky.

And I know I’m a total apologist for this movie, but really, Browning’s cover:

Is to Sucker-Punch what Carey Mulligan’s “New York, New York” cover is to Shame: self-indulgent, manipulative, and affecting anyway:

None of them, of course, add up to anything like Karen O and Trent Reznor’s “Immigrant Song,” cover, though I kind of wish they’d found a way to set it up so that’s what Lisbeth Salander does at karaoke or something:

Business Insider has pretty much the best headline announcing this news: “Some People Who Don’t Know Louis CK’s Material Very Well Just Booked Him for the Congressional Correspondents Dinner.” I like C.K. in part because his jokes are psychological, and often oriented towards making people recognize their common experiences and values. But it’s true that they aren’t the kind of zippy political one-liners that someone like Stephen Colbert can toss off all day. So here are five things that C.K. should do when he comes to Washington:

1. Get at the audience’s failure to ask the important questions of the day, like whether Donald Rumsfeld is a lizard from outer space who eats human flesh:

2. Washington is ridiculously full of powerful white people. Remind them how awesome their lives are — and that they aren’t necessarily responsible for that awesomeness:

3. Point out a fundamental an uncomfortable truth: no matter how tough reporters are, and no matter what their political leanings are, people get star-struck by proximity to the president (starts at 3:15):

4. If you take one policy position, go hard on evolution and its deniers. Please:

5. Remember: your Sarah Palin jokes are not your funniest (or best) work of the past couple of years:

Whoever is choosing the psych-up movies for the House Republican caucus is…not having a good year. First, the caucus used a speech by Ben Affleck’s bank robber character in The Town to rally enthusiasm for House Speaker John Boehner’s debt-ceiling plan, a spectacle that ended with Rep. Allen West (who has his own questionable taste in movies) to volunteer to drive the getaway car. Now they’re taking inspiration from Braveheart, which of course ends with its hero getting tortured and beheaded, perhaps a sign of psychological anxiety about their approval ratings?

What’s baffling about this is why the caucus doesn’t turn to the most anodyne, psychologically unmuddled psych-up genre, the sports movie? The speeches are martial without glorying in actual violence, a parallel way to set up climactic conflicts, and leave an out to feel good about yourself even if you lose:

It’s one thing to scapegoat cultural elites. It’s another to stumble into super-awkward cultural allusion after super-awkward cultural allusion. If you care about message discipline, sports movies are totally safe and reliable, and perhaps most importantly, Heartland-appropriate.

When I started this blog two and a half years ago, it was an experiment, a chance for me to see if I wanted to write about culture full-time, and an attempt to see if political, mostly cheerful, sometimes deeply cranky culture blog could find a home in the awesome, experimental wilderness that is online criticism. It turns out that I did, and that it could. And I’m deeply grateful that ThinkProgress and the Center for American Progress decided to take me on, and to make a serious investment in the idea that culture plays a critical role in shaping our politics and our collective character.

Being here has meant a lot of things to me. It’s a chance to write about the things I love full-time, and thanks to the wisdom of my editors here and to the standards you all hold me to, I’ve learned a tremendous amount. It means I get to take a seat on stages and argue that superheroes are the key to the American idea, ask Chris Dodd if he thinks piracy is a customer service problem, and talk about what the 99 Percent movement can learn from 2 Broke Girls. It’s given me a chance to call out the shame of Joe Paterno and the cowardice of Lowe’s and Kayak. And it’s let me talk, at great length, about banking, governance, and A Song of Ice and Fire.

A lot of what makes it possible for me to do the kind of criticism I do is the fact that I’m at a non-profit. But it’s not easy, or cheap, to create something like ThinkProgress. If you’ve enjoyed my writing, or if you’ve benefited from anything ThinkProgress does throughout the year, please consider supporting our work by making a donation. We’re headed into an election year where many of my colleagues will be hitting the road to cover a critically important presidential campaign, and during which I’ll also be expanding my reporting outside of Washington, D.C. to bring you more news, interviews, and early looks at what’s next in movies, television, video games, books, museums and theater. $5 gets us almost two gallons of gas in Iowa, and goes far towards Hollywood economics textbooks.

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The bridge is yours.

-The Force is growing stronger. Particularly in the Czech Republic.

-Anti-heroine recommendations from the great Heather Havrilesky.

-James Franco, jerk.

-Piracy turns out to be irresistible even to the people who fight it, sometimes.

-Are these the most underrated actors on television?

There’s been a lot of discussion prompted by Good Men Project founder Tom Matlack’s recent essay, in which he suggests that women want men to be more like them, and that manliness is a good thing. I’ll leave Amanda Marcotte to take on some of the larger assumptions in this piece (and to mount a defense as Matlack appears to denounce feminists and insist attacks on him are unfair because he’s a simple oral historian, or something), because I want to address this one: “So are dudes as a gender really assholes? If you look around in the press, on TV, and in popular culture you certainly might conclude that.” I’ve written in the past about some of the best shows about masculinity on television. Sure, it’s true — there are men who behave badly on television, but a lot of women who do same. But I also think that there are a lot of great manly male characters in pop culture right now. Among them:

1. With a bullet. Or with U.S. Army issued mustache trimmers. Parks and Recreation‘s Ron Swanson: Ron Swanson eats steak, drinks whiskey, smokes cigars, venerates John Wayne, reads Patrick O’Brian, hunts, camps, lays wreathes, lights torches, and teaches fourth-graders the importance of libertarianism. He also mentors women, loves mini-horses, shows up with hangover cures, self-sacrifices for the greater good, and dances with a fascinator on when he’s drunk. And he makes the point that none of these things are remotely inconsistent.

2. Because sometimes mentoring means you call the CIA on your mentee. And sometimes it means you show up with chicken soup. Homeland‘s Saul Berenson: Dude has one of the most serious beards on television. He blackmails the vice president of the United States in the name of justice. He talks around homegrown terrorists into giving up critically useful information. He responds to improper advances from his desperate mentee in an entirely proper fashion. He tries to woo back his estranged wife when she announces she’s leaving him to his workaholic tendencies, but ultimately respects her decision to go. Saul’s personal and professional courage are admirable. I’m going to be really sad if he turns out to be a mole.

3. Because sometimes being a good father means letting your daughter get mentored by Oprah. Up All Night‘s Kevin: Jason Lee’s had a bit of a wacky streak these past couple of years, but it’s turns out he’s exactly what this freshman comedy needed. As a contractor, he’s a nice counterbalance to the glitzy world new girlfriend Ava spends most of her time in without being an exploitable working-class fling. He spends Christmas with his ex-wife to create a smooth transition for his daughter. And he trusts and respects that Ava will find her way to a relationship with his daughter—and in expecting her to behave like a normal human, or as close as she’s capable of getting, helps her level up.

4. Cable executive. Tuxedo-wearer. Single father. 30 Rock‘s Jack Donaghy: Now, let’s be clear. Jack Donaghy has his flaws: a pathological hatred for his (admittedly dotty) mother, a disturbing level of comfort with turning children permanently orange, and a willingness to fake Dominican birth certificates to bolster Tracy Jordan’s struggling baseball team. But he loves smart women, whether he’s marrying first wife Bianca or talented cable-talker Avery Jessup or mentoring Liz Lemon; he’ll do anything for his father, include arranging a one-beneficiary all-star charity concert; and even if baby Libby is Canadian, you know that man will take all the care of her in the world.

5. The mismatched socks. The mad marksmanship skills. The naked omelet-making. Bones‘ Seeley Booth: I know Bones drives a lot of you crazy. But in the post-Bush years, and in this particular moment after Christopher Hitchens’ death, there’s something really valuable about throwing down a marker and declaring that while it may be manly to be able to use force, it’s morally correct to abhor killing even if you’re good at it. And even though David Boreanaz makes it look effortless, the character of Booth is all about the fact that manhood — whether in the form of resisting addiction, caring for a wayward brother, respecting and loving a strong but difficult woman, and holding on to your faith — is hard work. But it’s worth doing.

As many people have noted, there’s something fitting about the fact that Vaclav Havel, the playwright who became a liberator, and Kim Jong-Il, the tyrant who used his power to force people to produce movies for and with him, died on the same day. Kim Jong-Il’s movie mania may seem like just another hokey obsession and claim to greatness in a life full of them. And while one of the characteristics of repressive governments is that they crack down on free speech and on artists who produce “subversive” works, he’s hardly the only dictator to seek validation through art he produced himself or through relationships with artists.

There’s Hitler’s collaboration with Leni Reifenstahl on Triumph of the Will, of course — he collaborated and starred in the movie, and was an executive producer. Who needs the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and mawkish watercolors when you can participate in the creation of a groundbreaking work of cinema? Stalin, too, dabbled in movies, keeping an eye on the production of Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible movies. He also made socialist realism the official artistic movement of the Soviet State with a declaration entitled “On the Reconstruction of Literary and Art Organizations” in 1932. Saddam Hussein wrote cheesy historical romance novels that were meant to be metaphors for his own reign. Ferdinand Marcos hired actress Dovie Beams to play his love interest in a movie about his war exploits, had an affair with her that produced a sex tape scandal (which became an excuse to crack down on his political opposition). Before he ruled Egypt, Hosni Mubarak apparently cameoed in an Egyptian movie, Farewell at Dawn. A critical point in Juan Peron’s rise to power in Argentina was the fundraising efforts he lead in relief of the San Juan earthquake, which happened in collaboration with the country’s creative industry.

Cracking down on artists, and treating their speech as if it functions in the same way as other political speech is a first-level realization for tyrants. If you truly acknowledge and appreciate the particular power art has, of course you want to exploit it to your own ends. And if you’re creating a cult of personality or a cult of the state, it makes sense that you want your people to believe that joy and uplift emanates from the Leader and from the state. This is a reason that dictatorial art is bad, or sentimental: because it’s premised on an idea that isn’t true, that isn’t even really plausible.

Making movies about your own greatness, your historical roots, your role in upholding distinctly Filipino values, doesn’t actually make it so. Providing temporary distractions from the miseries you cause your people doesn’t ameliorate those miseries, or cause them not to matter. Vaclav Havel’s art worked in the opposite direction, becoming a crucible for refining the ideas and principles that informed his dissent, and later his governance. Unsurprisingly, truth makes for more humane politics, and for better art.