Bridesmaids succeeded because it took a simple story that a lot of women have experienced — over the course of planning and executing a friend’s wedding, two women grapple with their different priorities and stages in life — and told it well and with a great deal of warmth, pain, and humor. And it told that story to completion. We don’t need a sequel to it because the story is over. Which is why it’s heartening first to hear that Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo are smart enough to have decided that they don’t want to do a sequel, and depressing to hear that Universal might bull ahead without them anyway.

The Hollywood Reporter story that breaks that news contains two interesting, and I think indicative, tidbits. First, that the cast’s bonuses, which while more than I make in a year, were relatively stingy compared to the overall financial success of the movie. And second, that Wiig has a bunch of small, smart projects lined up. Both of those things seem to me to say something about the limited things Bridesmaids will be able to change in Hollywood. One of the reasons Bridesmaids impressed me so much was how deep the cast was: even the characters who got the least screen time had funny, sharp moments and the actresses nailed them. I’d be curious to know what the actors on The Hangover movies got as bonuses, but I’d be willing to bet that they’re more than $100,000, and this is an example of how the Hollywood pay gap is alive and well. If women making successful movies doesn’t get them paid like men, it’s not clear what will.

Second, I think there’s something feminist in Wiig’s decision to walk away from a potential franchise for which she was likely offered way more than her bonus. Bridesmaids would lose, just as Sex and the City and Nancy Meyers’ movies are to a certain extent a loss, if the lesson that studio executives take away from it is that this is the girl movie, or the kind of girl movie, they’ll make. We don’t need 47 Sex and the City movies. We don’t need 50 movies where the jokes is that Melissa McCarthy is fat and crude and sexually aggressive in exactly the same way. What we need is for Kristen Wiig to go off and become the kind of star who can turn a bunch of different movies into hits. And we need the same thing for Melissa McCarthy and Maya Rudolph and Alison Brie and a bunch of other insanely talented, gorgeous women. Franchises are a good thing, they provide reliable paychecks to working actors, but they’re also a way of sticking people in silos.

I’m headed to California tomorrow, where I’ll be covering the Television Critics Association press tour until January 15, so if you have questions for any of the networks, holler (in relation to Work It, “Why, for the love of God?” is an acceptable submission). If you’re local, and want to meet up while I’m in town, holler in comments and we’ll try to figure something out for one of my slower days.

Posting will continue apace, although likely slightly time-shifted, with some help next week from Tyler Lewis and Kate Cox, who have kindly agreed to come back and hang out with us for a while. And if I’m a little slow to answer email, that’s why. I promise I won’t get seduced by beaches and In-N-Out burgers and fail to come home.

Thank goodness ABC’s humiliating Work It premiered to ratings worse than the now-canceled show it replaced. It still doesn’t restore my faith in humanity that the so-called comedy beat Parenthood, but I’m narrowly relieved that it’s not an instant hit. Work It made me sadder than anything I’ve watched in a long time, sad enough that it’s proved difficult for me to muster up the same level of outrage as some of my colleagues.

It makes me sad that anyone would feel so vulnerable that they’d start darkly speculating bars, as a friend of main characters Lee and Angel, that “It’s not a recession, it’s a mancession. Women are taking over the workforce. Soon, they’ll start getting rid of men. They’ll just keep a few of us around as sex slaves…Not the kind of sex you like, Angel. Just kissing, and cuddling, and listening.” It’s not just that the mancession has been manifestly debunked, and men are doing better in the recovery of women. It’s the idea that people feel that lost and angry, that the idea that for women to succeed men have to lose, and lose badly, still has currency. It makes me sad to think that there are women anywhere who are waiting for men to buy them things but are doing for self because “none of them have any money.” It makes me sad to think that men and women know so little about each other that women find car maintenance mysterious and men think that the essence of femininity is nibbling on lettuce. And while I don’t normally like to complain about television networks being out of touch, because it’s not like market research doesn’t exist, it makes me profoundly sad that anyone, anywhere, would look at this show and think that audiences would see themselves in it.

Work It‘s approach to revelation via gender-switching is particularly grating given that Up All Night is doing the same thing, with vastly more tenderness and perceptiveness. It’s particularly ugly to see Lee pretend to have been sexually harassed at his old job, telling his new potential boss at the pharmaceutical sales company where he goes to work that “The guys were always sassing me, or patting my fanny, or ogling my teats.” In pretending to understand female experience, he’s demonstrating his ignorance of it in a way that minimizes sexual harassment, making it cutesy and adorable. The same thing happens when he goes to the taco shop where Angel works to try to convince him to join the masquerade. His complaint that “My eyes are up here” is glib, rather than revealing new understanding of how uncomfortable it can be to be ogled.
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One of the arguments that Stop Online Piracy Act advocates have made fairly repeatedly is that consumers don’t know which downloads are legitimate and which aren’t, especially when sites offering material outside of legal channels charge fees. On an instinctive level, I’ve gone back and forth about how I’ve felt about that claim. There’s just such a difference between the production values on legitimate outlets like Hulu and Amazon and something like, say, EZTVStream, which just looks terrible and fake, that it’s hard for me to believe someone would fall for it. But given the level of knowledge about how the internet works in, say, Congress, there’s probably some truth to the idea that innocent people are lead astray.

There’s some interesting data out from the American Academy about file-sharing practices that might provide a useful jumping-off point for further digging in to this kind of argument, and separating out intentional and accidental piracy. Apparently, about 15 percent of people who use file-sharing software hide their IP addresses while they’re doing it (25 percent of sharers between 18 and 24, and 5 percent of sharers older than 44), which suggests they’re aware they’re doing something that is not legal. TorrentFreak reports that an IP address scrambler has seen its business go up recently, and attributes that growth to the introduction of and debate over SOPA. Those people are probably not ending up the wrong place by mistake, and SOPA may harden their stance and practices — and it’s bad news for anti-piracy advocates that younger folks are hiding their IP addresses more than their older counterparts. That generational trend is in the wrong direction.

So it’s probably worth figuring out in granular detail what’s happening with that other 85 percent of filesharers and what makes them change their behavior. Do they stop going to filesharing sites when they learn about services like Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime? Do they stop going to sites that offer pirated material when they’re taught to recognize them? The creative industry is going to need two strategies, one for people who are accessing their product outside of legal channels on purpose, and one for people who are doing it by accident or out of ignorance.

I don’t really think that the Linda Lovelace biopic starring Amanda Seyfriend (there are several, one has to keep track) is going to do what The Playboy Club should have and didn’t do: capture the benefits and pitfalls that the sexual revolution offered women, including the freedom to have more sex without fear of pregnancy, and the corresponding expectation that they’d be more sexually available. But I do think it sounds like it might argue the inverse of The Playboy Club‘s silly assertion that the show was going to be about women’s empowerment, and take a hard line against pornography. My guess is based mostly on the fact that the project’s cast Demi Moore to play Gloria Steinem, suggesting her 1980 Ms. Magazine piece “The Real Linda Lovelace” will be some sort of frame device for the movie.

I don’t really think that either of these perspectives really captures the tension of the period. Just because Linda Lovelace was coerced into performing in pornographic films, or because Chuck Traynor coached her on her oral sex skills doesn’t mean no woman can ever find fulfillment in the adult industry or enjoy performing oral sex. Just because the Playboy Club wasn’t a model employer doesn’t mean that no woman ever found independence by working there. There’s no question that a pornografied culture has made headway in America, but it speaks to the success of feminism that it’s made those advances by wrapping itself in the mantle of women’s liberation and independence. Neither a purely anti-porn pitch, nor a pitch that women will be most happy by making themselves sexually available and fine-tuned to men has proven entirely successful. What women wanted was more subtle and complex than any one very successful pornographic movie then, and it remains as tricky and elusive now.

The bridge is yours.

-Game of Thrones: ruining America’s youth!

-DC Comics’ sexist relaunch totally worked.

-Pretty sure I’m responsible for a ridiculous amount of the 2 billion hours of content streamed by Netflix users in the fourth quarter of 2011.

-This is not a hard call: Fox should cancel Terra Nova.

-A Portlandia guide to television hipsters.

Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol begins with the destruction of the Kremlin. But there really is no better cinematic encapsulation of the post-Cold War era than a scene that comes towards the end of the movie, when a middle-aged Russian and a middle-aged American batter each other with increasing slowness around a hypermodern Indian parking garage. We still have a lot of money. We still have a lot of very dangerous toys. In this semi-unipolar world, the U.S. may be number one for the moment, but that doesn’t mean we’re the future. It’s a pattern that persists throughout the movie: the details of plot and the means by which it’s resolved may be utterly ludicrous, but they’re rooted in itchy geopolitical truths.

Even for someone who believes firmly in interrogating the trivial, the actual details of the plot by a nuclear megalomaniac to bring about world peace through the shock of a nuclear attack are rather silly (for one thing, he doesn’t think blowing up much of the Kremlin might do it?). But there’s enough enjoyment to be gained from just going with it that it’s worth not bogging yourself down in the details. And it gets a larger point correct: in a post-Cold War, the risk may not be that superpowers will go to war on their own, but that non-state actors can cause a great deal of trouble by aggravating them. The more villains we get like Kurt Hendricks, the freelance scientist and nuclear terrorist in this movie, or Le Chiffre, the terrorist financier in Casino Royale, the closer our movies will be to understanding the new world order. It’s not a matter of who’s got the launch codes now: it’s who can goad that person into making poor use of them.

In that vein, I thought the movie was wise to pull in industry actors as well as state ones. Anil Kapoor’s Indian media mogul is on screen for all too little time — some day his mugging may be irritating, but we have not yet reached that moment. But as access to media, to energy, to food, to water, to resources of all kinds become more critical, and given the ongoing role of markets in guaranteeing or undermining the stability of regimes, economic actors should be the supervillains of today and tomorrow. The Bond movies, until Casino Royale, tended to go rather over the top, focusing on bushy eyebrows and arcane plots rather than the actual drama of business, but there’s a lot of room to do better.

And while we’re focusing on the individual, is there a more appealing action star than Simon Pegg working right now? That might seem an odd question to ask about an actor whose resume includes playing a hideously obnoxious journalist and a star turn in a movie called Run, Fatboy, Run, and who often appears in action movies as a geek pressganged into a situation above his pay grade. But he’s a marvelous audience surrogate, alive to the true wonder of any situation. As Scotty in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek reboot, he declared of the Enterprise, “I like this ship! You know, it’s exciting!” By the end of Hot Fuzz, he’s got sunglasses, Point Break moves, and has finally nailed the bad jokes his office specializes in. And in Mission Impossible 4, he carries forth one of the franchise’s most noble traditions, asking at one point in the leadup to an action setpiece in a Dubai hotel, “Are you sure I shouldn’t wear a mask? Because I’m not exactly Omar Sharif. I’ll play it French.” It’s all well and good for Tom Cruise to slug it out to the point of insensibility with the Russians, but gosh, someone ought to enjoy these international jaunts, sharp suits, and snazzy toys.

And it’s nice that Jeremy Renner shares some of that self-aware humor without winking too broadly at the audience. “Next time,” he grumbles after a hairy jaunt into a satellite room, “I get to seduce the rich guy.” A new world needs new spies, willing to do new things.

Megan McArdle shares a lament with some of us here about Homeland‘s errors in Washington, D.C. geography:

The anomalies started small. A marine sergeant and his young wife seemed to be living in a fairly sizeable ranch house on a large lot located fairly close to Washington, a configuration that I am not sure exists–but which I am really quite sure is not available on at E-6 pay grades. A terror suspect was described by a CIA officer as living in “Truxton Circle”, a neighborhood which happens to be just southwest of ours. However, the appellation is a new one, and since both Truxton Circle and my own beloved Eckington are both on the outer frontier of gentrification, I can testify from personal experience that it’s highly unlikely that a CIA officer who lives in Virginia would be able to name the neighborhood; if he called it anything, it would far more likely be something like “way the fuck over on New York Avenue”. Furthermore, if he did somehow manage to apprehend that a suspect’s address was in “Truxton Circle”, anyone he reported this to would respond with a puzzled stare. Right now, the area is known less by its name than by its notorious housing projects.

We will not even ask why someone who is supposed to be teaching at one of our fine local universities–all of which are located west of 20th street NW–would be living miles away in an area that is at least an hour from work via public transportation.

This is true in all cities, but there’s an extent to which geography is destiny. And failing to understand the geography of Washington, D.C. is to fail to understand how power in the city works. Megan’s right, of course, that Farragut Square is fairly small, and that people don’t necessarily linger there. But it also gets very busy during lunchtime, particularly during the summer when it’s surrounded by lunch trucks, and it’s close to the Old Executive Office Building, which means that some of the people who go there during lunch are reasonably important. That, combined with the closeness of the space, and its proximity to two major Metro stations, means that a targeted, powerful attack there could be even more devastating than the one depicted in the show.

More broadly, not getting that the Brodys might not be able to afford the house that they have means that the show doesn’t entirely get how running for office and getting plugged into Washington’s power elite would change the family’s lives. Not knowing, for example, as the remake of State of Play didn’t, that Georgetown doesn’t have the Metro means you don’t know what it means for a young congressional aide to live there, to pay the extra rent, to have a car or schlep on the bus. Not getting the shifting dynamic of neighborhoods, the social realignment of the city, is to be stuck telling stories about the Washington that was, and may yet be. Not to understand that people in Washington are powerful but not as wealthy as the most powerful people in New York or Los Angeles is not to understand the particularities of the elite here — it’s not that there aren’t members of the 1 percent, lobbyists make bank, but proximity is more important than acquisition, and certainly more important than style. Motivations matter. And geography can be a measure of what someone — or a city — thinks counts.

I’ve watched bunches of Republican presidential primary debates this season, but there was still something shocking about watching Michele Bachmann hunker down yet again and complain that Barack Obama’s policies are socialist. As I tweeted, watching her, words have meaning. Socialism and communism are real, definable things with clear boundaries and significances. They’re not words to be used lightly, if you care about having meaningful debates. And attempts to obscure meaning by distorting language, and attempts to make meaningful debate impossible should be things we get angry about. They should be disqualifying because they’re a means of facilitating deep and profound dishonesty. Michele Bachmann should be considered manifestly unqualified for the presidency of the United States because she has almost no qualifications for the position and no serious policy positions. But she should also be disqualified from serious consideration because she uses language in a way that is fundamentally dishonest and is an anathema to serious and difficult conversations about our country’s future.

Perhaps as a writer I am unusually prone to vexation on the subject of language. And maybe we collectively accept that our language is blurred in this way, and that the correct response to it is to pull out jokes from The Princess Bride about things not meaning what people think they mean. George Orwell pointed out that it’s always been a little square to talk about reclaiming language for clarity and honesty: “It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.” But I don’t believe culture is entirely a natural growth, and as a subset of that, I don’t believe political rhetoric and writing are either.

Tweeter Terry McMahon suggested that it would be nice if people — and I think this is true for rival candidates, reporters, and the public — started asking questions like what “socialist” means. If you’re going to use a word for political gain, if you’re going to use it as a weapon, you should be held responsible for what it means and your reasoning for using it.