This is a standard, but silly, argument from Big Hollywood about how the entertainment industry hates the troops:

But patriotism doesn’t sell, right? If it did, Hollywood would be inundating movie theaters with pro-troop films and other tales of American soldiers in heroic action.
“Red Tails” also slices into another depressing Hollywood meme…An even better patriotism test comes next month when “Act of Valor,” a film which boldly toasts American soldiers as heroes, hits theaters. A “Valor” take down of the film competition may open the floodgates for more pro-troop features, assuming the appropriate bean counters are taking notes. Or, will Hollywood executives ignore the numbers and retreat to projects depicting U.S. soldiers in unflattering light? Is there a better chance we’ll see a new installment of “In the Valley of Elah” or “Redacted,” films showing the darker side of the modern soldier, than a “Red Tails” sequel?

I don’t want to spend time explaining why patriotism and unqualified support for the members and actions of the armed forces no matter what they do aren’t the same thing, because I think it’s obvious to everyone here and everyone reasonable why that’s the case. But I think there’s something fundamentally silly about the idea that Hollywood is unaware of the fact that patriotism sells.

In the last 10 years, the following movies with patriotic themes were among the top-10 grossing movies of the year. Last year, one of the top-selling superheroes of the year was Captain America, up there with Pixar’s most middle-American offering, Cars 2. In 2010, Iron Man 2 kept stumbling drunkenly towards public service. 2009 was ruled by Michael Bay’s military Valentine, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, along with the paen to charity and football as mainstreaming experiences, The Blind Side. In 2008, Tony Stark discovered service of country instead of himself in Iron Man. In 2007, Spider-Man 3, the latest installment about the webslinger who became a representative of post-9/11 New York, topped the box office list; the uber-pro-military franchise Transformers made its bow; Jason Bourne kept the idea of an intelligence community with integrity alive in The Bourne Ultimatum; and Will Smith saved human society in I Am Legend. The previous year, Clark Kent resurfaced to keep an eye on Metropolis in Superman Returns, and Hollywood affirmed a kinder, gentler American consumerism in Talladega Nights. 2005 had less obvious themes, though America obviously beats the Martians in War of the Worlds. 2004 reinforced Spider-Man’s ties to New York in that incredible subway scene. 2002 had Spider-Man topping the charts again, a celebration of the immigrant experience in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and more Americans v. the Aliens in Men in Black 2. 2001 was the last year a World War II movie cleaned up at the box office, but no one could accuse Pearl Harbor of being anything less than a big, old-fashioned patriotic weepie.

Even by the standards of military-worshipping conservatism, Hollywood is deeply committed to making movies that both reflect and make bank off that particular strand of patriotism. And if you’re thoughtful enough to have a broader understanding of love and country, there’s even more out there for you.

It may not be the first time French fashion magazines have shown some bizarre racial attitudes — anyone remember the time Carine Roitfeld had Lara Stone do an editorial in blackface for French Vogue? But French Elle apparently decided it wasn’t totally over the line to publish a piece (since pulled) about how Michelle Obama has finally, at long last, turned black women into French-acceptable style icons. In the name of educating them, here are 10 black women with incredible high style, who were around long before FLOTUS made the national scene, elevating everyone from Jason Wu to White House Black Market:

1. Josephine Baker: The toast of Paris, Baker may have been more famous for the clothes she didn’t wear during some of her most famous performances, but she wore designer clothes off-stage, popularized a hairstyle and a hat style, and did it all while aiding the French resistance and aiding 12 adoptive children.

2. Billie Holiday: The flowers in her hair. The big necklaces and earrings. The comfort with her curves.

3. Coretta Scott King: In the midst of the civil rights movement, Mrs. King and her husband brought classic style to the fight for justice, including fashionable hats, mixed textures in the fabrics of her clothing, flower-shaped stud earrings, and classic silhouettes. One of the reasons French Elle’s article is so stupid is that it ignores the role that style’s played in the fight against racism in an attempt to assert dignity and poise in the face of white hate.

4. Diana Ross: She’s rocked everything from the conservative fashions of early Motown to an Afro. And while she’s worn designers ranging from Halston to Bob Mackie, Ross’s interest in fashion was initially professional. She’d wanted to be a designer, but ended up helping establish international trends instead.

5. Kathleen Cleaver: The former Black Panther was one of the radical women who helped popularize the Afro, and with her gorgeous earrings and signature sunglasses, she stood for the idea that you could be involved in the struggle for black liberation without playing by conservative and respectable style rules.

6. Alek Wek and Iman: Elle appears to have missed the fact that black women don’t just buy fashionable clothes, they represent the way they should be worn to the whole world. Both Wek and Iman were born in Africa and have become international style icons, walking for and inspiring everyone from Alexander McQueen to Yves Saint Laurent — and both do enormous amounts of charity work.

7. Condoleezza Rice: No matter how you feel about her politics or her tenure as National Security Adviser and Secretary of State, Rice wore great jackets, killer boots, and turned pearls into an assertion of power rather than a representation of fustiness. And she could pose in a gown at the piano she loves to play, too.

8. Beyonce and Solange Knowles: High fashion and hipster queen, the Knowles sisters have very different senses of styles that compliment their music and personalities. Elle should know that black women aren’t just confined to street fashion, to one label, or to one set of trends.

I’m pretty excited about the new initiative that’s a partnership between the Sundance Institute and Women in Film to provide more data on the experiences of women in film and television. I think it’s important, though, that we get away from simply reporting the number of movies and television shows that are written, created, directed, or executive produced by women, and to try to get some of these kinds of other numbers:

1. Salaries for women in the industry. One of the easiest ways to keep women from advocating for salary and funding parity in any industry is to keep them ignorant about what they make relative to each other, and relative to men. If women in entertainment were willing to disclose what they make on their projects, they could make clear how much Hollywood values women, and how compensation goes up and down relative to the success of prior projects in comparison to men. That kind of data could be the basis not just for advocacy, but for legal action.

2. Financing for projects lead by women. It would be interesting and important to see what kind of budgets women and men get relative to each other when they’re working on comparable projects and bringing comparable experience to the table. I’d also be curious to know if projects created and produced by women end up having to rely more on promotional placement, a sign of how the industry views female consumers, and the amount it’s willing to invest in women’s projects.

3. Economic performance on projects created and produced by women. It would be good to know not just box office but consistent ratings data and ad rates for women’s projects. We need to debunk the idea that women can’t bring in big money for the industry, whether it’s at the box office or with advertisers. It would also be useful to know if television networks undervalue products created by women when they take them to advertisers.

At this point, we know that women are hugely disadvantaged in both the film and television industries. And we know that the gains women make don’t persist from year to year, or from generation to generation, and that Hollywood is good at finding and making space for female tokens. We need numbers beyond representation to make the case about causes, and to demonstrate trends in mindset. Otherwise, we’ll never know what substantive barriers we need to overcome, other than the all-too-vague assumption that women can’t write/direct/produce good, in order to really make a difference. Longitudinal data is easier to embarrass people with than general allegations of persistent sexism.

Over at the Technology Liberation Front, Ryan Radia has an eminently sensible post looking at the different kinds of people who circumvent copyright laws to download content, and explains why he thinks it make sense to focus on payment processing while acknowledging that we’ll never get to piracy zero:

The virtue of a “follow the money” approach to rogue websites is that it’s likely to curb piracy by users like Pirate #2, who are already willing and able to pay for legitimate content. Users who have a credit card and use it to pay for infringing content — or for services that facilitate access to infringing content — presumably have at least some disposable income to spend on expressive works. While rogue websites legislation is likely to leave many, if not most, websites that facilitate piracy unaffected, disabling U.S. payment services from doing business with a handful of especially popular offshore piracy sites will frustrate users. Many of these users will simply seek out alternatives, but some users will give up and “go legitimate.” By driving piracy further underground, such a law might cause users like Pirate #1 to spend more of their relatively worthless time seeking out infringing content. But this is the Internet we’re talking about; the determined user will find what he seeks, no matter the roadblocks lawmakers throw up.

The strongest argument against piracy is that the people downloading content outside of legal channels would never have paid for that content in the first place, and so there’s no economic harm. And the strongest counterargument to that argument is the sites that distribute content in exchange for money rather than for free. The content industries might be smart to pursue a combined approach that targets those distributors who charge for illegally downloaded content; makes it easier for consumers to get what they want at market prices in a timely manner (and makes the case to them that they’ll get better quality and customer service, including cloud portability, from legal services); and that examines international pricing models. As a new study (which I’m still digesting) points out, “Relative to local incomes in Brazil, Russia, or South Africa, the price of a CD, DVD, or copy of Microsoft Office is five to ten times higher than in the United States or Europe. Licit media goods are luxury items in most parts of the world, and licit media markets are correspondingly tiny.”

One of the nice thing about being at Sundance is that the festival is a break from watching movies about people who are ostensibly like me: young, white, urban professionals. That said, when I did see a movie about those kinds of people, specifically, Save the Date, it was a pleasure to spend time with a romantic comedy that, with one significant exception, felt vastly more emotionally true and specific than the kinds of relationship stories Hollywood seems convinced women like me want to spend the money we’re not already laying down for shoes to go see.

In Save the Date, Sarah (Lizzy Caplan) runs a bookstore but hopes to make a living from her illustrations (drawn by graphic novelist Jeffrey Brown, who wrote the script with Egan Reich and director Michael Mohan). As the movie opens, she’s moving in with long-term boyfriend Kevin (Geoffrey Arend), who’s half of a band with Andrew (Martin Starr, the man in movies who does the most to hide his sexiness), who is engaged to Sarah’s sister Beth (Alison Brie, playing a grown-up Annie from Community). Commitment-shy and career-insecure, Sarah breaks up with and moves out on Kevin when he impulsively proposes to her, then jumps into a new relationship with lovelorn bookstore customer Jonathan (Mark Webber) while trying to deal with helping an increasingly anxious Beth plan her wedding.

None of this is incredibly new territory, but all of the relationships have a specificity that works. Beth and Sarah are clearly playing out long-established scripts as they move through a series of swiftly-unfolding big events. “I’m waiting for marriage,” Sarah jokes to Beth as they drive her stuff to Kevin’s place. “I thought you didn’t believe in marriage,” Beth ventures, torn between being excited about the prospect of her sister joining her on the road to marriage and nerves about whether Sarah can handle the commitment. “I don’t,” Sarah deadpans, “So I’m going to die a virg.” After her breakup with Kevin, Sarah tells Beth, “All I want is to get food that’s really bad for us and for you to give me a lot of sympathy.” But Beth, who disapproves of Sarah’s flightiness, is hesitant. “I’ll get really bad food,” she compromises. “But I’m not giving you sympathy.” Similarly, Andrew and Kevin are friends of long-enough standing that Andrew can muse to Kevin, “Do you think she and Beth are the same at sex?”

And as Sarah gets to know Jonathan, their conversations have a nice tinge of nerves and wonder. “I stalk your friend quietly. Because it’s a bookstore,” Jonathan jokes to Beth as he works up the courage to talk to her at the concert where Kevin proposes. Later, as they get to know each other, Jonathan explains to Sarah that he wants to be marine biologist that “I know there isn’t an ocean in Kansas City. And that’s why I became totally obsessed with it. And waves are amazing.” “It’s just so cool that you care so much about something,” Sarah tells him, recognizing in Jonathan the shared risk of having a dream that could disappoint you if it doesn’t come true. It’s a nice movement that feels of the recession and the generation without being bogged down by it.

Similarly, the movie isn’t afraid to make drama out of human decency and indecency without going over the top. When Kevin confronts Jonathan over his relationship with Sarah, Jonathan says mildly, “If I were you, I wouldn’t have done this, but I’d have been really upset…I want you to know I’m entirely sympathetic to your situation.” “Dude,” Kevin tells him. “I’m just pissed you don’t suck.” Those emotions are big enough.

The one place the movie steps wrong, and that I think male writers and directors tend to get wrong frequently, is in a surprise pregnancy plotline. I understand that continuing pregnancies is a way of keeping a plot going, and of upping the emotional impact of a relationship. But there’s something kind of odd about when male writers think women will be less than careful about birth control. Being uncertain about the state of your career or indecisive about committing to a relationship doesn’t automatically being careless about birth control, be it the Pill, an IUD, or simply regular condom use. And I’m not sure why those two things seem to go together, whether here or in Knocked Up. If anything, if you’re worried about your future, that seems like a time that the well-educated, upper-middle class heroines in these movies would be particularly careful about getting pregnant. At least Save the Date, unlike Knocked Up, has the courage to at least utter the word abortion. But a movie that’s realistic and tender and smart about sex and pleasure seems like it could have been more thoughtful and internally consistent when it comes to sex and reproduction.

The bridge is yours (and apologies for yesterday, it has been busy!).

-The hats of Downton Abbey.

-Todd VanDerWeff defends slow television.

-Honest posters for Oscar movies.

-I adore this Hunger Games movie tie-in.

-This is so true, and so good, and so sad:

Tyler Perry Expands His Fan Base With New Films About Sassy, Chinese Grandmother

GamePolitics reports that along with Netflix’s plans to spin off Qwickster, the company’s plan to move into video game rentals is dead, mostly because the company believes that streaming is the future:

If you were hoping that Netflix was still considering renting video games like it does with disc-based movies, let that hope die tonight. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said today on a call to discuss the latest quarter’s earnings, that the idea was dead and laying in a shallow grave right next to the one about renaming its disc-based rental service to “Quickster.” The company’s streaming subscriber base outnumbers DVD users by two to one, and in the last quarter they lost 2.76 million DVD subscribers. So the whole idea of renting games would go against where the company expects the bulk of subscriber base to end up soon: streaming only. If you’ve watched any of its recent launches in new regions like Canada and the UK, you’ll note that those areas are streaming only.

But over at Wired, Tim Carmody sounds a note of caution of what that move towards streaming means for Netflix’s financial health:

That 24.4 million includes 21.67 million streaming subscriptions in the US (just slightly up from 21.45 million last quarter) and 11.17 million DVD-by-mail subscriptions — which is quite sharply down from 13.93 million last quarter. Still, those DVD-by-mail subscriptions contributed $194 million of profit on only $370 million in revenue. Streaming, meanwhile, brings in $476 million in revenue, but only nets $52 million for Netflix’s bottom line…Outside the US, meanwhile, Netflix is streaming-only — and still not profitable at all. Netflix lost $60 million on its international streaming business last year, with slightly under 2 million subscribers — a loss that more than cancels out its total profit from all 21.67 million US streaming customers.

He also points out that companies like HBO and Amazon, which have build their own proprietary streaming platforms, are holding onto their most valuable subscribers, which gives them an advantage against Netflix, which is shedding the people who make it the most money.

This, I think, is where Netflix’s original programming comes in. If Netflix can build properties that it owns entirely and are valuable enough to draw in new subscribers, or that other platforms want to distribute, that could be a valuable source of revenue for the company. Or, that content could provide leverage with the legacy media companies that would allow Netflix to push back on some of the price increases it’s faced as the company has re-upped content deals. Either way, there’s no question that reports of Netflix’s death were premature. But the company is confronting challenges that will be important not just for Netflix, but for the future of the streaming industry as a whole.

I wanted to like Detropia, the new movie from Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady about, among other things, the continued move of the American auto industry overseas; the proposed plan to contract Detroit’s footprint to save money on social services and concentrate the city’s residents in viable neighborhoods; and the role of the city’s arts community in its revitalization. All three of those things would make fascinating movies in their own right, and I think Detropia suffers from trying to do all of them at once. And I’m sorry that’s the case, because I would have been particularly curious to see a movie make the argument currently being advanced by the National Endowment for the Arts that investments in art and culture can provide the anchors that help economically revitalize blighted neighborhoods.

The movie looks at two primary examples of the arts in Detroit: the city’s financially struggling opera company, and the influx of young artists who have helped boost the city’s population of young people by 59 percent. In the former case, the opera mostly acts as a barometer in the movie for the difficulties faced by the city’s wealthy, white residents as well as the poor black ones who have been devastated by the loss of manufacturing jobs. It’s not surprising to know that the Big Three automakers were largely responsible for the corporate support that long kept the opera company running. But it would have been interesting to know how the automakers made decisions to continue — or cut back — their giving, and to have a few individual donors as part of the story. And the movie ends without telling us the fate of the opera companies, or any details about its budget. It ends up feeling sidelined.

And while it’s nice to know, as one young artist tells us that “I would never be able to own a home as an artist…we can experiment here because if we fail, we haven’t really fallen anywhere.” But the movie isn’t clear about whether the very cheap rents that lure artists to the city are helping revitalize its economy, or establishing market values for real estate and other goods and services at a permanently lower level. And Detropia doesn’t put these young white artists in conversation with the black residents, be they former autoworkers or local political bloggers, who are their new neighbors, or who they’re displacing. That would be a fascinating transitional discussion. But it never happens, and we never learn anything about what sorts of institutions these young people are creating or how they’re interacting with old ones. Detropia has parts of a story, but especially on the arts, the version of it that screened at Sundance feels much more like a first act than a complete story.

Over at the Hollywood Reporter, Scott Feinberg argues that the move to an electronic voting system could allow the Academy Awards to move dramatically earlier in the year, putting pressure on the competing awards shows that have sapped the Oscars’ momentum in the run-up to the big night. I actually wonder if what would help even more than the schedule change would be that electronic voting might make younger Academy voters more likely to participate.

This year’s Academy Awards nominations seemed decidedly creaky in most of the major categories, whether it was the odd nods for War Horse or Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, or the fact that Jonah Hill was almost bizarrely young in comparison to the other men up for acting awards. A movie like Bridesmaids, which probably resonated much more with younger viewers than with older ones, picked up some smaller nominations but didn’t make the cut for Best Picture — it would also be interesting to see whether comedies in general would do better with younger Academy viewers than older ones. And Shame, which I imagine would have been a hard sell to get the Academy’s most conservative older viewers to even watch, was shut out entirely.

I’m not saying that the Academy should become the Nickelodeon Kid’s Choice Awards or anything. And paper ballots should be available to older voters who want to use them. But if you’re worried about declining viewership for the Oscars, it’s not just a matter of timing. It’s a matter of viewers in the demo feeling like they have skin in the game.