Conservative radio host Michael Medved says what I’ve been thinking for a long time:

I think we may err, and I would include myself in this as I say “we,” in being a little bit too eager to promote some of those rare projects on the Right. It was very hard for me because I love “Atlas Shrugged” the book. “Atlas Shrugged,” the movie… I couldn’t believe that so many on our team contrived to like it. Because it was not a successful film, it wasn’t good. So I think to that extent, partially, the Right-wing stuff is very often very ad hoc and it’s a one-off. Which is why it’s so remarkable when something comes outside… way outside the system of extraordinary high craft-quality, let alone artistic quality. Like “The Passion of the Christ” or even “Fireproof.” “Fireproof” was not a masterpiece, it’s not an Oscar-worthy film. But it was emotionally, I think, an interesting film and sound and reasonably well-crafted.

He cites as two examples of movies he really loves Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, particularly noting the latter’s focus on the immigrant experience. I’d really love it if the latter in particular could be remade or updated and embraced by conservatives and liberals alike, though I suspect there’d be less conservative sympathy for the immigrants if they were Latino rather than European and undocumented rather than products of Ellis Island. And Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is really more an anti-corruption movie than a Democratic or a Republican one.

While these two movies might not be fantastic proof, it is true that conservative ideas and decently-crafted filmmaking aren’t inherently incompatible. I thought there were a lot of things that didn’t work about Act of Valor, but the movie did really reinforce for me that if we’re going to send people away from their families to do extremely dangerous things on our behalf, they may have to live by an alternate set of values than my own to get through it. You can sell forceful projection of American military force through action movies, or fiscal responsibility through family comedies. There are a lot of options for pairing ideas with genres, and a lot of people you can hire to make dialogue sing rather than thud. You don’t have to make a movie bad to make it authentically conservative.

Guys, I know I am a huge dork, but the fact that The Avengers is going to be about organizational politics makes me very happy, even if it’s a movie where the equivalent of Jack Donaghy and the Six Sigmas appears to be Scarlett Johansson and sexiness (I love how she has a teensy, lady-like gun):

I’m joking, mostly. Because seriously, this looks pretty fantastic. Making the Hulk look plausible at long last? Check. Providing a genuinely charismatic villain who poses a plausible threat that the heroes might not be able to fully defeat in a single movie*? Check. Giving us a sense of an ongoing invasion rather than a one-city mop-up operation that mysteriously makes the bad guys retreat? Check. I’m-so-excited-I’m-so-scared-level monster things? CHECK.

*And given that this is, after all, a Joss Whedon movie, the possibility that it’ll end in genuine pathos and a compromised victory seems high.

Former Gov. Sarah Palin and her camp may be raking in media hits by complaining about the portrayal of Palin in HBO’s upcoming movie about the 2008 presidential election, an adaptation of Game Change. But Hollywood seems to be giving more than it’s taking away from the Palin family lately: Bristol Palin’s just inked a deal with Lifetime to do a new reality series, following in her mother’s footsteps. The show promises “never-before-granted access to Bristol’s real-life experiences growing into womanhood, Bristol Palin: Life’s a Tripp will reveal how she adjusts to her life in Alaska, where daily she faces the many pressures of raising her toddler son Tripp alone and maintains the close relationship she holds with her parents.”

For all the Palins complain about their treatment by Hollywood, this deal is actually a sign of the industry’s generosity to the family. Sarah Palin’s Alaska started out with strong ratings for TLC, but they declined, particularly in episodes where Palin was hunting or fishing, and TLC declined to order a second season of the program. Her special on Fox News, one of the things the network hoped would make her a star on the network, didn’t exactly sparkle in the ratings either.

And Palin, more than any other member of her family, ought to have been the draw: she was the one who was rocketed to national prominence and national controversy. If she didn’t exactly turn into a television star, even when she was given a couple of chances in a couple of different formats, it’s hard to see why there’d be a strong market for a show about a second-tier member of the family whose main prior accomplishment in the entertainment industry is a stint on Dancing With the Stars and a novelty appearance on The Secret Life of the American Teenager. For all the Palins complain about the way Hollywood treats them, the industry certainly seems generous about continuing to cut them paychecks.

After the revelation that newspapers owned by the Murdoch family’s News International division had hacked the phones of everyone from members of the British royal family to the victims of the bombings of London’s subways on July 7, 2005 in pursuit of stories, it was inevitable that the company—and the family—would suffer consequences. News of the World, the paper most deeply embroiled in the scandal, closed last summer after it became clear that advertisers wouldn’t continue to support the publication. And now, James Murdoch, News Corporation owner Rupert Murdoch’s son, has resigned from his position of executive chairman of News International. He’s transferred to New York where, as Rupert Murdoch explained, “James will continue to assume a variety of essential corporate leadership mandates, with particular focus on important pay TV businesses and broader international operations.”

In other words, it sounds like James Murdoch will do penance for the hacking scandal by going to work on Fox News. While both channels have clear conservative slants, neither has committed journalistic sins as grave as the phone hacking scandal. But that doesn’t mean they’ve been free of ethical slips. In 2008, Fox and Friends ran clearly doctors pictures of New York Times reporters in what seemed to be retaliation for the Times writing an unflattering piece about the network’s ratings. And in 2009, the network twice aired misleading reports about the size of crowds at a rally organized by Rep. Michele Bachmann and a book signing by former Gov. Sarah Palin. In both cases, the network suggested the choices of footage were errors rather than an intentional attempt to mislead audiences about the success of those events. The culture may be conservative, but it’s not one of rampant law-breaking and privacy violations.

It’s not necessarily clear what James, whose career has been marked by a mixed record and persistent charges of nepotism, will bring to News Corporation’s American pay television business. But given that he started out in business by backing Rawkus Records, a hip-hop label that helped launch Mos Def and Talib Kweli (it was later acquired by News Corporation), maybe James can help the network get over its paranoid fear of rap music. Whether Fox Nation is referring to Obama’s birthday party as a “hip-hop BBQ,” or suggesting that the sight of Colin Powell with hip-hop stars mean he’s on the verge of endorsing Obama, Fox loves pulling out references to hip-hop to suggest that Obama is unacceptably black. It’s the least of Fox News’ problems, but it’s one way James Murdoch could make a substantive contribution to the company—unless his father wants to send him back to running record labels News Corporation can use to subsidize their other businesses.

In an interview with the Daily Beast’s Jace Lacob, Yvette Nicole Brown, who plays Shirley on NBC’s Community explains what she and her fellow black female actor friends do when someone asks them to play “sassy”:

As a black actor, it’s refreshing that I’m not playing the “sassy black woman.” It’s something that Dan Harmon was cognizant of from the beginning. It is something that I’m always cognizant of. Every woman on the planet has sass and smart-ass qualities in them, but it seems sometimes only black women are defined by it. Shirley is a fully formed woman that had a sassy moment. Her natural set point, if anything, is rage. That’s her natural set point, suppressed rage, which comes out as kindness and trying to keep everything tight…Female friends that are in my tribe, black girls, we all have stories about that. We find interesting ways to make [directors] tell us to be sassy because they know that it’s racist. I say, “Can you show me how to do that?” They don’t want to do a black version of sassy, so then they move on.

I can’t even imagine how much pressure there must be to go along to get along when you’re trying to get a job or keep one, so the folks who are pushing back at all get kudos. And I think, just rhetorically, there’s something smart about playing uninformed in this sort of situation. It lets the person giving awful instructions know that what they want isn’t just an accepted default for everyone. And it forces them to acknowledge they’re asking folks to do something they’d find embarrassing and artificial to carry out themselves—if they’ve got a whit of shame or smarts.

I also think Brown’s discussion of Shirley’s anger is really important—and it’s what’s the key to what made Octavia Spencer’s Oscar-winning performance as Minnie Jackson so good in The Help. Minny is full of justifiable rage, whether it’s at the husband who abuses her and their children, the employer who treats her dreadfully, or even sometimes at the white lady who thinks she has the presumption to tell Minny’s story honestly. The pursed lips and sarcastic remarks that make the character funny aren’t really for anyone else’s gratification. They’re an escape valve for the anger it would be so dangerous for Minny to express directly.

The bridge is yours.

-Carmen Sandiego, Latina role model.

-In a Don Henley v. Frank Ocean fight, I know which side I’m on.

-Warners v. Hotfile and takedown notices.

-This HBO series about war photographers sounds pretty great.

-I really hope Lindsay Lohan is okay. I miss her:

It’s been a depressing start to the year for those of us who care about women’s access to contraception and abortion, be it the fight over the Obama administration’s contraception coverage rule or Virginia’s attempts to require women to have transvaginal ultrasounds before they obtain abortions. And whether it’s CNN’s Dana Loesch tweeting that women have already consented to be penetrated or Rush Limbaugh declaring “what would you expect from a woman driver?” when Danica Patrick said she supported Obama’s decision, it’s been even more discouraging to see how that debate’s been amplified in the media. So if you need encouragement, here are ten pieces of pop culture that will make you laugh, think, and keep you in the fight for women’s rights at a time when the war on women makes America seem more like The Handmaid’s Tale than a modern country:

1. A stirring defense of middle-aged men’s right to comment at length about women’s health: Also, a chance to hear Nick Offerman say the word “vagina” and explain to us that: “Oral contraception is bad, plain and simple. Why? Because I don’t understand how it works and science scares me.”

2. Martha Plimpton on Personhood in Slate: She’s already the star of the best working-class sitcom currently on television, Raising Hope. She’s an awesome progressive Tweeter. And now, she’s dropping knowledge about the Affordable Care Act.

3. Annalee Newitz’s complete guide to science fiction and reproductive rights: The book that gets namechecked every time conservatives start proposing draconian measures to control women’s health is Margaret Atwood’s masterpiece The Handmaid’s Tale. While that book, a portrait of an America taken over by religious fundamentalists in the wake of a nuclear attack, is absolutely required reading, Annalee’s guide points out books that get at male anxieties at having their fertility controlled as well. Now if only we could strike a deal where we promise not to steal men’s sperm if they promise not to colonize our ovaries.

4. Sons of Anachy, Season 3, “Lochan Mor”: If you need a reminder that ever-so-occasionally, television’s capable of treating abortion like the medical procedure—and sometimes even bring a dose of humor to the occasion, watch this episode of television in which Lyla, Opie’s girlfriend, visits an abortion clinic. And watch out for the name she uses to make her appointment.

5. Sometimes, you encounter an issue that just requires a good old-fashioned flabbergast-off: Also, Amy Poehler pretty much killed me with this line: “I’ve got so many miles on Transvaginal that I always get upgraded to Ladybusiness.” Please, please let Parks & Recreation stay on the air long enough for Ron and Leslie to have some version of this conversation.

If you need any more proof that conservatives don’t just want to protect their own kids from material they find objectionable, they don’t want anyone to have any access to it, ever, check out the One Million Moms freakout over Archie Comics at Toys ‘R’ Us. They’re writing to the chain:

As a mother and a member of OneMillionMoms.com, I am extremely disappointed to learn that select Toys ‘R’ Us stores are now selling ‘Archie’ comic books with a same-sex wedding displayed on the front cover. I am referring to the ones where the front cover reads “Just Married” with two men marrying, one wearing a service uniform. I am aware that Toys ‘R’ Us employees do not actually set up the displays; they leave this up to the vendor. Your company should be aware of the merchandise being sold in your stores nonetheless. These comic books are displayed at the front checkout counters so they are highly visible to employees, managers, customers and children.

Unfortunately, children are now being exposed to same-sex marriage in your toy store. This is the last place a parent would expect to be confronted with questions from their children on topics that are too complicated for them to understand. Issues of this nature are being introduced too early and too soon, which is becoming extremely common and unnecessary. A trip to the toy store turns into a premature discussion on sexual orientation and is completely uncalled for. Toys ‘R’ Us should be more responsible in the products they carry.

If your children are too young for a discussion about the fact that sometimes two men or two women love each other the way Mommy and Daddy do, they are also probably far too young to see any other comic books or tabloids that are displayed routinely at checkouts, or to any of the violent or sexual toys or games that are regularly peddled at large toy chains. There’s always the option of shopping for toys while your children are at school or with another parent. And if your children are old enough to read, but you don’t want them reading the cover of this one comic book, hand them a new or favorite book while they’re at the checkout line.

I do sympathize with parents who want to expose their children to age-appropriate content, but I draw the line at those who think they have a right to a world where they don’t have to be exposed to anything that contradicts their worldview, and who are prepared to demand that, rather than to try to find reasonable workarounds. And if you want your kids to share your views even in a world that doesn’t, you’re probably going to have to raise them to believe strongly enough even when they’re exposed to new things. Keeping Archie comics out of Toys ‘R’ Us won’t keep gay couples invisible in the world the One Million Moms’ kids will grow up in.

This post contains spoilers through the February 28 episode of Justified.

First, the question of whether Arlo was faking memory loss with Raylan last week, or whether it’s real appears to have been answered. In a beautifully-shot moonlit sequence, we—and Limehouse’s lackeys—”Got some old white fool down the road shouting for Mr. Limehouse.” It turns out Arlo’s charged Noble’s Holler because he believes his wife’s gone missing and “I’m not leaving ’til you send one of those lap dogs up in the maze and bring back my Frances.” But his wife is dead, and Arlo ends up with a splitting headache in the care of Boyd Crowder, with his son telling the outlaw who’s caring for his old man that “It just sounds like he’s off his meds, and I wish you luck with that.” There’s a real sadness to the tale of old hoods in their twilight years, their bodies unable to stand up for the interests of their fading minds.

Raylan isn’t doing too well himself, it turns out. After Winona’s abrupt departure, he’s living above a bar where, in exchange for mild bouncing duties, he gets free DirecTV, the first drink of the night on the house, and regular encounters with girls who say things like “We’ve seen you in here the last couple nights, and we want to know if you were born before disco or after.” Quarles, who attempts to bribe Raylan on the mistaken assumption that his choice of residence is due to Boyd underpaying him rather than Raylan’s essential self-loathing and love for $3 martinis. It’s that assumption that annoys Raylan the most, even more than the fact that Quarles thought “That I was working for you. Taking orders. Doing your bidding. And on the cheap no less.” And having given offense, Raylan’s desire to crush Quarles has become a rather more serious matter.

I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about Quarles. Setting him up a serial abuser of rentboys and resenter of his boss’s son by blood gives him a personality detail other than Joker-like cheerfulness. And it’s kind of fun to see Sammy as a sort of weak-chinned second-generation dilution of a mob dynasty who buys two horses for his daughter rather than one, who answers Raylan’s “What is that, gabardine?” with “Sharkskin. $3,000,” not getting that he’s the butt of a joke. But something about Quarles as sexual psychopath doesn’t quite sit right with me: it’s a rather flip treatment of the serious issue of domestic abuse within the gay community, and we haven’t seen any great brilliance in Quarles yet that would lead the Detroit mob to keep him around in spite of the rather considerable baggage he carries with him.

That said, his attempt to bribe the Harlan sheriff, telling him, “Make a couple of bandaid repairs on those mountaintops everyone’s always bitching about, courtesy of the sheriff’s office,” has set up a great clash. I love the idea of him running one candidate and Boyd another. Quarles may talk a good game about the low prospects of Detroit ending up with “a shitkicker rebellion on our hands.” But one is coming for him anyway.

Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, a novel about a futuristic America wracked by poverty and severe energy shortages where most people spend the majority of their time inside an extremely sophisticated video game world called OASIS, and the billionaire inventor of the game who sets off a treasure hunt within it on his death, came out last summer and I finally got around to it last weekend. It’s not a perfect book—Cline does a lot of telling when he should show, as when he introduces us to a blogger and tells us what her style is like at length rather than letting us see it for ourselves in sample posts. But it’s an engaging story, and I think worth comparing to both Reamde, Neil Stephenson’s novel about a similar video game empire though set in a time closer to our own, and The Hunger Games, which features a similar teenaged protagonist—and in a similar way, prioritizes romance over political engagement.

Ready Player One‘s main character is an isolated teenager named Wade, who lives in extreme poverty with his aunt in the stacks—a name for tightly packed and deeply unsteady complexes of stacked trailers. Wade goes to school in OASIS and after the game’s founder dies, Wade becomes a deeply dedicated participant in the scavenger hunt that the man left behind—and that guarantees the winner access to his fortune. As Wade advances further in the quest, a corporation that wants to take control of OASIS starts stalking Wade and his counterparts, killing his aunt and one of Wade’s fellow gamers in an effort to coerce them into turning over the clues that lead to the treasure. In that respect, the book is a lot like The Hunger Games—both books feature a poor teenaged protagonist struggling to maintain his or her integrity in the face of a murderous and seemingly unalterable system, whether it’s a corporation that’s more powerful than any government, or a government that’s taken control of the economy. And like Reamde, Ready Player One features a game founder with a near-unkillable avatar who is an unpredictable free agent in the game.

But all three books have slightly different perspectives on how their main characters should engage with the world outside of the games they’re playing. At the end of The Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen, who has been turned into a political symbol and used for purposes contrary to her values, quits altogether: she commits a symbolic act of political violence and returns home, marries, starts a family, and gets as far away from engagement as possible. At the end of Ready Player One, Wade’s victory ensures him not just tremendous wealth but tremendous political power—the reward for winning the scavenger hunt isn’t just the billionaire’s fortune, but his OASIS avatar and the ability to self-destruct the game, driving everyone back into their real, and very broken, world. But the book treats that power, and the possibility of a massive intervention to change the fate of the American public, raised by another character, as if they’re simply not very interesting, at least in comparison to Wade’s reconciliation with his first love. In Reamde, by contrast, getting out of the game and into a world where they go head-to-head with some very nasty terrorists and a mountain lion, is reinvigorating and rewarding for the characters. They get major personal rewards for acting in the world—there doesn’t have to be a tradeoff.

Now, not all novels have to be social novels. And not all heroes have to change the world—nor is it realistic to expect that all heroes will be in a position to kill the hell out of an Osama bin Laden stand-in while also helping ensure the marital happiness of their favorite niece. But there’s something very odd about setting up very clear dystopian conditions, enumerating how they affect the characters, and then suggesting that engaging with those conditions and working to change them isn’t very differing. Both Ready Player One and The Hunger Games are grounded in more explicit social critiques than Reamde, but Reamde‘s far more interested in engaging with the world than they are.

I’ll have longer thoughts on Game Change, HBO’s adaptation of John Heilmann and Mark Halperin’s 2008 campaign book, closer to the movie’s air date. But one thing that struck me as strange about the movie was that it focuses entirely on John McCain and Sarah Palin, a story that’s both been done to death and is essentially irrelevant: Palin is a PR phenomenon and McCain will never be president. They’ve both returned from whence they came. By contrast, the story of how President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton regarded each other in the buildup to and during the 2008 campaign, and how they came to be partners rather than enemies, is both directly relevant to ongoing events and a much richer story than that of John McCain’s taking a flyer on his VP selection.

But I wonder if part of the problem is that it would be extremely difficult to cast a credible Obama. Fred Armisen’s impression of the president is laughable. Jordan Peele has Obama’s voice entirely locked down, but he doesn’t particularly look like him. I have no idea if Adrian Lester has the voice, or could figure out how to do it, but he’s got the look, or could pull it off plausibly. I also really like the idea of the main character from Primary Colors, who was responsible for wrangling John Travolta’s Bill Clinton stand-in character, returning to the movies as Obama. There are obvious decent stand-ins for Hillary: Emma Thompson could also step back into those shoes post Primary Colors, not to mention my personal favorite candidate Judith Light. But Obama is tricky—and important—to get right.

I very much wanted to like Smash, NBC’s show about the making of a Broadway musical, and not just because I’m eager for the generally well-intentioned network to be repaid for Parks and Recreation and Community with some huge commercial successes. I’m interested in people’s artistic processes, and I adore Anjelica Huston and Debra Messing, who star as the show’s book writer and producer, respectively. But the show isn’t drawing the kind of numbers NBC would have hoped for, particularly for a show they would have loved to monetize the way Fox has turned Glee into a cash cow, with iTunes sales and a spin-off live show. And it’s not really working creatively, either.

Perhaps the central problem of Smash is that it’s predicated on a rivalry that the show is contorting itself to make plausible. There’s no question that Ivy (Megan Hilty) deserves the lead in the Marilyn musical under development over Karen (Katherine McPhee): she’s a more polished Broadway singer, a more accomplished dancer, she has much more experience on the stage, she’s a physical match for Marilyn, and she’s a more dedicated professional. So how does Smash make it seem like an emotionally engaged contest? By making Ivy a shallow bitch. While we get Karen’s home life with her devoted boyfriend and trips home to her friends and supportive family in Iowa, Ivy gets a single phone call home, where it’s clear that things aren’t all right, but we never get any details. Even though she’s clearly more qualified, we’re told Ivy only really gets the part because she slept with Derek, the director, a convenient drama-driving plot device that also happens to reduce a talented performer. Now that we’re in rehearsals, we see Ivy pushing Karen (now a member of the chorus) to the side, even though she’s not exactly doing her job. It’s contrived and irritating.

Then, there’s the show-within-a-show itself. The characters talk endlessly about Marilyn Monroe without revealing anything particularly interesting about her character. The numbers themselves are charming, but ultimately light—maybe it’s just me, but I’m not particularly moved by a faux Marilyn cooing about manipulating men with her sex appeal. The show tells us, rather than shows us, that these artists are having profound experiences with the material—though it does a nice job of showing us how sexy artists can be to non-artists when they’re in their zones.

And I wonder if that combination of material and setting is what’s preventing Smash from becoming the grown-up version of Glee—and would prevent it from being that show even if everything else was clicking. Glee is a hot mess these days, but it can be genuinely daring and moving when it takes on the subject of gay teenagers. But it does so in a setting where everything else is familiar: this is a small town populated with relatively familiar archetypes, the students attend an essentially typical high school, and they’re singing songs almost everyone in the viewing audience has heard before. The gay characters are a minority in a largely straight world. It’s a show that is sometimes about tolerance, and asking to do that from a very safe space for straight, middle-American viewers.

Smash, on the other hand, is asking viewers to come into a world where women and straight men are dominant, framed by music that’s original rather than familiar. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, per se—shows shouldn’t have to star straight dudes to be successful. But I do think that it might be a sign of NBC’s unwillingness or inability to accept that it’s going to have to make some genuinely popular entertainment to score a smash hit. What makes Glee easy to consume isn’t just the renditions of popular hits—it’s the setting. It’s not actually a natural sege from the cover extravaganza that is The Voice and its quartet of judges who represent the full spectrum of the music business to a show about the making of a Broadway musical.

NBC needs to recognize the difference between the two and decide what kind of entertainment it wants to make. If it’s going to make quirky shows or shows that imply that rivals like Glee aren’t grown-up enough, NBC may be consigning itself to a smaller but wealthier group of viewers who are desirable to advertisers. But if it’s going to make big, mass entertainment that it endeavors to make somewhat smarter than its competitors offerings, it needs to do so without giving the impression that it resents having to do it.

Vida, an organization devoted to examination and discussion of the roles women play in literature, has released its latest survey of the articles and reviews published by women in major magazines in 2011, and the results aren’t encouraging.

Of articles published by The Atlantic in 2011, 64 were by women and 184 were by men. In the Boston Review, the ratio was 60 to 131; in Harper’s, 13 to 65; in the London Review of Books 30 to 186; in The New Republic, 50 to 118; in the New York Review of Books a truly embarrassing 19 to 133; the New Yorker published 165 stories by women to 459 by men; and the New York Times Book Review printed 273 articles by women to 520 by men. The Nation, ostensibly a progressive publication, published 118 articles by women and 293 by men. Granta’s the only publication that’s close to parity—in fact, it published slightly more pieces by women than by men, 34 to 30. Perhaps some of these other publications should ask how Granta finds women, a task that appears so phenomenally daunting to the rest of the publishing world that it suggests that women, rather than man, are the most dangerous game.

Because really, the only answer here is not that these publications can’t find women. It’s that they don’t really care if they do or not. These numbers, and the annual discussion of them, seem to have succeeded in making a lot of female journalists and readers angry and frustrated, but they don’t appear to have made editors feel ashamed, much less called to action. And I’m not quite sure what it would take to persuade them to shake off their lethargy and acceptance of the status quo, which really means accepting sexism. Do we really have to educate editors that women can bring new perspectives on major stories, and not just to stories about living as a single woman or going through a divorce? What level of evidence would it take to persuade folks that while Katherine Boo and Marie Colvin are and were utterly extraordinary, they are not the only women who can go into profoundly difficult settings and win sources’ trust? Because at this point, I would like to know what it would take to humiliate or convince editors at the major magazines to think more creatively about story assignments and recruiting pitches. Numbers clearly aren’t doing the trick.

Since market research came back with some deeply awful numbers about audience anticipation that suggest that America has basically no interest in seeing John Carter, Disney’s epic and epically expensive movie set on Mars, there’s been a lot of dissection of the way the movie has been marketed. But I want to return to the first big decision in that campaign: to change the name of the movie from A Princess of Mars on the grounds that nobody goes to see movies about women, to John Carter of Mars, to John Carter.

The thing about John Carter is that it’s totally nondescript. This literally could be the name of anything—there have been 8 movies made that are simply called John, and they’re everything from creepy horror movies to drug flicks to foreign films. John Carter could be the name of a cubicle drone or a futuristic warrior. The novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs that the movie is based on may be lovingly remembered, but they’re not part of the canon like Ender’s Game. This name means nothing to be people. A Princess of Mars, or a variant like John Carter and the Princess of Mars, would have at least provided the crucial context that this movie is set some place other than the planet Earth.

And the central premise, that women don’t see enough science fiction to make up for the presumed hordes of men who would run in horror at a move with “princess” in the title is just bizarre. Sure, there are action movies that don’t involve romances. But the vast majority of the time, whether a dude is stealing cars or blowing up planes, he is also wooing a member of the fairer sex. Even if Disney is assuming that its audience is shy dudes who are afraid to talk to women in real life, that audience still seems to enjoy watching Paul Walker or Brad Pitt or whoever spit game and bed ladies. Would that they’d turn out consistently to see women be strong and powerful and be the ones who are delivering lines and seducing guys. But when Disney is setting the bar for their expectations of their audience even lower than I assume it is, dudes and women alike should find themselves insulted.

All of which is a way of saying this fan-made trailer looks amazing:

The bridge is yours.

-Downton Abbey and Luther will move from the miniseries category to the drama category at the Emmys next year—and the category may expand as a result.

-Inspector Spacetime, to tide you over until the return of Community on March 15.

-How Oscar voters made their decisions.

-Kid Rock turns out to support the Detroit Symphony.

-Estelle’s back! Summer’s here!

I quite like this meditation by Noah Berlatsky on cheesecake and precisely why drawing superheroines as pinups as offensive, and just plain incompetent:

If you make it simply about visual stimulation, it’s simply about visual stimulation, and doesn’t have to have anything to do (or at least, not much to do) with real women. Once you start pretending that you’re talking about a smart, motivated, principled adventurer, on the other hand, you end up implying that said smart, motivated, principled, adventurer has an uncontrollable compulsion to dress like a space-tart on crack. Which is, it seems to me, insulting.

The second thing is that, if you must make your adventurer into a fetish object, it seems like the least you could do is make her tough…if you’re going to do action-hero cheesecake, then bring on the masochism: get off both on how hot the action hero is, and on how thoroughly she can beat you black and blue. It’s feministsploitation; not feminism exactly, but a fetishization of feminism, and it makes some sense at least to the degree that the fetish clothing and the putative power of the character are coherently working together, both in that the power makes the character more sexy and in that that the clothing adds (not necessarily logically, but still) to the sense of the character’s potency.

I basically agree with Noah: there’s nothing essentially wrong with producing sexy depictions of everyone. The problem comes when you mash up two projects in a way that undermines both: so-called sexy superheroines are drawn in a way that undermines our sense of their competence and power, and the things illustrators do that are meant to make them sexy often show more ignorance of the female form than appreciation for it. Sexist justifications for the depictions of female superheroines often get more contortionist than the heroines’ poses, and there’s something oddly refreshing about Noah pointing out that the guys who want hot depictions of powerful women are undermining even their own interests.

Well, the newest trailer for the second season of HBO’s Game of Thrones, which premieres on April 1, looks dandy, doesn’t it?

The nerd in me is rather pleased to see that the characters’ debates about who is best suited to rule Westeros and how that rule should be accomplished are intact, and are something the show is embracing, rather than running away from. But the trailer did remind me of something I find interesting. Given the extent to which A Song of Ice and Fire is based on the War of the Roses, I’m surprised that most people don’t point out the central difference between that conflict and the War of the Five Kings very often. In Martin’s universe, there’s no Parliament, nor any representative assembly, that the contestants for the Iron Throne can appeal to for recognition of their claim.

Sometimes, that makes the process more democratic: Stannis Baratheon, the late King Robert’s brother, can pull a Richard III and tell the world, instead of Parliament, that Cersei’s children are the product of incest rather than legitimate heirs to the throne, and then proceed to demonstrate that he’s best-prepared to lead Westeros by heading up the defense of the Wall when it comes under assault. And sometimes, it’s less direct: Stannis and his brother Renly, who wants to jump over him in the line of succession, argue about what the citizens of Westeros want in a neutral meeting that doesn’t actually involve consulting any of those citizens on what would be best for the country. Cersei Lannister, ruling as queen regent even as rumors about her children’s parentage fly, views her subject with utter contempt. Across the Narrow Sea, Daenerys Targaryen finds that presenting yourself as the mother of your people isn’t an automatic solution to their needs.

But having all of these debates about governance without the presence of a parliament obscures the extent to which they’re an anachronism. In the real world, Parliament may have been manipulatable during the War of the Roses, but its power and discretion grew as that of England’s kings waned. Part of the triumph of history is that we evolved forms of government that would prevent these bloody and unproductive dynastic struggle. I’m not sure what it means that we don’t see this germ of the future in A Song of Ice and Fire, but it is striking.

Michael Douglas, atoning for his stint as Gordon Gecko, that avatar of rapacious eighties capitalism, has cut an ad encouraging traders who see evidence of wrongdoing or get offered shady deals to call their local FBI office:

Somehow, it’s not as catchy as “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” And the problem, I suspect, is less that folks on Wall Street don’t know where to go and more that you’ve got to make them want to pick up the phone in the first place. In pursuit of that goal, it might help if folks other than Bernie Madoff had ended up suffering more than embarrassment and financial losses for facilitating the downturn.