Gavin Polone just keeps getting more awesome:

Because black films are thought of as “niche,” they end up being marketed as if they are for only one group of people. Take Tyler Perry’s Good Deeds, which opens this Friday. It’s a drama about a wealthy black executive whose life changes when he gets to know a single mother in need of help. Marketing for the film seems overfocused on the African-American audience: You’ll see billboards in black neighborhoods and few in areas where white people live. And like Perry’s previous movies, it will probably get little play outside the U.S.: His Why Did I Get Married Too, which did $60 million at the domestic box office, was only released in South Africa and Crotia overseas, taking in just $578,120. But is Good Deeds any more “niche” than 2006′s The Pursuit of Happyness, a big domestic and international hit about a struggling black businessman who takes custody of his son when his wife leaves him? The main difference is that the latter stars Will Smith, so it is not thought of as “niche” and Columbia marketed it all over the world as a broad-based film. But keep in mind that Will Smith only became the star that he is because he was marketed early as a “star” — not a “black star” — and audiences accepted him as such. The egg has to come before the chicken and that means going for it with certain films and actors to break them out of their niche.

Will Smith is not magically different from all other black actors. He’s just marketed that way. And it’s a huge tragedy that nobody is as desperate to make David Oyelowo or Michael B. Jordan as they are to turn Sam Worthington and Channing Tatum from sides of beef into leading men. It does no one any honor or any good to suggest that a low-talent white man is more valuable than a talented black man.

Act of Valor, a new movie directed by Mouse McCoy and Scott Waugh out today, has been set up as something of a loyalty test. Either you like the movie, which stars active-duty Navy SEALs and was made in close collaboration with the military, or you hate the troops. It isn’t that simple, of course. Act of Valor is a deeply uneven movie, an odd hybrid of first-person shooter, Nicholas Sparks treacle, and the wise-cracking, slightly surreal dialogue that’s become de riguer in action flicks. But while I don’t think the acting is much good—as Keith Phipps says at the AV Club, “Acting is a specialized skill too, albeit one less essential to national security.”—or the plot is particularly compelling, Act of Valor did make me feel profoundly sympathetic to Navy SEALs, though not precisely in the way McCoy and Waugh may have intended.

Act of Valor follows a team of SEALs, one of whom, Rourke, has a baby on the way at home, as they rescue a CIA agent and then start chasing down the terrorist cell she was tracking, who are planning an attack on major American cities. The movie’s goal seems to be to convince us of two things that I think most Americans don’t actually need to be persuaded to believe—that military families bear up under tremendous strains and make tremendous sacrifices, and that the SEALs do amazing, awe-inspiring things.

But McCoy and Waugh don’t always appear to know what their best tools are in achieving those objectives. The movie spends a lot of time on deeply ponderous voiceovers that are meant to communicate what a good man Rourke was with sentiments like “He said the worst thing about growing old is other men no longer see you as dangerous…dangerousness was sacred,” or “Your father was a reader. Churchill, of course, but also Faulker and books about Tecumseh.” This speechifying takes up time we could have spent watching the characters actually interact with each other, showing us these traits rather than telling us about them. Some of the action sequences are genuinely exciting, as when a SEAL comes up out of the water behind a guard at a terrorist camp, catching him after he’s shot and lowering his body into the water so as not to make a splash. But much of the action sequences are shot to look like a first-person shooter perspective in a video game, narrowing the frame and making the action seem less dynamic. And in an act of tonal bizarreness, the SEALs team features an interrogator who seems quite literally beamed in from A Fish Called Wanda: his name is Otto, he looks suspiciously like Kevin Kline, he’s got a talent for violence, and says things during interrogations like “You’ve never seen Star Trek? That’s insane!”
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After the MPAA refused to change the rating on Bully, a documentary about the impact of vicious anti-gay harassment on teenagers, from an R to a PG-13, Harvey Weinstein, whose company is releasing Bully, has suggested that it might be time for him to depart the MPAA. Weinstein is a showman par excellence, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s using the ratings system as a way of bringing attention to the movie. But he’s also correct that the ratings system isn’t working to truly get people the information they need to make decisions about what movies their children should see, and in setting standards for which content children absolutely shouldn’t be able to see without their parents present.

First, we need to move beyond the contradictory ideas that ratings simultaneously need to be responsive to community standards, and that they also should be consistent over time. It’s much more important that ratings be responsive to contemporary community standards, broadly defined, than it is that they be consistent from the onset of the ratings system until the present day. If we were still abiding by the standards of the 1947 People v. Wepplo decision that declared material obscene ” “if it has a substantial tendency to deprave or corrupt its readers by inciting lascivious thoughts or arousing lustful desire,” most American popular entertainment couldn’t be marketed or made at all.

More importantly, the American public as a whole isn’t actually served by holding on to certain old standards. A significant majority of Americans believe that gay couples should at least be able to get the legal protections of civil unions, and we’re edging towards a majority of Americans supporting equal marriage rights. It doesn’t serve the interests of that majority to treat depictions of sexual contact between gay couples differently than depictions of those same acts between straight couples—it serves a minority who are resistant to the consensus that the rest of the country has reached about the normalization of gay couples.

It also doesn’t particularly serve the public interest to have the only grounds for a movie to be moved from R to PG-13 even if the profanity it in would normally trigger an R rating is if “based on a special vote by a two-thirds majority, the Raters feel that most American parents would believe that a PG-13 rating is appropriate because of the context or manner in which the words are used or because the use of those words in the motion picture is inconspicuous.” That doesn’t leave any room for precisely what Bully is trying to accomplish: illustrate that certain language is the opposite of inconspicuous, that it’s pernicious, and damaging, and that it can take lives. One would hope that most American parents believe that it’s a worthy goal to communicate to their teenagers that harassing their peers to the point of suicide is horrendous and a message that doesn’t have to—and in fact shouldn’t—wait until children are of age.

We need a ratings system that more clearly breaks down the reasons parents might find a movie unsuitable for their children, and that provides some sort of context for tagging a movie with those elements. I’ve long thought it might make sense to have a universal ratings system that applies across popular media so parents don’t struggle with the different, and not particularly analogous, systems that are used to label music, movies, television, and video games. And while I don’t think it’s perfect, the television ratings system that appears before programming begins and breaks ratings down into discrete and clear elements seems to me to be the one that provides parents with most information. Parents expose their kids to different things at different rates—I might let my kids hear mild curse words before I let them see Darth Vader cut Luke’s hand off—and they should be given information consistent with that. It’s very, very difficult to reconcile efficiency in label with the goal of providing as much context as possible to parents, but we need more than a single tiny box with several letters in it to truly serve the needs of communities and individual families.

Linda Holmes raises a vital point about Bully that illustrates the difficulty of getting a ratings system right. In theory, it would be good for every student to see a movie about the worst consequences of bullying and harassment with an adult who can help talk through its lessons, be that teacher or parent. But there are also students who may be struggling dreadfully with these issues who might not be safe seeing the movie with a parent or teacher because those people are among their tormenters. We live in a day and age when teachers can use the platforms they have to make life harder for gay students, and when gay teenagers have disturbingly high homelessness rates because their parents are not always supportive. When the ratings system is based around parental decision-making rather than an impossible-to-reach standard of audience wellbeing, it’s going to flounder in cases this one.

This post contains spoilers through the February 23 episode of Parks and Recreation.

I hate to say this, because I adore Parks and Recreation, but increasingly, it feels like it’s showing its seams a bit. While the show’s exploration of how Leslie’s campaign is making her grow up and recognizing her limitations, and it’s finally found a way to turn Chris into a real person beyond his goofy quirks, the depiction of Ann’s become thin and inconsistent to the point that I dread it when she comes on-screen. When this show was hitting its stride last season, it was doing really nice work across the character spectrum. And I’m not sure why it’s lost that touch now.

Let’s take the good stuff first. While I agree with some of you that the way the show exposed Leslie’s insecurities during the campaign earlier in the season could be a bit hit-or-miss, I thought this episode was note-perfect. Leslie’s insanely competent, but it would be unrealistic for her not to have a breaking point at all. And campaign work and agency work use very different parts of your brain. And working through that realization brought out the best in the Leslie-Ron relationship—and for once, let Ron be right. “There’s an old lollipop that’s been stuck to the back since Tuesday,” Ron tells Leslie when she first tries to put off the idea of taking a sabbatical. “Thats the style now, Ron,” Leslie protests lamely (but ever-adorably). But after Leslie’s messed up everything from the maintenance report, to her campaign signs, to Jerry’s birthday, Ron gives her a heart-to-heart. “I used to work in a sheet metal factory,” he explains. “But then, a job came along at the tannery. the hours were better and I would get paid. Also, I have a chance to work with leather before and after the cow, which had always been a dream of mine. I didn’t want to give up my sheet metal job, so I tried to do both jobs and finish middle school.”

I thought there was a wonderful and subtle gender role-reversal at work here. Leslie is normally more professionally ambitious than Ron, a fact that’s generally a factor of her belief in government and his libertarianism, though it could also be explained as an inversion of the ambitious-dude, personal-life-oriented-lady dynamic. But here, Ron is counseling Leslie to find something approaching work-life balance. And he doesn’t let her negotiate up even five hours on maintaining her Parks Department commitments. We normally see Ron getting swept along on the force of Leslie’s enthusiasm, but here, he’s absolutely correct about what Leslie needs to do.

Then, there was Chris’s love affair with Champion. Parks and Recreation has done something wonderful with Chris in heartbreak—it’s rare in romantic comedies, or really any medium, to see a guy who’s been built up to be this handsome and talented be presented as also this vulnerable and slightly weird. And the tiny detail that he took Champion’s obedience class in German is perfect: a completely normal thing to do with one decidedly off-kilter element that makes the whole scenario fresh and funny. Seeing Chris be wildly enthusiastic about something other than fitness or government is also utterly charming. “He is a wonderdog!” Chris declares of the dog that even Andy’s sunny view of the world can never quite elevate. “He’s a mutt. Half amazing, half terrific.” His joy is sort of transformative—Chris has brought April out of her perpetual sulk, and now, he’s turning Champion into a better dog because of his faith in him and willingness to invest time and money in this poor three-legged dog.

Things that are not amazing or terrific? Ann’s relationship with Tom. Whether a couple cares about Ginuwine, or thread counts, or Paul Walker movies is totally irrelevant when there is absolutely no other plausible reason they would like each other as humans, much less date. This subplot is making me hate Ann, and like Leslie less for having her as a best friend. Especially because there are so many other things the show could be having Ann do. She is, after all, working in City Hall, a position that could put her in the way of valuable inside information for Leslie’s campaign. When the show isn’t doing campaign subplots, it could have the parks and public health departments work together. But the show has boxed Ann in, insisting that she’s totally incompetent when it comes to anything related to the campaign, marginalizing her jobs, and making her romantically pathetic. One of those choices could be a coincidence. Taken together, they feel like contempt.

I was reading through this hugely depressing article about so-called Oscarexia, the rush by actresses to lose weight before they hit the red carpet before Hollywood’s biggest night. And while the whole thing is deeply distressing, including the credence the article gives to the idea that you can drop a lot of weight suddenly and be healthy, this detail struck me as the most insane:

It’s the price you have to pay to vie for the most coveted clothes. “The Council of Fashion Designers of America has been trying to implement model guidelines about weight,” says longtime Oscar-watcher and stylist Tod Hallman. “Recently, two models fainted under hot lights — and not because they were hot! If gowns are being made to fit on these girls, how are actresses going to get into them? One celeb PR person told me, ‘Well, they HAVE to fit!’ I’ve seen people during the course of two-week fittings get smaller and smaller. If the designer’s people say it’s a model size 4, that means it’s really a 2. If you want to wear Dior or Versace or Chanel or Elie Saab, that’s the bottom line. Women hate themselves when they can’t fit in the dress — even if it’s a 0, they blame themselves. Hence the shrinkage. And don’t tell me anybody’s really working out that much!”

Let’s be real here for a second: clothes are made in variable sizes. These are the the best-looking women in the world, and the Oscars are one of the biggest platforms in the world to showcase a dress. That actresses accept that clothes can only come to them in one of a couple of sizes instead of insisting that designers send over dresses in the size that actually fits them is absolutely insane. It makes no sense for actresses and stylists to act as if they have no power, when wearing a dress in a high-profile situation—say, an Inaugural Ball—can make a designer as Michelle Obama did for Jason Wu. And even if they don’t want to pick a designer who will actually treat them like a dignified customer and get them something that fits, these women are rich enough that, if designers persist in being awful and refusing to send them dresses in something other than a size 2 or 4, they can afford to buy clothes that actually fit them! We’ve been hearing for years about how designers refuse to dress Christina Hendricks, who is one of the most attractive women on the planet, because she doesn’t fit their sample sizes. And we should be really clear that such a decision reveals not the Christina Hendricks is too big, but that designers are crazy people. The only people who are crazier are the stylists and actors (and honestly the rest of us) who, despite the fact that such a worldview is demonstrably bonkers, acquiesce to it.

The first couple of minutes of footage from Brave are out, and not only are they awesome, they contain the best riff on bodice-ripping ever:

We were talking about female action stars and the need to think more creatively about action choreography for women, and Brave and The Hunger Games both seem to me like they might provide an answer for how to design action setpieces that acknowledge that women may be less physically powerful than male foes. Sharp-shooting, something at which both Brave heroine Merida and The Hunger Games’ heroine Katniss Everdeen excel, distances a woman from her target, and eliminates the physical disparities between them and their opponents, be those opponents large bears wandering the Scottish Highlands or tributes from other districts who intend to murder you on live television.

If you want to get into hand-to-hand combat, traditional weapons or contrasting martial arts styles could also make for action scenes that are more interesting and that allow women to fight plausibly against men who are larger or stronger than they are. One of the things that was fun about the core fight scene in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was the way the two fighters moved from weapon to weapon so you could see the advantage of a heavier staff that could do more damage against a lighter, quicker one. It’d be fun to see a woman use muay thai, for example, against a heavy who has no particular style but relies on bigness and brute strength for advantage. It’s no mistake that probably the best action sequence of the last five years, the parkour-inflected chase between James Bond and the terrorist at the beginning of Casino Royale, put styles in witty conversation and said a great deal almost without a word of dialogue.

The ratings are in for the last episode of Downton Abbey, and PBS has got to be thrilled—5.4 million people tuned in to see Matthew Crawley and Lady Mary finally get engaged. Those are numbers that in some slots, NBC would die to have. And as the Daily Beast reported last week, the show hasn’t just drawn good numbers: it’s helped PBS pull in new donations. But Downton Abbey‘s only one show, and the last time the network pulled numbers like this was for Ken Burns’ series on the America’s national parks. That doesn’t exactly provide a clear guide to what PBS might build its brand into.

I suggested in January, and I still believe, that PBS could rebuild by airing a lot of British content that isn’t widely available over here. Hulu’s been able to make some inroads by airing Misfits, Party Animals, and The Only Way Is Essex, the kind of show that one would think would land on BBC America but didn’t. PBS could go the same route, but the shorter runs of British shows means they’d have to come up with a ton of material to fill the schedule. And not all of the options for promising British shows, be it Luther or Misfits, share what I think is a crucial attribute of Downton Abbey: it’s very family friendly. Certainly we know that Lady Mary had sex, and people suffer grievous war wounds, but there’s a world of difference between Mr. Pamuk’s death and the sex scenes in Misfits, or seeing bandaged fake Patrick and seeing the victims in Luther. Your mileage may vary, but I think you could watch Downton Abbey with a sophisticated 10-year-old, give or take a few years, and I think it’s a good thing to have shows available that a family can watch across the generations.

And finding that sort of programming is hard. I think what Ken Burns does is noble, but he can’t turn out these documentaries very quickly, and I don’t know that there’s an audience for more of them. ABC Family’s shows may be accessible to a wide age range of viewers, but I’m not sure they’re really intended to draw in adults. Finding something that’s genuinely appealing in a cross-generational way, rather than simply broadly age-appropriate, is tremendously difficult, and it’s not a code I’m sure anyone’s consistently cracked. I’d really like to see some creative experimentation with age-appropriateness as a starting constraint rather than an end goal. There are stories where sex, drugs salty language, and all the other things parents might want to wait to expose their kids to are essential. But that’s not true for every human story.

My DVR ate Parks and Recreation last night so reaction will be up slightly later this morning.