In a project that sounds alternately fascinating and disappointing, and certainly is proof that we’ve looped around a bit from the pro-soldier anti-war flicks of the first decade of our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, Tom Hardy is going to play a Vietnam veteran who, disillusioned by anti-war sentiment on his return home, reacts by joining a violent motorcycle gang. I find this thing sort of irritating because it feeds the persistent, and false, narrative that opposing sending young men into situations where they can be killed, maimed, and traumatized somehow means not being supportive of those men and their interests. But it’s also kind of too bad because one of my favorite, deeply weird movies about Vietnam deploys bikers to precisely the opposite effect.

I discovered The Losers a couple of years ago while writing a piece comparing Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan movies. The plot of the movie is essentially as follows: a group of violent bikers get dropped into Vietnam to do a covert mission the military apparently can’t, in its official capacity, carry out. They soup up their bikes with ridiculous killing machinery, wreck dive bars in Saigon, plot to get their Vietnamese girlfriends home, and behave with honor after serving time for rape. Eventually, they’re sold out and killed by the C.I.A. after they succeed in rescuing a captured officer in Cambodia—it turns out, they were meant to fail, and their failure was supposed to be a pretext for expanding the war into yet another country.

The movie’s a total mess, but it’s entirely comfortable with the idea that you can separate out the government’s interests from the interests of the men in its service. It’s unfortunate that it takes a B movie to embrace what should be an obvious principal, and one that, if it was championed by slicker, more high-profile movies wouldn’t be so easy to marginalize.

I just got into Live From Daryl’s House, the awesome little web series where Daryl Hall of Hall and Oates has musicians over to his house, cooks dinner and eats dinner with them, and then jams with them in his living room. It’s particularly cool to see Hall, a terrific white soul singer, duet with Cee Lo Green, who embraced his inner soul singer later in life, on “Cry Baby,” and to see how good they are when they’re riffing off each other:

I really think one of the better results of the internet for entertainment has been the proliferation of projects that put artists in juxtaposition with each other. It may not be a hugely revenue-generating project to see Cee Lo and Daryl Hall hang out, or to watch Marc Maron and Jeffrey Tambor riff off of each other for an hour, but it’s incredibly useful as a consumer of music and comedy to see what artists can get out of each other in a conversation that I as an interviewer probably couldn’t.

And I also wonder if innovations like this have managed to create an interim career tier for artists. Doing the WTF podcast is probably less stressful and more career enhancing for Maron than gigging around smaller comedy clubs would be. Daryl Hall can tour as much as he wants, of course, but this gig lets him bring collaborators to him once a month and to build a product that doesn’t have a clear place elsewhere. That’s lovely for the artists involved, and it’s also wonderful for us as consumers to have products that don’t fit neatly into other categories, that can be cut to a length that makes sense, and distributed flexibility. I was never someone who had incredibly fidelity to the album in any case (though Cee Lo is always an exception for me), and it’s nice to have options like these on the market instead of them, or in addition to them.

Roger Ebert, invaulable as always, intervenes in the controversy over the R rating of Bully with a reminder of what the MPAA was trying to do in the first place when it introduced its ratings system:

The MPAA began to set this trap for itself when it got into the ratings business in the first place. It was intended at the time not to promote public decency in language, but to provide the motion picture industry with a plausible way to head off local censorship boards. When I started at the Sun-Times, the city had a board of censors made up of the widows of police captains, and their rulings were often inexplicable. There was also the question of whether censorship was even constitutional. Jack Valenti, in 1968 the new head of the MPAA, came up with the rather brilliant notion that a new code should be “voluntary,” and thus no test of the law. Studios and theaters would be asked for voluntary compliance…

The one thing the MPAA cannot ever do, Valenti argued, is get into the business of value judgments. It can advise parents that a film contains the f-word, for example, but not whether that use is appropriate. Now that 20 members of Congress have come forward to sign a petition protesting the R rating of “Bully,” we can assume that the film uses the word for justifiable reasons.

And he also reminds us that Valenti’s code was a break with the Hays Code, the set of rules that dictated that, for example, even married couples in the movies had to be portrayed sleeping in different beds. If the MPAA’s ratings system has become more conservative than the communities it’s meant to serve, and if it’s no longer helping movies get into communities and in front of audiences that might otherwise be barred from seeing them, then it’s not fulfilling its original intention. Such certainly seems to be the case with Bully, which had schools prepared to bus their students to see it, and has a strong case for letting teenagers, especially those whose parents might not be appropriate and supportive discussion partners, see it on their own. If that’s so, there’s precedent for breaking with the past and starting over.

I was watching the latest trailer for A Little Piece of Heaven, Kate Hudson’s latest absurd-looking romantic comedy, which has two virtues going for it: the fact that Gael Garcia Bernal gets to play a romantic lead without being singled out as That Mexican Guy Kate Hudson Is Falling For, and the fact that a subplot in the movie apparently involves Peter Dinklage as a gigolo hired to cheer Hudson up. While Like Crazy’s unlikely to be remotely creative or unconventional in any other way, it did get me thinking about actors who should have a shot at playing romantic leads if only Hollywood had the courage to cast them:

1. Peter Dinklage: I’ve been beating the drum about the ridiculous hotness of Dinklage for years—in 2009, I wrote “He is not an affirmative action hire, and he is not a plain guy. He seems entirely capable of seducing older men, Liz Lemon, or anyone else who passes him by.”—and I’m thrilled that Game of Thrones has introduced a much broader audience to how sexy he is. I would love it if someone had the guts to just cast him in a romantic lead that doesn’t have to make a big deal about his stature. Dude’s earned it.

2. Demian Bichir: Bichir shot onto the national scene last year with an Academy Award-nominated performance as an undocumented gardener in A Better Life. But he’s long been a big star in his native Mexico, where his potential as a romantic lead is more appreciated than it is here. He’d be an awesome love interest for Diane Lane or Viola Davis if he wants to cash out, and if some director is smart enough to let him.

3. Romany Malco: Malco’s best known as a chatty movie number two, whether he’s giving Steve Carrell disgusting sexual advice in The 40-Year-Old Virgin or advising Tina Fey on getting knocked up as her doorman in Baby Mama. But his good looks and gift of gab really ought to bump him up to first tier as a worthy verbal sparring partner for a cerebral-but-sexy leading lady.

4. Patton Oswalt: To a certain extent, Oswalt got a shot at this kind of role in this winter’s Young Adult, where he plays a lovelorn high school friend to Charlize Theron’s hugely unpleasant YA writer—and he knocked it out of the park. In a world where we’re deluged by romantic comedies where schlubby losers score hot babes, Oswalt brought substance and depth to the stereotype, making it heartfelt and heartbreaking. He’s earned the opportunity to move the trope into a second, and more mature, generation. And come on, who doesn’t want to cuddle up with him and live-Tweet Downton Abbey?

5. Neil Patrick Harris and Zack Quinto: In recent years, both openly gay actors have made a point of proving that just because you’re gay doesn’t mean you can’t play winningly heterosexual, whether it’s the hyper horndogs Harris has portrayed in the Harold and Kumar movies and How I Met Your Mother, or a Spock who’s had his emotional side awoken by Uhura in the rebooted Star Trek franchise. Now, it would be great for them that it’s not just straight dudes like Jake Gyllenhaal who can switch effortlessly and credibly between gay and straight love stories. Casting directors, put these two dudes in a movie together, stat.

The bridge is yours.

-Bromance is back.

-The Walking Dead is borrowing from Treme.

-Ahh, the joys of campus boondoggles. Actually, this conference sounds pretty cool.

-I’m getting pretty excited for Snow White and the Huntsman.

- A typically awesome piece by Linda Holmes on my favorite movie out of SXSW.

The big technical news out of New York Times Magazine editor Hugo Lindgren recent appearance at Columbia may be that an iPad app for the magazine is still a couple of years away. But it was his explanation for why he replaced Ethicist columnist Randy Cohen with Ariel Kaminer that caught my eye:

“There’s no science to it. We thought the Ethicist franchise … still had some vitality to it and it’d be interesting try a different voice there. And I think there’d been a real male dominated voice. Randy’s an incredibly gifted, funny, smart guy, but he’s definitely a dude and I think a lot of his…” he trailed off. “Is this on the record?”

“Yeah,” Navasky said as Lindgren began to pick back up.

“But he definitely brought a male perspective. And not in a cheesy—he’s a fair-minded, decent guy—but we thought it’d be interesting to try a woman and see what the difference was. And it was just like we thought that’s interesting, so let’s try it.”

That curiosity is heartening. The assumption by powerful men that they can speak for all of humanity, that their opinions and views on the world are just naturally the appropriate default, isn’t just condescending—it’s boring. It’s the mark of a good editor to be looking not just for good new stories, but for good new perspectives, and to be suspicious of whatever has become the default. The Times Magazine as a whole can be kind of dudely. But if Lindgren’s operating under the assumption that dudely isn’t always better, maybe that won’t be the case forever.

Reading through the transcript of this weekend’s episode of This American Life, in which Ira Glass explores how the program came to air an excerpt of Mike Daisey’s monologue, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, despite clear warnings that numerous elements and anecdotes in it were fabricated for dramatic effect is a striking thing. It’s not just that Daisey’s actions will likely harm the larger—and still just—cause of pushing Apple to improve working conditions throughout its supply chain, or that a venerable program let itself be tripped up by the desire for a good story. It’s more that it’s a clear articulation of a troubling worldview that’s been awfully present in campaigns from this one, to Stop Kony, and that’s penetrating even the academy itself: that in telling moving stories, emotional experiences may be more important than precision.

” I’m not going to say that I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard,” Daisey told Glass. “But I stand behind the work. My mistake, the mistake that I truly regret is that I had it on your show as journalism and it’s not journalism. It’s theater. I use the tools of theater and memoir to achieve its dramatic arc and of that arc and of that work I am very proud because I think it made you care, Ira, and I think it made you want to delve. And my hope is that it makes—has made—other people delve.”

But of course, it didn’t really take Daisey’s monologue to make people delve. Daisey himself says on the program that “I wanted to have the voice of this thing that had been happening that everyone been talking about,” which suggests a desire more to capitalize on a rising wave of conversation to instigate it. And the New York Times reporting by Charles Duhigg and David Barboza has certainly succeeded in getting people talking and thinking critically about Apple and its supply chain without a whit of fictionalization for dramatic effect. It’s odd that Daisey wouldn’t trust the facts when the facts have proven to be so compelling time and time again.

The same is true for the efforts to stop Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army. While some of the defenders of the Stop Kony! viral video campaign suggested that it was forgivable for the video to make factual errors, including the number of members in the LRA and the fact that Kony’s moved out of Uganda, in the name of raising broader awareness about Kony’s brutality, it’s not particularly clear why such a thing was necessary—or effective. In fact, there’s been rather significant media attention paid to the campaign against Kony over the past several years. Samuel Childers, the evangelical preacher and biker who’s made it a personal mission to stop Kony, was profiled in Vanity Fair in 2010 and the subject of a movie starring Gerard Butler, Machine Gun Preacher, released last year. In other words, Kony, and the kind of militant interventionism by white Americans that Stop Kony championed, are already media stars here in the U.S. Stop Kony’s exaggerations weren’t necessary to achieve that kind of fame, and as Max Fisher at the Atlantic’s pointed out, their efforts seem to have produced a short-term interest spike rather than a long-term engagement.

In a recent essay in the New York Times examining the ideas of John D’Agata, a writer and professor who got into an extended battle over an essay for The Believer that had already been rejected by Harper’s because of how fast and loose it played with the facts, Gideon Lewis-Kraus explains:

D’Agata proposes that we give up the idea that there is a genre called “nonfiction” and instead return to the blurrier, artier time (from Herodotus until around 1940) when we were content with the term “essay” — “an attempt, a trial, an experiment.” From his rostrum as an influential professor in the nonfiction program at the University of Iowa, D’Agata has often argued that we read such essays for the poetry of “experience” rather than for mere “accuracy.”…He does defend James Frey, sort of, because even though he thinks Frey is a bad writer, he did fulfill his one obligation to his readers: “to give them a good experience.”

But why should a good experience trump the facts? And if you’re giving readers of non-fiction a powerful experience that’s built on fabrications, doesn’t that mean the experience is hollow, in danger of imminent collapse? Isn’t the question of whether an experience is good deeply tied to its authenticity? That depends on whether the story is presented as true or not. It’s one thing if Mike Daisey (or, say, Tony Kushner) had written a play called The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs (in its own way a Kushner-like title), where actors played Daisey, his translator, and the people he interviewed, and included clear signifiers that what they were relating was fictional, whether in the character names they were given, the cadences of their dialogue, or in the use of made-up companies or locations. If an audience expects that they’ll experience fiction, and experiences fiction, if then there’s no inconsistency to undermine their experience. If an audience expects facts and is given fiction, the realization that they’ve lied to may be shattering, and permanently discrediting. “Each time, I left the theatre electrified,” Michael Schulman writes in the New Yorker of his experiences seeing Daisey, “in part because I took what I was hearing as non-fiction.”

Whether it’s Mike Daisey, Stop Kony’s factual errors, or Greg Mortenson’s lies about his experiences in Central Asia, embellishing perfectly powerful stories for effect speaks of a insecurity about the power of the facts. And to an extent, I understand that sense of desperate urgency to bring attention to a cause in which is someone is deeply invested. We live in a deeply broken world, and it’s hard for an issue to break through and become a priority for the large number of people it would take to make a meaningful difference. But you can’t bridge the difference between what the facts are and what they wish you were with fiction if your viewers or listeners expect facts—and if you expect to motivate them to act in the world.

17-year-old Trayvon Martin, who is African-American, was shot to death by 28-year-old George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watchman who has claimed to have acted in self-defense despite witnesses and a 911 call to the contrary, in a Florida gated community more than three weeks ago. But the case still hasn’t penetrated mainstream media outlets fully, though shows like Melissa Harris-Perry’s weekend program on MSNBC have begun to cover it, and celebrities are beginning to add their voices to the case.

Def Jam Rcordings founder Russell Simmons is one of the few who’s spoken out directly, tweeting “Trayvon Martin didn’t die so we can create a race war he died so we can promote better understanding. We must start honest dialogue…pls join our facebook page as we seek justice for Trayvon Martin.” Singer Janelle Monae joined in, saying “Trayvon was murdered in his own father’s gated community,” and tweeting a link to the Change.org petition calling on Zimmerman to be prosecuted. So far, local authorities have declined to arrest Zimmerman.

Other celebrities have taken to Twitter to amplify the messages being sent by others. Spike Lee has taken time in between sending birthday wishes and discussing his NCAA tournament bracket to lend his account to the effort to get “I am Trayvon Martin” trending as a phrase and to promote others’ tweets about the Change.org petition. Taraji P. Henson also promoted the effort to get signatures, and to retweet followers telling her how disturbed they were by the case. Talib Kweli is also on board. Efforts to get celebrities like Lady Gaga, who has more followers than any other account on Twitter, Oprah, whose star may be diminished by the failures of her stand-alone network OWN but is still influential, and Rihanna to add their voices to the campaign were, as of Sunday night, unsuccessful.

But it was clear that news organizations were beginning to respond. Dan Abrams, the legal analyst for ABC told followers that “I’m @gma tmrw on the shooting of Trayvon Martin. I’ll talk FL law and specific facts that make the case controversial,” and GMA co-host Robin Roberts rebroadcast the promise to her followers. Star Jones tweeted that “The @todayshow is doing a feature on the #TrayvonMartin killing. Please sign this petition http://chn.ge/xc4oze #Justice.” And CNN analyst Roland S. Martin alerted his followers that “#Trayvon Martin rallies: Monday, 4 pm., prior to the Sanford City Council meeting. See @jamalhbryant for details.”

With any luck, their attention will help propel the story of Trayvon Martin’s death to the front pages and the top-rated television news programs where it belongs. And maybe some measure of justice will follow.