New In Theaters:

-The American Pie franchise wraps up this weekend with American Reunion: the humor’s as gross as ever, but there’s some real pathos there. And Alyson Hannigan in fetishwear.

-Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope: Morgan Spurlock’s latest is more sizzle reel than introspection, especially on issues of race and gender in the fan community. But there’s some fun to be had there, especially following aspiring artists and a costume designer for whom Comic-Con is a giant job fair.

On Television

-Starz debuts a new original series at 10 PM on Friday, Magic City, full of Jewish families, union busting subplots, Cuba’s fall to Castro, the arrival of casino-running gangsters in Florida, and gorgeous architecture—and people. The show’s uneven in the early going, but there’s potential there.

-Game of Thrones is back on HBO on Sunday with the second episode of its second season, and there are lots of fascinating gender politics on tap. Catch up, and we’ll discuss on Monday.

At the beginning of Knocked Up, when a group of nerdy Jewish dudes find themselves unexpectedly admitted to a nightclub, schlubby Ben Stone (Seth Rogen) tells his friends that “If any of us get laid tonight it’s because of Eric Bana in Munich.” Magic City, Starz’s next attempt to burnish its reputation as a provider of high-quality drama along with its standard doses of reasonably explicit sex and violence, follows the noble and recent pop culture trend of portraying Jews as something other than nebbishes. It stars Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Ike Evans, a recently-remarried widower who built his dream hotel, the Miramar Playa, on Miami Beach, just in time for Castro to take Havana and kick out the casinos, creating a hot new market for a Caribbean vacation spot. It’s the first of the current crop of period shows to put Jewish characters at the center of the frame, and it’s one of the best decisions Mitch Glazer, the show’s creator, made in standing up this gorgeous-looking but uneven drama.

Magic City‘s a personal story for Glazer, who in a conversation with me in January described starting out as an “assistant engineer”—or janitor—a job his father, a lighting engineer who ordered the chandelier for the Eden Roc and put in gambling machine hookups below the floor of the Fountinbleau lobby, got him. Living in the city was also his introduction to both Cuban immigration and the Civil Rights movement. “My parents, I was 7, dragged me to Civil Rights marches in Flagler Street, and we had rotten garbage thrown at us. I remember, because they were very active in what was then a very Southern town,” he told me. “Most of my friends when I was in sixth grade, the first-wave of Cubans, were the white-collar Cubans who came to America, guys who had been lawyers who became short-order cooks. Those were my best friends’ parents. I tried to pass for Cuban for about six months. They just seemed cooler. My high school was 60 percent Jewish, 40 percent Cuban, and Mickey Rourke.”

Magic City is at its best when the show reflects that transition. Ike’s second wife, Vera (Olga Kurylenko) contemplated converting to Judaism on the eve of Ike’s daughters bat mitzvah, and Ike and his father squabble over which of them is the worse Jew. Older Russian emigrees play balalaika on the beach and a louche State Senator from Tallahassee goes on at length about the “Aryan” charms of a potential beauty queen. We’ve had Jews at the margins of Mad Men for years, and with the arrival of Michael Ginsburg in the office, we’ll finally have one at the center of the frame. But I enjoyed how Magic City puts Jews and Jewishness at the forefront of the show, giving a Florida Jewish community far richer than the stereotype of retirees we have today. And Jews aren’t the only community Magic City examines. Work in the Miramar Playa kitchens grinds to a halt as word comes over the radio of Castro and Che’s advance on Havana. And Ike plays off the black residents of Overtown against white picketers who want to unionize the hotel, busting up the picket line by violence. It’s that kind of conflict that shows how perceptive characters are of how the world around them is changing, and how bold they are about taking advantage of shifting power dynamics.

It’s less good when it overreaches in search of drama. Starz’s existing viewers may depend on a heavy dose of nipples and killings, but the gratuitousness of both elements in shows like Magic City or Boss seems more likely than not to turn off the new subscribers Starz would like to woo. There’s a troika of characters in Magic City that should have been recast and rewritten: Steven Strait as Ike’s oldest son Stevie, a sullen seducer whose charms are inexplicable to me but appear to turn every woman around him stupid, Jessica Marais as Lily Diamond, the wife of mobster Benny Diamond (an insanely over-the-top Danny Huston), who begins an impossibly foolish affair with Stevie that serves only to fulfill the sexual quotient, and Huston himself, who lurks around killing dogs and threatening to feed people to sharks. Maybe these things really happened. But I wouldn’t mind if Glazer appeared to trust the power of his memories a bit more.

After Current TV fired Keith Olbermann last week, the combative host vowed he’d sue his (most recent) former network. Olbermann and his lawyers filed suit in California yesterday, and their allegations make for quite the read. Olbermann’s complaints with his former employer range from the social to the technical. Here are the ten most serious—and funniest—charges Olbermann makes against Current TV and its executives in the order they appear in the lawsuit:

1. Current co-founder Joel Hyatt was kind of socially awkward: A thread running through Olbermann’s lawsuit is that Current tried to distance him from his representation, sometimes to disadvantage him in negotiations. But in this case, Olbermann makes a more personal allegation, that “Hyatt also attempted to isolate Olbermann from his professional representatives in an awkward attempt to form a close personal friendship with his new star.”

2. Current underinvested in its web presence, to the detriment of its audience base: Sometime, these charges are an opportunity for snark, as when the suit alleges “Stunningly, Al Gore’s network was not interested in establishing a strong internet presence.” But the suit also suggests that the network was slow to build out its web presence and wouldn’t allow Olbermann’s show to stream online, a hook that might have helped viewers who didn’t have Current or weren’t sure where to find the network on their channel lineups, continue to watch the program. “Current even refused Olbermann’s request and contractual right, to stream segments of the Program and additional web-only content over the Program Website. It is both sad and ironic that a channel owned and founded by Al Gore, for the stated purpose of creating an independent perspective, free from the control of large corporate interests, restricted the rights of its most celebrated commentator and Chief News Officer to fully broadcast his opinions over, of all things, the internet.”

3. Current’s facilities were a mess: This has been one of the most commonly reported points of dissension between Current and Olbermann, particularly after an electrical failure while the program was on-air led Olbermann to bring a candle on set. The lawsuit alleges that “Current President David Bohrman admitted ‘the 33rd St. facility is never going to be a professional facility. We need to move to HD, and a better location.’ He further admitted in that same e-mail ‘We are paying for a Porsche and getting a Yugo.’”

4. Hyatt behavior threatened Olbermann’s staff: “Hyatt’s leadership was highly erratic. Just days before the premiere of the Program, Hyatt even threatened to fire Olbermann and the loyal staff members who had followed him from MSNBC to Current. Hyatt behaved as if he had just paid Olbermann to become his puppet instead of the Chief News Officer of the network.”

5. Hyatt and Current were moustache-twirling blackmailers: “Hyatt blackmailed Olbermann into agreeing to put himself in a position that no other major talent in the entertainment or news industries has been forced into in decades: fending for himself without the benefit of hire advisors. Olbermann gave in to Hyatt’s blackmail for the purposes of saving the premiere of the Program and the jobs of those who worked on it. Olbermann left the meeting devastated at having discovered that he was working for a blackmailer.”

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It’s been a big week for powerful dudes in the entertainment industry saying things they later regret, and David Simon is no exception. Yesterday, the New York Times published an interview with him in which Simon appears to be the hipsteryest hipster who ever hipstered, saying that if folks weren’t there from the beginning with The Wire, he’s annoyed by their interpretations: “I do have a certain amused contempt for the number of people who walk sideways into the thing and act like they were there all along…I’m indifferent to who thinks Omar is really cool now, or that this is the best scene or this is the best season. It was conceived of as a whole, and we did it as a whole. For people to be picking it apart now like it’s a deck of cards or like they were there the whole time or they understood it the whole time — it’s wearying.”

Fortunately, Simon seems to have recognized that contempt for your audience is not the best marketing strategy, because he called up Alan Sepinwall and attempted a clarification. This part of the interview strikes me as the most compelling:

You can watch it any way you want. I know I’m not allowed to speak for how people want to watch “The Wire.” But let me put it on its head and ask, am I allowed to say what I think has value in the piece for me, and for the other people who worked on the show? For us, telling us how cool Omar was four years after the entire thing is on the page — if that’s the point, then our ambitions were pretty stunted to begin with. I was asked a question about what I thought about the show’s longevity, and about the “Wire” mania that was going on in March when the brackets sprung up, and I answered to that. Other people’s mileage may vary and will vary, but if you’re asking me whether or not that stuff is meaningful, I think in some ways it diminishes “The Wire.” if you go online, you’ll find some people who made very smart critiques of that nonsense. I read those and went, “Yeah, man, those guys get it, and the fellows wasting time breaking this thing down to its components, what a shame.” I would have loved to see an idea or an argument that the show undertook come up in any of that bracketology, and it never does. Once you get done arguing over who’s the coolest, or what scene makes you laugh the hardest, there’s no room left to argue any of the things…

While I don’t think that breaking down Omar’s badassdom and discussing bureaucratic cultures are mutually exclusive enterprises, I’m actually somewhat sympathetic to this kind of frustration. Vulture’s drama derby, even if I found the way it treated gender to be kind of a problem, was one of the only brackets I’ve ever seen that was specifically set up to award intellectual ambition in television. What we want to watch, and the kind of reaction that’s buzzy and memeable don’t always go hand in hand. I think it’s somewhat overweening to suggest that The Wire can only be approached with the Utmost Seriousness, but I can also understand what it must feel like to see The Wire‘s declining ratings and some of the shallower reactions to its legacy and wonder whether it’s worth trying to build something that complex—or on a critical end, trying to plumb certain depths.

CNN contributor and conservative blogger Erick Erickson said he liked the idea of excluding women from The Masters golf tournament, saying, “I don’t want to be hanging out at some women’s event!”

The Augusta National Golf Club, which hosts the tournament, has never admitted a woman as a member in its history, but its discriminatory policy sparked controversy this week after it decided not to extend membership to the new female CEO of IBM, which sponsors The Masters. Augusta has offered membership to previous IBM CEOs (all men).

Both President Obama and presumed GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney have spoken out against the policy, as has South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R), but Erickson sees the debate over the prohibition on women as a “partisan” issue. “Who freakin’ cares?” he said during a lengthy rant in support of the policy:

ERICKSON: Who cares? Who cares that she wasn’t invited into the club? She’s a woman — women aren’t allowed! …. It is striking to me just how political the president wants to make everything. The war on women coming home to The Masters. Who freakin’ cares? [...]

I don’t care that The Masters are a male-dominated event. I don’t care that women aren’t members of The Masters. Frankly, I kind of like the idea that women aren’t members of The Masters. Good Lord, I don’t want to be hanging out at some women’s event! Can’t men go anywhere and just be men? There are plenty of places where women can be women. … You know what Mr. President, why don’t you just leave the partisanship out of golf?!

Listen to the clip, via Media Matters:

Erickson decries the partisanship of the issue, but even though Romney took an identical position to Obama’s, Erickson dismissed Romney’s opposition to Augusta’s policy by saying, “At lease he was smart enough to know that we don’t want to wade into the war on women with Augusta.”

The bridge is yours.

-It’s nice to know that Tyler Perry can get charges he was racially profiled investigated.

-I cannot fathom why a veteran producer would think it was okay to edit George Zimmerman’s 911 call selectively.

-Jimmy Smits will mentor Jax Teller.

-The fact that Jason Antoon is going to be in Downwardly Mobile makes me much more excited for it.

-Are there people left who don’t think Felicia Day is cool?

With Savages, a movie about a pair of pot growers and their shared girlfriend, who gets herself kidnapped by goons attached to queenpin Salma Hayek, Oliver Stone’s become the latest director to cast Mexican drug cartels as the villains in a flashy action movie:

Navy SEALs movie Act of Valor portrayed a tunnel system run by Mexican cartel leaders as a valuable aid to al Qaeda. Tony Scott’s working on Narco Sub, a movie about the submersibles the cartels used in smuggling operations. Breaking Bad‘s most recent season came up with a novel, moving, bloody twist on a cartel story, but it relied heavily on the visuals of sparkling pools, heavy gold jewelry, hot girls and hotter cars to set the scene. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to come up with a novel movie villain, or wanting to tap into new and different current of global anxiety. But there’s something weird about the assumptions of all of these movies that the most interesting stories you could tell about the cartels involve their impact on individual Americans rather than on Mexican society. It’s almost like there are compelling stories you could tell about Mexican characters that wouldn’t overstate the impact of drugs in the United States.

Augusta National golf club has never admitted a woman member it its history, but that gender discrimination policy is being put to the test this week. IBM, a sponsor of The Masters golf tournament which Augusta National is hosting, has a female chief executive – Virginia Rometty. (IBM’s prior four male CEOs were all given honorary membership.) Rometty is expected to be at Augusta National today, and media reports are asking whether she’ll be allowed to don the famous green jacket, which is traditionally worn only by club members and Masters champions.

Both President Obama and Mitt Romney have issued statements indicating their disagreement with the club’s policy. Meanwhile, club chairman Billy Payne insists that Augusta will decide for itself whom to allow in its ranks.

The golf writer for the New York Times, Karen Crouse, weighed into the controversy yesterday, telling GOLF.com in an interview that she would like to use her influence to bring about a change:

“If it were left to me, which it seldom is in the power structure of writer versus editor, I’d probably not come cover this event again until there is a woman member,” Crouse said Thursday. “More and more, the lack of a woman member is just a blue elephant in the room.” [...]

“I love the [Masters] tournament for the reasons the players do — the course is beautiful, the history is abundant,” Crouse said. “But I find it harder and harder to get past one thing that’s missing. [PGA Tour commissioner] Tim Finchem is not making a stand. High-ranking players with daughters are not willing to talk about it. Somebody has to make a stand. Why not me in my own little way?”

Crouse’s willingness to speak out about a discriminatory policy that affects her personally didn’t go over well with her employer. The New York Times’ sports editor Joe Sexton admonished her publicly:

Contacted by The Associated Press, New York Times sports editor Joe Sexton said the comments were, “completely inappropriate and she has been spoken to.”

Crouse deserves credit for being willing to stake a principled position on the issue, despite knowing it would anger her male colleagues and the existing power structure. As Alyssa Rosenberg has previously observed, women reporters are often subjected to double standards that devalue their opinions.

I was watching the fairly funny trailer for Ted, in which Mark Wahlberg plays a grown man who lives with a crude and belligerent teddy bear he’s had since he was eight:

And I realized it reminded me of FX’s show Wilfred, and not just because both the movie and the show feature adult men who take bong hits with their imaginary friends:

Both Ted and Wilfred are squarely in the tradition of Harvey, the 1950 classic about Elwood Dowd (Jimmy Stewart) a likable potential alcoholic who insists that his best fried is an invisible rabbit of that name (a remake was in the work three years ago but seems to have foundered). In that movie, Elwood’s family considers having him institutionalized or receive medical treatment that will make him stop seeing Harvey, but ultimately decide that they would rather have his kind, imaginative self than a normalized shell of a man. But they have a sharper edge than Harvey does—Ted and Wilfred both cause genuine problems in their human friends’ lives other than making them appear odd, and the show and movie appear more willing to treat these lingering attachments as a sign of real pathology. In that sense, they’re also a somewhat way of moving beyond the valorization of manchildren that’s been something of a staple of pop culture for the last five or six years. These men haven’t just coasted charmingly along. There’s something specific holding them back, and it’ll require a difficult, unpleasant decision to reckon with it.

This post contains spoilers through the April 5 episode of Community.

There’s a way in which “Pillows and Blankets” is the platonic ideal of a Community episode: it’s the ultimate example fans of the show can pull out to explain why they love it, and critics will use to demonstrate why the show is obsessed with concepts and detached from actual emotion. The show is a funny facsimile of war movies, a brilliant breakdown of the elements involved in the trope, but one that has precisely nothing to say about how we actually ought to tell stories about war, or what it means to be in combat or conflict.

I’ll admit to a certain amount of squeamishness about reducing the Civil War, the conflict to which this is the most obvious analogue, to a pillow fight, or to the suggestion, as Jeff put it, that “Some conflicts are so pointless they just have to play themselves out.” And while this assessment depends heavily on what comes after, I thought this was a remarkably facile means of dealing with the really profound issues that plague Troy and Abed’s friendship. Recognizing that you enjoying spending time together isn’t actually enough to mend the fact that you have significantly different worldviews, goals, and standards for treating people.

The recitations of war cliches aren’t bad. “There was a point where all I saw were feathers. And I started swinging. And I hit someone. And hear someone fall. It might have been someone from my side,” Shirley admits. Herry Jefferson, who we’ve never met before, talks about the camaraderie of war, explaining that “New Fluffytown didn’t care who you were. You were surrounded by softness.” Jeff’s platitudinous speeches mean he’s well-prepared to deliver lines like “We fight not because we want war. We fight because we might gain peace.”

But the fact that these forms are cliches doesn’t mean they aren’t meaningful, or that they don’t exist for a reason. Saying things like “The Rambo titles never made sense. And neither does war,” is cute, but it’s a statement doesn’t even remotely stand up to scrutiny. The episode does the same thing Jeff does at the end while writing in his diary, takes a potentially authentic moment and turns it into pure performance. At its best, as in “Introduction to Mixology,” Community’s capable of being wildly performative and achingly meaningful. This episode doesn’t live up to that standard.