The idea of making a movie out of Bob Dylan’s 1975 album Blood on the Tracks is ludicrous, and not just because the brilliant, weird movie I’m Not There already burned through all the best, most inventive ideas for who could possibly play Bob Dylan. If you do Blood on the Tracks as a straight narrative of a relationship breaking down, reducing the music to background atmospherics, you lose all the weird brilliance of the world Dylan’s created. And if you try to od it as a series of short vignettes, it’s hard to think how the narrative might work. But as long as this thing’s in the works anyway, here are five ideas for who should play some of the more entertaining characters on Dylan’s album:

-The Ex-Husband from “Tangled Up in Blue”: If “she was married when we first met / soon to be divorced,” it’s worth remembering that someone else got their heart broken before Dylan’s operatic love story even got kickstarted. John Hawkes is awfully good at portraying hope that expects to be disappointed, whether as Sol Star on Deadwood or paralyzed journalist Mark O’Brien in The Surrogate, about a paralyzed man who decides to lose his virginity, which will be major Oscar-bait when it comes out later this year. If anyone deserves to be in proximity to Bob Dylan, it’s him.

-The Parrot from “Simple Twist of Fate”: If the parrot from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is available, he’s definitely put in enough time in the background on a goofy project. Now’s his time to prove that he’s an artist.

-Mrs. Gray from “Idiot Wind”: Now that the American Pie franchise has come to a conclusion, Jennifer Coolidge is free from the obligations of obligations of playing Stifler’s mom. But she could put that experience to good use playing a sexy widow who runs off to Italy with someone inappropriate and an enormous amount of money. Maybe Eugene Levy can play Mr. Gray, who gets shot. Those eyebrows are great at conveying surprise.

-Lily, from “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts”: Emma Stone got famous as a redhead, only to reveal that her natural hair color was actually blonde. So who better to play a gorgeous frontier girl who switches hair color as part of a life transformation. She’d be awesome in an adaptation of the most epic song on “Blood on the Tracks.” And now that David Milch is available, maybe he could dust himself off and go back to the frontier well. I would totally watch this as a stand-alone movie.

-The message-deliverer from “If You See Her, Say Hello”: It has to be pretty stressful being the go-between for Bob Dylan and a woman he’s broken up with. But Adam Pally deserves a European vacation after all the awesome work he’s put in on Happy Endings this year. And any awkward news is more palatable when delivered by a man who’s in full-on bear mode.

When I read over the weekend that Thomas Kinkaide had died at the age of 54, I immediately thought of Susan Orlean’s 2001 profile of the painter, who rejected critical opinion of his work as schmaltzy and sold his work as part of the extremely lucrative collectibles market. Orlean points out of Kinkaide’s life story, in which he grew up poor and fatherless, left a Christian school for a secular art school before having a powerful conversion experience that lead him to dedicate himself to optimism in art, “It’s as good a story as you could hope for,” she wrote, “if you want to make a point about perseverance and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and appreciating life’s bounty; even the bad parts of the story are good, because it’s easier not to begrudge Kinkade his fortune when you are reminded that he was a poor kid who had to struggle, who rejected the smarty-pants liberal establishment to follow his heart, and who is proud of having earned his way into the ultimate American aristocracy of successful entrepreneurs.”

Lots of folks have jumped on the subsequent pieces about Kinkaide that suggested the real story was less than flattering, involving everything from sexual harassment, to defraudment of the franchisees who ran Kinkaide’s galleries, to public urination. While I think it’s fine to debunk the narrative, it’s also worth getting at precisely why that narrative, and Kinkaide’s paintings, were so compelling to so many people, especially if you get frustrated with what seems like the perpetual American default to simplistic popular culture when more complex and interesting alternatives are available. Orlean wrote:

“I created a system of marketing compatible with American art,” Kinkade said to me recently. “I believe in ‘aspire to’ art. I want my work to be available but not common. I want it to be a dignified component of everyday life. It’s good to dream about things. It’s like dreaming of owning a Rolex ~n instead, you dream about owning a seventy-five-thousand-dollar print.” In fact, a lot of limited- edition art is about dreaming; so many of the paintings portray wistful images of a noble and romantic past that never was, or the anti-intellectual innocence of fairies and animals, or mythical heroes who can never fail and never fade…

“I have this certain ability to have in my mind an image that means something to real people,” he said, sitting on a sofa across the room from the easels. “The No. 1 quote critics give me is ‘Thom, your work is irrelevant.’ Now, that’s a fascinating, fascinating comment. Yes, irrelevant to the little subculture, this microculture, of modern art. But here’s the point: My art is relevant because it’s relevant to ten million people. That makes me the most relevant artist in this culture, not the least. Because I’m relevant to real people.” He sat up and started to laugh. “I remember that quote, man! It was a great quote! It was ‘The Louvre is full of dead pictures by dead artists.’ And you know, that’s the dead art we don’t want anything to do with!” He laughed again and slapped his thighs. “We’re the art of life, man! We’re bringing the life back to art!”

Nostalgia is a powerful thing, whether it’s an old-fashioned fantasy of a multi-ethnic army coming to rescue us from the newfangled threat of giant robots, or the promise of escape to a non-existent bucolic paradise. When it comes to pop culture, the comfortable are deeply averse to being disturbed. It’s the rare pop culture engine that can get huge numbers of people voluntarily invested in something that will be profoundly disruptive. That’s not a reason to think less of people who like Thomas Kinkaide, or Two and a Half Men—just to think harder about how we can build those engines, and to recognize the magnitude of the challenge.

The long-overdue firing of John Derbyshire from National Review for writing a confoundingly racist guide for white parents about how to speak to their children about their social interactions with black people has raised has raised a number of questions about how editor Rich Lowry ought to have handled Derbyshire, whose thoughts in this area are not precisely new. Ta-Nehisi wants to know why it took so long for Lowry to reach this decision after Derbyshire described himself as a racist and homophobe in 2003. And Dave Weigel asks ” If you’re going to have anti-black sentiment, would you rather have it dumb and exposed or would you rather have it subtle? The authors of stories about how Trayvon Martin looked really scary in his fake grill and tweets don’t add oh, and this is because black youths are scary. Even if they’re unarmed. Derbyshire came out and did it.”

These questions go together, and both have serious implications for how editors, and other purveyors of valuable cultural capital, ought to allocate it. On the question of outspokenness, I have no particular wish to see people I care about harmed by the ugly speech of others. I know first-hand that calling out shockingly blunt speech like Derbyshire’s—or on a much lesser level, Lee Aronsohn’s—can be a terrific traffic driver. But hearing it and feeling that outrage is also mentally exhausting. The argument is, however, that such unadulterated, un-prettified speech gives us an opportunity to see racism, sexism, and homophobia as it truly is, an experience that I imagine is more of an education for straight, white dudes than for women, people of color, or gay folks. But it’s true that there are a lot of straight, white men in positions of cultural authority. I’m not immune to the idea that it’s good for them to be exposed to moments of uncomfortable clarity that require them to draw firm lines in the sand about what ideas they are and aren’t willing to be associated with, and what people they are and aren’t willing to credential.

The problem is that suggesting that such authority figures need those shocking moments absolves them of responsibility to constantly be thinking about these kinds of questions. Sure, the requirement that racists, sexists, and homophobes pretty up their ugly thoughts—whether via Charles Murray-like stabs at scientific legitimation or pretentions of concern—may make those sentiments less immediately obvious in prose. But isn’t that precisely the kind of thing that we hire magazine editors to detect through deep and perceptive readings? You shouldn’t get credit for elucidating the line when the lack of one is causing you discomfort. You should get credit for weeding out noxious ideas precisely when it would be less convenient for you to do so, but because you feel it’s important to make clear the damage that those roots are doing below the soil.

Last week kicked off with Two and a Half Men creator Lee Aronsohn‘s declaration that, in terms of raunchy comedies starring women on television, “Enough ladies. I get it. You have periods…we’re approaching peak vagina on television, the point of labia saturation.” So it’s wonderfully refreshing to hear Judd Apatow, when asked about his recent projects that star and are about women, and about the female comedy boom, say:

I got bored of penises. I said, ‘enough of that.’ No, I just like immaturity, I like to show people struggle and try to figure out who they are. I’m a guy and so it leaned guy for a while. But one of the projects I’m most proud of is Freaks and Geeks, which is about a woman in high school struggling to figure out which group she wants to belong to, so for me, it goes back and forth…It’s just because it’s a single camera show and we’re on HBO and it’s uncensored. There are limitations when you’re doing a sitcom, in terms of language and how long you have to tell a story. But we’re big fans of all of those shows. My friend Jake Kasdan, who produced Freaks and Geeks, is one of the producers on New Girl and we’re all obsessed.

It’s always funny to me that anyone would remember Freaks and Geeks as anything other than a show with male and female co-main characters. I suppose that has something to do with the fact that Linda Cardellini’s subsequent career been much, much quieter than that of almost any actor with a significant role on the show. John Francis Daley’s on Bones and has launched a successful screenwriting career. Seth Rogen and Jason Segel have morphed from manboys to heartthrobs. James Franco is James Franco.

Given how much time men and women devote to figuring out each other’s behavior and motivations—and how they should tailor their behavior in response—in real life, it’s always struck me as bizarre to assume that men would only want to watch stories about men or that women would only want to watch stories about women. Apatow’s curiosity shouldn’t seem so refreshing and logical. But in the world we live in, he’s practically a beacon of sanity.

The bridge is yours.

-November is coming. And of course Joe Biden is a maester with a bald eagle instead of a raven.

-The best Passover TV episodes.

-I’m sorry to hear the Watts House is having trouble, since the Watts Towers are one of the coolest things in America.

-Movies and television shows harming animals is less common than we might like to think.

-More Super Best Friends Forever!

I haven’t seen American Pie 2 and American Wedding, but I re-watched American Pie in preparation for a piece about American Reunion last week, and found myself spending a surprising amount of time talking to people about the franchise this week. For all its crass, happy commercialism, the movies have struck a deep chord with people, particularly on the question of how they portray sexuality.

Take Michelle, for example. Everyone remembers the payoff to her endless recitations of band camp memories in the first movie: “And this one time… at band camp… I stuck a flute in my pussy!” But no one seems to remember the line that comes after it, when Jim can’t believe what he’s heard. “What? You think I don’t know how to get myself off? Hell, that’s what half of band camp is—sex-ed,” Michelle informs him. “So are we gonna screw soon, ‘cuz I’m getting kind of antsy!” It’s a fabulous inversion of stereotype: while Jim is a clueless virgin who wants to sleep with a woman by the end of high school in part to know what it feels like, Michelle’s in touch with and knowledgeable about her own pleasure. She wants to sleep with him because she knows what she likes and wants more.

That revelation’s part of what makes their circumstances in American Reunion so sad. It’s not that the movie explicitly makes the case that pornography is childish. But there’s something depressing about the fact that, after having a child, Jim’s availing himself of internet pornography and Michelle’s snuggling up to the showerhead. Given that we know how much fun they had together, it’s too bad to see them alienated from each other and the sexual happiness they found together. A failed attempt to recapture the magic results in one of American Reunion’s funnier sequences, and gives us Alyson Hannigan in fetishwear, for those of us with happy memories of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Dopplegangland.”

American Reunion also has a more jaded approach to a theme of the first movie, reciprocal oral sex. In American Pie, under the tutelage of his older brother, Kevin finally goes down on his girlfriend Vicky after months of being on the receiving end. When his friends ask him about the experience, his response is near-beatific. This time around, it’s Stifler who’s going down. Desperate to recover the glory of his high school days, Stifler’s determined to hook up with a girl the gang knew back in the day who was famous for her own talents in that department. But when he meets up with her again, she’s no longer so accommodating—if Stifler wants to be taken care of, he’s going to have to meet her needs first. Unfortunately, the movie ends up portraying cunnilingus as icky for the fellows involved rather than transformative. But the point still lands.

John Darnielle and I were talking about this on Twitter, and I think he’s right that “if ‘radical’ is a movie in which boys aren’t repelled by women’s bodies, woe is me, you know.” It’s just too bad that no other mainstream teen franchise has improved on the foundation that American Pie laid down 13 years ago.

The Hunger Games has been a massive smash, but director Gary Ross is apparently out of the running to helm the next sequel, Catching Fire. And to be honest, Ross’s huge reliance on shaky cam both blunted the impact of some of the killings and was awfully hard to watch after a while. Here are five directors I’d love to see considered for the role, pending their availability, and what I think they’d bring to the tale of a critically important female action hero.

1. Patty Jenkins: Jenkins was supposed to be directing Thor 2, but ended up exiting the project. She might actually be better suited for Catching Fire. The Hunger Games trilogy is fundamentally a story about post-traumatic stress disorder and the trama of committing violence, themes that Jenkins explored in her serial killer biopic Monster. That’s also a great movie about love and the authenticity of affection under enormous stress, a key component of the franchise.

2. Steven Soderbergh: He’s done a delightful job with action sequences in Las Vegas, which is the closest we get to the Capitol in contemporary America. And his work on Haywire suggests an interest in building out new brands of action heroines. But he might actually be better for the sequences in the third movie in the series, Mockingjay.

3. Edgar Wright: I think Wright, the force behind Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and the adaptation of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is one of the most outrageously talented and creative action choreographers working today. One thing the movie adaptation of The Hunger Games didn’t entirely make clear is how weird the arenas for the Games can be, and the arena in Catching Fire is a doozy. I’d love to see what Wright does with it. And given the weirdness of the one fight between women in Scott Pilgrim, I’d say Wright owes us a better one.

4. Karyn Kusama: I know a lot of people didn’t like the movie adaptation of Aeon Flux, which is a totally valid position to take. But between that and Girlfight, I’d like to see Kusama take another crack at a dystopian action movie with a female heroine, particularly one where the heroine and a man she (maybe?) loves are violently opposed.

5. Matthew Vaughn: Given his work on X-Men: First Class, we already know that Vaughn can get good work out of Jennifer Lawrence, especially in situations that involve performative sexuality. And Kick-Ass is brutal fun, with a tender, violent performance by Chloe Moretz. It’d be fun to see Vaughn tackle a movie where an alternately tender and tough girl is the main character.

This post contains spoilers through the April 8 episode of Game of Thrones.

I said in my initial review of the second season of Game of Thrones that it’s remarkable how much more confident the show has become since its beginning, and this episode is a perfect example of that sure-footedness. As it jumps between settings and characters, it’s alternately funny and scary. And this hour of television is asking two particularly important questions: what makes someone a lord or a lady, a worthy heir to a throne, someone worthy of deference? And what does it mean to identify your god and to have faith thereafter?

The first character to face that question is Arya, who on her long journey north, has begun to bond with Gendry, the blacksmith’s apprentice who, after last week’s massacre, may be the living son of the late King Robert Baratheon. After finding out that Gendry is just as wanted as she is, and that he met her father shortly before his death, Arya is moved to confide in the older boy. “You’re a high-born then, you’re a lady,” he says. It should be a simple question, but Arya has a less than simple answer: “No. I mean yes. My mother was a lady. And my sister.” But Gendry’s firm in his assessment, telling her, “You’re a lord’s daughter. You lived in a castle. All that about cocks, I should never have said.” To him, it’s the circumstances of her birth that determine Arya’s identity. To her, it’s a more confusing question, one having to do with behavior and essential nature.

Theon Greyjoy, quite against his expectations, finds himself facing similar questions on his return to Pyke, the capitol of the Iron Islands and his ancestral home. He predicts to the ship captain’s daughter he’s biding time with that “they’ll be waiting for me on the docks…anyone who matters. this is a big day for them. They haven’t had much to get excited about since I left.” But once he disembarks, he finds only a man who isn’t interested in his cargo or the young man who claims to be his future king. And he’s doubly devastated when it turns out that the woman he saw as a whore turns out to be the sister who, in Theon’s absence, their father Balon has come to see as his heir.

Theon believes that his blood makes him Balon’s heir, but his father wants an assessment for character first. “Who gave you those clothes? Is it Ned Stark’s pleasure to make you his daughter? That bauble around your neck—did you pay the iron price or the gold?” Balon quizzes Theon, and she fails. By contrast, Yara, Theon’s sister, has spend a decade proving her mettle. “The only nights she’s spent off this island have been spent on the sea. She’s commanded men. She’s killed men. She knows who she is,” Balon informs Theon, who believes her gender inherently disqualifies Yara from serving as a war leader.
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