Guess we’ll have to wait for a longer cut to see more of that long-touted journey towards redemption and self-reflection:

I get that this is a riff on how Charlie Harper was killed off on Two and a Half Men. But it also inadvertently reveals how silly it is to suggest that this is any sort of grand comeback narrative. Charlie Sheen has made too much money for too many people for him ever to have to struggle to find work if he wants it.

Vulture has a very interesting piece up on the marketing campaign for the romantic comedy Think Like a Man, which apparently is scoring some of the highest audience approval ratings in early screenings ever. And Sony Screen Gems has apparently decided that since both majority-black and mixed-race audiences seem to love the movie they will, in a rare and welcome departure, try to sell Think Like a Man to all the viewers they think might possibly like it if only they could be got in the theater door, irrespective of race. One non-Sony executive told Vulture “it looks like a Nancy Meyers movie, with black people. Which is fine …. All it has to be is funny, and make it clear that the concept has no race.” But another, in full snipe mode, says of the marketing campaign, “There’s no general audience stuff.”

So I decided to take a look at the trailer and find out what it is that studio executive think it is that black people do and are attracted to that couldn’t be of interest to a general audience:

Who knew that only “urban” people (and really, can we retire that term? It has to be the most tiresome misconflation in the pop culture marketing dictionary), as that second executive put it, do or relate to the following experiences:

-Play pickup basketball

-Buy coffee in the morning

-Sometimes sleep with people they don’t actually want to date

-Can be overly attentive to their mothers and fail to set boundaries

-Work in restaurants

-Are flustered by attractive people of the opposite sex

-Get frustrated with their dating prospects

-Read self-help books

-Get sexually frustrated

-Think of Steve Harvey as kind of a square

-Get judgy about class

-Have friends who say awkward things at inopportune moments

If that’s true, then I am definitely not a white lady. Now I have to reassess everything.

The American Library Association’s annual count of the books that people most frequently tried to get removed from school libraries and classrooms is out, and of 326 reported challenges, these were the books that raised hackles most frequently:

1)ttyl; ttfn; l8r, g8r (series), by Lauren Myracle
Offensive language; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group

2) The Color of Earth (series), by Kim Dong Hwa

3)The Hunger Games trilogy, by Suzanne Collins

4)My Mom’s Having A Baby! A Kid’s Month-by-Month Guide to Pregnancy, by Dori Hillestad Butler

5)The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie

6)Alice (series), by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

7)Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

8)What My Mother Doesn’t Know, by Sonya Sones

9)Gossip Girl (series), by Cecily Von Ziegesar

10) To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

Of course we’ve got the old favorites in there. We’ll probably know we’re a healthy, mature society when people stop calling for To Kill a Mockingbird, one of the most well-rounded, humane explorations of racism that exists, stops getting challenged. Brave New World‘s an illustration of how anxiously people can react to science fiction, in part because of discomfort it inspires about what the world might end up looking like. And calls to get Sherman Alexie out of classrooms always strike me as inspired by the same sentiments that suggest Bully might not be appropriate for teenagers—we have to protect children in fiction what other children and the world at large inflict on them in real life.

Of the more recent additions, some of the rationales for challenges are amusing. The challenges to The Hunger Games, for example, suggest that the series is “Anti-ethnic; anti-family; insensitivity; offensive language; occult/satanic; violence.” Almost all of those allegations are significant misreadings of the novel, which makes pretty clear that it would be delightful for its main characters to grow up in a world with an economy that allowed all parents to support their children without taking on extremely dangerous work, or people weren’t divided into districts that restricted their social and economic brutality. And I’d actually love to know what challengers interpreted as occult or satanist sentiments in the book, which depicts a world in which any form of religious belief is actually conspicuously absent.

I’d also suspect that Lauren Myracle’s Internet Girls series, Sonya Sones’ What My Mother Doesn’t Know (which is one of the most challenged books of the last decade) and the Gossip Girl books are challenged not just for their content, but because of what they suggest about how the Internet has changed children’s and young adult’s lives. If I were a parent, I might be anxious about the possibility that my child’s life was essentially unmonitorable, and that there was a whole frontier beyond the real world where they could get into trouble (and as someone who grew up in the beginning of that era, I know what I’m in for). Removing one source of inspiration may delay a discovery, but there’s no way to prevent it completely. Kids will poke around and get themselves in trouble online whether or not they’re inspired to start trashy gossip blogs or pick screen names that will haunt them in adulthood. Open channels of communication, whether it’s on books, or on bullying, will probably prove more effective in the long run than panics about individual books.

The word’s just come down that Matt Damon’s new movie The Promised Land, which apparently centers around a salesman and a small town, apparently is also about the environmental impact of hydraulic fracturing, and it’s already become a football in the war over the natural gas extraction process. A pro-fracking group is already trying to raise money for a movie of their own off the existence of The Promised Land. And while Damon is well-known as a committed environmentalist, the movie seems likely to be taken as a referendum for how John Krasinski and Dave Eggers, who wrote the script, and Gus Van Sant, who will direct, feel about fracking. All of which is a distraction from the real issue—a lot of our most critical environmental issues and most invasive energy-extraction processes would make for stellar movies and action sequences, and we ought to have more of them.

Documentaries have been much quicker than features to document environmental problems and environmentally-dangerous practices. Both Tuvalu: That Sinking Feeling and The Island President, about Mohamed Nasheed, the now-ousted president of the Maldives who’s become an outspoken advocate about the dangers of global warming, have chronicled the island nations that are canaries in the coal mine for rising sea levels. Gasland‘s helped up the profile of hydraulic fracturing, and Robert Kennedy Jr.’s documentary The Last Mountain takes a look at the impact of mountain-top removal mining.

But all of these subjects would make for excellent, tense fictionalized films as well. Anna North’s America Pacifica and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy are only two works suitable for adaptation that chronicle the instability of relocating costal and island populations as the amount of available habitable land shrinks, and you could tell those stories from the perspective of people being moved or the people planning airlifts and handling the resulting instability. Fracking involves the kind of big machinery, complex machinery and poison gunk that action movie directors go to great lengths to invent (or license from toy companies). And mountaintop removal mining means blowing up large chunks of geography. Why invent an erupting volcano or an unlikely meteor’s arrival when we’re already doing things that are so destructive and lend themselves to dramatic movie visuals in the first place?

The bridge is yours.

-Ben Kingsley will be the villain in Iron Man 3. It’s a great time to be a British actor who wants to break into superhero and sci-fi franchises as a baddie.

-Adam McKay, bless him, is starting to give us Anchorman 2 details.

-The average American household is now paying $86 a month for cable.

-Chevy Chase: still angry, still with the voicemails.

-F. Gary Gray may give us an NWA biopic.

-Everything I’ve seen about Brave just makes me more excited for it:

Essayist William Deresiewicz has a fascinating look at the evolution of friendship between men and women in the New York Times—and a suggestion for why we don’t see these friendships in popular culture:

So if it’s common now for men and women to be friends, why do we so rarely see it in popular culture? Partly, it’s a narrative problem. Friendship isn’t courtship. It doesn’t have a beginning, a middle and an end. Stories about friendships of any kind are relatively rare, especially given what a huge place the relationships have in our lives. And of course, they’re not sexy. Put a man and a woman together in a movie or a novel, and we expect the sparks to fly. Yet it isn’t just a narrative problem, or a Hollywood problem.

This isn’t entirely true, of course: friendships have narratives and experience strains and uncertainties that can be just as impactful and interesting to explore as the stresses of new romantic connections. And one of the hallmarks of the Frat Pack and Judd Apatow is that they treat male friendships with that level of significance. In The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Andy’s growing connections with his coworkers, and the various ways in which they’re alternately respectful and insensitive, are the catalyst for him to develop his love life, and their friendships are almost as important as his first adult romantic relationship. In Wedding Crashers, John and Jeremy are the most important people in each other’s lives, and the movie is about how those friendships have to change when they start treating women as potentially permanent additions to their lives instead of as temporary interludes. I Love You, Man treats the process of finding a best friend as if it’s as significant as the quest for a permanent partner.

And even if you don’t want to do a 90-minute exploration of friendship in a movie, or believe that friendships are inherently less dramatic than romantic partnering (which strikes me as somewhat strange), that’s not an argument against including friendships between men and women on television, where they can be an established part of the background dynamic rather than foregrounded. New Girl, after a rocky start, has settled into a nice dynamic between Jess and her roommates, and has dealt with the sexual tension question by having the characters be honest about the fact that it exists while also being clear that they don’t intend to act on it. One of the many virtues of Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23, which debuts on ABC this Wednesday, is that it features a significant friendship between a man and a woman, the equally funny Krysten Ritter and James Van Der Beek. Peggy Olson and Don Draper are arguably friends on Mad Men, and this season’s Game of Thrones involves Arya’s friendships—or at least alliances—with men. These kinds of stories are far from impossible to tell. It’s not as if men and women who are friends are fictional creatures who have to be conjured into existence.

This post contains spoilers through the third season of Justified.

“He didn’t know it was a state trooper. He just saw a man in a hat pointing a gun at Boyd.”

There’s a lot to discuss in the season finale of Justified, an outstandingly strong episode of television that significantly redeemed the overstretched season that came before it—Jere Burns Emmy-worthy performance as Wynn Duffy, the sociology of Noble’s Holler, the question of what Raylan’ll be like as a mostly-absent parent. But for me, the third season of Justified comes down to precisely this shattering question: what happens when parents and children fail to fulfill their obligations to each other and replace the unsatisfying partner with a more compelling one? It’s one that takes on bitter connotations in Harlan, but that, for an anti-hero melodrama, has surprising resonance for a country only beginning to come to terms with a rising dementia epidemic.

There’s no question that Arlo hates his son, and Raylan doesn’t have much use for his father, even if Arlo took a moment to apologize to Raylan at the moment of his transition from free man to soon-to-be convict. Even that admission comes less out of charity and repentance than Arlo’s desire to quiet his own raging mind. “Not an easy thing for me to say,” he admits to his son, before explaining the delusion that lead him to it. “But she insisted. I know she always was your favorite…But you don’t know how she can nag.” But Raylan hates his father, too, telling Limehouse after the latter man addresses him as Mr. Givens that he’s “Deputy Marshal. I’m not my father and I don’t care to be confused with him.”

Much of this episode is an illustration of how Raylan’s abrogated any duties he might have been expected to carry out as a son. Raylan hasn’t had much idea where his father is, much less that it’s Boyd Crowder keeping track of whether his father takes his medications. “I been trying,” Arlo tells Boyd fretfully when called to account for whether he’s sticking to the schedule. “But she hides ‘em where I can’t find ‘em…Thinks it’s funny watching an old man chase around his pills.” And even when it’s suggested that Arlo, in his dementia, might have let one of Boyd’s crimes slip, Boyd behaves more like a caretaker than a man bent on vengeance. “I want you to take one of these pills in front of me. Go on,” he tells Arlo, a father and a child switching places, two criminals reduced to vulnerable patient and patient caretaker.

And what Raylan ultimately doesn’t get, ruminating on the rotten apple and the barrel later (Boyd’s “Well, Raylan, I think even in a little town like Harlan, the apple barrel is obsolete,” and Raylan’s weary “But the expression ain’t, because of the truth contained therein” is one of many great poetic moments in this season, one of the few of television that could without question qualify for literary awards.) is that Arlo’s evil is ultimately less consequential than the opportunity he afforded Boyd. “I’ve connected to Arlo in ways I was never given a chance to do with my own family,” Boyd explains. Whether he’s a coot, a criminal, or simply a sick old man, Arlo afforded Boyd the opportunity for tenderness and for mercy. And Boyd could see what Raylan, who believes that “Arlo’s a criminal, never been anything else,” could not: a man who responded to care and to be treating as if he had something of value left to offer.

That Arlo responded to Boyd’s care, and that ultimately he would have killed for him, is ultimately less proof of his hatred of Raylan than of Raylan’s demotion to mere mortal status in the eyes of the man who bore him. It’s not that Arlo had a clear choice between Boyd and Raylan and chose Raylan. It’s that he chose Boyd as his son against all other men. In that moment, Raylan was indistinguishable from the mass of men. And whether you’re a deputy marshal or an ordinary person caring for an aging parent, that’s the ultimate nightmare of watching a person you love vanish into dementia.