“I got hit in the mirror,” eleven-year-old Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward) tells Sam, a Khaki Scout, when they meet in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom. “I lost my temper at myself.” The movie, an exploration of an island off the coast of New England and the people who live there, is a mirror picking up all sorts of flashes and themes from Anderson’s work. But it’s also a reflection that’s kinder to one of Anderson’s earlier characters than Suzy is to herself: Moonrise Kingdom is, to a certain extent, a story about a young Margot Tenenbaum.

Anderson’s live-action movies are obsessed with children who have lost their parents, whether to death or misadventure. In Rushmore, private school boy Max Fischer is motherless, and renders his true father non-existent with lies and exaggerations. Margot Tenenbaum is adopted, the source of her discontent in The Royal Tenenbaums, while her childhood neighbor and grown-up lover Eli Cash wants to replace his family with hers. Steve Zissou, the narcissistic oceanic explorer in The Life Acquatic is the reverse, a parent who has lost his child only to be found out by the young man. The brothers in The Darjeeling Limited are mourning the death of their father.

Moonrise Kingdom features a real orphan and a metaphorical one. Sam (Jared Gilman), a Khaki Scout whose flight from summer camp mobilizes the residents of a New England island to search for him, is living in a large foster home, a fact that’s evaded Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton), who is supposed to be looking after him. Suzy, the doll in this particular Andersonian dollhouse, down to her matching dress and saddle shoes, which are color-coordinated to her house and school bus stop, is lost in her own family. The discover of a volume entitled Coping With the Very Troubled Child on top of the refrigerator is one of the reasons Suzy decided to make a break for it, heading off into the woods with Sam armed with a portable record player and a collection of young adult novels (“Usually I prefer a girl hero,” she explains to Sam, “but not always.”).
Read more

DC Comics has been teasing the reveal of a major gay character for some time, and they’ve finally revealed who it will be: Alan Scott, known as Green Lantern, a media mogul, will be revealed to be gay in a story that resets his character. When this news came out, I said it would be best if the supposedly-iconic character DC was going to have come out was someone for whom the revelation that he or she was gay helped tie together things we’d always known about the character and their personality, much as J.K. Rowling did with Albus Dumbledore. I’m not sure if a pure reset of an existing character quite does that. And over at Topless Robot, Rob Bricken explains that the move isn’t as bold as DC insisted it would be, in part because Scott is not even the most prominent Green Lantern in comics today, and in part because his arc as a gay man will be taking place in an alternate DC Comics universe, rather than altering our sense of the core universe, where a straight Alan Scott presumably is still going about his business.

DC Comics was never going to turn one of their genuinely iconic characters gay. An out and proud Batman would have been a great joke on moralists like Frederic Wertham, the psychiatrist who saw sexual perversion everywhere he looked in comic books. A gay Superman would have been a fascinating exploration of what it means to feel like an alien in human society. But it’s hard to imagine that DC would have done something so bold simply to demonstrate its commitment to diversity, or to compete in a market where Marvel Comics, and even Archie Comics, are directly selling themselves both to gay readers and to straight readers who live among and love the gay people in their lives.

Checking the box and including a gay character in your universe, whether you frame them as a stereotype or develop them well or not, isn’t really enough to earn a company points anymore. And I actually think the somewhat disappointed reaction to this revelation is a good thing because it suggests that our expectations are getting more ambitious. If companies want credit for doing something different and genuinely brave, rather than simply meeting their basic obligations to represent the world around them, they need to tell stories or highlight kinds of characters that no one else has the courage to represent. The L.A. Complex gets points for portraying gay characters who aren’t white and male, the standard television default. Happy Endings gets credit for showing us a gay man who’s chubby, romantic, semi-downwardly mobile. Maybe DC Comics will do something genuinely exciting with Alan Scott, but it’s fine not to shower the company with gratitude for simply nodding towards a diversity quota, and doing so with the same kind of gay person who’s been acceptable in pop culture for years: rich and white.

The bridge is yours.

-Has jargon taken over baseball?

-The Wachowskis’ Jupiter Ascending sounds delightfully bonkers.

-A meditation on the New Yorker and Tin House‘s science fiction issues.

-Todd VanDerWerff on the increasing strengths of Game of Thrones.

-The rise of the romantic comedy best friend.

Once upon a time, there was a critic with a particular fondness for fairy-tale stories and for awesome action choreography involving winning. This critic was particularly excited for a movie called Snow White and the Huntsman, starring Kristen Stewart as Snow White, a young princess who is imprisoned after her stepmother, a sorceress named Ravenna (Charlize Theron) murders her father and begins scouring the countryside for young women whose youth and beauty she can cannibalize to preserve her own youth. The movie looked to be a sophisticated take on an old story, putting the princess in armor and at the head of an invading army. But Snow White and the Huntsman behaves more like an old tradition anxious about the rise of a new one than the coronation of a new moment for action heroines.

By far the best parts of Snow White and the Huntsman are those that hint at the source of Ravenna’s pathology, and at the damaging power of beauty myths. “I was ruined by a king like you, my Lord,” she tells Snow White’s father on their wedding night, her seduction turning to poison. “Men use women.” Meeting the Huntsman, Ravenna muses “There was a time when I would have lost my heart to a face like yours. And you, no doubt, would have broken it.” Later, we learn that some sort of trauma inspired an older woman in a young Ravenna’s life to turn her beauty into something more than normal human loveliness. “Your beauty is all that can save you, Ravenna. This spell will make your beauty your power and your protection.” Watching the natural lines on Ravenna’s face vanish after she sucks the life out of another young girl is Hollywood airbrushing rendered visible, an act of humanity-erasing magic with consequences both on-screen and off it. “You don’t even know how lucky you are never to know what it is to grow old,” she tells a woman whose life she’s stolen. Both Ravenna’s selfishness and Hollywood’s obsession with youth are pursuits of immortality without any sense of what life is good for.

But much like Catherine Hardwicke’s adaptation of Red Riding Hood, which was advertised with a suggestion that Red herself might turn out to be the wolf (a concept adopted well by Once Upon a Time) before revealing itself to be conventional, Snow White and the Huntsman is less interested in its promising concepts than in visual spectacle and hitting traditional fairy-tale beats that could have been jettisoned. When Snow tears through the dark forest, the insects that erupt from the ground and the mists that swirl around her are repeated so often they lose their power. When she makes it to a sacred sanctuary, the movie spends loving time on rich natural wonders, like a turtle who is a walking garden, that are visually stunning, but that prove to have no relevance to the plot and little metaphorical significance. And as much fun as it is to see Ian McShane, Toby Jones, Nick Frost and others kitted up and shrunk down to size as a gang of prophesying dwarves, their main plot function is to open a drawbridge at a crucial moment. They’re there, taking up precious minutes seemingly because the movie doesn’t believe that audiences will buy Snow White without a group of small men to adore her, even if they get a Huntsman as compensation.

It doesn’t help that when the plot does get moving, it’s burdened with some deeply puzzling writing and bad casting. Snow White’s been locked in a tower for a decade and has no evident battle skills or organized base of support, but we’re supposed to believe she can rally the support of a kingdom with an incoherent rallying speech about how people have iron twisted up inside them. Ravenna, for no other reason than to increase the sense that she’s deviant, is burdened with a brother, Sam Spruell in an epically terrible wig, with whom she’s overly familiar: in their scenes together, they come across as a pair of low-budget Lannisters.

But the movie’s real failure is to develop Snow White’s character enough to make rooting for her against Ravenna feel organically exciting. As a child, her mother tells her “you possess rare beauty, my love. In here. Never lose it. It will serve you well when you become queen.” We see her play with William, her childhood friend, speak kindly to a fellow prisoner in Ravenna’s tower, and play with a child from the marsh, but these are gestures of common humanity, not of extraordinary empathy and insight. The dwarves follow her because of a prophecy, rather than on evidence, and the blessing she receives from a white hart with a magnificent rack of antlers that supposedly confirms the prophecy gives her no powers and is in recognition of no deeds—it’s just another opportunity to state, rather than demonstrate, Snow White’s goodness. “But how will I inspire?” Snow White worries at one point. “How will I lead men?” Snow White and the Huntsman would have been a better movie had its events given her, and us, confident answers to those questions rather than handing Stewart one of the most poorly-written inspirational speeches to make it into a Hollywood movie in a long time.

It’s a group of women Snow White and the Huntsman encounter living in a marsh at the edge of the dark forest who feel like a truer alternative to Ravenna than Snow White, who beats Ravenna but essentially preserves the game. These women ritually scar tear tracks into their cheeks because “without beauty, we are worthless to the Queen. It’s a sacrifice we make so we can raise our children.” But it’s only by Hollywood’s rules that these beautiful, independent women are less than lovely. Snow White and the Huntsman is on the edge of important ideas about beauty, just as it’s on the edge of a good story. But like Ravenna, it looks into the mirror for confirmation of old Hollywood standards and old stories, rather than for the truth.

Since Dan Harmon’s dismissal as the showrunner of Community, the endearingly experimental sitcom he created for NBC, there’s been a vibrant discussion about that particular role in the television ecosystem. Are showrunners primarily creative visionaries? Replaceable management functionaries? Is the job a fundamentally ungainly hybrid? Have critics and fans focused too closely on showrunners at the expense of credit for other people behind the camera and in front of it? One thing that crossed my mind though, is that while the rise of the celebrity showrunner is due in part to the emergence of figures like David Chase, David Milch, David Simon and Matthew Weiner on cable, credit also goes to a show that both put a showrunner at its center, and warned us that they could be mercurial, unlikable, ineffective sellouts—and heroes none the less: 30 Rock.

When Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and Tina Fey’s 30 Rock premiered in the fall of 2006, the assumption is that Sorkin’s drama would crush Fey’s plucky sitcom. Sorkin’s vision of troubled geniuses with noble ambitions is in line with fans’ perception of Dan Harmon, or of Chase, or Milch, or Simon, or Weiner—and of course, with Sorkin’s sense of himself. They may be cranky, they may have serious problems relating to other people and managing themselves, but they are fundamentally heroes. Even though those basic ideas took hold, Sorkin’s show didn’t: Studio 60 died after a single season, while 30 Rock is headed grandly into its seventh and final year. Over time, debates about the show have come to center around Liz Lemon as feminist totem, exploring her sexuality, her work-life balance, her role as a forebear of the Lady Loser Comedy trend, and both the conversation and the show have moved away from the show’s initial subject: the ridiculousness and impossibility of having a single person try to wrangle a writers’ room, actors, and network executives.

In its pilot, 30 Rock acknowledged that there was something quixotic both about trying to get the public to care about people who make television, and once they were over that hurdle, expecting them to find genius or high-mindedness behind the scenes. We first hear Liz Lemon’s name when Kenneth Purcell, an NBC page, tries to convince a group touring 30 Rockefeller Plaza that he’s got a genuine treat in store for them. “Here’s someone you never get a chance to meet,” he tells them. “The head writer of The Girlie Show, Liz Lemon.” He applauds in a void—the only response from the tour group is a belch from a young boy. Liz later complains that Kenneth has embarrassed her by singling her out, and when she meets Tracy Jordan for lunch, she’s surprised when he recognizes her. Kenneth’s enthusiasm, his sense that she is someone special, is meant to be a joke.
Read more

I imagine I might get tired of him at some point, but for the moment, I’m enjoying watching Jeremy Renner infiltrate every single viable action franchise in America, from Mission Impossible, to The Avengers, and now, the Bourne movies:

In a way, the Bourne franchise has always reminded me, and with the change in main characters reminds me more than ever, of Spooks, the great British spy series. The genius of Spooks is that the agents in the field are somewhat disposable: they may be attractive and competent at violence, but by the nature of the job, they have fairly short shelf lives. The real main characters are the people who work on the grid, who spend their time in the office making decisions that get other people out in the world killed or exiled. It’s an acknowledgement that there are differing moral responsibilities and different psychological costs for those who originate orders and those who execute them. The Bourne movies, and to a lesser extent, Judi Dench’s M during Daniel Craig’s run as James Bond, have always felt to me like they’re grappling with that distinction in a way that’s been fun and sometimes even illuminating to watch. These bureaucrats aren’t just shadowy figures with fathomless motives whose importance lies in their impact on the hero. You can damage your soul from your desk, without ever shooting a gun.