As reported late yesterday, Christopher Eccleston will play Malekith The Accursed, the big bad in Game of Thrones director Alan Taylor’s first forary into the Marvel universe, Thor: The Dark World. Though he’s been eclipsed by David Tennant and Matt Smith, Eccleston’s melancholy turn as the Doctor was terrific, with a sense of brooding, cosmic scale that should fit supervillainy nicely. Both the character, a shape-shifting dark elf, and one of the most important arcs he’s associated with, an attempted coup by secrecy of the throne of Asgard, seem like an excellent fit for the world Marvel’s building, and to leverage Taylor’s Game of Thrones experience.

In that arc that sounds most promising, Malekith has Loki switch places with him in prison, something that might be easy to accomplish if Loki’s going to get thrown in Asgard Jail after Thor brings him home after the events of The Avengers. He then disguises himself as Balder, an ally of the Warriors Three (Thor’s main men), who wasn’t a character in Thor, who is apparently about to be crowned king of Asgard. It’s the kind of thing that could make for terrific nasty court politics and dramatic and unexpected showdowns in those settings. Taylor’s proved himself a nice hand in those sorts of emotional situations—he directed “Baelor,” the tremendous first-season episode of Game of Thrones in which King Joffrey orders the former hand of the King Ned Stark executed in front of his daughters, and “Fire and Blood,” in which Dany reveals herself with her dragons. The man knows how to stage an announcement of a new and dramatically different identity or worldview.

And a disguise story could also be a setup for a larger Avengers arc. One of the best-executed parts of Joss Whedon’s The Avengers was Hawkeye’s brianwashing by Loki, and the sense of betrayal his teammates experienced, the loss Black Widow felt, and his shame when he came back to himself. Similarly, if the Skrulls are going to play a role in future Avengers storylines, it would be a shame not to make use of their shape-shifting abilities in addition to those nifty ridged chins, a plot device that could gel nicely with that sense of uncertainty, loss, and hollowing-out that was present in Hawkeye’s storyline. And a Malekith conflict that also involved swapping and surrendering identities would be in keeping with those themes.

Much of the conflict in The Avengers—and the reason the finale was so satisfying—was driven by the characters attempts to come to truly know each other. Captain America wants to know if Tony Stark is sincere or a callow playboy. Tony wants to know if Cap’s a relic, and if Bruce Banner has gotten comfortable with his inner rage. Nick Fury has a role and an agenda he successfully conceals for the entire film while his men and women are busy figuring Loki out. When they all trusted each other, knew each other’s capabilities, and could work together instinctively, only then could they stop the invasion, working together at the top of their capabilities.

Brave things don’t often happen on the stage at the Television Critics Association press tour. Executives come on stage and insist that they’re incredibly excited about sitcoms about men cross-dressing to find work in the bad economy, or to praise the creative direction of critically panned dramas. Every actor insists the creators are the best they’ve ever worked for. But occasionally, as has happened twice this press tour, an actor will be bracingly honest about working conditions and creative opportunities in Hollywood. And when they do, the stories they tell are striking.

Yesterday, it was Tippi Hedren, the star of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and Marnie. Signed to a seven-year contract with Hitchcock, Hedren’s working relationship with Hitchcock was initially a positive and beneficial one. But the director was extremely controlling and harassing,, and ultimately gave Hedren an ultimatum: she make herself sexually available to him, or he ruin her career. Hedren refused, and Hitchcock held onto her contract, preventing her from working on other projects, and substantially curtailed her movie career. Now, that story’s being made into an HBO movie, The Girl, premiering in October, starring Sienna Miller as Hedren and Toby Jones as Hitchcock. It’s a movie that gives a sexual harassment victim rather than her harasser the last word. And at a panel presenting the movie, Hedren spoke movingly about the impact Hitchcock’s obsession and harassment had on her personal and professional life.

“People have said, ‘Was he in love with you?’ No, he wasn’t. When you love someone, you treat them well,” she said. “I certainly am not capable of discerning what was going through his mind or why. I certainly gave no indication that I would ever be interested in any kind of a relationship with him.” The trauma of Hitchcock’s harassment had lingered, Hedren said, and her position relative to the director was heightened by her legal powerlessness. “Actually viewing the film, I have to say that when I first heard Toby’s voice at Alfred Hitchcock, my body just froze,” she said. “I had not talked about this issue with Alfred Hitchcock to anyone. Because all those years ago, it was still the studio kind of situation. Studios were the power. And I was at the end of that, and there was absolutely nothing I could do legally whatsoever. There were no laws about this kind of a situation. If this had happened today, I would be a very rich woman.”

And while Sienna Miller, asked about harassment in Hollywood today, suggested that conditions had improved, Hedren acknowledged that sexual quid pro quos might not be a thing of the past. “I hope that young women who do see this film know that they do not have to acquiesce to anything that they do not feel is morally right or that they are dissatisfied with or simply wanting to get out of that situation, that you can have a strength, and you deserve it,” she said. “I can look at myself in the mirror, and I can be proud. I feel strong. And I lived through it beautifully. He ruined my career, but he didn’t ruin my life.” That such a warning is still necessary is a reminder that while a contemporary Hitchcock might not be able to sell his actress’s contract without her consent, the different toll booths to enter the entertainment business charge rather different prices.

Once you’re in the business, of course, the opportunities available to an actor can be limited, and if present, fraught, as actor Lance Reddick reflected during a panel to kick off the final season of Fringe. Asked to reflect on the opportunities available to black actors, he gave a rich, and complex answer.

“It’s a tricky thing when you talk about stereotypes because there’s always you know, for me, there’s in addition to stereotypes there’s also, in my opinion, the whole issue of tokenism,” he said. “I was concerned about falling into the stereotype of the stoic black commander or the angry black commander.” And he said he felt torn about the opportunities he wished were available to them and the fact that he’s had a comparatively rich career. “I feel like I’ve had kind of particularly as a black actor, I’ve had kind of a charmed career because I’ve kind of gone from one kind of great character piece and great shows to another,” he reflected. “So I haven’t really even though I’m always complaining about having fewer opportunities than my white counterparts, I feel like I’ve had kind of a charmed career. So I’m very grateful.”

To say that crumbs, even delicious ones, don’t constitute a full dinner is a brave act in Hollywood. Reddick’s talent is undeniable, and exposing his frustrations with the limitations of his ability to use them is an important thing to tell the very critics who would love to see him work more. And both Hedren and Reddick are a reminder that Hollywood is in the business of illusion, and that sometimes includes self-deception.

“One of the lucky things one of the nice, sort of, unintended consequences of working for HBO is that the entire season is written, shot, and locked in the can before the first episode airs,” Aaron Sorkin said at the panel for his show The Newsroom at the Television Critics Association press tour on Wednesday. “So even if you are tempted to try to write a little bit differently to please the people or change someone’s mind, you can’t do it. The season is done.” In other words, he’s happy with his show even if critics dislike it, saying that he “a hundred percent disagree[s]” with viewers who have been perturbed by his portrayals of women. If there was one theme to the exchange, it was that there’s a gap between what Sorkin sees in his own show, and what critics are seeing on screen.

And that division was even more striking because of a presentation earlier in the day of a show that is exactly what Sorkin seems to want The Newsroom to be, only it’s not airing on HBO and Sorkin didn’t create it: The Hour, a period piece about British news broadcasting in the fifties, that aired its first season on BBC America last summer.

Where The Newsroom began with vague arguments about will (and Will) and has moved into the nebulous motivations of his cranky corporate overlords, The Hour has clearly-delineated obstacles to the excellent reporting of the news. In the first season of The Hour (as was also the case with the miniseries State of Play), the show’s public broadcasters struggled to get a story out despite significant reporting hurdles thrown up by the government and pressure applied by the agents of state. In the second season, star Romola Garai, who plays producer Bel Rowley, explains that “There’s a new character that comes in at ITV, which is the big rival to the BBC. It’s launched at the beginning of the series. And they have their own show, which is very much a competitor to ‘The Hour.’ And their Head of News is a very dashing and attractive man who Bel hates and then grows to find curiously attractive.” That’s a specific and important story to tell, and one that requires more specific contrasts between styles and ethics of reporting (as well as more new characters), one that Will hints at in his monologue about providing advertising-free space for news broadcasting, that The Hour will spend part of six full episodes on.

And where The Newsroom has Neal as its blogger caricature, Don as the producer who wants to do right but is failing at it, and Maggie as, apparently, the person designated for Sorkin to establish and then “have them slip on as many banana peels as you want,” as he put it on Wednesday, The Hour’s characters are more clearly connected to larger positions and larger pressure points. This season on The Hour, Hector (Dominic West), the aristocratic anchor who found his nerve in the previous season, will find himself disgruntled when he’s forced to share the position with Freddie (Ben Whishaw), the young, radical reporter who backed him up previously. And The Hour’s creator Abi Morgan explained that they’re part of a larger alignment within the galaxy of the show.

“You have that internal triangle going on as well with Bel as the kind of mediator of those two,” she explained. “And then the bigger one is the birth of other channels, in particular ITV, and it’s about the commercial success of a commercial channel like ITV versus a public service broadcaster like the BBC. So we have that, and then, on a wider level, it’s about Britain aligning itself with America, trying to compete with America, but also the friend of America. So it has a bigger issue about the nuclear arms race and their relationship with America and really the kind of duck and cover terror of the late ’50s where life felt very short and very prescient.”

Morgan promised other issues as well: race, in the form of booming immigration to Britain and the far-right response to it, as well as a love triangle between a black secretary, a black doctor, and a second-generation British Jew; the rise of glamor and celebrity culture imported from the U.S., which Morgan said would go to Hector’s head; and the launch of Sputnik. The Newsroom‘s response to these issues has been to treat anti-immigrant bigots like fools rather than powerful forces and to provide an opportunity for Will’s saintliness even as he makes a range of equal-opportunity offensive comments, and to egregiously insult women who work in and consume celebrity culture.

On a character level, there’s a dramatic gap between Bel’s hypercompetence when it’s juxtaposed against Maggie’s perpetual mistakes and the vast gaps in supposedly-genius MacKenzie’s knowledge about basic world facts. Sorkin seems to believe that he’s firmly established MacKenzie as brilliant even though we rarely see her doing substantive work on the show. He insisted that “she’s got the whole meeting with the staff in which she’s extremely deft and a great leader, and then once you nail that down, it’s, for me, permissible to have her hit ‘send all’ instead of just ‘send’,” even as he ignored the wildly hysterical reaction and technical ignorance he wrote for her in the aftermath of that error. Morgan, by contrast, shows Bel doing much more of her job in the first season of The Hour, giving her working life and her affair with Hector balance, and having her excellence in the former be a part of the attraction that leads to the latter. And she outlined plans to expand the relationship between Bel and foreign correspondent Lix, and to contrast them with the women they meet in London’s burgeoning club scene.

Finally, The Newsroom seems plagued by a problem that I don’t think I would have identified before Sorkin and Jeff Daniels’ presentation on Wednesday. Given Sorkin’s history, I think it was reasonable to assume that Will was meant to be a straightforward hero, which is why is deeply unpleasant behavior, particularly towards women comes across as obsessive-repulsive. Now, I think Sorkin believes he’s writing and Daniels believes he’s portraying a nuanced anti-hero, when in reality, Sorkin is struggling to write an anti-hero in a realm where he’s previously written straightforward champions. “We present this Will’s mission to civilize as something, first of all, that people roll their eyes at, and second, that always blows up in his face,” Sorkin said in response to a question from me. “Hubris on this show is always punished.” Except it’s not. When Will’s mission to civilize meets with derision, the women who are offended by him are portrayed as bitches, and in one case, as actually unhinged. When Will reflects with his therapist on his bullying of a Santorum supporter on his show, he feels bad later, but in the broadcast, he ends with the last, tough word, and faces no drop in ratings or professional consequences. Sorkin hasn’t found a transgressive thing for Will to do that makes the audience excited that’s the equivalent of Walt’s cooking meth or Omar robbing drug dealers. Instead, he’s made us feel bad and cranky about his case for values that many of the viewers who dislike the show actually share.

The Hour, on the other hand, has absolutely straightforward flawed heroes, and I think it benefits from that clarity, and its willingness to visit down real consequences. Hector may start the season riding a wave of celebrity at the dramatic expense of his job performance, but from the promo we saw at press tour, he swiftly ends up in the clink for an as-yet-unidentified transgression. That, not a drink in the face, is a true consequences to face for hubris.

In Chloe’s last post on sports movies for women, she considered Bend It Like Beckham.

By Chloe Angyal

Toe to Toe isn’t really about sports. Yes, it’s about lacrosse players, and there are some great training montages, but really, this movie is not about sport. It’s about the straight and narrow path (which includes sports), and what happens when young women deviate from it.

Jesse (Louise Krausa) and Tosha (Sonequa Martin-Green) are seniors at a prep school in the DC suburbs. Jesse, who is white, lives in a luxurious house in the leafy green ‘burbs, and she lives largely unsupervised because her single mother is always traveling abroad for work. They have a housekeeper, Fatima, with whom Jesse is closer than with her own other. Jesse drinks a lot, smokes weed, and screws around. Early in the movie we learn that she’s been thrown out of multiple schools in the last few years.

Tosha lives in Anacostia, also with her single mom, as well as her grandma, kid brother, and her older brother and his baby daughter. Tosha’s mother isn’t terribly supportive of her academic ambitions, but her grandmother (Leslie Uggams) is determined that Tosha realize her dream of getting into Princeton. Tosha studies hard and is friends with other black girls at school, none of whom have grown up in the disadvantaged circumstances in which she lives. In her neighbourhood, Tosha is teased for playing “retarded white people games.”

Tosha and Jessie would presumably never cross paths at school were it not for the abovementioned game, lacrosse. They’re the only two seniors to make the team, and at the start of the movie, they’re both aiming to make the all-star team. They become kinda-friends, training together and bonding over their status as outsiders. Jesse is an outsider because she’s the school slut and Tosha doesn’t feel she fits in because she seems to be the school’s only poor black girl. But they’re both rather good at lacrosse, it seems, even if they have different styles of playing. In a scene early in the movie, Jesse watches Tosha at tryouts, her two tight black braids tucked up into an unmoving low bun, as she tries to drive through the players standing between her and the goal. There are blonde and light brown ponytails swinging all around her, and she stands out as she tries to muscle on through. Jesse, up next, tells her “watch me,” and runs onto the field, her own blonde ponytail flying around her head as she dodges and weaves and finds a path to the goal.

As the movie goes on, lacrosse becomes a symbol of the straight and narrow path. Tosha manages to stay on it, and on the team. Jesse does not. She’s late for games (because she’s busy performing oral sex in the locker room, on a boy who claims to have a crush on Tosha), and after being disciplined for repeatedly showing up late to practice, she just walks away. Off the team, and off the straight and narrow.

Emily Abt, the writer-producer-director, did an amazing job with two very fine but inexperienced young actresses, and nothing about Krause’s or Martin-Green’s performances feels forced or overdone. There’s so much going on in this movie that I haven’t mentioned here – around race, and class, and religion, and motherhood – that it’s almost a wonder that Abt is able to keep it all contained and under control.

As I said, at its core this movie is about sex, and about other ways that teenage girls supposedly misbehave when they aren’t properly loved and don’t properly love themselves. But it’s also about how sports can keep them on track, giving them something to work toward and achieve, and making them part of a team. In Tosha’s case, sports are partly her ticket out of Anacostia and into Princeton. In Jesse’s case, sports are just one more thing that gets thrown by the wayside as she veers dramatically off course. It’s hard to miss the message that studying. It’s hard to miss the message that for teenage girls, studying and team sports will lead to success, while experimenting with sex and substances will only make you unhappier than you already are.

Lee Daniels’ The Paperboy has been getting a lot of buzz for the nutty intensity of Matthew McConaughey, Nicole Kidman, Zac Efron and David Oyewolo’s performances in a deep Southern story about a group of people who work to get a man off death row, only to discover that it may not have been such a good idea:

I like the idea of a death penalty drama that feels no need to make its inmate out to be a saint, or even a particularly nice person, for its characters to believe that he should not be executed. But it seems like a high risk, high reward project. Daniels is good at bringing out wildly individual characters, but this project smothers them in a lot of chicken-fried stereotypes. It remains to see if their individual flavors will be distinguishable amidst the tropes.