The 2012 London Olympics were destined to be notable for female participation when, just weeks before the Games kicked off, three countries added women to their national teams and ensured that this would be the first time every country represented sent at least one woman to the Games. Female participation in the Olympics has increased steadily in recent decades, but even accounting for that, the sheer amount of women punching holes in the barriers that once existed is breathtaking.

The barrier-breaking began with star American soccer player Megan Rapinoe, who came out as gay before the Games began. In doing so, Rapinoe not only became one of the most prominent out athletes in American sports, she also gave fans an opportunity to examine the fact that, even though it may have been easy for Rapinoe to come out, being a gay female athlete isn’t as easy as we often make it out to be.

Then there’s Gabby Douglas, the affable gymnast with a trillion-dollar smile who became the first woman of color to win an individual all-around gold medal. In an American sports world where race sometimes seems irrelevant, Douglas is an African-American woman who dominated a lily-white sport — one that is so expensive that her mother had to take on extra work and sell “almost all” of her jewelry to keep her daughter in training. Douglas, at least for the American crowd, has become the darling of the Olympics, and her success will undoubtedly provide an avenue for African-Americans into gymnastics and other niche Olympic sports, a road paved by the likes of Dominique Dawes and others before her.

The story of the games, however, is Wojdan Ali Seraj Abdulrahim Shahrkhani, the first Saudi woman to ever appear in the Olympics. Shahrkani’s Olympic dream lasted just more than a minute, but those 82 seconds shattered cultural barriers that will, hopefully, make it easier for Saudi women to play the games they love. ‘‘I am happy to be at the Olympics,’’ Shahrkani said after her judo match, according to the Associated Press. ‘‘Unfortunately, we did not win a medal, but in the future we will and I will be a star for women’s participation.’’

The stories of the Olympic woman hardly stop there. Female athletes from various countries and in numerous sports are proving that they belong not just in the Games but at the forefront, and the barriers to female participation seem to crumble a little more on each new day of competition.

There are, of course, still issues facing women in sports both at the Olympics and elsewhere. Shahrkani’s story aside, women are still largely prohibited from playing sports in Saudi Arabia. There are still huge socio-economic barriers preventing athletes from backgrounds similar to Douglas’ from making it to the Games. Unlike Rapinoe, too many women find it impossible to open up about their sexuality in the world of sports. Female athletes often still lack the notoriety and sponsorships that are more common for men, and sexism is still rampant both at the Olympics and in sports.

But these women and others are bringing those barriers down, making the world of sports a more open and equitable space for females of all shapes, colors, nationalities, and sizes. Because of that, it isn’t hard to imagine the London Olympics going down as an Olympiad remembered for the triumph of the Female Athlete.

By Alan Pyke

“He doesn’t catch the bird, okay?” Emile Hirsch’s character screams at his sister in the last relatively calm moment before Killer Joe descends all the way into the filth it’s been building toward for an hour. He’s frustrated because she is staring at a Roadrunner cartoon over his shoulder instead of listening to him. Chris is the closest to a sympathetic male character in the movie, but he is still enforcing the story’s only real rule: Listen to the men and do as they say, or they’ll find a way to make you fall in line. Over the course of the film, the enforcement of that code builds to an astonishing, grotesque climax.

That mounting pressure is captivating even as it horrifies, thanks to Matthew McConaughey’s shapeshifting Robert Mitchum-like charisma, an excellent counterpoint performance from Juno Temple, and gorgeous cinematography full of rusting Texas dilapidation.

Those are about the only things I can say with certainty about Killer Joe, the new William Friedkin movie opening Friday. Beyond that, it’s a dark, often hilarious, and thoroughly subversive mess. Friedkin’s adaptation of Tracy Letts’ violent, manipulating play builds a rhythm of pitch-black humor in its first hour, then dares you to keep watching as the titular murderer shifts from seductive to sadistic. The MPAA’s ratings may feel arbitrary, but flicks like this are why “NC-17” exists.

The particulars: Chris (Hirsch) has an idea that is, by the standards of doomed crime-scheme movies, fairly straightforward. He wants to hire a local detective who moonlights as a contract killer to get rid of his loathed mother. He needs the money from her insurance policy to wipe out his debt to a local drug distributor after she pinched the coke fronted to him by the distributor. His father Ansel (Thomas Haden Church) doesn’t have any money to lend him to pay Joe’s (Matthew McConaughey) advance fee, though, so when the detective-cum-hitman suggests Chris’s young sister Dottie (Juno Temple) could function as a “retainer,” Chris assents. The offscreen machinations of Chris’s stepmother Sharla (Gina Gershon) threaten to hijack the whole messy business.

Killer Joe revolves around men who treat the women in their lives as levers to power — “chess pieces” would imply intelligence, which Chris and Ansel lack. Joe, whose savvy and witness-stand formality of speech suggest he’s a pretty skilled detective when he’s not killing people, is no better. He suggests that Dottie’s virginity (and indefinite use of her body) will tide him over until payday, but are Chris and Ansel any less disgusting for quickly agreeing even if they don’t abuse her themselves? If anything, the film makes them out a little worse: neither man can bring himself to explain the arrangement to Dottie, even though she knows and approves of the murder they’re buying with her body. When Joe shows up as Chris and Ansel hurry out the trailer door, it’s been left to him to explain (indirectly), and to calm a crying Dottie (which he does with alarming ease). The ensuing dinner and sex scene are the first real hint you get of just how much this movie enjoys daring you to keep watching. It’s a deeply creepy and coercive thing happening, but as Dottie succumbs to Joe’s dominating charisma she seems, at least somewhat, to enjoy herself. The film doesn’t do anything to help you decide how to feel about that. It’s a calculated, exploitative experiment in audience manipulation, and together with the preceding talk of Dottie as a form of capital, it helps finally establish that there might be somebody to root for in all this mess.
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Yesterday, just hours after Kofi Annan resigned his post as the special peace envoy representing the United Nations and the Arab League in the efforts to resolve the widening civilw ar in Syria, NBC announced that it had picked up a drama focused on an interpreter at the United Nations, described as The West Wing with an international focus. This strikes me as smart move by NBC to recapture some of its past prestige. And more broadly, it’s a development that highlights one of the weaknesses of the way our pop culture approaches conflict.

Both movies and television constantly focuses on what happens after diplomacy fails. It makes sense for action stories to start at the point when the talking stops and the guns come out, but there’s a weird relish for those kinds of stories, one that paints diplomacy as naive or unworkable. If there was a soberness to that calculation, a sense that military action kicks in only when preferable diplomatic solutions fail, our pop culture might be less straightforwardly, gleefully militaristic. But that’s just not the case. We like watching soldiers and spies kick ass, maybe more than is particularly good for us.

The thing is, diplomacy is hard and it is interesting, even if it doesn’t involve punching people in the face or blowing them up with missiles. It might be hopeless to send in Annan to broker a deal between a dictator who has no intention of ceasing his campaign against dissident forces and democracy-protestors-turned-rebels. But it doesn’t mean Annan and the UN were wrong to try, and the backstory of how he prepped for those negotiations, how they went down, and what it was like to watch the proposal that would have stood down the conflict fall apart, would make for a fascinating multi-part story.

There are challenges to this kind of story-telling. You risk a lot of show-downs over meeting tables, which means you have to have excellent writing, and to find a way to dramatize the dilemmas of translators, who are making split-second decisions in their heads. We also don’t have the same cultural images of what makes a fantastic diplomat the way we immediately understand that what makes a man or woman an admirable combatant is the ability to take a lot of pain as well as dish it out. And we don’t have a set of established tropes about what diplomats do after hours, like we do with military bars or courtly spies, though Hillary Clinton’s rocking out overseas provides a potentially awesome template. This lack of established character and plot beats is definitely a challenge for attracting viewers who are looking for a new take on a familiar idea. But it’s also an opportunity to lay down a new template and to do what The West Wing did at its most effective: humanize people who ought to be heroes for the hard, unglamorous work they do.

People seem to be positioning wedding movie Bachelorette as a Bridesmaids knockoff, which strikes me as unfortunate, considering the former is supposed to be more acid than the latter, and the emotions in it are oriented in a slightly different direction. While Bridesmaids was about a rivalry between a bride’s oldest friend and a new friend to whom she’s become close, Bachelorette is about what happens when women actively resent a friend who they’re helping prepare for her wedding:

Weddings Make the Ladies Crazy is a cliche that’s made for a lot of deeply awful movies that perpetuate awful stereotypes about catfights and female materialism. I literally could not care less about Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson go to war over which one of them gets to get married at the Plaza. But weddings are an inflection point, one that raises questions about where people in the bridal party think their lives are supposed to be, and how much they give to other people or how poorly they take care of themselves in times of stress, and that can make for interesting stories.

27 Dresses may have been dismissed as yet another Katherine Heigl romcom, but it’s also a movie about a woman who is taking care of other people to avoid pursuing her own dreams or taking stock of her own life. In Her Shoes, which builds towards a wedding, is a sly rebuke to romance dogma, which is that the perfect man will come along and accept you who you are and heal your brokenness. Instead, it’s a story about how if you want to be in a relationship, you have to get yourself to a place where you have things to give as well as missing pieces someone else can turn out to be. And I think Bachelorette could touch the third rail of weddings: the sense by a member of the wedding party that it’s inexplicable that the bride would be getting married before yourself. That’s an ugly emotion, tied up here in ideas about Rebel Wilson’s body and mien, and I’m kind of glad that the movie is taking it on. The relationships between women—and goodness knows, I’ve been a very happy maid of honor to some gorgeous brides—aren’t as vicious and divided as they can be portrayed in popular culture, and the profusion fo fake friendships on something like the Real Housewives doesn’t help. But there are real, painful dynamics there, inflected by societal dynamics on race, and class, and education, and looks. I’d rather movies mine the details of those conflicts thoughtfully and for specific drama, rather than not doing them at all.