Note: I was out of town during the critics screenings of The Bourne Legacy. Alan Pyke was kind enough to review it for me.

By Alan Pyke

Making a decent fourth Bourne movie is a large lift, but not because franchise star Matt Damon wanted out. The Robert Ludlum books are kind of a mess even by spy fiction’s serpentine standards, to say nothing of the Eric Van Lustbader sequels, and the original trilogy of films set a high bar. The Bourne Legacy clears it, though, with room to spare.

I went into the Tony Gilroy adaptation of the fourth book expecting very little, as you may be. But the fourth installation delivers, with compelling photography, tense choreography, and solid performances from Rachel Weisz and Jeremy Renner (as a brand-new uber spy, not an attempt to reboot Jason Bourne). The basics are familiar: One member of an elite, biochemically engineered corp of barely-authorized government spooks has gone off the program, and the shadowy officials who created him determine to get rid of him. But where the Jason Bourne character was made sympathetic through his attempts to clarify his amnesia and hitman’s guilt, Renner’s Aaron Cross is simply presented as savvy enough to escape the termination of the program that created him. We root for Cross only because he’s being targeted by irresponsible bureaucrats because his usefulness no longer exceeds his threat to their position.

Renner starts off tangling with wolves and drones in the Alaskan mountains, and it takes him awhile to get linked up with Weisz’s willfully-ignorant-of-her-work’s-implications scientist. Weisz’s life has just been torn apart by a coworker’s psychotic break (Zeljko Ivanec of Damages and Heroes fame). Renner’s arrival should be just the latest in a chain of pathologically violent controlling forces in her life, but this is a movie, and Renner’s spy is more interested in escape than revenge, so things move in a more predictable direction. But Gilroy doesn’t put his two lovely leads in bed, or even (hardly) in longing eye contact. That’s a saving grace, but also probably born of necessity. The centerpiece here is Renner turning his mental and physical prowess against the paper-pusher spies (led by Ed Norton) who created him.

It’s a hell of a centerpiece. Gilroy shoots the fight scenes in the often-frustrating close-in style of the latter two Damon flicks in this series, but the camera seems to have taken a crucial half-step back. There’s a balance between the digestibility of the movements that made the first Bourne flick so fun, and the crunching kinetics of the Paul Greengrass followups. Renner acts with the same economy of motion that made Damon’s Bourne so fun to watch, and the camera lets you enjoy his precision without letting you voyeurize it. (Damon also pops up– Gilroy smartly layers in snippets of the third flick, to show that we’re operating on a familiar time frame but in a deeper corner of the spookocracy.)
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The U.S. women’s soccer team captured its third consecutive Olympic gold medal in thrilling fashion Thursday, avenging its World Cup finals loss to Japan at London’s legendary Wembley Stadium. The gold added to the already-impressive Olympics for America’s women, who are now on pace to win more medals than they ever have at a single Games. American women are carrying the U.S. Olympic team: entering Friday, they are responsible for 26 of the team’s 39 gold medals with more likely to come, and they have outpaced every other country’s women on the medal leaderboard.

The 2012 Olympics, the first in which the U.S. team has had more women than men, happens to coincide with the 40th anniversary of Title IX, the landmark law that granted women equal access to education and sports. That may seem coincidental, but it’s not: Title IX and the commitment to equality that followed is what made the success of America’s female athletes possible.

Without Title IX, many of the women on America’s Olympic team may not have made it to London, and others would have taken paths with many more hurdles along the way. In the U.S., female participation in sports has increased 545 percent at the college level and nearly 1,000 percent at the high school level since Title IX passed in 1972, and it has led to opportunities for female athletes that did not exist years ago.

Take Abby Wambach, the star forward for the women’s soccer team, as an example. Wambach played her college soccer at the University of Florida, which added a women’s soccer program specifically to comply with Title IX. “I like to tell people, ‘Title IX gave me a national championship ring,’” Wambach told ESPN earlier this year.

She’s not alone. Before Title IX passed, few women received college athletic scholarships. There are now more than 200,000 women playing sports at American colleges and universities. Those women largely play low-revenue sports like basketball, track and field, soccer, and volleyball — all sports where American women either have or will win medals, most of them gold.

Title IX hasn’t been perfect: there is still a significant participation gap between male and female athletes in America’s high schools and colleges, and there is a funding gap too. As women’s sports have become more prominent, the number of coaching jobs occupied by females is at historical lows. And the sports world is far from equal in the way women are treated and portrayed by the media.

But the implications of Title IX are clear, even acknowledging those challenges. As America’s Olympic women have shown us, it has been successful, so much so that other countries are now devoting resources to expanding female access to sports. Increasing female participation in sports improves educational attainment, employment opportunities, and the health of our women. Title IX’s success shouldn’t just be celebrated, it should be replicated in other parts of our society, especially given the lack of political will that exists — at least within one party — to give women the same level of equal access to compensation and health care that we’ve given them in sports.

The bridge is yours.

-Meet Bobak Ferdowsi.

-Adam Yauch wrote his will to keep anyone from using his image or music in advertisements.

-What is Joss Whedon’s contract with Marvel actually going to involve?

-The BBC told broadcasters not to focus solely on British wins.

-This is totally unsurprising and entirely depressing.

By Chloe Angyal

So, you’ve spent the last two weeks watching Olympic gymnastics coverage, and now, it’s all dried up. You’ve just realized that you’re going to have to wait four more years until you can watch a bunch of freakishly flexible, jaw-droppingly powerful teenagers flip and tumble while wearing leotards that look like a truck full of diamantes veered off the road and crashed into a sparkly lycra factory (on the plus side, it’ll be another four years before you’ll next be reminded that glitter hairspray is thing that exists in the world). Never fear, Stick It is here. It’s not London 2012, but it is gymnastics. And unlike London 2012, it has Nastia Liukin in it.

Hailey (Missy Peregrym) is a former champion gymnast who has quit gym and is now a petty juvenile criminal. Given the choice between sending her to the Texas Military Academy and sending her to an elite gym where girls are more likely to end up in hospital than on national teams, her parents choose the latter. Hailey goes to the Vickerman Gymnastics Academy, but she refuses to train. She’s done with gymnastics, she insists: she’s sick of being judged. She mocks the silly cookie-cutter routines that the other gymnasts do, and accuses them of being gymnastics automatons. And they hate her right back: it comes out the Hailey walked out of the World Championships a few years earlier, destroying Team USA’s chance at a gold medal, and she’s now persona non grata in the gymnastics world. Vickerman (Jeff Bridges) gets her to agree to train with him, and compete for prize money so she can pay the restitution and be on her way. In the process, she befriends some of the gymnasts, and gives them small glimpses of what it might be like to have a life outside of gymnastics. When national championships roll around, Hailey and the other gymnasts stage a protest in response to an unfair judging decision. This time, they insist, they get to decide who wins. By the end, Hailey has made peace with gymnastics and is even considering competing for a collegiate team.

As a former gymnast (level six state beam and floor champion, baby!), there are parts of this movie that I really appreciate. I like that it explores the sport’s demands that gymnasts be feminine and pretty and pert even as they’re performing almost superhuman feats of strength. I like that it pokes fun at what spending your teenage years in a gym will do to your social skills and your ability to interact with members of the opposite sex. And I like that it tackles the darker side of gymnastics: the high injury rate (and not just ankles and wrists, we’re talking heads and necks here) and the grim reality that coaches prefer obedient, unquestioning gymnasts who do what they’re told and don’t think too hard about what might go wrong. This particular dynamic can go horribly wrong, and it’s far too common to see coaches accused of exploiting it in a sexually abusive way. I also like that it capitalizes on the remarkable things that gymnasts do with their bodies, without crossing the line into making it about those bodies. This isn’t about girls in leotards, this is about athletes doing really impressive things:

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The Campaign, directed by Jay Roach and starring Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis, as rival Congressional candidates fueled by Super PAC donations and campaign staff provided by a pair of sinister industrialist brothers, appears to have already gotten under the skin of its main targets. Earlier this week, a spokesman for major right-wing and libertarian donors Charles and David Koch went on the offensive, suggesting it would be stupid to take advice or ideas from comedians and their movies. Whether the movie, a blunt indictment of the influence of money in politics, affects audiences the same way is another question. At 85 minutes, it’s a slight gathering together of several ideas and a number of brutally brilliant jokes, the two best of which don’t even involve the brawling incumbent Congressman Cam Brady (Ferrell) and insurgent Marty Huggins (Galifianakis, in high holy fool mode). But given that the point of The Campaign is that we’re governed by people other than our elected officials, perhaps that makes artistic as well as political sense.

The action begins when Cam, a Congressman with the hair and weakness for hot superfans of John Edwards, the faux-folksy barn jacket of Scott Brown, and the willingness to boink anywhere that Hustler once attributed to the Rev. Jerry Falwell, accidentally leaves a dirty phone message that he intends for his mistress on the machine of a nice evangelical family (lead by 30 Rock‘s Jack McBreyer). Sensing his vulnerability, billionaires Wayne and Glenn Motch see an opportunity to implement a plan they’ve been wanting to try out, and one of the movie’s most effective jabs. If they elect a sufficiently dumb Congressman in a district where they own property, they can convince him to request waivers that would lower the district’s wage and environmental standards below China’s, and save money on shipping by bringing in Chinese immigrant workers to make their products in toxic conditions in the United States. They settle on tourism bureau director Marty, a genial idiot obsessed with his two pugs, his family, and the withheld approval of his father (Brian Cox), a man so nostalgic for the racist past that he pays his his housekeeper, Mrs. Yao (a very funny Karen Maruyama), to do her best Butterfly McQueen. “Isn’t he the weird one,” Glenn Motch asks of Marty. “Has weird ever stopped us before?” Wayne Motch asks him.

The Motchs dispatch ace political candidate Tim Wattley (Dylan McDermott) to Hammond County to, as he puts it to Marty, “make you not suck,” given that “the focus group words that come up about you are odd, clammy, probably Serbian, looks like the Travelocity gnome.” Making Marty not suck mostly means replacing the pugs, earlier maligned as “Chinese dogs,” with a chocolate lab and a golden retriever— “One is named Sergeant, the other Scout. They will wear bandanas.”—giving Marty’s wife Mitzi (Sarah Baker) a Katie Couric haircut, and schooling Marty in the dark art of political bullshit. One of the deep and disturbing pleasures of The Campaign is watching Marty and Cam sling platitudes at each other and realizing how close they are to the pablum and evasions of questions politicians regularly deploy on the trail. When Cam declares that “Filipino tilt-a-whirl operators are this nation’s backbone,” or explains that “My father worked with his hands, as head stylist for Vidal Sassoon,” it reveals how the forms of our political language gilt meaning onto substancelessness. And the movie gets a very funny sequence out of Marty accusing Cam of being a closet Communist because of a picture book he wrote about “Rainbowland” as a child that depicts a fictional country where everything is free. “I don’t want to live in Rainbowland,” hollers an angry constituent. “It’s a fictitious place!” Cam despairs. The picture book, of course, ends up at the top of the Amazon bestseller list.

The Campaign‘s feisty nastiness dissipates, however, in the final third of the movie, when its candidates try to free themselves from the influence of big money, spurred on by their children, wives, various hideous playground scars, and dogs. I understand the movie’s desire to end with a moral. But it’s weirdly naive, for a movie that can be so sharp and mean about the willingness of politicians to be bought to end up suggesting that we rely on their reawakened consciences rather than on legislation to keep big money out of politics. Though even when they do, the winning candidate’s promise to the residents of his district that “You will not be sold to China, or Brazil, or Nova Scotia, ro any other country…And I want to end Daylight Savings time. I hate it when it gets dark,” is a reminder that stupid free from corporate influence is, well, still stupid—and unlikely to be gone from our politics any time soon.

Kim Masters’ entire profile of Salim and Mara Brock Akil, who often work together (she writing, he directing) is worth a read, particularly for its analysis of the ways that two African-American Muslims found their ways into the movie and television industries, given how much we talk about gatekeeping and gatekeepers here. But I also wanted to highlight these three paragraphs, which I think say a great deal about the relative position in Hollywood of content that focuses on non-white characters, and the dynamics of writers’ rooms:

“Like anyone else in television, I like to explore my life experience,” Salim says. “And I don’t think African-American artists see doing shows or art about African-Americans as something ‘less than.’ I think maybe the industry sometimes does. We don’t get as much attention, we don’t get critical acclaim and so on. But as far as my perspective, it’s a natural thing. And it doesn’t limit me because all I’m really doing is telling American stories.”

Mara agrees, though she is dismayed that the actresses in Girlfriends did not get the awards recognition that she feels they deserved. And while she believes that much of her success derives from the spice of a diverse writers room, she gets annoyed that there is rarely a similar approach on shows that don’t have predominantly black casts. Kenny Smith, who worked with Mara on Jamie Foxx and is now an executive producer on The Game, says Mara relies on writers from different backgrounds and genders to create authentic emotional notes. And she doesn’t worry about political correctness. “When we’re developing stories in the room, she wants guys to be guys,” he says. “And if it’s sexist and ugly, she wants the women to respond as they actually would. It’s like, ‘Let’s not sugar-coat this.’ It’s always courageous.”

Mara is also aware that UPN launched Girlfriends — and other shows revolving around African-Americans — because they were seen as cheap audience magnets. She says new networks like UPN or Fox, back then, “didn’t believe you have to spend a lot of money to get [the audience] to come because we’re so hungry to see ourselves that we’ll just show up and find it. That is not the case, by the way.” But Mara says the experience taught her to do a lot with a tight budget.

It’s a mystery to me why any showrunner would be comfortable with a writers’ room with a narrow range of life experiences unless they’re doing an insanely tightly focused show about one sort of person, and if they were, why they’d even bother with a full room unless, like Aaron Sorkin, they need research monkeys. I just don’t have that kind of confidence. But then, I guess I don’t have the chutzpah to be asking for a couple million dollars a week to execute my storytelling vision, either.