Ever since I saw Craig Zobel’s film Compliance, about employees at a fast-food restaurant who were talked into an abusing a co-worker, at Sundance, I’ve been eager to see it reach a wider audience. The movie follows a day in the life of Sandra (Ann Dowd), a manager at the restaurant for whom nothing seems to be going right, who receives a phone call from a man claiming to be a police officer, who tells her that Becky (Dreama Walker), a junior employee at the restaurant, has stolen from a customer. Over the course of the day, the man talks Sandra into detaining Becky, having her searched, and ultimately, another man into assaulting her.

Compliance is a powerful movie about our desire to gain police approval and our willingness, or lack thereof, to intervene when things are going terribly wrong around us. And it seemed to me to be misunderstood at the festival, where audiences complained that its depiction of what happened to Becky, which is based on a series of true events, was exploitative, or insisted that they couldn’t relate to characters who worked in the service industry. I talked to Zobel about art that makes people uncomfortable, what it means that we seek approval from the police, and feminist filmmaking. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I wanted to start by asking how you came to the source material. I’ve seen the Law & Order episode that’s based on these real events, so it’s floating around in the pop culture ether, but I was curious how you became interested in it.

It’s funny, I’m from Georgia, and one of the events took place in Georgia, so I kind of knew about it from that, but I hadn’t remembered exactly what the deal was. And I was reading about Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments when I stumbled upon it, so it was after the pop culture moment had happened.

I know Dreama Walker from her more comedic work, but she has been bubbling along in Gran Torino and everything else, so how did you come to work with her?

She read the script and was really interested, and it resonated with her. She was familiar with the original story as well. She came in, and we were casting, the casting for that role was delicate in a way. We had to up front lay everything out. This is what this movie’s about. She was interested and came in and auditioned, which was great. And than she and I sat down and had coffee, which I think quickly turned into beer because we were talking about some heavy stuff really fast. She just had the same questions that I did about the story and what it was all about…They just wouldn’t come in. It was a voluntary thing. Acting is a voluntary thing. Most of hte people I was seeing were people who were already fascinated by it in some sense. But Dreama and I talked a lot…She just was the right person. it made sense to me for a lot of reasons…She was kind of identifying certain things as the more interesting way to play this or that beat, or the way that was compelling though it was somewhat frustrating. We were talking about these things and kind of landing in the same places. When we started working together, it was very specific. These are the shots. This is what you’re going to do. Talking about that stuff before we were ever on set so there weren’t any surprises…

I first encountered this story and was very much, kind of what a lot of people’s reactions are, “Well, that’s fascinating, but I would never do that.” Truly a very condescending point of view, when you really think about it. Which has been interesting, to have the movie keep going, to listen to some people who very much distance themselves from the movie at Q&As and things like that, who point out how dumb the people were, how they’re from a different class, and all these things that I was not comfortable. I think my bullshit detector went off inside of myself when I was so condescending about how I would never do it. I think that’s what made me want to do the movie. It was “Why did I just act like that?”

That was one of the things I wanted to ask you about, because in one of the Q&As you did at Sundance, one of the members of the audience said “Well, I just couldn’t identify with these people because they were too dumb.” And it seemed like people, who normally wouldn’t fall back on class prejudice or gender prejudice had been scrambling to do that to avoid any suggestion that they could ever be complicit.

Or putting it back on me that it’s painted that way. I would feel like I fucked up if that’s what you really think, that these people are dumb. I would feel like I failed. I tried hard. I tried hard to avoid that. That was the one thing to avoid in my opinion. It’s condescending. Especially when it’s multiple people over a ten year period, and it’s these seventy cases you can look at, and it keeps happening. It’s like, man, it’s not that. There’s no way it could have been all the dumb people that got called. People do fall back on, I’m reading it the way your’e reading it, people are trying to distance themselves from the movie and don’t want to go there and want to put these people into boxes so they can be safe. We had a screening the other day where that came up, and it was funny, because it came from the very back of the stadium seating, and it was just the perfect place for it to come from. You’re truly looking down your nose at me and the people who made the movie. You’re actually physically looking down your nose at us.
Read more

Over at Topless Robot, Rob Bricken has some interesting speculations what could be happen if reports that Guardians of the Galaxy is “about a U.S. pilot who ends up in space in the middle of a universal conflict and goes on the run with futuristic ex-cons who have something everyone wants,” turn out to be true:

Now, I have no idea how accurate The Grid is, how good their sources are, if they even have sources, or who actually updates it. All I know is that if the above plot is true, then there’s a pretty good chance…

…Carol Danvers is the U.S. pilot in question. This is a phenomenal idea in many ways, and I’m going to list them: 1) As the Kree-powered Ms. Marvel, Carol already has ties to the cosmic Marvel-verse, and would work extremely well in a GotG movie. 2) The Marvel movie-verse could use a higher profile (and more powerful) superheroine than Black Widow. 3) She could immediately be added to the Avengers, which is another great way to tie the Marvel movie-verse together. 4) Carol is getting a pretty big push from Marvel right now as the new Captain Marvel, so there’s synergy there. 5) Carol Danvers/Ms. Marvel/Captain Marvel is awesome, and I would really, really like her to get her movie due and her movie debut.

It would also be encouraging to have a female member of the armed forces as a member of the core team for The Avengers, who thus far have fairly traditionally gendered occupations: Bruce Banner is a nerdy scientist, Tony Stark and inveterate tinkerer who gets with, and later promotes, the loyal woman who runs his life, Captain America is as archetypal a doughboy as has ever existed, while Natasha Romanov is a femme fatale. It would be fun to have a female fighter jock in that mix, particularly because adding Carol Danvers to the Marvel movie universe would give me a chance to agitate for Katee Sackhoff to play her.

The bridge is yours.

-A history of black nerds on TV.

-Catwoman’s armor here is pretty excellent.

-In defense of scaring children.

-DeLilloesque desert art.

-A new single from Pussy Riot:

“A kid like you doesn’t get a job like this unless he’s fucking somebody. Hard. In any sense of the word,” Chicago Mayor Tom Kane (Kelsey Grammer), sounding like Christian Grey of the Fifty Shades Thereof, tells a young campaign aide at the beginning and a new and improved season of Starz’s Boss. Where the last season of the show, which follows Kane as he battles a degenerative neurological condition he’s trying to keep secret even as he tries to push forward an expansion of O’Hare Airport and manage his daughter, a heroin addict, as well as a variety of political counterparts and rivals, this season introduces a series of up-and-coming scrappers in addition to the people who already count among Chicago’s powerful. Their ambition, and the stories of how they move closer to Kane’s orbit, makes Boss more interesting this season, particularly as it locks down some of the sillier tendencies that marked its first year and moves into a fight over the fate of a major Chicago housing project.

One of the things that has always distinguished Boss, and that remains the same this season, has been its sense of grandeur, manifested particularly in its dialogue. Unlike Deadwood, which used a mixture of setting-appropriate argot and contemporary profanity to create a vernacular that brought viewers back in time while making sure cussing retained its force, the language and cadence of Boss‘s characters is deliberately at odds with its setting in modern-day Chicago. Mayor Kane declares in press conferences about contracts for new housing projects that “Avarice will not be tolerated.” His police chief, leading the investigation into who shoots Kane’s wife (Connie Nielsen) at a public event, tells Kane that, though they were once enemies, “I repent.”

Sometimes, that portentousness seems misapplied. “I hate the Oxford comma. I assume you know what that means,” Kane growls at his new aide, Ian Todd (Jonathan Groff, whose malevolence seems better-placed here than it ever did on Glee). “Mental note. I’m indifferent myself, but you won’t see it again,” Ian tells him with a studied blandness. But the archness can be effective, as when Kane muses, “She was more of a my will than thy will kind of person,” to the priest he’s asked to be available if Meredith should need last rites.

And this season, the show has set up a competition around Kane that has heft to match the show’s tone. Rather than simply replacing fembot Kitty O’Neill (Kathleen Robertson) with Todd, Kane hires Mona Fredricks (Sanaa Lathan), a political operator from the South Side of Chicago after she outmaneuvers him in a fight about the future of Lennox Gardens, a housing project standing in for the former Cabrini Green development. While Ian represents established Chicago interests, Mona challenges Kane to consider upping the city’s Section Eight-eligible housing stock and to go with someone other than the entrenched contractor who’s long counted on getting work from the city without having to bid for it. A collision between a black aide and a white one may be a little obvious, but it’s uneasy to see how Kane sides with Mona as a matter of whim and frustration, to realize that change can succeed or fail on a mood rather than on reason.

Another improvement this season is Boss‘s treatment of sex. In the first season, the show occasionally felt as if was trying to meet some sort of Starz-imposed quota with lingering nipple shots and scenes of Ben Zajac (Jeff Hephner), a bright young political candidate, boffing Kitty, who also turned out to be his mistress, in hotel lobbies because he apparently got off on the prospect of getting caught. This time around, there are lingering looks, but the show has some restraints. When Zajac seduces a young, eager campaign aide, the sequence feels more like a comment on his sexual entitlement and lack of discipline than it does an attempt to check a box. And Boss is one of several shows on the fall schedule to take an adult approach to an unwanted pregnancy subplot, eschewing the timid Magical Miscarriages or not-in-character decisions to keep a baby that so much of pop culture defaults to in order to avoid controversy. These approaches, and the attention given to little details like Kane bringing flowers to his daughter Emma’s childhood bedroom to welcome her home from jail make the characters in Boss feel a bit more like people than they did the previous season.

Boss still doesn’t quite hang together for me, which is too bad given how much I want to like it. The show’s devotion to drawing drama from the minutiae of politics, its ability to make a city council vote exciting, and its visual ambition, whether in its gorgeous graphic design or Kane’s visions of a ghostly Meredith or a lizard that stalks him from the desert into his office, are all precisely my speed. But in its attempts to emulate the shows that ushered in the golden age of television, Boss seems to have forgotten to have fun. There’s none of the glee of Peggy Olson hunting down a high, or the humor of Omar in the courtroom. Tom Kane is fighting awfully hard for his kingdom. I just think I’d enjoy it more if he was too.

I recently had a chance to attend a screening of Chicken With Plums, Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s adaptation of her graphic novel of the same name about a violinist, Nasser-Ali Khan (Mathieu Amalric), who makes the decision to give up on life. The movie itself is a wild ride through pre-revolutionary Iran, legendary Persia and the United States in a mix of live action and animation. And Satrapi’s talk after the screening was almost as wide-ranging, touching on her cinematic influences, getting audiences to relate to Iranian characters, and the value of reading her work for its politics, as well as her glimpses into the human heart.

Satrapi called back to an older tradition in discussing the multi-cultural nature of her movies, in which French actress Chiara Mastroianni has been a stand-in for Iranian Satrapi. “Cultures, they have so much influence on each other. You don’t get to the border and one culture stops and another begins. They are rings of the same tree,” she said. “You have an Iranian story, you shoot it in Berlin, it’s in French, and you present it in America…You had a man like [Ernst] Lubitsch, he made a set, called it Prague, and had Jimmy Stewart or Gary Cooper and they were Czech.” And she noted that while she and Paronnaud love European movies, “We also love American sitcoms because they were all over the world. Who’s The Boss was the impetus for us to make the sitcom section,” of Chicken With Plums, which follows Nasser’s son on a his picaresque immigration to the United States.

Satrapi said that one of the challenges in making Chicken With Plums was how quickly expectations for what she, as a graphic novelist, would do in movies became set. “Once you have made an animation movie that works, they want you to make another animated movie with the same subject,” she said. But she said that the tradition of underground art, where she and Paronnaud began their careers, gave them and their collaborators the advantage of low expectations. They, and the composer who wrote the original score for Chicken With Plums were less worried about making money than about making the work that was important to them.

It was an attitude that also served her well in making Persepolis. Satrapi said she’d been reluctant to pursue an adaptation because of their shaky track record, until a friend told her, she said, “Are you crazy? People are going to give you a couple million Euro…The worst thing that can happen is you make the worst movie in the world.” Even then, she was rigorous about what she wanted, reasoning that she wouldn’t make the movie if her conditions, including hand-drawn animation and casting Catherine Deneuve to voice her mother, weren’t met. Satrapi said it was important to her to make that movie with hand-drawn animation because “The abstraction of the drawing is something that let us tell a unique story, because anyone can relate,” but that because Chicken With Plums is a sweeping romance rather than a historically-engaged memoir, “This was a universal love story, so we didn’t need that.”

The movie traces the source of Nasser’s dissatisfaction back to the love of his youth, with a young woman named Irâne whose father refused to allow her to marry a musician without prospects. That journey back in time makes clear that Nasser’s brokenness is not simply a character trait, but the result of a profound disappointment that damaged his ability to connect with other people. To be nasty and bad cannot only be the privilege of nasty and bad people. Everyone has the right to be nasty and bad once in a while. His wife Faringuisse (Maria de Medeiros), “she’s like a maniac at the beginning but little by little, we see hear beauty and learn her cause and we come to love her,” Satrapi said.

And while Chicken With Plums is a story of doomed romances, Satrapi made it clear that she welcomes a political reading of Irâne, whose name stands in for her country, and whose rejection of Nasser inspires him to travel the world as a musician, bringing bits of his nation with him in a parallel of the diaspora that sent Iranians, including Satrapi, all over the world. “The story happens in 50 years. There was a coup d’etat that destroyed the dream of democracy, not just in Iran, but in the whole region, and the result is the situation you are living now,” she said. “It’s symbolic but it is something that is underneath. If you understand it, better. If not, it is a beautiful love story.”

David Simon has never had much patience for the vultures in any economic system he’s examined (with the possible exception of Omar, the roguish robber of drug dealers in The Wire), and he’s positively appalled by the idea that Mitt Romney’s declaration that he’s never paid less than thirteen percent of his income in taxes constitutes an appropriate defense of Romney’s approach to his finances and his fiscal obligations to his government and fellow citizens:

Am I supposed to congratulate this man? Thank him for his good citizenship? Compliment him for being clever enough to arm himself with enough tax lawyers so that he could legally minimize his obligations?

Thirteen percent. The last time I paid taxes at that rate, I believe I might still have been in college. If not, it was my first couple years as a newspaper reporter. Since then, the paychecks have been just fine, thanks, and I don’t see any reason not to pay at the rate appropriate to my earnings, given that I’m writing the check to the same government that provided the economic environment that allowed for such incomes.

Simon may be impatient with Obama, particularly on issues of the drug war and mass incarceration, but if he decides that the present commander in chief is preferable to a guy whose attitudes indicate that, as Simon puts it, “This republic is just about over, isn’t it?” I imagine the Obama administration wouldn’t say no if Simon wanted to shoot some ads for the campaign. Treme comes back in September, and Simon might have some free time once it’s in the can. Just a thought.