EA Sports, the video game magnate behind successful franchises like Madden NFL Football and other sports games, announced this week that it will for the first time include international female hockey stars in NHL 13, the newest version of its National Hockey League game. EA included a female body in its “Create A Player” option in last year’s NHL game, but this year, it is going a step farther, adding former Team USA star Angela Ruggiero and former Team Canada player Hayley Wickenheiser to NHL rosters in this year’s game.

Both Ruggiero and Wickenheiser are four-time Olympic medalists in a sport that isn’t widely known but has grown across the world since it was first included at the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics. The inclusion of women in this game should help bring even more attention to the sport, as Wickenheiser said in a release from EA:

“The EA SPORTS NHL franchise took a big step last year by including female characters to create a more inclusive experience for female hockey fans,” said Hayley Wickenheiser. “I’m excited to be a part of NHL 13 and hope that the addition of women’s hockey legends will encourage greater participation in hockey from young women everywhere.”

EA, for years, has included female golfers in its Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf games, and it is facing a petition drive to add women’s teams to its series of FIFA soccer games after the success of the U.S. Women’s National Team, and the sport in general, at the 2011 World Cup and 2012 Olympics. EA now says it is “inevitable” that women will appear in the soccer game, even if it is too late to include them in the 2013 version.

A cynic could take the view that this is all a marketing ploy — other companies have found success by increasing their marketing efforts to young girls — but I’ll take the opposite view: in a world where women’s sports are becoming more visible, in a world where more young women are playing the games, in a world where we more often talk about the gender issues that permeate the sports world and the successes female athletes have despite numerous obstacles, EA is acknowledging not just the fact that women and girls play sports, but that they play sports video games and should have the same opportunity to participate in the gameplay experience men have every time they sit down in front of their XBox or Playstation.

Lawless, John Hillcoat’s new flick about Prohibition-era bootleggers and the government officials seeking to leech off their profitable flouting of the ban on alcohol, has all the elements of a good American crime story. It’s got two distinct criminal syndicates, one reclusive, taciturn, and reluctant to use violence, and the other deliberately transgressive. It’s got a suitably disgusting officialdom more interested in self-enrichment and control than in the law. It’s got a pair of female characters wriggling out of patriarchy. But unfortunately, somebody — maybe Hillcoat, or screenwriter Nick Cave (yes, that Nick Cave), or whoever decided Shia LaBeouf should have more lines than Tom Hardy and Gary Oldman combined — slapped those ingredients together in a sloppy, unambitious way. The souffle never rises.

The basic conflict of the movie isn’t between Hardy’s clan of bootlegging Bondurants and Guy Pearce’s vicious, greedy Chicago lawman. It’s between de facto leader Forrest Bondurant (Hardy) and his little brother Jack (LaBeouf). Where Forrest uses his local-legend status and massive bulk as quiet guarantors of stability, Jack is ambitious, image-obsessed, and self-deceived about his criminal successes. (Think of Breaking Bad’s Walter White, with more hair and less brains.)

There are lots of little problems: Pearce’s hardboiled lawman probably wouldn’t cringe and close his eyes when he shoots his pistol, and violent scenes rely as much on sound effects as any kung fu movie you’ve ever seen. But the big problem with Lawless is that the rural bootlegger protagonists feel every bit as synthetic and unoriginal as the baddies. Nearly every character is a cardboard cutout who blunders in predictable ways at the right moments to move the story through obvious beats. None of them ever feel like real people (despite good work from Pearce, Jessica Chastain, and Hardy). Some characters simply disappear from the story. There’s not a surprising moment in the whole two hours, but plenty of implausible ones.

These failures are all the more frustrating because the movie’s setup implies some interesting themes: organizational coercion, the contrasts between internal and external motivations for criminals, the difference between violence and power and the consequences of conflating the two. In its messy failure to say anything about those ideas, Lawless got me thinking about two crime stories that take a more deft touch to similar stuff.

2000’s Way of the Gun centers on two kidnappers willing to do violence to innocents in pursuit of their goals, but far more interested in the pot of gold than the rainbow they paint getting to it. The movie’s best scene has kidnapper Benicio del Toro and bagman James Caan talking shop in a bar. They deride the self-important jargon of corporate security and law enforcement types, before the subject turns to their own side of the lawbreaking street: “These days they wanna be criminals more than they wanna commit crime,” del Toro says. “That’s not just crime, that’s the way of the world,” Caan retorts. del Toro and his partner may be unconscionably quick to violence, but they are also businesslike, professional criminals. Like Caan, they are who they are because they’re good at it and it’s a living, not because of status symbols or adrenaline.

When HBO pulled the plug on David Milch’s Deadwood, TV lost one of its most thoughtful shows about violence. The titular goldmining camp’s uncertain future in the expanding United States drives the show’s plot, but the lack of law does not mean there’s a power vacuum. Saloon boss Al Swearengen is the camp’s capo at the show’s outset, and has his control tested first by a new saloon/brothel, and later by the organized might of George Hearst (implicitly backed by the legal forces that previously ignored the camp). Over the course of the show’s three seasons, Swearengen metes out violence in increasingly calculated ways. But even at the outset, when he uses his fists and Dan Dority’s knife to consolidate his holdings, the show makes clear that he understands violence is not power. Violence becomes necessary only in response to erosions of Swearengen’s power; its use is evidence of weakness, not strength. His minimally violent chess match with Hearst in the final season shows he’s internalized that lesson.

Deadwood’s other main character, reluctant sheriff Seth Bullock, follows a similar learning curve with regard to violence. But Bullock’s motivation is never power, and his violence is born of temper rather than calculation. Swearengen’s long game for the camp’s survival and his own enrichment stands in contrast to Bullock’s situational, morally-driven choices about violence. His abortive first-season friendship with Wild Bill Hickock seemed to reinvigorate his sense of righteousness, without imparting any of Bill’s weariness from a lifetime of killing. As the show goes on Bullock works to control his temper, but his desire to imprint rightness on every situation he encounters never flags. Swearengen becomes deliberate with his violence because that’s what his machinations require, but Bullock restrains himself (or tries to) out of a more internal conflict over what kind of person he wants to be.

Before it ever made the New Cult Canon, Way of the Gun lost $8 million at the box office. Deadwood pulled a couple million viewers a night but was always more beloved of critics than seen by non-critic humans. It shouldn’t be hard for Lawless to prove a greater success in business terms, but if it does Hollywood will continue to learn the wrong lessons about how to make violence interesting.

By now, you’ve probably already seen or heard about Clint Eastwood’s riveting, surreal address to the Republican National Convention (if you haven’t, here’s a highlight reel and here’s the full thing), ably discussed by Mychal. The easiest way to understand what happened is, in Mike Grunwald’s words, simply that “a rambling old dude with no teleprompter” acted like, well, a rambling old dude with no teleprompter.

But simply dismissing Eastwood’s performance as rambling insanity misses a crucial part of the speech: it was entertaining as all hell. Eastwood’s diatribe about Invisible Obama telling Romney to perform an anatomically impossible act on himself was met with riotous laughter from the delegates, as were most of his jokes. Even his politically importunate lines, like his poke at the futility of the War in Afghanistan, were well-received by the crowd. The speech was terrible politics, sure, but it was a funny stand-up routine — and that’s how the audience appeared to receive it.

One way to see Eastwood’s routine, then, isn’t that he bombed. It’s that he was doing he was doing the wrong kind of performance on the wrong kind of stage. In a certain sense, that shouldn’t be surprising. Though Eastwood isn’t shy about expressing his political views, and was once mayor of a small town in California, he isn’t a politician. First and foremost, Clint Eastwood is an artist and an entertainer. And the two types approach public performance in very different ways.

The qualities that make effective art are the opposites of the ones that make a good campaign spectacle. Art, even (or especially) when it’s political, succeeds by simultaneously entertaining the audience and opening up new avenues for thought. Art that attempts to lecture at you generally fails as art because it forgets what it’s best at doing. Campaign events, by contrast, are about selling one particular narrative as persuasively as possible. You’re supposed to come away from a campaign event or convention convinced that a particular candidate is Best For America, inspired to work for their campaign. It’s about getting you on a team, not getting you to laugh or think. Even humor deployed in a campaign event is carefully crafted to serve the event’s overall message rather than be comedy qua comedy. Political spectacle, while perhaps an art form, isn’t art.

So when the Romney campaign simply just told Eastwood to go talk (which is basically what happened), it was eminently predictable that he wasn’t going to give a campaign speech even if the scale of this particular meltdown was unimaginable. Eastwood has a history of making riveting, somewhat offensive political art; Gran Torino and its racist, cantankerous Jesus-protagonist being only the most recent and best example. When you throw someone with that sort of artistic sensibility in front of an enormous audience without a script or much advance planning, it’s utter folly to expect them to stay “on-message.” Clint Eastwood is a performer. He performed.

Jamelle Bouie had my favorite tweet of the entire Republican National Convention, when during the epically bizarre Clint Eastwood “speech,” he said: “This is a perfect representation of the campaign: an old white man arguing with an imaginary Barack Obama.”

You can’t escape the racial subtext of what happened last night. Eastwood scolded an (imaginary) black man for his perceived slights to the American way in front of an audience of millions, and a sea of mostly white faces laughed and egged him on. There isn’t anyone for “America” than Dirty Harry; like John Wayne before him, Eastwood stands in for the American sense of masculinity and rugged individualism. In his babbling incoherence, he was telling this effete liberal, possibly foreign, definitely un-American, black man the way things are really done around here.

It also brought to mind Eastwood’s Gran Torino. It didn’t receive any Oscar love, but in 2008 Eastwood fielded a lot of praise for playing Archie Bunker with a muscle car and rifle. Critics and audiences couldn’t help but love a character that says to a black street gang “What are you spooks up to?” or tells a southeast Asian character “You’re wrong, eggroll, I know exactly what I’m talking about.” It was cinematic gold to hear jokes like “A Mexican, a Jew, and a colored guy go into a bar. The bartender looks up and says, ‘Get the fuck out of here.’” Hilarious stuff, right?

It perfectly encapsulates conservative thinking on race. Bigotry isn’t much more than a quirk, like drinking warm beer or being a bad tipper. In the film, Eastwood’s not a bad guy, just a lonely old war veteran further disgruntled by the deterioration of his neighborhood from a white suburban enclave to an ethnic gang wasteland. Don’t let the pandering and tokenism of a few minority eloquent minority speakers fool you: this is the mindstate of the Republican party today. Mitt Romney, who won the nomination in part because he was supposed to be the adult in the room, has played right into it with his lies about welfare and birther jokes. But he’s not a bad guy, he’s just trying to protect the America we all love. Never mind it’s an America some of us have never known.

It’s not a huge leap from “get off my lawn” to “we own this country” to “take our country back.” Someone in this equation is an intruder, claiming something they have no legitimate claim to, and for that they must pay. If Mitt Romney wins the presidency, the rest of us are stuck cleaning his Gran Torino.

This Eastwood episode didn’t overshadow Romney, the convention, or the campaign. It was the campaign.