Last week, we got word that Disney was introducing its first Latina princess, Sofia, in a television special. But unfortunately, rather than using this occasion to tell a culturally specific—and as a result, less generic and more interesting—story, Disney decided to put Sofia in a European fairy-tale setting and use her as a marketing vehicle for other Disney products. And now Disney is backtracking on the idea that Sofia is Latina or Hispanic at all:

“What’s important to know is that Sofia is a fairytale girl who lives in a fairytale world,” Nancy Kanter, senior vice president of original programming and general manager of Disney Junior Worldwide said in a post on the Princess Sofia Facebook page. “All our characters come from fantasy lands that may reflect elements of various cultures and ethnicities but none are meant to specifically represent those real world cultures.”

Kanter said that most importantly, Sofia’s world reflects the ethnically diverse world we live in “but it is not OUR world, it is a fairytale and storybook world that we hope will help spur a child’s imagination.”

Craig Gerber, co-executive producer/writer on the project says, “Princess Sofia is a mixed-heritage princess in a fairy-tale world. Her mother is originally from an enchanted kingdom inspired by Spain (Galdiz) and her birth father hailed from an enchanted kingdom inspired by Scandinavia.”

This isn’t just cowardly: it’s all kinds of boring. The idea that you’d create alternate universe that’s like our own not to comment on reality by giving people a framework that lets them consider issues that would be painful to discuss directly, but to escape actual problems and painful issues like the lack of representation of people of color (Latinos are the most underrepresented ethnic group in American popular culture), you’re giving up not just a chance to make a difference, but a chance to do interesting story work. I get the appeal of a fantasy world shorn of our problems and our most uncomfortable history. But that’s also a fantasy that strips characters of the things that make them specific and unique, and of and chances to exhibit specific kinds of heroism that are deeply moving to the people in the audience.

The bridge is yours.

-I really, really cannot wait for Louis C.K. on SNL.

-The best TV character Halloween costumes.

-Dilbert’s Scott Adams has endorsed Mitt Romney. I am not remotely surprised.

-Presidential debates as theater.

-Entertainment companies: pay your damn employees.

-Looks like the Assassins Creed movie with Michael Fassbender is happening. Now I just have to hope they do the Revolutionary War timeline.

The 9/11 Truth movement, which denies that terrorism was the cause of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, has always had deep roots in movies. In 2005, the first Loose Change movie, which marshalled so-called evidence for the theory, was released streaming online and in a limited DVD run: three editions have been released since. But now, the movement is leveling up with September Morn, a closer-to-Hollywood production that’s meant to act as a call for a new investigation into the attacks separate from the 9/11 Commission. Normally, I’d ignore this kind of thing for the silliness that it is. But as the Truther movement’s ambitions have expanded cinematically, it also seems to have captured some new adherents, including two that could give the project a worrisome credibility.

It’s particularly depressing that Woody Harrelson and Martin Sheen would lend their credibility to a project like this, and I almost can’t believe that it’s true. Other members of the announced cast either burned through their talent or their credibility long ago. Daniel Sunjata, who’s probably best known for his work in Rescue Me, is a noted, long-term truther. As much as I share Jay and Silent Bob’s enthusiasm for Judd Nelson, he is not exactly what you’d call a major movie star these days. But Harrelson is at a second, impressive crest in his career, and Sheen has both accumulated West Wing good will to burn with politically-oriented filmgoers and has stumped for Obama in the past. Without them, this would be a project with a no-name writer, a director who did Jack Nicholson’s stunts in As Good As It Gets (I would, I have to admit, love to know what that entailed), and a collection of actors who might attract small, passionate followings, but nothing else. Harrelson and Sheen have made this project news instead of another entry in the conspiracy trash heap.

That’s the danger of actors’ influence, and movies’ power to reach, even for the least of them, what are comparatively large audiences in the context of almost any other medium. September Morn won’t just disseminate bad ideas that ought to have been discredited long ago, that linger as a symptom of what seems to be a plague of our country’s conspiratorial thinking. It will help credit the idea that people who have an enormous amount of influence can use it for anything substantive or socially valuable. The casualties aren’t just the unsuspecting who pick up conspiracy theories: they’re informed, serious people who could make a difference but get lumped in with what 30 Rock’s protestors would call the Hollyweirdos.

Ken Burns is good at finding a way to frame big, epic narratives, and as it turns out, that skill applies to the 2012 presidential election as well as to his excellent forthcoming two-parter on the Dust Bowl, which airs the weekend before Thanksgiving. In his endorsement of Obama, he’s found he perfect cultural reference to use to think about the election:

One of my favorite movies of all time is Frank Capra’s “It’s A Wonderful Life,” starring Jimmy Stewart. In the film, Stewart’s character, a despondent and near suicidal George Bailey, who runs a small savings and loan in the town of Bedford Falls, is given a gift: the chance to see what his town would be like if he’d never been born — if he’d never extended a helping hand to his neighbors when they needed it most, never helped his community understand how much they depended upon one another. In this alternative vision, the town’s plutocratic banker, Mr. Potter — without the decent George Bailey to counter him — rules everything. A bottom-line-is-everything, every-man-for-himself mentality runs unchecked, resulting in Bedford Falls’ metamorphosis into “Pottersville,” an amoral, soulless place.

The movie has a happy ending, thank goodness, but its themes endure to this day and echo in the current presidential election, which at its core asks the question: What kind of country are we? Are we Bedford Falls or Pottersville? Are we all in this together — and stronger and better because of it — or are we entirely on our own, with a few “makers” on the top of a heap of “takers?” I’m supporting President Barack Obama because there is no question about his answer to that question. Having observed Mitt Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts, and then watching him in the Republican primaries as he tacked this way and that whenever it suited him (but mostly to the far right, the Tea Party radicals, even the birthers), I can’t be sure of him.

It also makes so much sense that Ken Burns’ favorite movie is It’s A Wonderful Life.

This post discusses plot points from the October 21 episode of Homeland.

There’s a real statue in front of the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters, much like the one Brody glimpsed Carrie through this week on Homeland, called Kryptos. A series of four elaborate encryptions, only three have ever been broken. The first to be decoded reads “BETWEEN SUBTLE SHADING AND THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT LIES THE NUANCE OF IQLUSION.” (The misspelling is deliberate.) It’s harder to think of a better lesson for Homeland, which delivered its best episode this season, and one of its most powerful of the show by sticking to the nuance of illusion, rather than the increasingly frantic contrivances the show has used to generate drama in Brody’s half of the story this season, and by examining the subtleties of the ways Brody and Carrie have lied to each other over the year they’ve known each other*.

In a way, the show makes a joke of such mummery in the first scene when David’s son from his failed marriage, Kenny, meets Saul at the door waving a lightsaber and warns him “I am your father. Don’t make me destroy you.” Saul is here on a quieter mission, to let David know that Carrie was right, with a minimum of bitterness and blame. “We could arrest him. That would be that,” Saul suggests. “Or we could leave him right where he is. Iran is planning blowback against the U.S. for the Israel bombings. Abu Nazir was going to be the agent of that plan. That’s what the Beirut meet was about.” David’s anxieties mostly have to do with his relationship with Vice President Walden. “I dupe this guy, he fires me in five seconds,” he tells Saul. “You tell him you missed the signs on Golden Boy, he’ll fire you in three,” Saul tells him, the closest he gets to nastiness for what David did to Carrie, offering him a way to redeem himself to his country, if not to the woman he drummed out of the agency.

As proof Carrie remains unredeemed in his eyes, David assigns another agent, Peter Quinn, to oversee her. But that insult appears to be an unexpected gift, because after some initial prodding at each other, it seems like Quinn and Carrie might turn out to like each other. Some of the best scenes in the episode happen between Carrie and Quinn, pitting her emotional wrecking ball against his penchant for cleverness as they learn the basic facts, the subtle shadings of each other. “I don’t like surprises,” he tells her when they meet. “I’m not crazy about them either,” Carrie agrees. “Crazy. Interesting choice of words,” Quinn tells her, reminding her he knows who she is. Where Carrie gives out information directly, Quinn does it at a slant, cloaked in sharp, short phrases. “You were fucking him, huh?” Quinn asks her. “Who are you fucking?” Carrie responds, her voice going up in confirmation. “An ER nurse. I’m not that into her,” Quinn deadpans. But he’s sympathetic. “I’m just saying, if he did to me what he did to you, got me fired, and made me think I was crazy when I wasn’t, and sent me off to get my brain zapped, I’d fucking rip his skin off.” When he pushes again, asking “So, was it work or love? Brody?” Carrie snaps at him “What are, we, girlfriends?” and he lets her interrogate him instead. “You ever go back to Philly?” she asks of his past. “There’s no good Indian food,” he complains as a form of the negative. “Why does Estes like you so much?” she wants to know, not revealing that once upon a time, Estes liked her a lot, too. “I’m pretty likable.” He might be, but there’s a knife edge to him, too.

They aren’t alone in their flirtation, either. “Makes you realize there’s this whole big world out there,” Dana tells Finn Walden when he sneaks her away from a study break to the top of the Washington Monument (bonus points for the post-earthquake construction setup). It’s heartbreaking to contrast Dana’s hope for that big world with Carrie, who has a world of experience Dana can’t even begin to contemplate, tentatively approaching someone new. Finn and Dana are sweet and tentative with each other because this is new to them. When Finn tells Dana “I like your attitude,” and she tells him artlessly ‘I like you,” they’re tentative because the risk of rejection is some of the worst hurt they can imagine, Dana’s need to untangle herself from Xander the most complicated emotional extraction she could undertake. Dana and Carrie have the same problems, magnified and distorted by pain and experience.
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