“All boundaries are conventions, waiting to be transcended,” intones one of Cloud Atlas’ ubiquitous voiceovers. It sounds trite or, worse, meaningless, a point the film’s harsher critics have delighted in making. But for all of Cloud Atlas‘ bombastic presentation, its actual argument is a subtle meditation on the tortured relationship between power and emancipation, one that marries two seemingly inconsistent approaches to the world into a novel notion of human freedom. That the film dunks this argument in a vat of sentimentality obscures the point, but it’s there. And it’s entrancing.

The movie’s six interconnected stories, spanning the 19th century to a post-apocalyptic future, all share a habit of conveying the movie’s basic moral point — everyone should help each other be free! — in the cinematic equivalent of all caps. I, for one, was delighted by this, but I can see why others might complain that this isn’t much intellectual heft for a movie purporting to be about ideas. But there’s a danger in assuming any movie’s most obvious message is the only thing has to say. Cloud Atlas is a case in point.

Take the plot centering on Adam Ewing, a pre-Civil War lawyer stuck on a merchant vessel in the Pacific Ocean. In a certain sense, it’s the bluntest moral arc in the film — through his friendship with escaped slave Autua, Ewing goes from chatting about racist theories of history at the dinner table to abandoning his father-in-law’s slavetrading business in favor of a life as an abolitionist activist. Your garden-variety contemporary American morality tale, right?

On the surface, yes, but the ways in which Autua’s struggle prompts Ewing’s evolution betrays a nuanced understanding of what it means to have power over another person and when it’s right to use it. Autua convinces Ewing to help him stow away on the ship not by a direct, simple appeal to their shared humanity — indeed, he tries that and it fails. Rather, Autua takes out a knife and puts it to his own throat, demanding Ewing slit it rather than leave him to the more terrible death that stowaways face after they are, inevitably, discovered. Forced to confront the fact that his inaction will kill Autua as surely, and more horribly, than murdering him, Ewing feels compelled to become Autua’s advocate. Autua survives not by killing Ewing or winning him over with words, but by embracing the desperation of his own situation. Autua found power in his own seeming powerlessness.

If this analysis of power sounds familiar, that’s because it’s straight out of influential social theorist Michel Foucault’s work. Foucault’s mantra is that “power is fluid,” by which he means that it’s a mistake to think that force, constraint, and privilege are the only avenues to change the world. In his view, the power to change the world can be found anywhere; those who seem beaten down often have unexpected and unpredictable ways to turn the tables. But there’s a dark side as well — because power (understood as the ability to direct the behavior of others) is everywhere in human interactions, it also can constrain those who believe themselves to be free. Methods of domination, for Foucault, can often be as unexpected and invisible as opportunities for freedom.

Foucault’s understanding of power is nearly omnipresent in Cloud Atlas; many of the stories critically involve finding power in unexpected places. Robert Frobisher, the brilliant gay composer, escapes his debts by becoming an assistant to the more famous Vyvyan Ayrs. The relationship appears to be mutually beneficial; a friendship built on deep intellectual appreciation of music. But that move ends up trapping Frobisher further, as Ayrs exploits Frobisher’s dependence on him to demand the younger composer credit Ayrs with his original work or else be ruined. Frobisher’s response, an escape to finish his work and then suicide, is the film’s only tragic ending, but nonetheless a small victory in the sense that we see in 1975 that Frobisher succeeded in claiming his masterpiece.

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It has been less than a week since Hurricane Sandy slammed into the nation’s East Coast, flooding major parts of New York City and New Jersey, killing at least 54 in the area, and leaving thousands of residents without power or clean waters. And yet, in two days, the New York City Marathon will go on as planned, winding its way from Staten Island through Brooklyn to the Upper East Side and Queens before finally ending in Central Park.

Despite calls to cancel the marathon, it must go on, at least according to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “I think it’ll be a great testament to the city’s resilience,” Latif Peracha, who will run in the marathon for the first time, told Fox News.

Sports have often been a symbol of our nation’s resilience. The continuance of the 1989 World Series, played between the Oakland Athletics and San Francisco Giants, 10 days after a massive earthquake shook the Bay Area showed that we could carry on through natural disasters; the return of sports in the immediate aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks, and the return of the New York Yankees to the World Series, showed the world we could carry on after devastating attacks on our own people.

The New York City Marathon continued in 2001 too, an allusion Bloomberg made in deciding not to cancel it. “If you remember going back to 9/11,” Bloomberg said, “I think Rudy (Giuliani) made the right decision running the marathon.”

But this isn’t 9/11, which occurred nearly two months before that year’s New York City marathon and 10 days before the next baseball game was played in the city, and this isn’t a situation in which sports should show the rest of the nation, or the world, how tough and resilient our biggest city is.

First responders in New York are still digging through the aftermath of Sandy to find bodies, and the death toll is rising by the day. Now, hundreds of police officers will be forced off that job to secure the marathon route. Thousands of the city’s residents are without power, but according reports, the generators that will be devoted to on-site tents throughout the marathon route could power 400 Staten Island homes. Thousands more in both New York and New Jersey lack clean water, but on Sunday, marathon runners will be tossing back quick swigs of water to stay hydrated, dumping water on their heads to stay cool, and tossing half-filled cups into the street below them.

Games across the city, from the NBA’s debut in Brooklyn to the MLS playoffs in northern Jersey, have been postponed or moved over the same concerns. Those are far smaller operations that require fewer security officials and less resources than the all-day marathon.

Sports have helped Americans cope with crises, providing an outlet to return to normalcy in the wake of disaster. They have demonstrated the resilience of our people and our values. But running the New York City Marathon this week, devoting attention and resources away from people who need them to carry on, isn’t resilient. It’s ridiculous.

One of the weirdest things about writing about mainstream film and television is constantly glimpsing the gap between the values in the work that many (though emphatically not all) writers and directors produce, and the values that they themselves hold. I was particularly struck by this reading today that Chuck Lorre held back vanity cards–the logos shown at the end of television episodes that Lorre often uses as editorial space–that directly commented on the presidential election from this week’s episode of Two and a Half Men. Instead, he told viewers to look for the card on the internet, where this statement appeared:

What does it say about us when we are simultaneously pro-life and pro AK-47′s? What does it say about us when God’s will would allow a rapist to ask for shared custody and child support payments? What does it say about us when a black guy’s in charge and we say things like “it’s time to take America back”? What does it say about us when we think the institution of marriage is threatened by gay people who love each other, but not by idiotic game shows like “The Bachelor”? What does it say about us when we export democracy with Hellfire missiles, then restrict the right to vote here? What does it say about us when we build nuclear submarines to defend against exploding vests? What does it say about us when we think a guy who doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, keeps his money offshore, stubs his toe and says “H-E-double hockey sticks” and wears magical underwear can feel our pain? What does it say about us when we demand less government and more FEMA? What does it say about us when we completely forgot the colossal shit storm we were in four years ago? The answer, my friends, is not blowing in the wind. The answer is, “We are fucking crazy.”

Now, I’m not into Mormon-bashing, which is an unfortunate thing a lot of liberals have fallen into during this election cycle. But it’s kind of fascinating to see Lorre go straight for the nuances of, say, the rape and abortion debate. This is a guy who could make literally any television show he wanted, and any network would want to buy it. I kind of want to know what his dream show that reflects his values looks like. Because Depressed Womanizing Ashton Kutcher kind of seems like a comedown.

The 2009 action movie G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra was so spectacularly awful, so gleefully, intently dumb that it overdid it and shot past so bad it’s good to so bad it’s bad, that I kind of can’t believe this but…I’m sort of looking forward to G.I. Joe: Retaliation. And I kind of can’t believe that, in between jokes about Channing Tatum babysitting the Rock’s kids, and Bruce Willis talking about his cholesterol, there’s a line about drone strikes, or at least terrifying strikes from the skies, so blunt it could have been spoken on Homeland. “There’s only one man who could authorize a strike like that, and I voted for him,” the Rock says grimly:

This all comes, of course, wrapped in a package that includes an In Like Flint-like president-swapping scheme (sadly, the ladies of America are not also getting brainwashed through salon hairdryers), sexy ninjas, and motorcycles that turn into explosives. I’d expect nothing less. But it’s interesting to me that even pop culture artifacts that are otherwise quite comfortable with projections of American military power are getting increasingly uncomfortable with our capacity to deal death from above and without warning. Homeland’s concerned with the possibility of blowback, while the much showier G.I. Joe makes horrifying spectacle of the prospect of getting blown of out of existence from a higher level of the atmosphere. But they share that anxiety. And it’s telling that the Rock’s character believes that even a legitimate president might have grossly abused the power drones or satellites give him.

The bridge is yours.

-Rejoice! The third series of Luther starts shooting this November.

-Enabling the cult of Lance Armstrong.

-Jamie Foxx will fight Spider-Man.

-Recognizing that your high school experiences are so distant as to be history is, in fact, pretty weird.

-Famous ladies for Obama:

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I promise this will be the last exercise in Star Wars nerdery for…a little bit, at least. But Jamelle Bouie, who is one of my favorite people to geek out with, and I sat down yesterday to record a Bloggingheads episode about our hopes and fears for the new movie coming down the pike. In it, Jamelle makes what I think is a good point: that Disney’s profit incentives could actually be good for fans if they did things like release remastered box sets of the original cuts of the movies.

Another part of the conversation we had was how to design villains for the new movie better. In the absence of Vader , as a Big Bad for most of the prequels, the villain design was either haphazard or racist. One thing Jamelle and I discussed was whether the new movies could introduce the shape of familiar conflicts but with different participants. The remnants of the Empire could function like an insurgency, but one run by white, British-coded members of the Imperial Navy. If you want to do a trade wars story, bring in Thyferra, the planet that produces Bacta, and where a white minority forces labor out of an alien majority, a la South Africa. If you want to force an existential crisis with the Jedi, bring in the Yuuzhan Vong, who have an apocalyptic worldview, and are very effective at implementing it, to be al Qaeda. In a way, I’m excited to see how this goes less for Episode VII itself and more for a chance to think about what our action movies should be.

Looking at the world of college sports, and a casual observer may presume that the child rape scandal that enveloped Penn State University last winter has been settled. Jerry Sandusky is in jail for the rest of his life. Joe Paterno is dead. His statue no longer stands in front of Beaver Stadium. The NCAA placed crippling sanctions on the football program Paterno oversaw, and the football season is nearly two-thirds gone. Some semblance of normalcy–or at least a new normal–has returned to Happy Valley.

That casual observer would be wrong. Pennsylvania Attorney General Linda Kelly announced Thursday that the state was bringing charges against former Penn State president Graham Spanier, the man who oversaw, overlooked, and may have ignored the entire scandal. Spanier will face eight counts, five of them felonies: two for endangering the welfare of children, one for perjury, one for obstruction of justice, and three others for conspiracy. Former Penn State athletic director Timothy Curley and former university vice president Gary Schultz were also charged for endangerment and perjury, adding to the charges they had already received.

It’s all a stark reminder that Penn State’s very public shaming is far from complete.

“This was not a mistake, oversight or misjudgment,” Kelly said at a news conference Thursday. “This was a conspiracy by top officials at Penn State.”

The man who molested 10 young boys over a decade-long period during which he worked and was associated with Penn State is behind bars. But the men who the state of Pennsylvania believes played an extensive role in allowing Sandusky’s crimes to continue may yet join Sandusky there.

There are still facts of this case to be learned, information about how men in very high places failed, and what mechanisms or reporting requirements might have forced them to uphold their responsibilities. We will still learn about why that failure took place, how an entire institution of higher learning failed to protect the most vulnerable people on its campus and in its community. About why football was so important that it took precedence over the safety and welfare of children, about how the same failures can be prevented in the future.

Football, and some sense of normalcy, may be back at Penn State. The pain, the reckoning, and the education that will come from all of this, however, is far from over.