Because we really need our pop culture franchise to be dominated by an increasingly limited number of visions, Deadline and other outlets are reporting that J.J. Abrams will direct Star Wars Episode VII:

Star Trek director J.J. Abrams will be helming the next Star Wars movie. “It’s done deal with J.J.,” a source with knowledge of the situation told Deadline today. Argo director Ben Affleck was also up for the gig, the source says. Michael Arndt is writing the script for the first installment of the relaunch of George Lucas’ franchise by Disney.

There are two issues here: how well-suited Abrams is for Star Wars in particular, and the consolidation of big franchises under a very limited number of perspectives (especially since the perspectives are those of white dudes).

On the question of Abrams as a fit for Star Wars, I’m deeply ambivalent. I think the franchise has been at its weakest when it’s delving too deeply into the details of its mythology. In the initial trilogy George Lucas and his collaborators had the wisdom to retain the emotional power of the Force as a cinematic device by leaving it relatively mysterious. Once the movies started delving into midichlorians and the manifestations thereof, the Force started to seem clunky and silly, no longer something those of us at home could dream of accessing. Abrams and his collaborators have a weakness for focusing on mysteries and exploring them to death, be they Smoke Monsters, strings of numbers, or aliens rampaging around New York City. I do think there’s an extent to which Abrams will be protected from this tendency by Arndt’s script, and the larger plans of Disney, which will presumably will be thinking about projects like television shows and Zack Snyder’s rumored stand-alone Star Wars movie. But I do think that Abrams’ interests in mysteries are actually a relatively a poor match for the greatest strength of the Star Wars movies: using a mysterious concept to open up a larger world, rather than focusing obsessively on the mystery itself.

But really, the profound disappointment I felt on hearing this news is less about my specific feelings about Abrams as a director. It’s more that franchises like The Avengers, Star Trek, Justice League, and Star Wars are opportunities for writers and directors to exert enormous cultural influence, and to accrue the kind of capital and credibility that can become enormous springboards for their more personal projects. The Avengers, for example, gave Joss Whedon an opportunity to bring his unique spin on female characters to Black Widow, who’d been poorly served in Iron Man 2. And its success won him a long-running and one assumes extraordinarily lucrative position overseeing the franchise: his ideas about superheroism will play a major role in American moviegoing for as much as a decade to come, and the money he makes from it gives him the opportunity to pursue more passion projects like his adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing. That is an extraordinarily precious thing, and it makes me terribly sad to see that power concentrated in one person, rather than spread out to a number of people with different interests and perspectives on the kinds of questions raised by our biggest franchises.
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This post discusses plot points from Fruitvale and Blue Caprice, both of which are based on true events.

Before The Weinstein Company bought 26-year-old writer-director Ryan Coogler’s debut feature Fruitvale, an examination of the 24 hours that lead up to the shooting death of Oscar Grant at the Fruitvale BART station on New Year’s Eve in 2008, Mike Fleming Jr. wrote on Deadline that “The feeling from buyers I’ve spoken to who’ve seen it is that Fruitvale has the potential to be one of those festival pictures that come out of nowhere — like Precious and Beasts Of The Southern Wild — to capture audience and critical acclaim.”

What Fleming didn’t note in his post is that Fruitvale, Precious, and Beasts Of The Southern Wild all star African-American actors, and both Fruitvale and Precious, which was directed by Lee Daniels, were directed by African-American men. Sundance has gotten more buzz this festival for the number of films in its narrative feature competition that were directed by women. But it’s equally important to note the festival’s role in creating buzz for films about African-American characters that translate into distribution deals and profits: Precious made $47.6 million domestically on a production budget of $10 million, while the even lower-budget Beasts has made $11.5 million on a $1.8 million production budget.

Two of the best movies I saw at this year’s festival, Fruitvale and Blue Caprice, an examination of the growth of a fictionalized version of the relationship between Beltway Snipers John Allen Muhammad (Isaiah Washington) and Lee Boyd Malvo (Tequan Richmond), directed by Kanye West collaborator Alexandre Moors, fell into that category. To a certain extent, they’re formally similar chronicles of deaths foretold. Both begin with footage of the real-world events they explore, Blue Caprice with a montage of news footage of Muhammad and Malvo’s killing spree, and Fruitvale with cell phone video of Grant’s shooting on the BART platform. But from there, they become complementary movies on separate paths. If Fruitvale is about how prejudicial suspicion of black men can inject deadly violence into a specific life at random, Blue Caprice explores how two men build a highly specific and fatal future.

In Fruitvale, Oscar (an exceptional Michael B. Jordan) is year out of prison and almost compulsively on the make, a young man attempting to close the gap between his considerable charm and his lack of discipline. As the movie begins, he’s just talked his girlfriend and the mother of his daughter, Sophina (Melonie Diaz) into taking him back after he cheated on her, though he’s less successful in talking the grocery store manager who fired him for lateness into giving him back his job, even when he tries to manipulate the man’s emotions and white liberalism, asking him “You want me selling dope, Brad?” At the store, he flirts with Katie (Ahna O’Reilly), a young white woman who’s gotten herself bollixed up trying to pick fish to fry for her boyfriend for a New Year’s Eve dinner. “It sounds like he’s black,” Oscar teases her, before putting her on the phone with his Grandma Bonnie, who sets Katie straight. When he finally comes clean to Sophina about losing his job, he does it two steps, first telling her that he’s unemployed, and finally admitting that he’s been so for several weeks. In between that admission and ditching a stash of marijuana he intended to sell to make the month’s rent, Oscar’s in a precarious, but hopeful position: he’s made some moves away from both dishonesty and criminality, but hasn’t started to look for legal employment or started to feel a serious pinch. As he tells Sophina, who explained to him of her New Year’s resolution to cut carbs that it takes 30 days to form a habit, he needs to “just not fuck up” for a month.
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I did not particularly like Fox’s The Following, Fox’s new drama, which stars Kevin Bacon as an alcoholic former FBI agent who comes out of retirement to hunt down James Purefoy, the pretentious, Edgar Allen Poe-quoting serial killer, who has escaped from prison and trained a whole bunch of other serial killers to fulfill their own dark fantasies and enhance his own legend. The whole thing struck me as a slick but empty excuse to put extraordinarily grotesque violence on television in an attempt to compete with cable, as if violence itself, rather than the things that lead up to violence, were what make cable dramas sophisticated. Over at Vulture, however, Matt Zoller Seitz has a theory about what the show’s really about:

Once you become attuned to the show’s anti-logic, the mix of gnawing dread and random mayhem might trigger the gloomy adrenaline rush of the 2001–2004 period. Hijackings, collapsing skyscrapers, subway explosions, shoe bombers, anthrax attacks, terror alerts, weapons of mass destruction: The Following evokes an alternate-world version of that horrendous time. Watch the skies. Sleep with the lights on. Trust no one. Those co-workers or next-door neighbors or smiling security guards that you deal with each day could be in cahoots with an ice-veined genius-madman. Portions of the first few episodes reminded me less of The Silence of the Lambs or Se7en than a zombie or body-snatchers picture, one in which every character but the lead could secretly be, or potentially become, a monster. Parts of The Following feel like 24 with serial killers instead of terrorists. It’s an apocalypse story as long-form nightmare. The whole world is losing its mind.

It’s an idea that that actually makes me like The Following even less.
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Over at The New Republic, Erik Nielson has a somewhat strange piece up about President Obama’s relationship to what he projects as a monolithic hip-hop community:

Although he said in a 2008 interview that he saw a place for hip-hop in the national dialogue, his engagement with it has largely consisted of slips and quips—calling Kanye West a “jackass” for interrupting Taylor Swift at the Grammy’s, joking at the 2012 White House Correspondents’ Dinner that he sings Young Jeezy to Michelle, revisiting the Kanye remark, and so forth. Yes, he has maintained a close relationship with Jay-Z, self-proclaimed hip-hop royalty, but perhaps more telling was his 29-song campaign playlist for 2012: It didn’t have a single rap song on it. This year’s inaugural playlist is revealing as well; while it does have songs by Nick Cannon and the Far East Movement that would qualify as rap, these aren’t exactly the names you’d expect from the man who claimed to “love” hip hop…

Other rappers have been far more ambivalent in their support. Speech, of Arrested Development, supported Obama in 2008, but came out for Ron Paul in 2011, saying he’d become disillusioned with Obama. But then, as the election approached, Speech hopped back on the bandwagon, taking to social media in support of the president and encouraging others to vote for him. Killer Mike came out in support of Obama in 2008, but on R.A.P. Music, one of the best albums of 2012, he went on the attack. On the song “Reagan,” he characterizes Obama as “just another talking head telling lies on teleprompters” and goes on to compare his foreign policy to the Gipper’s. Yet, even as that song was raising eyebrows across the country, Mike was insisting in interviews that he wanted Obama to win reelection, going so far as to claim that black voters would sell out their race if they didn’t support him in 2012: “If you don’t vote for Obama this time you’re a fuckin’ race traitor,” he said.

Nielson seems to assume that there’s such a thing as a coherent hip-hop community that determines both what does and doesn’t count as rap—even though MCing is a vocal style that’s thoroughly penetrated (and to a certain extent, been assimilated by) pop music—and that sets out a coherent political agenda that rappers collectively endorse. One of the things that’s been musically and politically fascinating about hip-hop in recent years has been its fragmentation, rather than its coherence. The East Coast-West Coast polarity is a thing of the past. Jay-Z made the transition to respectable mogul. Kanye West exemplifies the path of middle-class MCs. The internet’s made it easier than ever before for aspiring rappers to make tracks go viral—it’s a lot easier to email or tweet a link to a YouTube video or a SoundCloud playlist than to pass cassettes hand-to-hand. Hip-hop’s status as a giant business means that the antipathy for government Nielson talks about can mean a distaste for paying taxes as much as rage against the police. Credibility fights flare up all the time, but it’s not as if Nicki Minaj isn’t going to sign a giant American Idol judging contract because a Council of Hip-Hop Elders might look askance at her for it.

And ultimately, it’s totally possible for rappers, like the rest of us, to weigh disparate elements of a presidential candidate’s agenda and record and decide that, in a two-party system, a guy with, say a foreign policy record you find deplorable might be worth voting for anyway because of his domestic agenda. It makes total sense that Macklemore and Ryan Lewis (who by Nielson’s standards might only “qualify as rap”) might be more excited about President Obama’s evolution on marriage equality than the kinds of guys who toss around “no homo” disclaimers, that Jay-Z might be paying more attention to the economy given his work in moving the Nets to rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn while Lupe Fiasco prioritizes the Obama administration’s use of drone strikes in the war on terror.

Saying hip-hop has a part in the national dialogue is an acknowledgement of what’s already happening musically, and a useful if overdue declaration that rappers aren’t pariah artists, excluded from the political conversation by virtue of their art form’s origins. But an openness to listening to new voices isn’t a commitment to a dialogue or a musical style. And Lord forbid hip-hop codify itself musically or politically as the price of getting to be heard politically.

The bridge is yours.

-No word on a release date for The Winds of Winter, but George R.R. Martin would like you to have a novella about the Targaryens.

-The National Book Awards will have a more diverse judging pool.

-I agree with Ken Tucker’s take on the finale of Parenthood.

-I’m a little late to this, but still excited for the upcoming all-lady X-Men team-up.

Over at The Mary Sue, Jill Pantozzi passes along a cool rumor. Man of Steel director Zack Snyder, who already switched the race of Clark Kent’s Daily Planet editor Perry White from white to black with the casting of Laurence Fishburne, may have turned Jimmy Olsen into a woman:

Actress Rebecca Buller is listed as Jenny Olsen on the Man of Steel IMDB page. You can’t always trust the information there but when you add in this still from the trailer of Fishburne running with Buller, things get a bit firmer. She doesn’t have red hair but then, Lois does this time around so I guess a swap was in order there too. Perhaps Snyder is trying to make a point that we need to start breaking the mold when it comes to comic adaptations.

Jimmy Olsen has had a lot of interesting character morphs in old Superman comics and while he’s dressed up as a woman for undercover work several times, he’s never actually been a woman. Again, this whole thing could be totally off. Buller could be any Daily Planet employee, or just a friend of Perry’s, there’s no way to know for sure since neither Warner Bros. or Snyder have mentioned Jimmy Olsen but what do you think of the possibility?

I wouldn’t be surprised by this. Snyder, whose wife Deborah is his long-time producer, had always seemed more interested than a lot of his action-directing brethren in female characters. He managed to get the underrated Sucker-Punch made at a time when there was an unofficial Warner Brothers’ ban on movies with female main characters in place. The performance he got out of Lena Headey in 300 is the best thing in that arguably racist mess of a film, and he did a nice job with Malin Ackerman, an actress I’ve never found particularly compelling in other circumstances in Watchmen, too. And Man of Steel is also rumored to feature a Kryptonian supervillainess in addition to General Zod.

None of which is to say that I think Snyder has all of his ideas about women worked out in a particularly coherent way. And it doesn’t exactly help that some of his earlier projects were adaptations of sexually violent source material by authors—Frank Miller and Alan Moore—who have significant issues of their own to sort through. But I keep coming back to his work because at least he’s thinking about things like women and self-sacrifice, and friendship, and loyalty. He’s no Joss Whedon. But if Jimmy Olsen’s become Jenny, and Snyder’s become one of the only superhero directors willing to tweak a fandom with a decision that questions the invoilate nature of canon, it’ll be another reason to keep an eye on Snyder if only because I want to see what his female characters are eventually going to evolve into.

This truly is a new standard in sublime ridiculousness: one of the stars of Bravo’s reality show Shahs of Sunset, about well-to-do members of Los Angeles’ Persian community, has decided she’s a civil rights icon:

“It took someone like Rosa Parks to say, ‘I’m not getting on the back of the bus,’ to start a movement,” cast member Golnesa “GG” Gharachedaghi told The Huffington Post. “She got a lot of drama for it, but at the end of the day it started something so revolutionary and I feel like we are doing the same in respect of the entertainment industry.

“Knowing we are the first doing this so our egos are a little bit bigger than should be,” Gharachedaghi continued. “We are paving the way. It’s been difficult being Persian on TV. I don’t think anyone has given us as much drama and bullshit as the Persian community. There has never been anything out there about Persians before.”

Now, I’m not one to suggest that we’ve achieved all of our diversity goals in popular culture, by any means. But there’s a lot of evidence that Iranian-American actors—as well as South Asian actors—have broken into television quite successfully. And their successes raise interesting questions about why they’ve succeeded where African-American characters have actually lost ground on television.

In between Fairly Legal and Life, Iranian-American actress Sarah Shahi alone has two-thirds as many starring or co-headlining roles in television series in the past decade than African-American actresses have had collectively. Nazanin Boniadi (Tom Cruise’s pre-Katie Holmes girlfriend) did 119 episodes on General Hospital between 2007 and 2009, and had a fairly long arc on How I Met Your Mother, in addition to her recurring work on other television series. Maz Jobrani hasn’t had as steady a role as he did on Better Off Ted in some time, but he also recurs regularly. Shaun Toub, who also appeared in Iron Man works regularly in television, including in HBO’s Luck. Adrian Pasdar even played the President of the United States in Political Animals.

Not all of the reasons for these successes are particularly comfortable or helpful. I’d be willing to bet that most people who see Shahi on screen assume that she’s Caucasian rather than that she has Iranian heritage. And the rise of terrorism as a significant subject for television has created work for actors of Middle Eastern origin, like Navid Negahban, who played super-terrorist Abu Nazir on Showtime’s Homeland. But it’s absolutely significant that television feels comfortable casting Middle Eastern and South Asian actors as a lot of different kinds of professionals, from research scientists in Better Off Ted to white-collar legal mediators in Fairly Legal, while African-American actors still often end up breaking into heroic television professions as cops partnered with white counterparts, or as military officers like Andre Braugher in Last Resort.

Gharachedaghi’s comments aren’t offensive just because they trivialize the risk that Rosa Parks too, and the basic liberties African-Americans were denied, though of course they do that. They’re frustrating because she’s failing to acknowledge the work that Iranian and Iranian-American actors have already done to blow open opportunities in the industry for their counterparts.