Image courtesy Josie’s Juice.

Russell Brand’s late-night news show on FX, Brand X never quite came together and has been cancelled by the network. But his appearance on Morning Joe this week to promote his new stand-up tour illustrated why, while Brand may not have been adept at hosting a full half-hour or hour of news and interviews, he’s strikingly gifted as a guest, correspondent, or columnist:

That the Morning Joe segment was both a disaster and an opportunity was due to host Mika Brzezinski, who utterly lost control of the program, and Brand’s fellow guests, who created the conditions for Brand to launch a scathing critique of cable news. When Brand was asked what unified the world-historical figures who inspired his tour, Brand gave a terrific answer that should have lead to some follow-up questions: “They’re all people who died for a cause, they’re all people whose icons are used to designate meaning perhaps not in the manner in which they intended.” Brzezinski’s response? “I kind of like that, that sounded dead serious.” The other panelists mocked his accept. When one of them tried to ask Brand a “serious question”–actually a bit of fluff about which medium Brand prefers, which Brand answered with insight and introspection–Brzezinski told him he could “Try. It’s never going to work,” as if being a comedian disqualifies one from introspection. They referred to him in the third person, declared his clothes distracting, and in general behaved like children rather than news professionals.

And finally, Brand had enough. “Is this what you all do for a living? Let me help you. I’m here to promote a tour called Messiah Complex,” he told them exasperated, before shuffling up a stack of paper and posing a series of entirely reasonable questions about the roles of Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden in our national security environment before continuing his lecture. “You forget about what’s important and allow the agenda to be decided by superficial information.” Turning to Brzezinski, Brand asked, “What do you think that gesture means, the way you’re touching that bottle. You need to lose that ring because it don’t mean nothing to you.”
Read more

The bridge is yours.

-Have a mix tape of all the samples from Yeezus.

-Nick Offerman will be Axe Cop.

-Apparently, China has a statue of Kobe Bryant.

-Katy Perry: less than happy with her ex-husband.

“You gotta have that narcissism, that ego,” Bruce Springsteen says of what it takes to be a lead singer early in Twenty Feet From Stardom, the excellent new documentary about backup singers from director Morgan Neville that opened on Friday. “It’s a pretty long walk.” Ambition and bravado are important and difficult-to-quantify factors in professional success. And that Twenty Feet From Stardom identifies it, along with record company chicanery, the musical training many backup singers received in African-American churches, and underpayment of black singers as factors in directing some artists into backup roles makes the movie a valuable contribution not just to our understanding of contemporary pop music, but to the debate about ambition and work-life balance sparked by books like Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In or Arianna Huffington’s Third Metric conference.

Twenty Feet From Stardom makes clear that there are talented backup singers who were, without question, robbed of their shots at solo stardom. Record producer Phil Spector, who had Darlene Love on contract, took her vocal performances on songs like “He’s A Rebel,” and “He’s Sure The Boy I Love” and marketed them as the product of a girl group called The Crystals, who got credit when “He’s A Rebel” hit number one on the pop charts. “It’s pretty debilitating to sit at home and hear the song you sang and someone else lipsynching it,” says Susaye Greene, who was a member of The Supremes in the seventies. Spector’s power meant that he could be vindictive. When Love eventually signed a contract elsewhere, Spector bought it from her new label, and effectively sidelined her career. Love ended up working as a housekeeper, before revitalizing her career in the 1980s.

Another factor the movie identifies as routing women into backup singing is the institution that trained their voices in the first place: African-American church choirs. “You come up learning the part your voice actually sits in,” Love explains in the movie. And Dr. Mable John, who was the first woman signed to Motown by Berry Gordy, and who worked in pop before 1973 before leaving to make Christian music, suggests that “We, in the mustic industry, as African-American people, need to know our worth. As women, we need to know our worth.”
Read more

I’m trying very, very hard not to get too excited for Anchorman: The Legend Continues because of the considerable risk of disappointment I’m running, but the first full-length trailer for the movie is absolutely not helping my efforts to contain my enthusiasm:

Ferrell, for all that he’s a big, loud goof in a lot of his comedy, is an actor with a great deal of interest moments when American culture is shifting in some significant way, particularly when he’s collaborating with Adam McKay, as he did on the original Anchorman, the underrated Talladega Nights, and The Other Guys. If Anchorman was about the arrival of women not just in the workforce but in occupations that men believed to be specifically reserved for them as a result of their maleness, it looks like Anchorman: The Legend Continues has an equally good idea. It’s going to explore what happens when someone like Burgundy, whose ego was healthy enough when he worked in local news, goes national, and what happens when broadcast news, which in Anchorman was padded out with panda pregnancy watches and cat fashion shows, goes from hour-long slots to round-the-clock coverage. That’s an incredibly rich area for critique, and I can’t wait to see what happens when the news team has to fill that much programming, how Ron will react when he meets a rival anchor with better hair in the form of James Marsden, and whether it’s possible for him to destroy race relations in America in a single dinner.

The bridge is yours.

-How rock explains income inequality. I wonder if this economist factors in the fracturing of the genre?

-Sounds like Dan Harmon’s ego is in all-too-healthy shape.

-The case for banning steroids in baseball.

-The first reality stars: astronaut’s wives:

RogerEbert.com editor and New York television critic Matt Zoller Seitz is one of my favorite people to read, so it’s no surprise that, though it seems he and I took rather extraordinarily different things away from the Man of Steel screenings we attended, his review of the movie still made me think. Suggesting that Amy Adams and Henry Cavill lacked chemistry, which I’m not quite sure I agree with, Matt notes the way the movie plays down romance. “Considering that every previous “Superman” movie put the courtship dance between men and women at the heart of its action — particularly “Superman: the Movie”, “Superman II” and “Superman Returns” — the fact that “Man of Steel” has a No Girls Allowed sensibility seems like a deliberate creative choice, a way to reassure young male viewers accustomed to the glib swagger of “Iron Man” and the dire self-pity of Nolan’s Batman that this hero is very much in the same wheelhouse,” he argued.

It’s absolutely true that Man Of Steel is much less concerned with the budding relationship between Superman and Lois Lane than in Clark Kent’s self-actualization and Lois’ insatiable curiosity, though there is a smooch, and a discussion of whether superheroes do it better. But reading Matt’s review, I realized that I was fine with that. In fact, unlike Matt, for which it was a decided and unwelcome abandonment of tradition, I was so relieved to see any break in the portrayal of superheroes’ love interests that it probably upped my overall assessment of the movie. I’m so burned out on the way superhero movies treat romance that I’d actually be relieved by one that leaves out the prospect of a climactic kiss altogether.

What is it that women do in superhero movies, after all? If they’re Pepper Potts, you act as a dutiful assistant, waiting to be noticed, then run Stark Industries faithfully while your boyfriend runs off to save New York, get ignored as Tony Stark navigates PTSD, then remembered when someone else expresses romantic or sexual interest in you, get kidnapped, get superpowers, and get divested of said superpowers. If you’re Jane Foster, you pursue obscure astronomical research, fall for the hunky guy who crash-lands out of the sky, get saved a lot, and get shipped off on fellowships to be removed from possible danger, since apparently Thor couldn’t just call her up and say “please get out of town for a while and when this is all over you and I can hit up a resort.” If they’re Peggy Carter, they’re feisty and then dead of old age. If you’re Black Widow, things are a little bit better: you get cocktail dresses that can apparently stand up to delivering an ass-kicking, you get to hang tough through an interrogation with a very cranky god, and you, unfortunately, get to beat the hell out of your brainwashed maybe-love interest before rewiring his brain correctly. If you’re Rachel Dawes, you get to be Batman’s moral compass, and in the process, get drugged and then burned to death. If you’re Catwoman, you get to rob and lecture Batman before he delivers unto you your actual purpose, and then runs off to Paris with you. If you’re Talia al Guhl, you get to honey trap Batman, while having a much more interesting backstory with Bane that gets filled in by two minutes of dialogue. In other words, over and over again, you get to participate in a man’s self-actualization.

Don’t any of these guys have male friends who are non-employees, unlike Happy and Alfred, with whom they could shoot the breeze or work through a few more of their issues? What about women friends or coworkers who aren’t there simply to be love interests? That might be a way for the Marvel universe, at least, to make use of the dramatically under-utilized Cobie Smulders as Maria Hill? If superheroes are supposed to be possessed of tremendous will, couldn’t they take care of some of the self-actualization their own selves? I am exhausted by watching talented actresses get cast as the little women to very big men, not just because it’s sexist, but because over and over again, the narrative arc of these origin stories is exactly the same, whether the origin is of the superhero’s powers, or of his relationship with the love interest who helps him manage them.
Read more

So, Disney’s new movie Frozen has a girl as a main character, a girl named Anna voiced by Kristen Bell. And it’s got another significant character, Anna’s sister, the Snow Queen, who has apparently cast a spell on the country they both live in, to keep it permanently winter. That’s not a lot to go on, but it’s an interesting update to Disney’s tradition of female protagonists, making those kinds of characters active rather than passive, a queen with her own agenda rather than a princess or princess figure who gets pushed into action as a response to external events, and setting up the story as an interaction between two women, rather than a woman and a man.

But would you be able to tell any of this from the first trailer?

I recognize there’s more to come, but I’d be curious if parents in the audience are as irritated as I am by the idea that the best way to sell children on a movie is with the most disposable parts of it, the relatively non-narrative, slapstick comedic relief provided by the less-intelligent sidekick characters?

By contrast, the initial trailer for The Little Mermaid in 1989 lead with Ariel’s voice, and with the plot–the fact that you’d heard her singing meant that when the movie got to a key plot point, the fine print of her deal with Ursula, we were invested in getting her voice back because we’d heard how fine it was. And Disney wasn’t afraid to lead with the music, which won an Academy Award, a Grammy, and the soundtrack as a whole went triple platinum.

Ditto with Beauty and the Beast:

Both of these trailers have problems of their own–Ariel and Belle have qualities other than being beautiful and young, something both previews emphasize the first time we see them on screen. But they both trust that parents and children might be interested in a single film, and that children can handle and be drawn in by actual narrative and characterization. If a “family film” is to be something other than ninety minutes of animation parents can use to narcotize their children, it would be nice if those movies were sold with some respect for children, and some expectation that they have something to offer that parents and children can talk about together.

This post discusses the final two episodes of the first season of Veronica Mars.

The last two episodes of the first season of Veronica Mars center on the two central mysteries that have threaded their way throughout the year: who raped Veronica at that party? And who killed Lilly Kane? But though those questions have very different answers, they center on a similar problem. How do you be a decent person when up against social pressure, fear of losing your class status, addiction, or even rotten parenting?

There are a few good people in Neptune. Weevil may not be able to resist baiting Logan, when he chases after Veronica, who’s become convinced that Logan was responsible for her getting roofied at that fateful party, even if he didn’t actually dose her himself. “When they run away like that, it’s kind of a hint they’re not interested,” Weevil taunts the more privileged boy. “I”m just looking out for Veronica. So if you think you’re going to lay a hand on her the way you did Lilly…” And when Logan falls back on class to try to assert his dominance in the conversation, Weevil has an answer for that, too. “What’s worse?” he asks Logan. “Thinking Lilly had feelings for me, or that she was using me for sex?” Weevil may be stuck in an ugly and unproductive war of words with Logan, with whom he’s feuded since the first episode, but it’s remarkable to see how consistent Weevil’s support for Veronica has been. He’s one of the only boys her age who appears to want remarkably little from her, who doesn’t ask for anything in return, whether he’s trashing Logan’s car back at the beginning of the show, or only wanting to know “You okay?” when he picks her up from the Ecchols’ house after she discovers the camera in the guest house.

He’s not the only person who is decent out of proportion to public perception. As Veronica uncovers the story of what happened to her at the party, an unexpected voice of conscience shows up in the form of Beaver. “She’s actually kind of hot, when she’s quiet,” the odious Dick declares of Veronica, who is passed out in bed after a GHB-laced drink. “She’s not willing, Dick,” Beaver tells his friend, who is encouraging him to have sex for the first time with a woman who can’t possibly consent. “She’s unconscious.” That he knows the difference, that he, like Weevil, asks “Veronica, you okay?” marks Beaver as one of the boys in Neptune who appears to have picked up a rudimentary moral education, even if he leaves her there passed out in bed and ends up vomiting outside, rather than ensuring her safety.
Read more

Last week, NPR’s Linda Holmes did the math on movies that were screening in the Washington, DC-area on Friday, and calculated that of the 617 movie showings on the calendar, 90 percent of them were for movies about men, and only one of the movies in theaters was directed by a woman. And this is in a major metropolitan area.

“I want to stress this again: In many, many parts of the country right now, if you want to go to see a movie in the theater and see a current movie about a woman — any story about any woman that isn’t a documentary or a cartoon — you can’t. You cannot,” Holmes wrote. “There are not any. You cannot take yourself to one, take your friend to one, take your daughter to one. There are not any.”

This is terrifying not just because of what it says about how limited the choices for consumers are, particularly in the dude-heavy summer blockbuster season, or about failures of the movie market that don’t seem to happen in, for example, book publishing. Holmes’ piece scared me not just because of what it says about how Hollywood studios and Hollywood filmmakers think about women, or because of what these numbers suggest about how the rise of the international film market is making female characters less valuable, though those things are depressing too. Actually, I think the idea of women literally fading from our movie screens like Hermione Granger from the photos in her parents house after she casts a spell on them to erase herself from their lives scares me most because it means we could waste an outrageously talented generation of young female actors on the rise.
Read more

The bridge is yours.

-Amazing pictures of the Second Avenue Subway construction.

-Paul Feig’s cultural influences.

-Hipster DC Superheroines.

-Natalie Portman might fight some people.

-I am totally in favor of Blumesday.

-Jon Snow’s eighties training montage:

Frequent food television host and food writer Nigella Lawson found herself on the front page of British tabloids over the weekend when paparazzi photographs appeared to capture her husband, advertising mogul Charles Saatchi, with his hand on her throat at a London restaurant. This isn’t the first time that Saatchi has appeared to behave less than well to Lawson in public. There’s a 2012 photograph of him putting his hand over her mouth while they’re at an outside table at a restaurant, both with expressions on their faces that make it hard to tell if what’s passing between them is nasty, or a bit of private theater that might be misunderstood. But the image of Saatchi seeming to choke Lawson is much more decidedly disturbing image, and though Lawson hasn’t filed criminal charges yet, Scotland Yard is investigating the incident.

It’s also raised questions about whether the celebrity photographers who captured images of the events should have intervened to help Lawson. The debate over whether photographers and other journalists should be willing to take action after they’ve photographed people in danger, or whether they should take action rather than photograph people in danger, is hardly limited to paparazzi, or to situations where violence is imminent or occurring. Kevin Carter, the South African photojournalist who captured the galvanizing image of a small, starving girl being stalked by a vulture in Sudan during the terrible famine there, was sharply criticized for not making sure that the girl reached a feeding center, though he did reportedly chase away the vulture watching her. In other words, this sort of reaction isn’t just limited to celebrity gossip or to the much-reviled paparazzi. Perhaps because photography is so visceral, it’s hard for some audiences to see images of an obviously news-worthy event like the Sudan famine, shot by a hard news photographer, and understand why someone would capture images rather than try to save a starving child, even if photographing that child will do important, long-term good in terms of mobilizing public action and changing public opinion.

But while it’s easy to think that the paparazzi should step in, even if we don’t like to acknowledge that they might be bound by journalistic ethics not to intervene, however loose, it’s harder to tell if, in Lawson’s case, they actually could have done any good. The photograph of Saatchi’s hand on Lawson’s throat is frightening. It captures her choked expression, her face filling the frame. But that doesn’t mean the person who took it was actually close to her, just that they had access to good telephoto lenses. By the time they put down a camera, got into the restaurant (where they might not have been allowed in any case), and attempted to intervene on Lawson’s behalf, Saatchi could have taken his hands off her, or already done whatever harm he intended to do. In the interim, there were people in the restaurant with Saatchi and Lawson, some of whom have already talked to the press about how upsetting it was to witness the incident, and who might have been in better proximity to intervene on Lawson’s behalf if they thought she was in real danger. It’s fun to talk about the evils of the paparazzi. But when domestic violence, if that is indeed what this proves to be, takes place in public, bystanders, not just photographers, have obligations as decent human beings, too.

“This was what she disliked most about Gerald’s hobby; the contests made you think you needed something that, left to your own devices, you wouldn’t even want,” Evelyn, a woman devastated by the fact that her son, Teddy, has abandoned the family that Evelyn turned out to love more than he ever did, reflects of her retired husband’s passion for company-sponsored mail-in competitions. Her meditation while preparing lunch lays out the theme of J. Courtney Sullivan’s The Engagements, a tart critique of how DeBeers’ creation of the engagement ring trend, affects a number of couples across a 75-year period. But the way it’s delivered also gets at the core problem of Sullivan’s third novel: she seems so terrified that her arguments might get lost, that she doesn’t trust her characters, or a clever plot that unfolds like a meeting between a moral horror movie and a romance, to carry them. Reading The Engagements feels a lot like a socially-conscious response to having to scroll through entire Instagram and Facebook feeds full of rings that have, in some places, supplanted pictures of actual women themselves.

One section of the novel follows a fictionalized version of Mary Frances Gerety, the ad writer who worked on the DeBeers account, and who is responsible for the ad slogan “A Diamond Is Forever.” It’s obvious that Sullivan has done an enormous amount of research into Gerety’s life, but rather than creating vibrant scenes that bring us into Gerety’s work, we’re treated to passages that read more like school reports. Early in the novel, Sullivan writes that “Frances had just finished writing the newest De Beers copy, a honeymoon series with pictures of pretty places newlyweds might go— the rocky coast of Maine! Arizona! Paris! And something generic for people without much money, which she labeled By the river. In a way, that one was the most important of them all, since they were trying to appeal to the average Joe.” Frances is someone who tells us rather than shows us how excited she is to live alone, that she dresses like a man and drinks brown liquor like one because that’s what it takes to get ahead in the advertising agencies of the 1950s and 60s, and wonders aloud about getting old alone. But she’s so burdened with the responsibility to convey historical information about DeBeers, as well as to deliver the basics of a counterpoint to Mad Men that might have made a more interesting section if Sullivan was willing to write more naturalistically about her.

The other stories in The Engagements follow a series of couples from up and down the class spectrum, from James, a Cambridge EMT who’s become obsessed with upgrading his wife’s wedding ring even as a hole develops in their ceiling, to Kate, who’s guarding the rings for her cousin’s extremely expensive wedding to his fiancee. All of these couples have been affected by Frances’ work in ways that include, but aren’t limited to these feelings about their jewelry.
Read more

Given how infrequently Leonardo DiCaprio does comedy, I’ll be fascinated to see the full results of The Wolf of Wall Street, his new period movie about the finance industry, especially since DiCaprio will be going up against Matthew McConaughey, who is on quite a roll when it comes to a deep commitment to roles that might otherwise seem impossibly goofy:

Given the rich storytelling implications of our current financial crisis, sketched out brilliantly in movies like J.C. Chandor’s Margin Call, HBO’s adaptation of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big Too Fail–one of the best features to air on that network in several years–and somewhat less-well in the over-the-top Richard Gere morality tale Arbitrage, my initial reaction to the trailer for The Wolf of Wall Street was to wonder why we were getting a period piece about the recklessness of the eighties, rather than a meditation on a new set of failings. But I wonder of the result of financial chicanery, not the details of that chicanery itself, is precisely the point of The Wolf of Wall Street.

Hollywood, driven by an “aspirational” aesthetic that affects everything from Bravo’s upscale reality television programming to the kind of decision about sets that makes it seem reasonable for four people in their late twenties and early thirties working in lower-wage white collar jobs to live in a giant loft on New Girl, has gotten very good at making us covet the wealth we see on screen, and even to equate wealth and taste with morality. So if you were to tell a story about callous people working in finance in a contemporary setting, and show them amidst the trappings of their wealth, be that getting to the Hamptons by helicopter, or a Damien Hirst dot painting in their living rooms, we might get distracted by what we’ve been taught to see as class from the way the movie wants us to see the character. But a movie like The Wolf of Wall Street, that wants us to see both the moral rot in the tactics by which its main character is pursuing millions, as well as to see the tackiness of his broish enthusiasm for spending that money, needs to go back in time to a moment we can’t help but see as horribly un-chic, where what was once mistaken as taste or panache can only come across as horrifying.

In the second season of Veep, Armando Iannucci’s caustic comedy about the woman who occupies the second-highest office in the land (though if you ask Kent, the President’s chief of staff, that should make her half as tall as the president), something happened. Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) got good at her job, or at least as good as a secretive President, a depressed staff, a daughter in college, and a sexually magnetic weasel of an ex-husband would let her be. And in tandem, Veep got wiser about the awkwardnesses of foreign travel, what it’s like to be climbing the Washington career ladder in your twenties, and how hard it is for people in public life to date.

I sat down with Iannucci to talk about why Selina did a Leslie Knope in her second season, what made Dick Cheney the most powerful vice president, and what makes HBO sitcoms different from their network counterparts. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I wanted to start out by asking something that had been sort of noticeable to me in the second season, which is that all of the characters seem somewhat more competent and I was wondering if you talk a little bit about that evolution of that decision.

I think there’s two things, one is, you know, we’re getting to know them and therefore, it’s all about them, doing more with them. So I think any politician, when they go into a high office, there’s a period of adjustment. All the huge mistakes that presidents make usually are within the first six months, all the embarrassing stories, and they didn’t quite get this right, and why didn’t they do that, you know, that sort of goes on. But also I felt the first season was about coming to terms with the limitations of her job and also her staff. The second season would be more about what happens when you have power and influence, what does that do to you? Because that’s what you got into politics for. Okay what happens when you get what you’ve been asking for?
Read more

There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about how the web, which initially became a vehicle for extremely short-form journalism and blogging, has become a refuge for long-form journalism through projects like Pro Publica, which partners with legacy publications on investigative journalism, and publishing platforms and apps like Atavis. One of my favorites is Symbolia, a digital magazine where authors do journalism through comics in themed issues. The publishers of Symbolia have been kind enough to let me publish an exclusive excerpt of “Heroines,” Symbolia’s latest issue, which features five first-person narratives from women around the world. In the story I’m reprinting here, we get to hear from Laura Sandow, a veteran of the U.S. Navy who served at GITMO, which morphed from a sleepy naval base to an infamous detention center during her time there. It’s fascinating not just to read Laura’s words about her attempts to process her role in the War on Terror, and how military culture has affected her emotional and mental health, but to see her experiences.

Laura’s story is a collaboration between Sarah Mirk, who interviewed her, Lucy Bellwood, who illustrated the interview, and of course, Laura herself. To read the rest of her story, and to meet other veterans, bellydancers, and survivors of human trafficking, you can download (and subscribe to) Symbolia on iPad, via PDF, and for Kindle. And for more information about Symbolia in general, visit www.symoboliamag.com.

Read more