Conservatives are apparently very upset that the Obama administration talked to Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal for their upcoming movie about the campaign to hunt down Osama bin Laden—despite the fact that Bigelow and Boal have been clear that the movie will cover the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations:

Complaining about the White House’s efforts to stall the organization’s requests for death photos of the Al-Qaeda leader, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said, “These documents, which took nine months and a federal lawsuit to disgorge from the Obama administration, show that politically-connected filmmakers were giving extraordinary and secret access to bin Laden raid information, including the identity of a Seal Team Six leader.

“It is both ironic and hypocritical that the Obama administration stonewalled Judicial Watch’s pursuit of the bin Laden death photos, citing national security concerns, yet seemed willing to share intimate details regarding the raid to help Hollywood filmmakers release a movie ‘perfectly timed to give a home-stretch boost’ to the Obama campaign.”

This is a silly complaint. First, the movie, Zero Dark Thirty, is coming out more than a month after the election precisely to avoid any suggestion that it’s an attempt to influence the campaign. Second, collaborating with a fictional movie project is as much of a risk for the Obama administration as it is a guarantee of an election slam dunk. Kathryn Bigelow is the inverse of a director like Michael Bay who’s willing to rent his opinions to the government in exchange for lots and lots of military hardware. She’s got a very specific vision, one that isn’t particularly triumphalist and is based more on the front lines than in the halls of power.

And finally, what this kind of objection really reveals is an attempt by conservatives to preserve the idea that only they can authentically represent the troops. When Act of Valor casts real Marines for parts in a silly, overdramatized movie, that’s supposed to be a move so dedicated to honoring members of the military that there’s no valid way to critique it. But when Bigelow and Boal do research to try to give their movie verisimilitude, they’re dupes who couldn’t possibly care about the truth of the story they’re trying to tell.

Abigail Breslin may have come up as a precocious little girl in Little Miss Sunshine, and have honed that act in movies like No Reservations and Definitely, Maybe where she’s up against more experienced adult stars. But it’s exciting to hear that she’s moving into a new phase of her career by taking an action role, specifically in a movie called Final Girl where, according to Deadline, she gets to fight off a pack of feral teenage boys who want to use her in a weird initiation ritual.

It’s incredible and inspiring to me that there is a generation of teenage female actresses who are making their bones this way, whether it’s Chloe Grace Moretz playing vampire and superhero or Saorsie Ronan playing the result of an experiment in Hanna and a human hijacked by an alien in The Host. Growing up, I loved movies like The Babysitters’ Club, the Winona Ryder-anchored adaptation of Little Women, and Ten Things I Hate About You, but I know how hard I would have been cheering for girls who were allowed to be ferocious and strong instead of simply smart and creative. It’s not enough to have smart movies for and starring teenage girls if they’re all smart in the same way. Not everyone is a bookish budding feminist like Jo or Kat Stratford, and that’s absolutely fine.

And what’s particularly interesting to me about Breslin’s path is that she’s embodied all kinds of alternagirls. In Little Miss Sunshine, she’s defiantly weird, close to her grandfather, totally uninterested in the standards she’s supposed to meet. As Valentine Wiggin in Ender’s Game, she’ll get to be cerebral and loving. And as the Final Girl, further proof that Joss Whedon created our pop culture world and we all just live in it, she’ll get to fight. The idea that someone like Breslin could just keep going and not have to make a teenaged romantic comedy to continue working feels liberating, even though it’s entirely new. I’m all for letting a thousand Jodie Fosters bloom, and with Moretz, Ronan, and Breslin going strong, we might just get them.

In a conversation with Entertainment Weekly about a sequel to The Avengers, Scarlett Johansson drops some knowledge about why superheroine movies have tended to fail so badly:

I’d have to wear pasties to greenlight any of these movies…They’re always fighting in a bra, so while it might be exciting for a still photo, it’s ridiculous. One of the most exciting thing about [The Avengers,] is that in my opening scene the first thing you see is my character getting punched in the face. Everybody’s like, ‘Damn, it’s nice to see a girl get the shit kicked out of her…Superheroine movies are normally really corny and bad. They’re always like, fighting in four inch heels with their [thrusting out her chest] like a two-gun salute.

If you want audiences to respond to superheroines like they respond to superheroes, you have to treat them the same way. Their bodies can be admirable, but they should be framed so we admire what these heroes are capable of accomplishing with those bodies, not solely as objects of consumption. In The Avengers, we’re introduced to Captain America through a shot that presents his body as a beautiful thing, but we immediately see him using it to wreck a sandbag, and later, to perform remarkable feats. Ditto for their romances: My Super Ex-Girlfriend may have been meant as comedy, but its depiction of an insecure superheroine whipping out her powers solely to take revenge on a man who made her feel awful was sour and disappointing. In the X-Men movies, Dark Phoenix kills one lover and overdoes it with another, Rogue’s in constant danger of killing off any man she wants to touch, while the X-Men: First Class incarnation of Mystique has an implied encounter with Magneto that’s more about solidarity than a real relationship. It’d be nice to see a superheroine have a relationship, whether it’s with a superhero or a normal person, that’s about providing her with affirmation, with a reason to fight, rather than that acting as an illustration of her weakness.

Now, superheroines don’t have to fight the same way as superheroes, or to have the same priorities and motivations. In fact, it would be interesting for them to be different. But whether it’s Black Widow circumventing the need to torture Loki by conducting a skilled interrogation that never gets physical or Mystique grappling with the fact that having a power sometimes makes people more frightened of you than admiring, that difference should be a means of articulating that there are multiple kinds of power that are equally effective, not that being a woman with powers means you can never be equal to a man.

In the wake of George Zimmerman’s fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, Fox pulled some advertising for its upcoming comedy Neighborhood Watch, in which some overly-vigilant patrolees discover they’ve got an alien invasion on their hands. Now, they’ve changed the movie’s name to The Watch, and released a trailer that suggests the movie is more R-rated comedy than an affirmation of a power grab:

I tend to think movies like these are always somewhat dicey, since they’re built on the proposition that things that in the real world would be extremely dangerous or morally compromised—like getting overly zealous about guarding your neighborhood to the point that you start treating people in threats in ways that can escalate, or, say, torturing people—end up getting the results you want, whether it’s beating the bad guys or eliciting accurate information, both outcomes that in those cases would be rather unlikely. I thought it was problematic, for example, that in last week’s episode of Scandal, Olivia asks one of her employees to torture a suspect, aggravating what appears to be a severe case of PTSD, and then was rewarded for asking him to do this terrible thing by getting the information that she wanted. One bad message, that torture works, was wrapped inside a better one, that asking people on our side to do terrible things harms their humanity.

The Watch could end up validating macho nonsense that does real harm off-screen. Or it could end up arguing that most of the time, the people we assess as threats are no danger to us, and in fact are common allies in larger projects, the people we need to help make our communities better rather than the people we need to fear.

I’m literally hopping up and down with excitement to talk to y’all about The Avengers—I’ll have a review on Friday that can act as an open thread for discussion over the weekend and spoilerific post about the movie on Monday. But to pass the hours until the movie hits theaters, and to continue our conversation from yesterday about The Avengers and The Dark Knight it’s worth checking out Adam Rogers’ long piece on Joss Whedon and the process of making The Avengers, perhaps the first time Whedon’s been able and allowed to relax into a well-oiled machine that had no interest in letting him hoist himself on his own petard. He also has an overarching theory of why Marvel movies are working, while DC Comics movies, with the exception of Batman, have had such trouble:

Not incidentally, these were all characters from comics published by Marvel. The characters from competing comics company DC—Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and the rest of the Superfriends—were lying fallow, even though the corporation that owns DC also owns Warner Bros. Pictures. Marvel, on the other hand, was doing so well with its A-list characters that in 2005 the company took the bold step of financing its own theatrical releases. It would translate its characters its own way.

Spider-Man had been indentured to Sony, and the X-Men and Fantastic Four were already at Fox, but the remaining roster of potential movie heroes was still plenty deep. First up: Iron Man, an alcoholic gazillionaire playboy who builds his own rocket-powered exoskeleton. Then there’s the Hulk, a brilliant scientist who turns into a massively strong, uncontrollable green monster. Oh, and Captain America—a supersoldier from World War II brought into the present—and Thor, a hammer-wielding Norse god with superpowers and family drama that makes the real housewives of Atlanta look like the Osmonds. Unlike the gleaming, godlike DC heroes, Marvel characters are more likely to regard their powers as a curse than a blessing; great power has a pesky tendency to come with great responsibility. And that makes for pretty good movie plots.

I think there’s something to that. But of course, Marvel movies do have gods in the form of Asgardians, and some of the pleasure of watching Thor and Loki duke it comes from seeing gods behaving badly, of seeing these brawls play out on the largest possible scale. I wonder if the secret overall is that, on-screen at least, the Marvel heroes have tended to be funnier and more self-deprecating than the DC heroes, which is not precisely the same thing as angsty. There’s something inherently ridiculous about a god in a pet store, or a rich kid reacting in amazement and pleasure to his new toys, to the fact that he can fly. Acknowledging that absurdity is a useful nod to people who aren’t lifelong geeks, but are letting themselves be talked into drinking the Kool-Aid. And the transmutation of anxiety and darkness into comedic gold is basically Joss Whedon’s sweet spot.

Batman’s owned the flip side of that joyful ridiculousness, a sense of deviance: Gotham residents may not be right about the precise ways in which Bruce Wayne’s head isn’t right, but they’re not wrong that there’s something wrong with him. That comfort with painting the hero as a bit too dedicated, acknowledging our unease, may be why it’s worked better than say, Green Lantern or Green Hornet. One way or the other, the movies seem to require a deep tonal commitment to work.

We’ve finally got a trailer that gives us a real sense of what ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ will look like, and golly is it gorgeous and melancholy:

More to the point, I’m excited to see an intellectual debate between this movie and The Avengers. Christopher Nolan’s Batman’s movies have always had an element of monkish sacrifice to them: to be an impactful superhero, Bruce Wayne’s had to surrender his true public image (in the first film, he acts the playboy to disguise his intentions), the love of his life and of the populace, and now, it’s implied, either his life or his physical health. Bane’s declaration that “your punishment must be more severe” is a looking-glass version of how Nolan’s understood the only way for superheroes to make a difference, to self-abnegate, to foreswear their own happiness, to separate themselves from the people they are sacrificing themselves for.

The Marvel franchise, and The Avengers in particular (without spoiling anything), take the opposite tack. Its superheroes become better individuals more closely drawn to their communities for their experiences as superheroes. Tony Stark stops cackling over his power to kill and begins craving the approval of those around him, a selfish motivation that ultimately teaches him to engage with their needs. Thor falls in love with Jane Foster, and with Earth, a process of attachment that turns him from self-involved Asgardian prince into an admirable man. Captain America, in life and in death, gives the American people something to rally around, not to unify in their disgust at his perceived actions. The great tragedy of the Hulk has been that he’s cut off from reason and attachment precisely at the moment that he could provide the greatest amount of strength to protect people or causes. These two movies are going to make serious bank for their studios. But taken together, they’re also a vigorous argument about superheroism. That’s an exciting debate to have, and I’m looking forward to it.

Every summer, Fandango polls consumers about the blockbusters they’re most excited for. And it turns out that the movie women reported being most excited to see is Snow White and the Huntsman, followed by The Avengers, Men in Black III, The Dark Knight, and Dark Shadows. Now, there are a lot of dedicated female fantasy and science fiction fans out there—I should know because I talk to all of you on a constant basis. But I don’t know that we represent 22 percent of the female moviegoing population, the percentage of women who named Snow White and the Huntsmen as their top ticket-buying priority.

And I think that gets at an important point: women, even outside the core fan community, will be interested in fantasy and science fiction if work in those genres have anything to say to them. Snow White and the Huntsman is being explicitly sold not just as a story with two female leads—Charlize Theron and Kristen Stewart—but as a story about the connection between beauty and power, about competition between women, and about styles of rule and command. From the outside, the women in the movie don’t look like women acting like men. They appear to be women acting like women but with the force of armies and heroes available to play out the issues that they’re grappling with personally.

Women watch Game of Thrones not for the incest and other sexual skulduggery, as the New York Times suggested in its utterly bizarre review when the show premiered, but for the variety of women we see on-screen the way they exercise power. We watch to see Cersei Lannister wonder what it’s like to be a man, and to struggle between the imperatives of command and family. We watch for that moment when Brienne of Tarth beats the Knight of Flowers, and reveals herself for what she is (and I watch The Return of the King for the moment when Eowyn spits out the declaration of her gender at the Witch-King of Angmar). We watch for Sansa’s bitter, brittle bravery, and Arya’s nourishing hatred.

The dudes who make much of our science fiction and fantasy are rightly confident that they’ll get my, and other women’s money, even if they don’t speak to us. We’re going to Men in Black III and The Dark Knight, after all, and we’ll turn out for The Avengers even if we’re supposed to accept Black Widow and Maria Hill as our representatives. But from a purely mercenary perspective, you could always get more of our money once in a while by catering to us as women first, and counting on dudes to come along for the swords and dragons as a secondary market.

One of the biggest stories in Hollywood over the past week has been the falling-out between Mel Gibson and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas. Gibson, in a move that that garnered justifiable skepticism from those of us offended by his repeated expressions of anti-Semitism, planned to make a movie about the Maccabees, an army of Jewish rebels who reconquered Judea and expelled its Greek occupiers, reestablishing the Temple and experiencing the miracle of lights that’s the basis for Hanukkah. Eszterhas was supposed to be writing the script. Warner Brothers rejected the script. Eszterhas released an exceedingly lengthy letter full of allegations that Gibson had behaved bizarrely, frighteningly, and in a way that indicated he continues to despise Jews. Gibson said that Eszterhas was covering up for the fact that the script was a disaster. Whatever the truth is, two things remain. First, it would be nice to mine Jewish history and scripture for awesome movies. Second, these two should probably stay far away from these stories. But here are five ideas that someone else should take up!

1. Deborah and Yael: Jewish men aren’t the only potential badasses who would make for great movie heroes. Deborah’s the wife of a commander who made her husband promise at the beginning of a war that a woman would have the honor of killing the enemy commander. Said enemy commander wanders into Yael’s tent, upon which she takes care of him, lulls him to sleep, and hammers a peg through his temple, killing him. Quentin Tarantino would approve.

2. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: It doesn’t have a happy ending. But trying something incredibly brave and humanity-restoring in the face of certain defeat isn’t any less brave. And the decision by Warsaw’s Jews to resist transportation to the Treblinka concentration camp is tremendously moving.

3. Esther and Mordecai: This is a great story about the reembrace of identity even under incredible odds. Esther, the secretly Jewish wife of a Persian emperor decides to break the rules that govern her contact with her husband when she learns that one of his advisors plans to manipulate him into a pogrom against the Jews in his kingdom. That defiance of convention at great personal risk to Esther makes for great drama. And Esther’s relationship with her cousin Mordecai, who raised her after she was left an orphan, is also a wonderful story of a friendship between a man and a woman without the slightest hint of sex in it. There’s a relatively recent, but decidedly indie movie on the subject.

4. The Book of Joshua: If you want a pioneer story, Joshua, which documents the settlement of the land and the clashes with the people who already live in the areas the descents of the Twelve Tribes want to settle. This is as close to a Jewish Western as we’re going to get. It could be a story that touches a lot of nerves. But it’s go an epic sweep, and contemporary relevance.

5. People of the Book: Text is important in Judaism, so why not tell an awesome story about the survival of a Torah? Geraldine Brooks’ novel People of the Book imagines the survival of the Sarajevo Haggadah through occupation, Inquisition, pogrom and war. It would make a terrific series of short films, and it’s a great testament to the almost religious power of art, even to people who don’t share the religion that art is created in service of.

There have been on-and-off efforts over the year to get a stunts category into the Academy Awards, and apparently those conversations are starting up again. As someone who would like to see more movies like Casino Royale or District 9 to be in Oscar contention, and for action movies to have more incentives to think of themselves as Oscar-worthy and to raise their game correspondingly, I think I’m in favor of such an addition, pending what the final categories look like, of course.

I’m also in favor of this for the same reason that I support some sort of collaborative performance category to recognize performances like Andy Serkis’: such categories would serve as an important reminder that the movies are a craft as much as they’re an art, and that they can’t exist without the people who do things that stars won’t, either because they require a different set of skills, or because they’re dangerous. A lot of what funds the ability of pretty, elegant people to do pretty, elegant things on screen (or, alternatively, to surrender their beauty and poise in ritual artistic acts of self-abnegation) is the work that’s done by these people to make movies that are exciting, and propulsive, and that sometimes are dumb but don’t inherently have to be. Action sequences can be as compelling, and as witty, as good dialogue. Movies like Mission Impossible IV and Casino Royale have been particularly good at using fights to joke about and comment on characters from the first and third worlds. And Mr. & Mrs. Smith is a decidedly more mediocre movie without the fight that destroys the main characters’ soul-sucking suburban facade and resurrects their sexual connection. That’s work, and it draws a lot of people to the movies, and it should be recognized for that, though it might make sense to start the category out small to set a consistently high bar.

The Hunger Games has been a massive smash, but director Gary Ross is apparently out of the running to helm the next sequel, Catching Fire. And to be honest, Ross’s huge reliance on shaky cam both blunted the impact of some of the killings and was awfully hard to watch after a while. Here are five directors I’d love to see considered for the role, pending their availability, and what I think they’d bring to the tale of a critically important female action hero.

1. Patty Jenkins: Jenkins was supposed to be directing Thor 2, but ended up exiting the project. She might actually be better suited for Catching Fire. The Hunger Games trilogy is fundamentally a story about post-traumatic stress disorder and the trama of committing violence, themes that Jenkins explored in her serial killer biopic Monster. That’s also a great movie about love and the authenticity of affection under enormous stress, a key component of the franchise.

2. Steven Soderbergh: He’s done a delightful job with action sequences in Las Vegas, which is the closest we get to the Capitol in contemporary America. And his work on Haywire suggests an interest in building out new brands of action heroines. But he might actually be better for the sequences in the third movie in the series, Mockingjay.

3. Edgar Wright: I think Wright, the force behind Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and the adaptation of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is one of the most outrageously talented and creative action choreographers working today. One thing the movie adaptation of The Hunger Games didn’t entirely make clear is how weird the arenas for the Games can be, and the arena in Catching Fire is a doozy. I’d love to see what Wright does with it. And given the weirdness of the one fight between women in Scott Pilgrim, I’d say Wright owes us a better one.

4. Karyn Kusama: I know a lot of people didn’t like the movie adaptation of Aeon Flux, which is a totally valid position to take. But between that and Girlfight, I’d like to see Kusama take another crack at a dystopian action movie with a female heroine, particularly one where the heroine and a man she (maybe?) loves are violently opposed.

5. Matthew Vaughn: Given his work on X-Men: First Class, we already know that Vaughn can get good work out of Jennifer Lawrence, especially in situations that involve performative sexuality. And Kick-Ass is brutal fun, with a tender, violent performance by Chloe Moretz. It’d be fun to see Vaughn tackle a movie where an alternately tender and tough girl is the main character.