Ashton Kutcher has a new (and almost immediately pulled) video series up for PopChips that’s supposed to be a comedic riff on dating services. It’s a weird little project in which he riffs on profoundly obvious targets—hippies, rednecks, size queens, Karl Lagerfeld—without having much new to say. But it tips over into a decidedly bizarre place with Kutcher’s impersonation of a Bollywood film producer:

It’s not a funny impersonation, and it doesn’t have anything to say about globalized Indians the way Bride & Prejudice’s riff on Jane Austen’s Mr. Collins did, in a role written, directed and played by Kenyan-born artists of Indian origin:

We’re at a really interesting inflection point where characters with South Asian heritage have made their way into tons of television shows, whether Kalinda on The Good Wife, Abed on Community, or Dev on Smash, and have done so in a way that hasn’t all cast them as representatives of the same trope. It’s a pretty remarkable example of pop culture getting to second-level diversity with a minority group quickly and all at once, without first giving us a huge wave of say, South Asian grade-grubbers or convenience store managers that would have been the equivalent of sassy gay friends.

At the same time, not going through a period where stereotypes about any minority groups are specifically debunked does leave room for folks like Kutcher who are new to those unfortunate tropes to think they’re hilarious and to trot them out. Unless people are pushed to try harder and instructed to be funnier, it’s depressing how quickly folks will default back to the laziest—and comedically broadest—possible option. Give me the jewler’s-fine tools any day. The specific made universal is always a more impressive feat than the resort to the common assumption.

When Mitt Romney Came to Town, the short documentary about Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital being touted by the Newt Gingrich-backing and Sheldon Adelson-funded Winning Our Future Super PAC, has raised questions about everything from the clout of those organizations to the accuracy of the charges of job-cutting against Romney, the Republican frontrunner. But it’s also a good example of the tension between good political ad-making and good documentary-making. And as Super PACs and well-funded candidates increasingly make and release long specials, whether for the web or television, as President Obama and Vice President Biden’s campaign did in 2008, it’s worth examining this odd marriage, to see what works as argument and what works as art.

It’s disappointing how heavily When Mitt Romney Came to Town relies on dog-whistles. The documentary fans flames of elitism, noting of Romney that “he had a Harvard pedigree and he was on a tear,” and closing out with footage of him speaking French as if it’s an indication of something sinister. There are stock images of bearded men gleefully smoking cigars that don’t land nearly as hard as Romney and his Bain colleagues posing jokily with bills. When it comes to its section on the fate of Kay-Bee toys, there are even scenes of sad-eyed children staring mournfully at televisions.

That lack of specificity is a larger problem with the movie. One of the earliest segments is the most interesting, in part because the workers talk in some detail about the changes Bain made to their work processes. “One of the first things that they did when they started, when we became part of the corporation, was to start cheapening the product,” one of the interviewees complained. “You’d have to hurry faster through your work,” Tommy Jones says, explaining that the rushed production times meant that the company sometimes shipped out equipment without parts. Those kinds of details make the case against corporate raiding even more damning. It would be one thing if companies were just finding inefficiencies and improving production with layoffs and reorganizations. But it’s worth making clear that layoffs are part of a larger philosophy of stripping down companies to their constituent parts and extracting the value from them. And it might have helped to identify the people interviewed for the movie more clearly by their job function, providing a sense that they had more expertise than the people who took their companies out from under them.

Slogans are powerful, of course, and the documentary relies heavily on them. But sometimes reaching for rhetorical force means the movie gives up a chance to explain how systems work, as when the movie declares that a tech start-up was “helped by a favorable rating from Bain’s Wall Street friends,” but doesn’t bother exploring those connections and processes. When a worker named Shannon explains that “I was pregnant at the time, and at the meeting they told us we were all fired, that we had to reapply for our jobs,” it’s incidentally powerful, but it might have been more so if the movie could demonstrate a pattern of terminations of people whose insurance was about to get expensive.

When Mitt Romney Came to Town may founder on its factual errors before it truly takes off. There’s no question that there’s a story to be told about Mitt Romney’s time at Bain Capital, and that story may well damn his presidential ambitions. The only thing at issue is how to tell it in every format from 30 seconds to two hours. Fact-checking and specificity to back up the sound bites seem like they’d be good places to start.

Always-wise commenter Anthony Damiani asks a fair question about the challenges of building female comics readers:

But the counterpoint is that it’s not like they haven’t tried, a number of times. A book like She-Hulk (in its Superhuman Law incarnation) was a good book that should have attracted a female readership. Marvel Divas and Models Inc weren’t good books, but they were clear efforts. Ms. Mavel? Ghost Rider? Alias? Marvel’s solo books with female leads have had a hard time selling for some time now– and it’s not all because they’re vapid cheesecake male-oriented fantasies.

I think part of this is an equilibrium issue; the “comic-book-shop-as-smelly-boys’-club” effect makes it hostile terrain for books that would otherwise be appealing to a female audience. Which, in turn, leads to Brevoort’s attitude: a sort of despair that what they feel is socially responsible to produce is directly at odds with what they’re actually able to sell.

I agree that it’s true that the comics industry has produced some quite fine comics about female characters. Dan Slott’s Superhuman Law arc on She-Hulk is one of my all-time favorite comics and one of my all-time favorite procedural stories, and it’s tragic that She-Hulk has sort of slipped under the waters, that she’s not even on the list for a second-tier movie in Marvel’s slate.

But I don’t think that’s actually sufficient. It’s not as if women have some sort of mysterious homing pigeon hormones that allow us to swarm the best in lady culture when it’s published even if no one lets us know about it. I’d be genuinely curious to know if Marvel and DC have done substantial advertising campaigns in women’s magazines, or on female-oriented television shows when they’re rolling out new storylines or new artists on comics with female characters? Or if they’ve pitched their comics characters as cover girls or interview subjects a la Marge Simpson’s Playboy spread? Just for fun, I checked the Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire archives for references to She-Hulk, Ms. Marvel, the Scarlet Witch, Catwoman, Wonder Woman. Only the last produced any results actually related to comics or related products: in a guide to famous breasts in Marie Claire that misstates Wonder Woman’s history. If any other industry was making a push to get a product to its core audience and was failing that miserably in reaching them, they would fire their PR people and their marketing department. Maybe someone can offer information I don’t have here, and if so, I’d be curious to hear it.

You can’t expect women to go into comic book stores if they have no idea that anything’s there for them. You can’t expect them to swing by comics and graphic novels sections in physical or online bookstores if they have no conception that there are characters they should get excited about. If you really want a female audience, go after it.

I was joking about beer commercials on Twitter while watching football on Sunday, suggesting that my occasional indulgence in a Miller Lite is probably going to mess with my gender since it is apparently such a powerful masculinity supplement, when Matthew Henderson notified me of the existence of a complete abomination: Chick Beer. Of course it’s pink. Of course it’s a light beer. And apparently, the makers went that route because “One day, we were in our local store looking for an interesting beer to take home, and thought ‘Isn’t it strange that out of hundreds of beers, none are designed to appeal directly to women? In fact, most are clearly marketed to men.’”

But that seems like a marketing problem, not a product problem. If women are already drinking a quarter of the beer sold in the United States despite advertising that almost exclusively harps on the relationship between beer choice and gender with occasional forays into the relationship between beer choice and class, that actually suggests women need very little convincing to drink fermented beverages. It would be pretty easy to run more ads like Coors’ Love Train series, which are seen through the eyes of a man, but have women in roles other than nagging girlfriends or sexy bartenders, and that sell refreshment as much as gender reaffirmation:

Then, there are the witty wordless Corona ads where women get to enjoy their beer on their own:

Or pay their boyfriends back for ogling other women with a wordless squirt of a lime. But I guess if you were going to cut full-on ladycentric beer ads, even if you air them during shows with predominantly female audiences, a man might accidentally catch wind of them and run screaming in the direction of a more masculine beverage like, I don’t know, scotch, or something. In the hive mind of the marketing industry, dudes are fragile creatures. But that doesn’t mean that if it’s not pink, I can’t drink.