The bridge is yours.

-The only celebrity memoir I’d even contemplate purchasing.

-Another reason you should catch up on Enlightened so you can watch it next season.

-Michael Chabon on his life-long relationship with Edgar Rice Burroughs.

-Amazon v. the Independent Publishers Group.

-This is basically the perfect role for Ben Stiller:

Brett Ratner is not exactly a producer of sophisticated entertainments or a sensitive societal compass, so I was prepared for Tower Heist to be a tiresome mess. It’s not a perfect movie, but he’s lucky enough to be working with a script that is acid — if not revolutionary — about the callousness of the 1 percent, and has action sequences that if not precisely believable, have some nicely scary bits. I’m not hugely fond of the movie’s main premise — that Bernie Madoff-like Ponzi schemers are responsible for the recession, rather than people doing risky but entirely legal things and taking advantage of people’s financial illteracy — but Tower Heist manages to be a nice movie about the pain of downward mobility.

It’s not easy to make me feel sorry for investment bankers who have fallen on hard times, but Matthew Broderick, as the depressed ex-Merrill Lynch trader who Josh Kovacs, the manager of the Tower, has to evict, actually succeeds. When Josh comes to tell him to get out, he asks if Mr. Fitzhugh knows anything about the markets. “I don’t know. I used to know. That’s why they hired me at Merrill Lynch,” Fitzhugh confesses mournfully. “I went to Yale 20 years ago. Now, I’m a squatter.” Later, when Josh comes and finds him in a miserable hotel, he explains in a perfect deadpan that “I’m thinking of becoming a male prostitute.” And he provides a bitter perspective on why Arthur Shaw took on the Tower employees’ pension fund even after his Ponzi scheme started collapsing, telling Josh that “At a certain point, it isn’t about securities fraud. It’s about catering.” Some folks on the right have used the idea that Occupy Wall Street has downwardly mobile participants as some sort of evidence that the movement is about preserving existing privileges rather than a just realignment of the system. But I tend to think that it’s more about a recalibration, a reminder that the American dream is about security and equal opportunity, rather than the promise of vast wealth.

There’s another nice reminder of that fact in the scene where Josh informs the staff that his decision to ask Shaw to manage their pension fund has left them broke. “I never asked anyone to triple my portfolio,” Odessa (a very funny Gabby Sidibe) tells him bitterly, exposing the ridiculousness of the promise Shaw used to haul Josh in. She just wanted a reasonable rate of return. Lester, the doorman whose planned retirement is ruined by Shaw’s fraud, just wanted to go on a cruise with his wife. It was Josh, who listens to a ludicrous lifestyle radio show about cheese so he can recommend food and wine pairings to Shaw, and mistakes their chess games and Shaw’s professions of familiarity for friendship, who let himself get sucked into an unsustainable dream.

A key question for a lot of folks about this movie is what it means for Eddie Murphy’s career. He gives a good performance in a deeply annoying trope, the black man hired by pasty white dudes to teach them how to commit crimes. But he’s not nearly as much fun as Gabby Sidibe, proving she can crush comedy as well as drama in her turn as Odessa, the Jamaican maid turned safecracker for the team. I can see how some folks might see her as a stereotypical sassy, curvy black woman. But she’s refreshingly and hilariously tough and pragmatic, entering the movie to inform Josh, “My work visa is about to expire. You must find me a husband!” and later, when her plan to drug an FBI agent with a piece of cake fails, explaining nonchalantly, “He’s allergic to chocolate. I had to beat him.” And honestly, it’s nice to see a movie where a woman can be a member of a team not because she’s a hot distraction, but because she has skills that are absolutely vital to the operation.

-London’s riots claim a major record distribution warehouse.

-I’m going to miss Eureka.

-White men can’t jump.

-Here are all of your television premieres this fall.

-Captain America testifies on his steroid abuse:

I’ve been pretty harsh in the past about Ben Stiller’s sourness. But there is one thing I think it’s perfect for: a movie about robbing Bernie Madoff.

I have some reservations here, particularly the plot device of a bunch of pasty white boys hiring a black man to advise them in how to commit felonies, which I thought, even with a twist, was the weakest part of Horrible Bosses. But on the whole, I’m actually more optimistic about this than I thought I would be. There’s an admirable frankness to things like a conversation between two luxury apartment building employees, where one says, “You know what these people are really buying?” and the other responds, “White neighbors?” Or the withering condescension with which the movie treats Alan Alda’s declaration that “I may have my own private island in Belize, but deep down, I’m just an Astoria boy like Josh here,” when he’s really someone who believes that “You people are working stiffs. Clock punchers. Easily replaced.”

Our popular culture spends a lot of time treating the decadence and myopias of the very rich as if they’re admirable, or at worst, an amusing excuse for judgement. There’s something refreshing about a movie that upsets that assumption, and suggests that its characters tear down that false idol rather than aspire to it. That’s much blunter than the class politics of American pop culture normally get, a rebuke to the industry from within the industry itself — whether it’s self-aware or not.

I really prefer reasoned argument and wit to getting shouty about things, but the news that, after the sacrilege that is a Jim Carrey-starring Mr. Popper’s Penguins, I cannot restrain myself about the news that Ben Stiller is going to direct himself in a remake of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. STOP IT. WHAT IS THIS NONSENSE? WHY ARE THE SOUREST, MOST CRABBED ACTORS OF THEIR GENERATION PUTTING THEIR HANDS ALL OVER THE THINGS THAT I LOVE?

James Thurber’s original short story is really wonderfully dark, and might actually be the basis for a terrific, unsettling recession movie. The main character is henpecked to death, emasculated by cabbies and cops alike, and gets through a day by imagining himself as more competent and powerful than he actually is. And at the end, it turns out that instead of using his fantasies as the basis to motivate himself to improve his life, Mitty instead uses his fantasies to accomodate himself to the unhappiness of his existence, envisioning himself bravely facing a firing squad. Of course, in the Danny Kaye movie adaptation, Mitty’s ends up having real-life adventures that rebuild his confidence and help him be assertive.

And I guarantee a Ben Stiller movie will have the same message. Stiller’s characters generally get away with treating other people badly, often for irrational reasons, and still get rewarded at the end of the movie. His Mitty interpretation seems likely to miss all the wistfulness of the original, and to pair Mitty’s fantasies with a strong sense of entitlement. In the hands of an actor with greater range, this gap between fantasy and reality could be a powerful reflection of our disappointed aspirations — and the gap between our pop culture and our reality.