Per Kotaku:

At CinemaCon today, Disney revealed plans to release new Star Wars films each summer beginning in 2015. The plan isn’t to go Episode VII, VIII, IX in three years but, rather, to run spinoff films in-between the major “episode releases” every two or three years. This is consistent with earlier reports of plans for spinoff movies, plus reports that the next trilogy will pick up after 1983′s Return of the Jedi. Disney’s announcement meshes the two together rather definitively.

In a way, I’m even more interested in what the spinoffs might look like than about the new trilogy. It’s a setup that creates more space for creative storytelling within the Star Wars universe, while still keeping the core space opera going under the—if nothing else—predictable leadership of J.J. Abrams. I don’t know that Disney will ever be comfortable getting this experimental, but there’s so much room for playing with visual styles, kinds of stories, and pairings of directors and subject material. Why tie Ben Affleck, for example, to the core trilogy movies when he could take his experience with Boston cop movies and apply it to a movie about the Corellian Security Force? Why not reunite Jessica Chastain and Kathryn Bigelow for an austere lady-Jedi movie—or even cast Chastain as Mara Jade? How about hiring Guillermo del Toro to do all of the monster design for the franchise going forward and letting him play with some stories about non-human main characters? Disney’s going to make an absolute fortune out of these movies. I’d like to see fans communicate to them as clearly and as loudly as possible, and as early in the process as we can, that we’d be excited to see the Star Wars franchise innovate if it’s going to flood the zone, rather than stay stagnant.

Nick Baumann, the news editor at Mother Jones, wrote a terrific piece about the way marketing has eaten South By Southwest, and was kind enough to come on my Bloggingheads show to discuss it:

One of the things I’ve found personally fascinating about South By Southwest is the extent to which the interactive portion of the festival actually demonstrates the limitations of social media: it’s a terrific place to have in-person conversations with people you know primarily online, but it’s also a reminder of the limitations of email, chat programs, Twitter, etc. And for all the discussion about the festival itself, one thing Nick and I talked about that I’ve rarely seen discussed is the impact of having the music, film, and interactive festivals running both concurrently and next to each other. Of course, it’s not new to have music festivals get dominated by big acts, but what does it mean to have a tech start-up mentality leach over into music and film? Or to have dealmaking come first to one part of a festival and then the others, even if the buyers are different? I don’t think anyone’s averse to people making money, but what happens when properties that have already made money—or, at least, say, movies that have already been acquired for distribution—crowd out the things that are supposed to get their shot at making a more modest amount?

I skipped Black Rock at Sundance, even though I love The League‘s Kate Aselton, because it takes a lot to get me to watch a horror movie. The last one I watched was Drag Me To Hell, which I watched because it was about the mortgage crisis, and from which I learned that you should never foreclose on a powerful gypsy. But Black Rock looks like the rare horror movie that could lure me out from my general moratorium:

There’s something really powerful about the promise of a piece of popular culture that insists that a woman has the right to say no at any point in a sexual encounter, no matter how flirtatious she’s been or how willing she’s seemed up until that point, and that she has the right to say no without being judged or attacked. And it’s even more powerful to make that point, and then emphasize how terrifying it is to live in a world where people feel like they’re entitled to sexual access to you, and if not to that access, to enforce the way they think you should behave. In fact, watching this trailer felt like a metaphor for doing feminist work, particularly on the internet: it can be frightening, and it can be hard, and sometimes people appear out of the blue to turn on you. But when you fight back, and when you see the people who are fighting back with you, sometimes you end up recognizing capacities you didn’t realize you had, and support you didn’t realize was there the whole time.

This post discusses some extremely basic plot points for American Horror Story: Asylum.

Of all the genres I wish I appreciated more, the one I have the most regret about is horror. An early encounter with an extremely violent graphic novel version of Frankenstein gave me childhood nightmares and a life-long aversion to being deeply frightened by my entertainment. I mustered up the courage to see my first horror movie, Drag Me To Hell, several years ago for a long piece on the recession in movies, but nothing’s pulled me back since. I’m aware that in staying away from horror, I’m cutting myself off from a tradition that’s rich with explorations of our darkest social anxieties and pathologies, from violence against women to immigration. But it’s been very difficult for me to justify subjecting myself to images that upset me so deeply to get to the substantive ideas expressed by them.

Somewhat to my surprise, this season of FX’s anthology series, American Horror Story, is prompting me to try again. The second mini-series from creator Ryan Murphy, this time set at an insane asylum in 1964 New England overseen by the Catholic church, with its central mystery the identity of a killer of women who skins his victims, is at the very outer limits of my tolerance for violence. But its exploration of sexual taboos and repressed desires is more deeply felt and certainly as frightening as Bloody Face, as the killer’s been dubbed by a morbidly obsessed public, and much more interesting than the buckets of blood and organs sloshing around in the space between those themes.

At first glance, it looks like American Horror Story is pitting the mostly-innocent and not necessarily insane inmates of Briarcliff Asylum against its proprietors, most notably the severe Sister Jude (Jessica Lange). There’s Shelley (Chloe Sevigny), incarcerated as a nymphomaniac, her head shaved for punishment, mostly on the grounds that she has a high sex drive. “Men like sex and no one calls them whores. I hate that word. It’s so ugly,” she tells Dr. Arthur Arden (James Cromwell), who appears to have a more serious set of problems than some of his patients. “I like sex. It’s my crime.” Kit Walker (Evan Peters, one of the few returning members of the original American Horror Story cast) is a young man, newly and secretly married to his African-American wife, when he experiences what appears to be an alien abduction, she is brutally murdered, and he is arrested on suspicion of being Bloody Face. “Did her dark meat slide off the bone easier than any of the other victims?” Sister Jude asks him nastily at his intake session.

And then there’s Lana Winters (Sarah Paulson), a journalist relegated to the recipe column who comes to Briarcliff, ostensibly to write up Sister Jude’s famous bread bakery, but is using the assignment as cover to try to get a coop on the Bloody Face story. After an accident at the asylum, Sister Jude has her put in a cell, first telling Lana it’s so she can recover, but later blackmailing Sarah’s lover, Wendy (Clea Duvall), a young school teacher who fears having her sexual orientation exposed and being fired, into having Lana committed. “You have no legal standing,” Sister Jude tells Wendy. “I have a moral standing,” Wendy protests, seeing defeat already but determined to have her say. “Moral. That’s an interesting word,” Sister Jude tells her. The heartbreak of that decision, which Wendy immediately recognizes as an error, is the truest emotional beat in a new season with a fair number of them, mostly because it relies on real social conditions rather than lights in the sky or people made up as freaks to achieve a profound sense of fear and despair.
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As should be obvious, there are massive spoilers for Prometheus in this post.

I’ve been thinking about many aspects of Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s prequel to his Alien movies, but the one that’s stuck with me most is the clearest continuation of the Alien franchise’s themes: the movie’s exploration of bodily invasion and specifically women’s bodily autonomy. In New York Magazine, David Edelstein describes one of the movie‘s most harrowing and original sequences “a bit of grisly self-surgery that should inspire the pro-choice movement for millennia to come.” Livejournal user cavalorn, in a long and much-circulated analysis of the movie that’s the closest I’ve seen for a compelling argument for the coherence of some, but not all, of its ideas, writes: “I’m not even going to begin to explore the pro-choice versus forced birth implications of that scene. I don’t think they’re clear, and I’m not entirely comfortable doing so.” I’m still considering this element of the movie, and suspect I will be for some time to come. But for the moment, I feel like Prometheus is a movie that attempts to describe the quest for bodily autonomy as a sign of extreme toughness that ends up reaffirming the persistence of patriarchy and rape culture, even in the future, even as we travel beyond all we know.

There’s a lot of discussion to be had about the android David’s (Michael Fassbender) motivations for dosing Holloway, the colleague and lover of Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), the movie’s main character: does he know that it will result in her pregnancy? Is he experimenting for his own purposes or at the behest of Peter Weyland, the father he also wants dead? To a certain extent, his motivations and reasoning are irrelevant. The end result of David’s actions is that Shaw ends up with a metaphorical pregnancy against her plans and will, and when she expresses a wish to end the invasion of her body, David forcibly prevents her from doing so.

The scene of Shaw’s—abortion isn’t really the right word for it, because she isn’t pregnant, but rather infected, and the result of the surgery isn’t the termination of her pregnancy but a premature birth—seizing control of her body is undeniably, viscerally powerful, even as it’s sacrificed in small ways to the movie’s other needs. The surgery would have been urgent enough even without the medpod’s initial warning that it isn’t programmed to treat women, a nonsensical restriction on its programming that causes a slight delay in the midst of great urgency but really exists as another clue that Peter Weyland is still alive. Similarly, the revelation that Shaw has been unable to conceive a child with Holloway ends up functioning as foreshadowing, rather than as nuance. Her instant reaction to David’s diagnosis of her pregnancy is to want to terminate it. The movie isn’t interested in the possibility that, given her profound upset over her inability to have a child with Holloway, she might have some sort of connection to the thing growing rapidly inside her. Those emotions might have been uncomfortable given how that creature came to be inside her, but it would have been a fascinating, uncomfortable conversation for the movie to engage in.
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Normally I wouldn’t do this, but Cabin in the Woods relies so much on the element of surprise, that you should not read this post if you haven’t seen it and care about being spoiled on it.

As I wrote after seeing the movie at SXSW, Cabin in the Woods, I wrote that the movie is a fantastic extension of Joss Whedon’s long-running interests in the bureaucracy of evil and the beauty of the monstrous. The work that Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford are given to do as the control room operators of the Apocalypse, the torture pornographers who happen to be humanity’s saviors, is just a delightful, funny, sensitive use of both men. And the gorgeousness of Whedon and Goddard’s monsters is something to behold—I found myself unexpectedly moved by the man with the gears embedded in his skull and the ballerina dentata that Dana and Marty encounter in the elevator.

But I was disappointed by one element of the movie, which felt to me like a bit of a regression from Buffy the Vampire Slayer: the treatment of Jules, the blonde sexpot who is the first of the characters to get killed by the murderous hillbillies the friends unwittingly unleashed in the basement. Whedon told Vulture that he sees Jules’ character as an attempt to answer some of the same questions as Buffy was:

Cabin isn’t overtly a feminist work necessarily, but it is built on the same question that built Buffy the Vampire Slayer: If you have a blonde who is perfectly nice and funny, why are you intent on her coming to a bad end? What is the purpose of the final girl, as she’s called? All these people, all the characters behave a certain way, and there is a progression of what they have to do, to allow themselves to be written off as sex fiends or druggies or bullies or complete idiots in the face of true danger, and you just don’t get in the way of that. It’s about being stereotypes versus fleshed-out people. There was never a question — the nudity had to happen, because the movie is about objectification and identification and that’s what horror is about. Drew and I were not unhappy if the hot blonde took off her shirt — hey, we thought it was a good decision! — but mixing titillation and mutilation started to become a very weird confluence. It’s not the same kind of pleasure for us. Those are two separate things. But that’s the foundation of what we knew was part of the film, and we were the most timid filmmakers ever about it.

But Jules’ character is the one that’s least-played with, the least-subverted, and the one we see suffer the longest. We learn that Dana isn’t really a virgin—she’s just the best the people orchestrating the sacrifice have to work with. Curt, the giant jock, turns out to be a pre-med smarty. Stoner Marty’s protected from the malign influences of the people manipulating them because the pot he’s smoking ends up inoculating him to the pheromones they’re pumping into the cabin, and he’s the one who figures out how to get them into the complex. (Holden doesn’t get much of a fair shake either, and it’s too bad that both of the characters of color in the movie are somewhat quiet and detached). But we don’t get a clear debunking of whatever stereotypes we’re supposed to have about Jules. Clearly, she’s being influenced by the chemicals, the heightened moonlight. But we don’t know what her base behavior is like, whether she and Curt were already sleeping together (though I assumed so) before the trip, why her actions here are surprising—when we meet her, after all, she’s bugging Dana to be less of a prude.

I asked Whedon about this at South By Southwest, where he seemed kind of irritated by the question, telling me that “I don’t think Jules comes off as dumb…We did want to be making that movie at the same time that we were talking about that movie and making images that were sexual and sometimes exploitive.” (After that line drew a lot of applause, he noted “I don’t think I’ve ever been applauded for exploitation before.”) I agree with Whedon that those things aren’t incompatible. And a movie is always going to offer less time to develop its characters and debunk simple tropes than a television show us. But I was sorry there wasn’t a little more detail in there, something that would have heightened the sense that even if, in the balance, the world isn’t worth saving, there’s some real pain in the loss. If anything, Cabin in the Woods feels like it’s coming from Willow before Xander talks her down at the end of Buffy season six, rather than Buffy herself.

I ended up quite liking The River, ABC’s delightful piece of horror movie cheese about a reality show crew stuck on a boat in the Amazon searching for a vanished television star, which ended its first, and likely only, season last night. But I think that might be because I finally decided to read it as a show about a bunch of irritating white people (and one endearing gay, black cameraman, who informed his coworkers that his sexual orientation hadn’t come up on their trip because “I don’t go clubbing when I’m running away from ghosts.”) who got what was coming to them because they treated the Amazon as a mysterious place and ignored reasonable knowledge about the place that was available to them.

That’s really the core of the show: the main characters in The River treat the Amazon basin as a dark, mysterious place that can be made comprehensible by Western explorers who will approach it rationally. Rather than a place populated by, you know, actual people, it’s full of mysterious tribesmen, ghost ships, and cures for diseases that have a nasty tendency to zombiefy scientists if proper treatment protocols aren’t observed. Dr. Emmet Cole got himself in trouble in the first place when he strayed from his rational principles and started believing there was something mystical out there. That conviction lead him to take insane risks that endangered the life of his crew and his long-term friends, and also lead Cole into sin. His decision to abandon Jonas to a state in between life and death is reprehensible, the kind of thing that people who don’t happen to be pursuing wacky vision quests are relatively certain they’d never do.

But the truth is, for all the crew of the Magus are convinced that they can use logic and deduction to find Emmet, they’re awfully incurious people, by both the standards of Western rationality and beyond it. Maybe it wouldn’t serve the interests of the show to have them interrogate what in God’s name Emmet is doing in a giant chrysalis. But that seems like it might be a fairly relevant question to try to answer before he and Lincoln get to work on their mess of a relationship or he and Tess get all lovey-dovey again (if it were me, no matter how much I loved my missing husband, I would want to know what’s up there before I let him get near my lady bits).

And it’s deeply frustrating that, despite the fact that Jahel Valenzuela tends to be right about almost all the misfortunes that befall the Magus, and to have the power to summon resurrecting goddesses to boot, no one ever seems to have sat her down and done a comprehensive download on her knowledge of religion, folklore, biology, etc. The show’s getting somewhere in its critique of Western know-it-allism with scenes of scientists dissecting the native people of the region and keeping them in specimen tanks. But it’s not quite getting a central point. Emmet Cole might have had a better sense of a country that’s only Undiscovered to him and his ilk, and the scientists in that creepy lab might have increased the world’s store of knowledge more if they relied a little less on their own sense of their abilities, and tried a bit harder to talk to and learn from the people around them.

It’s difficult to talk about The Cabin in the Woods, Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard’s much-delayed, highly mysterious horror without spoiling it altogether. And while I’m not the world’s most spoiler-averse person, I am going to hold off on discussing the film in any specific detail, though this post will affirm that certain elements are present in the movie, until it’s in theaters, and I’ll revisit it once folks have had a chance to see it. This post is spoiler-safe if you are only concerned about specific plot points. But if you don’t want to know anything about the movie whatsoever, hold off.

In very general terms, it turns out I was right that the movie is about the bureaucracy of evil. And in a lesser way, it’s a sustained exploration of another major theme in Whedon’s work: the beauty in evil.

Over the course of Whedon’s career, he’s shifted from writing purely about the people who escape from bureaucracies and started to spend more time on the people who participate in running organizations, some of whom commit significant evil in the course of their work. We see the Watchers largely from Buffy’s perspective, and the ones who are allowed to have stand-alone stories, and whose perspectives and growth we have access to, are apostates. Wesley Wyndam-Pryce is fired for incomepetence, and Rupert Giles defies the council before he is dismissed. Maggie Walsh is murdered as a direct result of her manipulation of the Initiative beyond its original parameters. Riley’s struggles against the Initiative, first as a reformer and then a flawed revolutionary, are as important an aspect of his character arc as his relationship with Buffy. He finds peace when he finds a role that suits him within the government, and that new organization becomes not just the source of his job, and his family. In Firefly and Serenity, we see the same pattern again: we see the agents of the Alliance through River Tam’s memories, or through their encounters with the crew of the ship. And the Operative is redeemed when he accepts the truth about the creation of the Reavers and calls off the agents of the Alliance.

Dollhouse, however, spends substantially more time with the agents of both the U.S. government and the Rossum Corporation, tracing the damage that they do to other people and that participation in the system does to them as well. Corporations, it seems, are self-replicating machines. And fully half of The Cabin in the Woods is spent with and told from the perspective of the movie’s bureaucrats. They get to be just as quippy as the average teenage Whedon hero or heroine, and they get to be tragic in a way that’s compromised and adult.

That’s not the only way the movie feels like it’s different in degree, if not in kind, from Whedon’s past work. It’s also got some of the best monster design in his ouvre. Whedon’s always been very good at creating novel monsters—the Mayor’s demonic form, the gods breaking through from Glory’s ritual. But often, he creates unease by implanting monstrous behavior and worldviews in extremely beautiful human forms. We’re disturbed by seeing David Boreanaz, James Marsters, or Clare Kramer behave in ways that are horrifying particularly because we’re taught to equate physical beauty with goodness. The monsters in Cabin in the Woods can, at times, be much more foreign than that. The loveliness in some of that moster design is impressive, an inverse aesthetic subversion. I found some of the monsters genuinely moving. And for someone who suffers from unusually bad nightmares and has low tolerance for horror, that’s saying something.

The bridge is yours.

-This is a pretty plausible explanation for why CBS does so well.

-Louis C.K. starts a movement.

-Jonny Lee Miller is Sherlock Holmes because why not?

-Chernobyl as horror movie.

-And the streak continues:

I really wanted to like Red Lights, the Cillian Murphy and Sigourney Weaver-starring thriller about investigators who debunk paranormal hoaxes that premiered at Sundance this week. I like skepticism! I like Sigourney! But to my disappointment, Red Lights turns out to be a somewhat astute academic farce wrapped up in a deeply, profoundly silly paranormal quasi-horror flight.

Murphy plays Dr. Tom Buckley, an assistant professor who works with famed hoax debunker Dr. Margaret Matheson (Weaver). As their departmental budget crumbles and they lose ground to Dr. Shackleton (Toby Jones), a “parapsychologist” who believes in paranormal phenomena, Tom pushes Margaret both to take on a pair of student research assistants, sexy Sally (a woefully underused Elizabeth Olsen) and Ben, and to investigate a famous blind psychic, Simon Silver (Robert DeNiro). As the pair proceed, they’re plagued by creepy phone calls, birds flying into windows fast enough to kill themselves, and mysteriously bent spoons. Ultimately, Silver agrees to undergo trials run by the friendly Dr. Shackleton with Tom as an observer, and as the results are released, Tom confronts him at a show in a packed theater.

When the movie explores the horrors of academia, all is well. No self-respecting university would put this much muscle behind paranormal research, but no matter. Watching Margaret make a fool of Shackleton by beating his tests is tremendous fun, even if it doesn’t do any good. “There only way they could make it clearer they don’t want us is a marching band,” Tom grumbles as their position relative to Shackleton’s erodes further. Later, he forces Shackleton to at least let him observe Silver’s trials, shoving him up against a wall and screaming “I want to be on that committee, Shackleton! Don’t give me more excuses! Just do it!” Silly stuff, but it conveys some of the desperation of being shut out. I can imagine graduate students struggling to keep their funding will empathize. Ultimately, it’s Sally and Ben who make a critical discovery, rather than Tom, and their revelation turns out not to matter very much anyway. While I won’t reveal it, Tom ends up meeting a more dramatic fate that suggests whatever time and money he spent on his PhD may have been a waste. Academia has rarely looked worse.

Red Lights is also, briefly, a promising movie about doubt that brings some novel perspectives to common decisions. “If I thought there was something else, I’d turn off all that crap and let my son go,” Margaret says of her son, who has spent years in a coma in an interesting inversion of the rationalist’s approach to brain death. Other times, it’s less convincing: at one point, Tom compares acupuncture and homeopathy to belief in the paranormal despite the fact that the former is in use by military doctors. It’s a weird little slip that suggests the movie isn’t very serious about the line between hoax and scientific validation. And the movie’s twist ending ultimately undermines any commitment or rigor the movie has to the ideas it spends much of its time exploring.

It’s a perfect example of reaching for something more than human and coming away with junk. It’s too bad Rodrigo Cortés, who wrote and directed Red Lights, didn’t trust Tom and Margaret to be interesting enough on their own.