The bridge is yours.

-President Obama: not quite ready to conquer Hollywood.

-Really glad to see The Invisible War, one of my favorite movies at Sundance, get picked up.

-More Avatar: Legend of Korra footage.

-The Streep domination passes to a second generation.

-The origins of Keep Calm and Carry On:

Listen, I adore Meryl Streep. She is gorgeous and funny and absurdly accomplished. But I’m extremely tired of her getting hired to play every female character over the age of 50.

I think the breaking point for me was the news that Streep’s been cast to play to play Violet Weston, the poisonous matriarch of the family at the center of Tracy Letts’ play August: Osage County. It’s a terrific piece of theater, and very hard to watch: Violet is an addict, and she abuses her relatives terribly when they come together to bury her husband. What makes her powerful is her abandonment of dignity and her insistence that she’s superior anyway. Violet’s raving and out of her mind and because she’s telling enough truth, she’s able to play everyone around her. Streep does goofy or self-deprecating, occasionally, but I can’t think of a movie where she’s been genuinely unhinged, comfortable utterly abandoning the regalness that’s her signature.

So why cast her? All three actresses who played Violet on Broadway—Deanna Dunagan, Estelle Parsons, and Phylicia Rashād—are alive, healthy, and working. If you want an actress who has film and television credibility, Parsons won an Academy Award for her Best Supporting Actress turn in Bonnie and Clyde and did 59 episodes of Roseanne. Rashād is less famous, but she’s still familiar to audiences from The Cosby Show and Cosby, and she’s on Psych. You don’t have to go with Streep to go with an actress who is already prominent and has a proven ability to nail this particular role.

Handing Streep all of these roles without seriously considering other actresses in her age range puts Streep in the same position as Will Smith. Her prominence lets the industry simultaneously say that of course they take women of her age seriously, while also suggesting that no other actress would be able to do what Streep does, so they don’t have to cast or build movies around anyone else. They’re both ways for the industry to prove that they aren’t uncomfortable with diversity per se while avoiding making any substantive changes that would make movies demonstrably more diverse both in who they star and what kinds of stories they tell. I don’t begrudge Streep work in general. But she’s not actually the best actress for every single role for a woman over 50.

It’s hard to tell much about what Luc Besson’s Aung San Suu Kyi biopic is going to be like from this brief teaser trailer, but it certainly is visually attractive, and my understanding is that the script is based on fairly extensive reporting, so I’m optimistic:

I’m sorry, though, that it looks like this won’t be in theaters until March 2012. As much as I love Meryl Streep and I’m sure she’ll be wonderful as Margaret Thatcher, I’d really like to see a biopic about a political figure who isn’t British or American treated as if it’s a serious contender for major awards, particularly when it’s about a struggle that is still urgent and ongoing, rather than safely and quaintly in the past. Plus, Michelle Yeoh is a marvel and, as she proved with the $128 million box office for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 11 years ago, can be a real commodity stateside. She deserves to be loved here as more than a voice actress in kids’ movies where Jack Black plays a rotund panda or as a geisha.

If, in fact, a threatened filibuster materializes tonight as the Senate prepares to vote on the debt ceiling compromise, said filibuster will keep a lot of Washington up late. It will also be exceedingly boring. American lawmakers may be good at a number of things, among them raising money, asking leading questions in hearings, and appearing on cable television, but almost none of them are even close to entertaining for more than a few minutes at a time. So if we’re going to have to suffer monologues, here are six people I’d rather see yielded time than any of our representatives in Congress.

1. Ian McShane, now and forever. Whether he’s reconciling God, evolution, and breakfast on Kings:

Or explaining the importance of calm to conquering the difficulties of life on Deadwood (which, NSFW unless you put your headphones in):

I would listen to McShane talk forever, and unlike most members of Congress, consider it a privilege to pay him to do it.

2. If you want to go full-bore crazy to match the circumstances, Tom Wilkinson, in Michael Clayton, does it better just about anyone else.

3. Or, if you want people to forget they’re being kept from the business at hand, bring in Emma Thompson, who can do inspired impressions all night long:

4. If the goal is to depress both yourselves and the journalists monitoring you, bring in Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs:

Then, he can cheer everyone up and creep everyone out by telling Truman Capote stories.

5. Or to talk your colleagues into economic stimulus, Gary Oldman in Fifth Element mode is always a good bet:

6. Meryl Streep, on sweaters. On anything:

It’s a pretty reasonable assumption that every time Meryl Streep steps in front of a camera, she’s gunning hard for an Academy Award, or at least a nomination. And that’s doubly true for her turn as Margaret Thatcher:

Looking at this, it struck me that there’s an odd imbalance between Best Actor and Best Actress nominations when it comes to whether the actors in question are playing real people from the U.S. or the U.K. In the last 10 years, the real-life roles for which women have been nominated have relatively evenly split between Americans and Brits. On the American side, women have been nominated for playing consumer safety advocate Erin Brockovich, semi-obscure serial killer Aileen Wuronos, singer June Carter Cash, mother of murder victim Christine Collins, football mom Leigh Anne Tuohy, and cookbook revolutionary Julia Child. On the British side, they’ve been nominated for playing Iris Murdoch, Virigina Woolf, Laura Henderson, Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II.

Men, on the other hand, if they’re nominated for biopics, are heavily nominated for playing American men. They’ve gotten nods for playing Jackson Pollock, John Nash, Muhammad Ali, Bill the Butcher, Charlie Kaufman, Ray Charles, Howard Hughes, Truman Capote, Johnny Cash, Edward R. Murrow, Chris Gardner, Harvey Milk, and Richard Nixon. The exception to the other side of the pond is Johnny Depp who was nominated for playing J.M. Barrie.

What makes the gap interesting, I think, is that the British roles for women are for the most part, so much meatier than the American ones. June Carter Cash and Julia Child are obviously both very famous, but Erin Brockovich, Leigh Anne Tuohy, Aileen Wuronos, and Christine Collins are much more minor or transitory ones, who aren’t nearly as powerful or as long-lasting as English queens or Virginia Woolf. With a few exceptions, like Chris Gardner, the American biopics for men are about men who were very famous before their stories were told on film.

It’s not like there aren’t good stories about famous American women that aren’t worth telling. How awesome would a Harriet Tubman biopic be? What about Martha Washington or Abigail Adams? If you want Terrence Malick to make something dreamy, what about Emily Dickinson? Something sensationalistic, fun, and quietly feminist? Do Annie Oakley. I’m a nerdy Anglophile, and there are a lot of awesome British women. But it’s funny that we tell more stories about powerful British women than powerful American ones.

The 1979 political drama The Seduction of Joe Tynan has been in the back of my mind as a movie I ought to watch just about forever. It’s early Meryl Streep, it’s a nerdy political procedure movie, it’s Alan Alda. But because, for whatever reason, the movie isn’t treated as part of the first tier of political movies, it was never high on my priority list. But with Anthony Weiner’s sex scandal percolating away, it flitted back into my mind, I checked Netflix for it, and there it was. And it’s really an excellent movie, both about political machinations and about the psychology of people who go into politics and find themselves unable to resist things they really ought to stay away from.

From almost the opening scene of the movie, we know Joe Tynan’s marriage is headed for trouble. “You know how many people have tried, and I got it passed,” he brags in bed, telling his wife about a public works bill. “I got clout!” She’s visibly bored, not just in this instance, but permanently. “I may not like politics, but I love you,” she tells him shortly after. The problem is Tynan is politics, and so when Meryl Streep slides on screen as a sultry Southern political operative with the goods on a Supreme Court nominee with a segregationist past, Tynan is toast.

It’s a sign of Andrew Breitbart’s influence that I spent much of the movie assuming that the goods—video of the nominee opposing integration obtained by a black woman running for Congress in the Deep South, who is using it as leverage to win support from local Democrats—was fake, and that was what would take Tynan down. It turns out that subplot’s really only a vehicle for the affair, and for Tynan’s decision to sell out his mentor, who would prefer him to oppose the nomination quietly, and use the nomination hearings as a platform to turn himself into a national politician and a presidential contender.

And the movie is very, very good at capturing the dual vanity that both leads men into affairs, and leads them into thinking they can lead the nation. In an eerie prefiguring of Weiner’s Congressional gym snaps, we’ve got Tynan working out with his colleagues when his mentor wanders by and declares “You look too good, you’re going to lose votes.” The Supreme Court nomination fight is a convenient cover for Tynan’s affair with Streep’s Karen Traynor, but their work, their common interests, her ability to and interest in making him a great man are genuinely a turn-on for the couple. “You remind me of John F. Kennedy,” Tynan tells Traynor as he seduces her. “When you get there, clip a rose from the Rose Garden and send it to me, okay?” she tells him later, simultaneously stroking his ego and keeping the possibility of their liaison alive for the future.
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