If you’re running late on your Valentine’s Day planning, never fear! ThinkProgress is here to help! Here are five great movies about progressivism and romance, so no matter if you’re looking for someone new, just started seeing someone, or celebrating a long-term love, you’re covered—even if you don’t have time to get your hands on a disc on the way home.

If you like progressive history: Catch The Loving Story on HBO at 9PM EST tonight. The movie’s both a good recapitulation of the court case that bears the family’s name, and that made interracial relationships in America legal, a Valentine’s Day-worthy story if there ever was one. But it’s also a terrific portrait of the Lovings themselves, bolstered by archival footage of them and their lawyers. Sometimes, we need a reminder that without fiercely dedicated individuals facing up to illogic and inequality, history doesn’t move forward.

If you’re headed out to work on a campaign this cycle: Watch Definitely, Maybe, the rare multi-purpose romantic comedy that works both if you’re trying to keep a long-distance relationship going on the trail, or hoping to meet the person you’re destined to be with! Also if you have an adorable child who’s kind of like Abigail Breslin! But seriously, this is a deeply charming movie that’s rooted in the substance of campaign work. And it offers a nice rebuke to the romantic comedy ideal that there’s only one person that you’re meant to be with if only fate will cooperate—instead, Definitely, Maybe argues that you’ve got to do work to make it work.

If you’ve just started dating someone: Okay, so the movie may be weirdly romantic and optimistic about the role of lobbying in the policy-making process. But The American President is a pretty great movie about the early stages of seeing someone, whether it’s dinner invitations or picking out the right flowers to send your sweetie. Plus, you want to make a big gesture to a policy nerd? This is your template.

You need a reminder that political integrity is sexy: Dick is wildly underrated as a political movie. But it’s also a worthwhile reminder that a) even if you think the President is dreamy, you should weigh in his corruption and meanness to his dog when deciding that you have a crush on him, b) you should never commit your confessions of love to the tape recorder in Rose Mary Woods’ desk.

You’re looking for affirmation that love conquers all—even small towns: Issue movies are fantastic. But sometimes—and Valentine’s Day is such a occasion—there’s nothing wrong with wanting a little uplift. In that case, turn to Big Eden, which is all about what happens when you return to your hometown, work out your issues with your old crush, and find new love in a place you least expected it—and the romances just happen to be gay and interracial.

The bridge is yours.

-Erik Kain talks to The Civil Wars about music and piracy.

-Hollywood takes on the recession phenomenon of adult kids moving back in with their parents.

-Cleverly vandalized Mad Men ads.

-Movie ticket prices hit a high in 2011.

-Morgan Freeman will be the latest celebrity to survive the apocalypse.

This is a standard, but silly, argument from Big Hollywood about how the entertainment industry hates the troops:

But patriotism doesn’t sell, right? If it did, Hollywood would be inundating movie theaters with pro-troop films and other tales of American soldiers in heroic action.
“Red Tails” also slices into another depressing Hollywood meme…An even better patriotism test comes next month when “Act of Valor,” a film which boldly toasts American soldiers as heroes, hits theaters. A “Valor” take down of the film competition may open the floodgates for more pro-troop features, assuming the appropriate bean counters are taking notes. Or, will Hollywood executives ignore the numbers and retreat to projects depicting U.S. soldiers in unflattering light? Is there a better chance we’ll see a new installment of “In the Valley of Elah” or “Redacted,” films showing the darker side of the modern soldier, than a “Red Tails” sequel?

I don’t want to spend time explaining why patriotism and unqualified support for the members and actions of the armed forces no matter what they do aren’t the same thing, because I think it’s obvious to everyone here and everyone reasonable why that’s the case. But I think there’s something fundamentally silly about the idea that Hollywood is unaware of the fact that patriotism sells.

In the last 10 years, the following movies with patriotic themes were among the top-10 grossing movies of the year. Last year, one of the top-selling superheroes of the year was Captain America, up there with Pixar’s most middle-American offering, Cars 2. In 2010, Iron Man 2 kept stumbling drunkenly towards public service. 2009 was ruled by Michael Bay’s military Valentine, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, along with the paen to charity and football as mainstreaming experiences, The Blind Side. In 2008, Tony Stark discovered service of country instead of himself in Iron Man. In 2007, Spider-Man 3, the latest installment about the webslinger who became a representative of post-9/11 New York, topped the box office list; the uber-pro-military franchise Transformers made its bow; Jason Bourne kept the idea of an intelligence community with integrity alive in The Bourne Ultimatum; and Will Smith saved human society in I Am Legend. The previous year, Clark Kent resurfaced to keep an eye on Metropolis in Superman Returns, and Hollywood affirmed a kinder, gentler American consumerism in Talladega Nights. 2005 had less obvious themes, though America obviously beats the Martians in War of the Worlds. 2004 reinforced Spider-Man’s ties to New York in that incredible subway scene. 2002 had Spider-Man topping the charts again, a celebration of the immigrant experience in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and more Americans v. the Aliens in Men in Black 2. 2001 was the last year a World War II movie cleaned up at the box office, but no one could accuse Pearl Harbor of being anything less than a big, old-fashioned patriotic weepie.

Even by the standards of military-worshipping conservatism, Hollywood is deeply committed to making movies that both reflect and make bank off that particular strand of patriotism. And if you’re thoughtful enough to have a broader understanding of love and country, there’s even more out there for you.

Paul Graham, the founder of start-up seeder Y Combinator has decided that the fight over SOPA and PIPA proves that Hollywood is a dying industry, and has issued calls for competitors to kill it:

That’s one reason we want to fund startups that will compete with movies and TV, but not the main reason. The main reason we want to fund such startups is not to protect the world from more SOPAs, but because SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying. They must be dying if they’re resorting to such tactics. If movies and TV were growing rapidly, that growth would take up all their attention. When a striker is fouled in the penalty area, he doesn’t stop as long as he still has control of the ball; it’s only when he’s beaten that he turns to appeal to the ref. SOPA shows Hollywood is beaten. And yet the audiences to be captured from movies and TV are still huge. There is a lot of potential energy to be liberated there.

How do you kill the movie and TV industries? Or more precisely (since at this level, technological progress is probably predetermined) what is going to kill them? Mostly not what they like to believe is killing them, filesharing. What’s going to kill movies and TV is what’s already killing them: better ways to entertain people. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now?

That’s a big task, and one that comes with formidable obstacles. First, there’s the cost. Hulu’s spending about $500 million on content in 2012. That’s the total cost of making Avatar, including investments in cameras and a $150 million marketing budget. There are other companies that are spending more money, Netflix among them, but that money is going to buy up access to back catalogues as well as to original programming. But the point’s clear: it will take time for rivals to rise up who can spend as much money creating and marketing products as Hollywood does. And while there’s certainly proof that you can make fascinating, visually engaging, and financially successful movies for less than Hollywood typically does (District 9, anybody?) you’re not going to put Hollywood out of business when you’re at a huge disadvantage in terms of making product and getting consumers interested in it.

Second, and relatedly, knowing how to distribute content isn’t the same thing as knowing how to produce it, or to spot what’s good about a project, or to know how to make it work. That means that organizations like Yahoo, Netflix, and Hulu, all tech companies that are producing original content, are going to have a learning curve in producing good material. Particularly if the reason to try to kill Hollywood stems more out of a distate for SOPA than for formulaic storytelling or the lock of straight white men on the industry in a way that limits storytelling. And they’re going to have to figure out how to get customers to consume it regularly without the predictability of a movie release calendar or a network. These challenges aren’t impossible to overcome, but they are a hurdle.

Third, I don’t know that there’s good evidence that there will be a direct tradeoff between movie spending and other forms of entertaining. Video game sales are outstripping movie tickets, but it’s not like movie ticket sales have declined in relation to the rise of video games: in fact, both industries have experienced a similar downturn in the recession. And certainly, video game creators have an interest in Hollywood surviving as a way to spin off games into movies that help extend and make more durable existing franchises. There may be new forms of entertainment in 50 years, but I’m not sure it’s going to entirely replace movies or television, both of which have proven to be durable art forms even as our ways of consuming them change, posing both distribution and storytelling challenges. I don’t doubt that we’ll get new and exciting forms of entertainment. But I don’t think we’ll have to kill Hollywood to get them.

No Robots, a movie by San Jose State University students YungHan Chang and Kimberly Knoll is lovely, sad, and ultimately redeeming. It’s also a great challenge to the way we normally use robots as metaphors:

No Robots from YungHan Chang on Vimeo.

Often, when we see robots in popular culture, they’re actually more powerful than we are. If the Cylons were a metaphor for, say, Irish immigrants to the United States, they’d be telling a story about workers rising up from the slums and engulfing us all in whiskey and potatoes. These metaphors tend to legitimate the fears of privileged class rather than debunking them. But a movie like No Robots has a different power differential. The shopkeeper is angry at a robot who is physically smaller than he is, who is annoying rather than intimidating. He commits an act of terrible violence against that much more vulnerable actor. And then he discovers that things he’s conditioned to want to protect and find adorable—kittens—are emotionally dependent on the robot, who has been stealing milk to feed them. It’s a narrative that questions the shopkeeper’s prejudices and assumptions, rather than suggesting he’s right to be angry and afraid of a new element in his environment.

(HT: io9)

Derek Thompson has an intriguing post up about why ticket prices aren’t variable. It’s an interesting question, but I think he’s ignoring the full extent of what it means that movie theater ticket prices are set by theaters rather than by studios and distributors.

It’s useful to look at how book and music pricing’s shaken out in recent years. It used to be that publishers set a price for books that retailers would pay, and the retailers would then determine what price they wanted to charge consumers based on that cost. In the e-publishing era, they’ve moved to something called the “agency model,” where publishers set prices for their titles and retailers like Amazon get 30 percent of that price. It’s a system where retailers have less power than they had previously, and even under both models, the publishers had significant control over basic pricing.

That system means that the publisher’s and retailers’ incentives are fairly closely tied together. Which isn’t entirely the case for the studios and the theater owners, the former of whom want to monetize a mix of movies across multiple platforms, the latter of whom want to get a steady number of people in proximity to candy counters and popcorn machines. You see a lot of friction between the parties, as with the scrapped plan to release Tower Heist both in theaters and via premium-priced Video on Demand, or with 3D pricing, which some filmmakers have said is too expensive and drive moviegoers away from theaters. The New York Times had a good piece this summer about the incentives that have driven studios and theaters apart on pricing:

Even some of the best-compensated players are beginning to wonder whether exhibitors and studios are pushing their luck with consumers….Historically, the big theater chains like Regal, AMC Entertainment, Cinemark Theatres and Carmike or their predecessors have been reluctant to raise ticket prices because their profit margins were higher on the sale of popcorn and other concessions than from tickets. Thus, they had an interest in raising the number of attendees, rather than maximizing film revenue that would be shared with studios. (The studios and exhibitors typically split the proceeds from each ticket sale, although the exhibitors alone set the price to consumers.)…More recently, though, theater chains turned to price increases, and especially to premium prices for 3-D and big-screen formats like Imax, for added cash that sometimes has been used to pay large dividends to shareholders or to pay down debt.

Cinemark Holdings, though generally more restrained than some of its peers when it comes to pricing, raised its quarterly dividend 17 percent, to 21 cents a share from 18 cents, an amount that nearly equaled its earnings in the first quarter. Meanwhile, Carmike, which operates many small-town theaters with relatively low ticket prices, has paid down a substantial $100 million in debt in just over three years.

Negotiating how variable ticket pricing would work would require fiendishly difficult movie-by-movie negotiations. Discounting a small independent movie might be in the interests of an individual filmmaker willing to accept small profits to get a movie in front of audiences, but it could also create the perception within a studio that one film was being used to undercut the performance of others. If the theaters started slashing prices on individual movies, one studio might feel it’s being targeted compared to other studios who are getting the revenue from regular ticket pricing. There’s no question that variable pricing would be in the interests of consumers. But the interests are complex and murky enough that it’s not clear that it would be in the interests of the studios or the theater owners — or of streaming providers. It’s worth remembering that the prices for movies you watch through Netflix or Amazon don’t vary either.

I’m getting increasingly frustrated and confused by what seem like the illogic of movie-making economics (television seems much more clear to me, though I’m not sure why), and so I’m beseeching y’all:

1) What are the best things I should read about the economics of Hollywood generally? About cost controls, auditing, etc. on film projects? Is it just Arthur De Vany’s Hollywood Economics, or should I be looking at other things?

2) What are the best things I should read about the economics of special effects, and the impact of globalization on special effects costs, wages, working conditions?

If enough good suggestions come in and folks are interested, I’d be open to doing a bit of a reading group. In the mean time, though, send me everything: books, magazine articles, scholarly journals, whatever.

There are many ways to cleverly and powerfully expose the limitations and contradictions of ideas and movements you vehemently disagree with in popular culture. It looks like Butter is going to be about as subtle, but much less funny and damning, than, say, Starship Troopers. And with less Neil Patrick Harris:

I’m all for making fun of ridiculous beliefs, but I tend to believe that, when possible, you should try to find a way to do so that doesn’t result in you looking like a tremendous, elitist jerk. Reinforcement of your own moral superiority and self-satisfaction is not a particularly admirable motivation. It’s a lot dumber and more dangerous to believe that, say, Social Security is unconstitutional than to care about the outcome of a dopey contest that’s a long-time local tradition.

Hidden in John Ridley’s castigation of Hollywood for resisting rational evidence (and box office numbers) in refusing to cast more black leads is this interesting tidbit:

In the concisely titled study “The Role of Actors’ Race in White Audiences’ Selective Exposure to Movies,” Indiana University professor Andrew Weaver writes, “Movie producers are often reluctant to cast more than a few minority actors in otherwise race-neutral movies for fear that the white audience will largely avoid such films.” Weaver found that white audiences tended to be racially selective with regard to romantic movies, but not necessarily when it came to other genres. So, sorry, Hollywood. You can’t blame it on the ticket buyers. And as the bankability of comic book franchises begins to cool — did we really need four hero-in-tights movies this summer alone? — you have to wonder if studios will ever get hip to the possibilities of going after multi-cultural audiences.

I’d be extremely curious to see why racial preferences continue to exist in romantic stories. Is it that we’re still harboring anxieties about interracial relationships? That we think people of other races much have vastly different courting processes and preferences to our own such that we couldn’t possibly see ourselves in other people’s journeys towards happily ever after (the wild success of My Big Fat Greek Wedding would seem to give the lie to this, at least to a certain extent)? Whatever the reason, it’s fascinating that white audiences are entirely comfortable watching black and Latino people, say, use a lot of concentrated firepower to fight aliens, but draw the line at watching them date.