Latepass on this one on a day full of screeners. But I really, really love that the new trailer for Man of Steel presents Superman as a story that Lois Lane is tracking down:

I’m not super-crazy about her giving Clark Kent his nom de guerre. But I really appreciate her being the audience surrogate, the one who frames the mystery of who Clark Kent has tried to be and who—and what—he actually is. Superhero stories have been very, very weighted towards internal journeys and self-discovery in recent years. Man of Steel is right to acknowledge that the emergence of people with superpowers would be an even more seismic change for the rest of us who have to live in the world changed by their presence.

This morning’s post on the problems prestige television continues to have with sex inspired a rather epic conversation about the assumptions movies and television shows make about sex and sexuality, and the lies that a lot of them told us. A number of folks were kind enough to help me curate the conversation, including Jess Zimmerman, who Storyfied the section of the conversation on the very specific misconceptions about sex my followers took away from pop culture, Monica Reida, who captured, among other things, a long section of the conversation on young adult fiction, fan fiction, and respect for characters, and Heather McLendon, who produced a comprehensive roundup of the discussion I’ve embedded here*:
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At 9PM tonight, PBS will air Central Park Five, co-directed by Ken Burns and his daughter Sarah Burns. An adaptation of Sarah Burns’ book The Central Park Five: The Untold Story Behind One of New York City’s Most Infamous Crimes, Central Park Five is a searing examination of the 1989 sexual assault on Trisha Meili, a crime for which five young men, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kharey Wise and Yusef Salaam were convicted after coercive interrogations and wrongfully imprisoned. Though their convictions were vacated in 2002 after Matias Reyes confessed to the attack on Meili, a civil suit filed by a number of the men in 2003 is still pending, the district attorney in the case, Elizabeth Lederer, still works for the city of New York, and the city attempted to subpoena outtakes and additional footage from the Burns’ film, an effort that was just recently blocked by a judge.

I spoke at length with Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and Raymond Santana, one of the Central Park Five, in Pasadena in January. We discussed the role of the media in the case, the impact of courtroom sketches, and why Lederer, who the Burns’ believe had grave doubts about the prosecution, has never spoken about her involvement in the case. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I think the movie is tremendous, and it’s wonderful to have all of you here. I wanted to start out by asking, one of the things that really struck me about the documentary that I’m not sure is completely explicit, but that really came across to me, was that New York in this time was a place that was not really safe for women or for young men of color, and this was a case that ended up pitting these two populations that were being poorly served against each other. I wasn’t sure if that was something you wanted to pull out explicitly or that was more interesting to have as an implicit thread.

Ken Burns: We took a lot, we made a lot of narrative decisions that were at least superficially different than other movies that we’d made, so in fact we were trusting that a lot of things would have to remain implicit and not explicit. Explicit could be explicated by narrative. And in this case what we felt would just contain as much of the story as possible, filled with all of its excruciating paradoxes and contradictions. Not the least of it is that. I think that’s a really good point, that the most vulnerable are in some ways the symbolic antagonists in this invented drama.

Sarah Burns: I think Craig Steven Wilder does a good job of giving you at least some sense of that, of the vulnerability of minority teenaged boys especially, as the people who were most likely to be victims of the crime that people were seeing and were concerned about. And that was something that was forgotten. That’s sort of an important thing to understand, both that that was happening, and the way the media was covering not only this case but the time in general was such that we were seeing those people who were most likely to be victims as the source of our problems and not the victims of them.
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Per The Hollywood Reporter, the Motion Picture Association of America and the National Organization of Theater Owners have announced plans to try to make it easier for parents to get information about film ratings, a move that’s a response to the debate over the role of violent media in inciting or inspiring real-world violence:

Following through on a commitment made to Vice President Joseph Biden in the wake of the December shooting in Newtown, Conn., the Motion Pictures Association of America and the National Association of Theater Owners are making minor tweaks to the movie ratings system in order to better inform parents. The new “Check the Box” campaign, unveiled at CinemaCon, will highlight descriptions of why a movie received a certain rating. Also, there will be a tag attached to trailers explaining that the trailer is approved to play with the feature they came to see. The campaign also includes a new PSA, as well as a new poster that will be displayed at theaters across the country.

Given that the ratings system is intended to give parents information that will help them decide whether or not their children should be allowed to see given movies, any movie that makes it easier for them to get details on why the ratings board decided to assign a given letter rating is a useful one, even if highlighting the rationales won’t placate people who object to any given decision.

And I think it’s a smart move to try to align trailers with the content they’re paired with. It’s easy to start with the theater owners, of course, because trailers and movies are governed under the same ratings system, and so it’s not tremendously difficult to pair up trailers that have been cut to the same standards as the movies they air in front of. And though it would be much more difficult, I think this kind of alignment is something the movie industry should strive for with television as well. It might mean some financial hits for networks if they stop accepting violent advertising for movies to air during general interest programming like sporting events, and it might require some creativity on behalf of the people cutting trailers to make spots for R-rated content that’s appropriate to air before general audiences, or that doesn’t feature guns or gun violence. But these constraints don’t seem like they would completely paralyze either television or movie studios.

This post discusses plot points from the movie Upstream Color.

Shane Carruth movies, for all that he’s directed only two of them, Primer and this year’s Upstream Color, seem perfectly designed for the internet age: dense, mysterious, and designed to be collaboratively decoded. But I’ve been thinking about Upstream Color since I saw it SXSW last month and had a reaction to it that was so strong and personal that I had to sit with it for a while. And I’ve decided that the best way to watch this wildly romantic movie about two deeply damaged people who come to love each other is emotionally rather than rationally, to accept its profound strangenesses rather than to try to understand them.

Those strangenesses are considerable. The movie begins when Kris (Amy Seimetz), a young film producer, is abducted and drugged with what appears to be a worm, outside of a bar. The man who has captured her procedes to order her to empty her bank accounts, to sign over her house, to drink glasses of water, and to copy over pages from Walden, and then to abandon her to face the loss of her job, her financial security, and large parts of her memory alone—though not before an enormous worm has been extracted from her body and implanted in a rather cheerful-looking pig. The people who are intervening in Kris’ life are extraordinarily strange, and the things they’re doing to her are stranger. But their strangeness is precisely what makes them powerful figures—they’re specters of ineffable forces like loss, mental illness, and isolation who suggest a sinister plan to the universe rather than the randomness of fate.

Kris might have struggled to reclaim control of her life on her own, but Upstream Color is more than a simple narrative of vengeance and female empowerment. As she comes back to herself after having been attacked, Kris’ recovery doesn’t happen in isolation: she meets Jeff (Carruth), and she’s forced to reckon with someone who is more willing to trust her and to invest in her than she is in herself.

What makes the courtship and growth of the relationship between Kris and Jeff so powerful is the extent to which Carruth has used extraordinarily strange circumstances as a frame for emotional realities that more conventional movies prefer to obscure. When Jeff spots Kris on the train they both ride to work, she’s initially diffident, understanding herself—not without reason, given that she appears to have spontaneously destroyed her own life—as far too damaged to be a worthy romantic prospect. When he asks for her phone number, she tells him only to call her for professional reasons: she has started working at a small print shop after being fired from her job as a film editor after her inexplicable absence. “I’m not going to call for signage, though,” Jeff warns her. “I don’t need any signage.” That he might want her for herself is almost impossible for Kris to comprehend, and she avoids him. But Jeff pursues her anyway in a display of curiosity and budding ardor that Carruth carefully calibrates to seem eager, but not overpowering. “I can’t do this every day,” Jeff finally tells Kris after she’s ducked a number of his calls, and revealing that he’s shuffling his schedule to talk to her. “It makes me late for work. You’re four trains behind me.”
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On Friday 42, the big-screen treatment of Jackie Robinson starring Chadwick Boseman as the player who integrated Major League Baseball and Branch Rickey as the man who gave him the contract to do it, hits theaters. Unfortunately, what could have been a nuanced and complex exploration of racism and the role of sports in progressive movements and American life at large is a cliched, hackneyed mess that exists more to lionize Branch Rickey than to explore the real journey to desegregating America’s game. ThinkProgress sports columnist Travis Waldron and I saw 42 together, and discuss the problems with the movie’s treatment of history—as well as with its acting and writing—here:

Hi Travis,

On Wednesday, you and I headed out to see 42, the Jackie Robinson biopic that might be better titled The Oracular Pronouncements Of The Sainted Branch Rickey. I think we both walked out of the theater thinking that it was a terrible movie: there’s no human moment the script can’t resist immediately quashing with cliched oratory, and with a few exceptions, it seems to have some real anxieties about portraying the uglier side of racism.

I want to talk about all of those things, but I thought we should start with the one thing the movie got right: the economics of bringing Jackie Robinson to the major leagues. “New York is full of Negro baseball fans,” Rickey (Harrison Ford, overacting so dramatically I’m amazed he isn’t sponsored by the ham council) tells his assistant Harold at the beginning of the movie. “Dollars aren’t black and white. They’re green.” When a gas station attendant refuses Robinson access to the toilet when his Negro League team is on the Deep South, Robinson blackmails him into desegregating it by suggesting the team can buy its gas elsewhere. “Jack, is this about politics?” a white reporter asks him at his first spring training. “It’s about getting paid,” Jackie (Chadwick Boseman, who might have had a star turn with a better script) tells him. “I’m in the baseball business,” Rickey tells Robinson at a later point. “With you and the other black players I hope to bring up next year, I can build a team that can win the World Series. And a World Series means money.” Dodgers manager Leo Durocher (a fantastic Christopher Meloni) lectures his players, some of whom oppose the idea of playing with Robinson, “I’ll play an elephant if it’ll help us win…We’re playing for money, here. Winning is the only thing that matters.” Durocher himself is suspended from baseball when the Catholic Youth Organization threatens to boycott the league over his affair with a married actress. Even the racist manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, Ben Chapman (a very strong Alan Tudyk) recognizes the economic imperatives, taunting Robinson at the plate “You’re here to get the nigger dollars for Rickey at the gate.”

That economic imperative story is interesting, and it’s important—and it’s a critical reminder that the decision to desegregate baseball wasn’t simply done out of the goodness of Branch Rickey’s heart. I actually wonder if that’s one of the reasons we haven’t seen an out player in professional sports, yet. Unlike with black players and black fans, who were visibly excluded from the game, and who represented a clear pool of both ticket dollars and playing talent that were shut out of sports, it’s not as if there are alternate gay leagues and alternate gay fan bases that are visible to mainstream sports and mainstream executives.

But it’s a story that pretty much gets smothered in sentiment. What did you think? I’m particularly curious what your reaction was to the way 42 presents how Robinson’s teammates came around to his presence on the club.

Cheers,
Alyssa
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Reading comedian and actor Russell Brand’s meditations on the late Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on my return to the States this week was a delightful experience in and of itself—reading Brand on almost any subject is a pleasure. But it also reminded me just how much terrific popular culture Thatcher inspired, and the extent to which pop culture did real battle with her ideas.

One particular place that portraits of Thatcher in pop culture congregated was in stories about teenagers and young adults, where she represented, as Brand suggested, a parental figure to be rebelled against, as well as a proponent of specific policies that characters found objectionable. In the anarchic sitcom The Young Ones, which began running in 1982, Rick, a bad poet who believes he writes for the people, threatens to bomb the UK if Thatcher “doesn’t do something to help the kids, by this afternoon,” and sees her as an enemy generally, despite the overall incoherence of his politics. In Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole novels, the titular main character lives with Margaret Thatcher as both a scourge and as a rallying point, writing her into plays and poems with lines like “When you’re dressing in your blue, do you see the waiting queue? / Do you weep, Mrs. Thatcher, do you weep?” Her elocution lessons are, for Adrian, a sign of phoniness, her hair an object of nostalgia after John Major’s ascendance. It’s an awfully personal engagement with a political figure, a reaction that’s in part the result of a small nation being close to its leaders, and in part a response to policies that did affect teenagers and university students directly.

It wasn’t just novelists who took inspiration, and who were catalyzed by Thatcher’s policies. In a great, long piece by Aaron Lake Smith, he discusses in particular both the way that the Miners’ Strike influenced the punk band Chambawamba, and how British youth radicalism from the Thatcher era seeped into its partying culture, making underground techno parties an opportunity to invite clashes with the police:

The British Miners’ Strike, called in response to Thatcher union busting, was a decisive event in Chumbawamba’s political evolution. The group supported political bombings against South Africa’s corrupt racist leaders. This forced them to reexamine their pacifist stance. Diet and lifestyle became less important than solidarity with organized labor. The band recorded a three-track Miner’s benefit single, distributed pamphlets and food to worker’s families, and even started a theatre troupe to perform for the miner’s children…This was the first crack in what would soon become a fissure between Chumbawamba and the punk scene they were part of. No longer spouting the expected pacifist line, they were decried as “sell-outs.” Chumbawamba worked to incorporate themselves into their community in Leeds rather than to be punks standing apart from it. They chose to venture into uncomfortable situations with people who were different from them. As Chumbwamba became closer and closer with the miners, they distanced themselves from “the punks,” whom they increasingly viewed as petty, hardline, ineffective, and humorless.

Then, there’s the terrific romantic comedy Brassed Off, about the members of a brass band associated with a coal mine, based on the Grimethorpe Colliery Band, after the mine where they worked was closed as a result of policies initiated by Thatcher’s administration, as the Grimethorpe Colliery was in 1993. The main characters are former coal miner Andy (Ewan McGregor in an early star turn) and Gloria (Tara Fitzgerald), who has returned to town to research whether the mine could be made more profitable, and begins playing in the band—and reconnecting with Andy. The two of them wrestle with real issues as they commence a romantic relationship as adults, even though they’re attracted to each other. They have different political views, and different perspectives on how important the mine is to the social fabric of the town, given that Gloria is open to the prospect of shuttering it. Their coming around to the same conclusions politically is crucial to their coming around to the same conclusions about the viability of their relationship.

But the movie is also deeply engaged with one of Margaret Thatcher’s most-quoted arguments, the idea that “There is no such thing as society. There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.” The members of the miners’ band do the best they can to help each other through illness and severe depression, and they manage to keep the band going, giving back to a society that has made them redundant. But even though they have tremendous will to help each other, they have few of the resources that Thatcher suggests will fill the gap on issues like housing and employment. It’s hard for men and women to weave a tapestry that’s an alternative to a government-provided social safety net if they don’t have enough thread to clothe themselves.

Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 is one of my favorite science fiction movies of the last five years, and his follow-up, Elysium, is probably the movie I’m most looking forward to this year, and I’m glad to see that the first trailer for it doesn’t contain any signs I should contain my enthusiasm:

One of the things that I think the best dystopian fiction gets at is the idea that technological advancements will not be distributed equitably or universally, and in fact, that technology may be used to provide an escape hatch for the most privileged people in society. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, the anti-aging treatment that’s developed by Mars’ first settlers goes to the wealthiest people, who are often associated with multi-national corporations, first, while the much larger and poorer segments of the population are denied it. In Alaya Dawn Johnson’s excellent young adult novel The Summer Prince, the main characters live in a society that’s physically stratified, the most powerful living on the highest levels of an enclosed dwelling, and the least on the lowest levels, which are most affected by both sewage and the results of agricultural production. This was something that actually struck me particularly strongly on my trip, which was my first experience with resort travel, a system that, from your pickup at the airport by a preassigned shuttle, to the huge gates you pass through on the way to your actual hotel, is designed to make sure you have as little contact with the actual country you’re visiting as possible.

Given that Blomkamp was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and that his family migrated to Vancouver to get away from South Africa’s extremely high crime rates, it makes sense that he’s particularly attuned both to physical separate by class and race, and the possibility of exit from a system that seems to have failed. It was that awareness that make District 9, in which a stalled alien spaceship united black and white South Africans, who joined together to ghettoize the lost extraterrestrials in a township system like the one that was once used to restrict the movement of black South Africans, such a smart and moving piece of science fiction. In that movie, someone went from the privileged side of the divide to the underprivileged one and discovered that he couldn’t go back again, that there are strict rules for who you have to be to live in a comparative paradise. It looks like Elysium is flipping that divide in having Matt Damon crash the gates of a heaven near to earth, surprising the residents of that gated community with his capacity to get inside. I can’t wait to see what happens when he gets there.

From the rosy box-office numbers for new movies like Oz the Great and Powerful and G.I. Joe: Retaliation to the solid opening for Jurassic Park 3D, it’s been a strong few weeks for 3D movies, which reliably continue to attract audience members and vex most critics. But last week, I saw a 3D movie that gave me new hope for the possibilities of the technology – and I only had to go 57 years into the past to do it.

On Wednesday night, I went to New York City’s Film Forum to attend a limited engagement of Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder –- which was Alfred Hitchcock’s only 3D movie, though relatively few filmgoers got the chance to see it that way in 1964. I had seen Dial M for Murder several times on home video without giving much thought to the 3D effects; unlike modern 3D movies, watching it in 2D doesn’t make you feel like you’re missing anything. But watching Dial M for Murder as Hitchcock intended gives scenes like the attempted murder of Grace Kelly’s character a startling new texture and impact:

Plenty of critics have attacked the modern crop of 3D movies for their perceived blandness and lack of variety, but it’s not the variety of 3D movies that I’m concerned about. Yes, the vast majority of 3D movies are summer-y blockbusters and animated movies, from the relatively high highs of movies like The Avengers and Wreck-It Ralph to the extraordinarily low lows of movies like The Last Airbender and Mars Needs Moms. But there’s actually more variety in modern 3D movies than Hollywood gets credit for: sci-fi/action (Dredd), sci-fi/horror (Prometheus), horror/comedy (Fright Night), Oscar bait (Hugo and Life of Pi), illuminating documentaries (Pina and Cave of Forgotten Dreams), not-so-illuminating documentaries (Glee: The 3D Concert Movie and Katy Perry: Part of Me), garish-looking adaptations of the great American novel (The Great Gatsby).

But given the dozens of movies that have been released in 3D since the technology’s comeback in 2005, it strikes me that not a single one has captured the effect that I admired so much about Dial M For Murder: claustrophobia. Most studios now rely on 3D to make their big movies feel even bigger; blockbuster characters like the Avengers or settings like Oz are supposed to pop off the screen in a way that adds an extra degree of spectacle (and an extra $5 to each ticket price).

But it’s just as possible for 3D to make a small movie feel even smaller. Hitchcock’s use of 3D in Dial M for Murder makes the apartment feel more cramped, as we see the action behind desks, lamps, and other assorted knickknacks, and the apartment in which the vast majority of the film takes place feels all the more claustrophobic for the jutting angles and closed-off corners that pop from the screen. It may be a single, relatively nondescript apartment, but thanks to Hitchcock’s deft use of 3D, it’s etched into my mind far more completely than the expensive, expansive blandness of something like Alice in Wonderland or John Carter.

So if any Hollywood studio is looking for a way to make 3D feel fresh again, I have a challenge: Make a 3D film that’s deliberately small in scope. As I look over all the movies released so far in 2013, I wouldn’t have picked a blockbuster like Oz the Great and Powerful or G.I. Joe: Retaliation for a 3D release; I would have gone for a small-scale, slow-burn thriller like Side Effects, which could have relied on the technology for an effect utterly unlike anything modern audiences have come to expect. Critics are quick to bag on 3D, but in the end, it’s just a tool – and a tool is only as effective as the way it’s wielded.

My colleagues here at ThinkProgress are writing about Roger Ebert, the great critic for the Chicago Sun-Times who died today at 70 after many years of surviving cancer, as a liberal, and his voice is undoubtedly a loss to liberalism. His vocal interventions on politics, particularly as he took to Twitter, a medium where he bloomed after losing the use of his voice, seem to have taken some of his readers by surprise, even angered them. But to me, it’s impossible to read Ebert’s writing as a critic and not be struck by his politics, and how his political and aesthetic understandings came together to inform his understanding of what made movies work, what made them brave, and what made them fail.

Ebert’s reviews were always deeply alive to human concerns, rather than exclusively aesthetic ones. Re-reading his review of The Godfather, it’s striking that Ebert praises Francis Ford Coppola’s structural decisions. But he takes time to note a moment when the movie turns away from violence: “Notice how the undertaker is told ‘some day, and that day may never come, I will ask a favor of you,’ and how when the day comes, the favor is not violence (as in a conventional movie),’ but Don Vito’s desire to spare his wife the sight of his son’s maimed body.” And he asks the reader “Now here is a trivia question: What is the name of Vito’s wife?” In the midst of one of the greatest movies ever made about men, it’s critical to him to ask what the treatment of women means for the male characters, and for the movie, which made strategic decisions to eliminate major sections of Mario Puzo’s novel told from the perspective of women.

He could be as attuned to the ideas in movies as he was in their entertainment value, as in his analysis of Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, in which he identified a flaw that shifts this movie, long considered a landmark in Hollywood’s treatment of race, away from a discussion of race at all. “What it boils down to, then,” he wrote,”is that the two fathers are overcome by implied attacks on their masculinity. The race question becomes secondary; what Tracy really has to decide is if he feels inadequate as a man. Kramer accomplishes this transition so subtly you hardly notice it. But it is the serious flaw in his plot, I think…Here is a film about interracial marriage that has the audience throwing rice. The women in the audience can usually be counted on to identify with the love story, I suppose. But what about those men? Will love conquer prejudice? I wonder if Kramer isn’t sneaking up on one of the underlying causes of racial prejudice when he implies that the fathers feel their masculinity threatened.”

He wasn’t a litmus-test reviewer, judging movies on single decisions or statements, but balanced different elements of a film in making up his judgements. This kind of thinking was clear in his reading of Gone With The Wind in Ebert’s Four-Star Reviews. Ebert was scathing about the movie’s uncritical use of Margaret Mitchell’s text, which describes the slave-holding South as “a l and of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields,” writing acidly “One does not have to ask if the slaves saw it the same way.” And he was not kind to the balance of concerns in the film. “The movie sidesteps the inconvenient fact that plantation gentility was purchased with the sweat of forced labor (there is more sympathy for Scarlett getting calluses on her pretty little hands than for all the great crimes of slavery).” But he read the film as a film, noting how some elements of it weighed against others, saying “to its major African American characters it does at least grant humanity and complexity. Hattie McDaniel, as Mammy, is the most sensible and clear-sighted person in the entire story.” In that same review he championed the need to depict even “values and assumptions fundamentally different from our own,” because “A politically correct GWTW would not be worth making, and might largely be a lie.” It’s a piece I wish every person who condemned Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty as an endorsement of torture had read before putting fingers to keyboard.
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