No matter how much I think the Spider-Man reboot is utterly unnecessary, I have to admit it looks like a lot of fun:

A couple of thoughts: I’m relieved that the movie is acknowledging that someone other than the scientific community, riders of random subway cars, and J. Jonah Jameson notice that a dude in a funny suit is messing with the city’s criminals. It makes sense that an escalation of tensions in the underworld that leads to massive property damage and physical fights would pop up on the NYPD’s radar and that they’d have an interest in what’s going down. Dennis Leary is great as a cantankerous, drunk, or otherwise difficult representative of city government (he is the best part of The Thomas Crown Affair remake), and he’s got the perfect mein to pull off a portrayal of a man who is personally and professionally deeply irritated by Spider-Man. If the Powers adaptation ends up not happening, at least we’ll have something.

Second, the Gwen Stacy storyline in the Spider-Man universe is awesome and heartbreaking. And if this iteration of the franchise wants to honestly grapple with superheroic hubris and the limitations of superpowers when the go up against the laws of physics and the odds, it would be wonderful if they followed that original template. Being a teenager—as well as being a depressed middle-aged billionaire—is a dark thing. And I don’t mean in a getting-infected-with-venom-and-going-to-jazz-clubs kind of way. It’d be nice to see a movie franchise that recognizes that not everyone makes it out of that period okay, and that having superpowers may increase the kinds of risks you can take, but it doesn’t mean you’re utterly protected.

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.

I like Charlie Jane’s post at io9 on how to avoid the too-many-supervillains problem, but I want to offer a slight variation on two of her proposals for how to solve it. She suggests:

It’s not the number of villains, it’s the number of stories. There’s a limit to how many subplots your average movie can contain, especially subplots which are about the villains of the movie. In the end, the antagonists of the movie have to tie into the main storyline, and there has to be one of those. So if there’s more than one villain, the villains still have to work together as part of the central story, thematically and from a plot standpoint. The Dark Knight does this brilliantly, by making the Joker’s effect on Harvey Dent a central part of the film’s arc…

Each villain is a different lesson. This is another way to go — it’s a bit of a cliche to say your enemies are your best teachers, but it’s still definitely true. And if you’re going to go having more than one villain in a film, then each villain ought to be teaching a different lesson — or at least, a different version of the main lesson. Maybe there are different weaknesses that each villain plays on — or different wrong-headed ideas on the hero’s part that each villain represents.

I’d suggest more specifically that it’s a matter of figuring out what the core issue in a movie is. Spider-Man 3 is exploring two totally divergent issues: the question of whether power’s made Peter Parker a jerk, and the issue of whether his narrative of his origin story is true. These are both full-sized stories that could interlock, but aren’t made to, and as a result, the movie feels squashed. Thor, by contrast, is a movie about one issue, the responsible use of power, but the multiple obstacles Thor faces are all ways to explore that issue. The Dark Knight is about the failure of institutions and norms, all of which are tested in different ways by the Joker, the police department in Gotham, and ultimately even Batman himself. The X-Men movies, which use huge teams to explore the notion of citizenship, have always understood this incredibly well: every character on both sides represents a facet of that ancient argument between assimilation and separatism. The point being: pick your issue first, and the best villain or villains to explore it second. And as a side note, I’d really like to see some superhero movies from the villain’s perspective.

Quick programming note: our Deadwood discussions are going to switch to Tuesdays and Thursdays so we don’t get recap-overloaded on Mondays and Fridays. Otherwise, the bridge is, as always for these posts, yours.

-The charter school lottery process is going to be part of the new Spider-Man comics.

-Is Gloria Steinem just a professional hater now? (Glad she can at least find it in herself to like Lady Gaga.)

-So glad Aziz Ansari rescued himself from business school with comedy.

-It’s not very nice of the Avengers to destroy Cleveland. Cleveland has enough problems!

-This is why ladies can’t have nice things.

Joe Quesada, the Marvel Comics Chief Creative Officer, says that the creation of Miles Morales, the new mixed-race Ultimate Universe Spider-Man, was informed by debates over education reform:

Miles was starting to take shape. We discussed his family and upbringing at length and slowly you could see how he was becoming his own person and not just a copy of Peter. Now while I don’t want to give too much away, over the years I’ve been really intrigued by the revolutionary work being done by educator Geoffrey Canada, and as we looked deeper into Miles’ character, I suggested to Brian that he watch the documentary, “Waiting For Superman” (ironic, I know!). Bri loved it, and the wheels started turning. Pretty soon he was building a world and cast that would support Miles in some fantastically intriguing ways that were relatable but also different from Peter Parker’s world. I have a sneaky suspicion that Brian is going to make people fall in love with Miles very quickly.

Obviously I can’t pass judgment on how those themes play out until I see it happen, though it would be pretty weird to see a comic book where Morales fights a teachers’ union that’s secretly entirely made up of Skrulls or something. But no matter how it turns out, I’m glad to see this kind of thinking be part of the comic book process. Assuming that getting bitten by radioactive spiders doesn’t induce amnesia, there are factors in Spider-Man’s past other than Uncle Ben’s dying words that influenced him. And while many superhero stories propel newly-made supermen and women into larger worlds, whether it’s from a gated mansion into the slums of Gotham, or from Westchester County to the Blue Area of the Moon, there’s something to be said for superhero stories that take on problems closer to home. It may take a single bug bite from a very special arachnid to make a hero, but it takes a village to raise all the kids who are only lucky enough to get nipped by mosquitoes.

The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation just named ABC Family the network that does the best job at portraying gay characters — and as portraying them as something other than simply white urbanized men. Apparently, 55 percent of the network’s original programming hours have images of LGBT people, which seems like an impressively high ratio considering the actual number of gay people in the population, though it would be interesting to see also what percentage of their characters are gay, and how many of those programming hours feature gay characters instead of having them in the mix or in the background.

But that’s sort of splitting hairs — ABC Family’s managed to work gay characters into shows as racy as Pretty Little Liars and as conservative as The Secret Life of the American Teenager, and that commitment is an important kind of accomplishment. I write a lot here about the things that adding character diversity to pop culture can bring to stories, but it’s an important second-level realization to understand that there are a lot of kinds of people within a minority grouping like “black” or “gay” or “women.” Pop culture may think to look for gay men, for example, in hair salons, but they also do things like run the Republican National Committee, just as lesbians may attend WNBA games but they also have their own entertainment empires. The presence of gay people, for example, in places culture and stereotype have suggested we shouldn’t expect them says something about the flexibilities and limitations of those organizations and settings as well as about the characters who inhabit them.

The reason someone like Glenn Beck gets verklempt about the possibility of a mixed-race, or as he put it “half-gay,” Spider-Man is not just that folks get weirdly grabby about continuity and crabby about characters who they don’t feel represent their struggles (because, of course, it’s the color of Spider-Man’s skin that makes him unlike white readers, not the ability to eject webs from his body). It’s because fitting black or gay or female heroes smoothly into superhero storylines suggests that the superhero community as a whole are comfortable with people Glenn Beck isn’t comfortable with, that it might not be the place he imagines it to be.

-Adam Serwer on Harry Potter‘s goblins and Jewish stereotypes.

-Karen O is going to write an opera.

-We may be getting crazy amounts of Game of Thrones and America Gods adaptations, but Hollywood apparently draws the line at a multi-platform Dark Tower project.

-I’m always down for Big Idea Sci-Fi.

-The new Spider-Man: same as the old Spider-Man

Last week, Paulie asked me in comments on my post about Miss Representation, “Say I’m a stereotypical guy looking to watch/read something new. What stuff written by or starring women am I likely to enjoy?” Here, in no particular order, are 18 things that I think would appeal to men. I’ve omitted classics because I assume you know. All of these, for me, pass Ta-Nehisi’s test in that these are not things you should watch or read out of obligation, but because they’re very good. Got more suggestions? Toss ‘em in comments.

1. Prime Suspect: Helen Mirren is so universally understood to be an amazing actresses, a salty dame, and a foxy lady, that it’s difficult to think about a time when she wasn’t a phenomenon in the U.S. as well as in the U.K. But if you want to understand Mirren’s general awesomeness, it’s worth checking out her seven-season run as DCI Jane Tennison, during which Mirren puts away serial killers, works with immigrant communities, challenges institutional sexism, has affairs and an abortion, and acknowledges her drinking problem. In other words, she’s an actual person rather than a saint, a living illustration of the costs of breaking gender barriers in the working world. And she’s funny, too.

2. Anything Barbara Stanwyck: The woman was tougher than most of the guys she was on-screen with, even in a dress so tight she couldn’t run in it, even in heels that she broke strategically as a way to get back to a mark’s stateroom on a cruise ship. “I love him because he’s a kind of a guy that gets drunk on a glass of buttermilk,” she declared in Ball of Fire. “I need him like the axe needs the turkey,” she glowered about Henry Fonda in The Lady Eve. Stanwyck is the apotheosis of the idea women can be equal — even superior — to men with an entirely different toolkit. Read this profile and critical reassessment of her by David Denby. Then rent The Lady Eve and prepare to die laughing during the mirror scene.

3. Emma Thompson and Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility: Jane Austen is, indeed awesome, but Emma Thompson is the only woman who possibly could have improved upon her, turning Sense and Sensibility into a pitch-perfect examination of why women get emotionally attached too quickly, or don’t explain why they’re thinking — and how social pressure, particularly when it comes to class and money, leads men into bad decisions. The movie is sharp, very funny, and quite moving. Yeah, it’s Austen and it’s understated, but don’t let that fool you into thinking it’s boring.
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