A recent news story reported that 47% of Detroit resident adults are illiterate. Detroit is 80% Black. Heather McDonald at City Journal wrote in 2010 that Blacks committed 66% of all violent crimes in the first half of 2009 in NYC according the NYPD, though Blacks are only 23% of NYC's population. Blacks and Hispanics committed 98% of all shootings, and Blacks committed 70% of all robberies. Meanwhile Whites committed 5% of all violent crimes, at 35% of the population. Whites committed 1.8% of all shootings and less than 5% of all robberies in NYC, first half of 2009.

So Whites in NYC (and elsewhere) DESPITE being depicted in the media as nearly 100% of violent killers (Blacks are NEVER depicted this way outside of the Wire and Homicide: Life on the Street re-runs) commit almost no crimes. Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy, Sopranos, and every network TV show, depict Whites as violent criminals and they don't actually behave that way. In fact, the reverse, Whites are among the least violent and least criminal of all racial groups in the US. Blacks the most, is what the actual numbers show us.

So no, Lee is as usual WRONG. It is not the media's fault. Otherwise Whites would by hyper-violent and Blacks placid, highly educated middle class people as they are depicted in the Media. The media constantly hypes Blacks as valuing education and depicts them as computer geniuses, doctors, etc. Rather it is Black people themselves that don't value education, reject middle class values (as Obama's Church Trinity United does explicitly) and riot over $180 Nikes. No people take greater pride in their identity nor defend their concept of it more. Lee and every other Black celebrity could give Black people at large a good moral lecture every Sunday and it would have no effect.

Any real change will have to come organically, from the bottom up, enforced rigidly by Black women (by refusing to sleep with thugs instead of the situation now) and as a matter of survival. I reckon the chances of that slightly lower than Superheroes from Dimension X coming over to fight crime and poverty. Because Black people thoroughly LIKE being who and what they are, by and large.

David Mamet in "Secret Knowledge" wrote that old-style romances were of two people who very quickly fell in love, but had outside barriers they had to overcome to get married. Now, there are no barriers, and the rule is that two people who are strangers and/or don't like each other very much are forced by outside circumstances to try and make a go of it.

The "barrier" to romantic consummation being that at least one of them doesn't like the other very much. This movie seems more of the same. Heigl seems to have a huge ego wrapped up in being "the Hot Chick," hence her fits with being paired on-screen with Seth Rogen, and a "difficult" reputation. She does't seem to have enough charisma to carry off the role.

"Earn $50K and rekindle the romance?" Again that's outside forces, basically an admission that there are no more external barriers anymore, and that extreme autonomy makes romance absent implausible outside forces really just not possible to depict onscreen. How sad.

Let me add, Marvel is under the same economic pressure as every other studio. Margins are declining all the time, piracy abroad is not going to stop, further eroding the "magic bullet" of foreign sales that was supposed to supplant DVD sales.

So you'll see more and more emphasis on "cheap" -- cheap actors (guaranteed, there is ENORMOUS talent out there, angling for work), cheap writers, and cheap directors. Ten years ago Lucas would have had any studio happy to subsidize "Red Tails" just to get some project out of him, willing to take a bath of $100 million or so. Now Marvel has to hedge against losing more than $10, making the Mouse happy. Because THEY are under pressure.

John Nolte is right -- Hollywood does not know how to execute, the easy money of DVDs and foreign sales are drying up, they are like crocodiles in an ever drying up water-pool in Africa. Marvel has lacked the imagination to fold in their lower-ranked characters in interesting ways. The Punisher, Daredevil, Ghost Rider, Fantastic Four, are all good characters that could form the B-Team of Super-heroes, and can and should be on a network, particularly the Mouse's (but ABC is all female soap operas all the time). Even better, the fan-fave trick of cross-overs, like say the Punisher showing up in Daredevil, or Ghost Rider, is cheap and easy, but generates lots of press, favorable reaction, and showcases the Marvel "Wider Universe approach" that let it gain on DC in the 1960s.

Kenneth Branagh (director of Thor) is a "name" and well respected, he probably was not cheap. Captain America was a pretty good movie, all in all, and the WWII set designs were not cheap. If Thor was all Shakespeare in Space, with Gods, Captain America was a WWII movie made with CGI. Emotionally it hit the right points.

The Hulk movies were flat, mostly because the leads were unconvincing, and the CGI Hulk lacked emotion.

Iron Man 2 was phoned in, Rourke was right on that.

Whedon? OVER-RATED. He's not even the best comic book writer out there: No Brian Michael Bendis, or James Robinson, or Micah Ian Wright, or Keith Giffen, or Garth Ennis. Writers actually trying to push new emotional boundaries, with new/original plots and character development. Instead of chain-jerking cliches. Whedon has not CREATED any new characters fans love, like say Gerry Conway (the Punisher). Whedon's a hard-core Liberal and self-proclaimed feminist who has stated how much he hates the Punisher as a character.

How good is he going to be as a hard-core feminist and Liberal on the Avengers? Odds, are, not very good. He was a genius in casting: Adam Baldwin, Nathan Fillion, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Alyson Hannigan, Eliza Dusku, Anthony Stuart Head, are all VERY good actors. He's never had a bad actor working for him, near as I can figure. But casting is already done. As a writer, he sucks, mostly, depending on chain-jerking manipulation (killing fave characters) to keep attention and not bore the audience, instead of character development. He's frustrating because his gifts for dialog and character development are over-ridden by his obsession with "cool" and shiny object characters/plot-points. Twilight is pretty much the Buffy-Angel thing, so you can blame him for inspiring Stephanie Meyer (Buffy and Angel's dialog could be substituted for Meyer's almost word for word).

Whedon's Titan AE was not very good, Alien Resurrection? His TV shows depended mostly on great actors, not the erratic, inconsistent writing ("Spike you loved me so much you had to rape me!" -- that's Whedon's.) He's known to be "difficult" and could not turn in a script for Wonder Woman (duh, that's easy if you buy a clue).

But his Quote was undoubtedly CHEAP. And the economics are moving towards that.

The Help was not a particularly good movie. It was basically about some "secretly Hot!" White girl who got moral approval from status objects (Black people) for "taking on" the "snippy/snobby" White women who got a come-uppance -- being beaten by their maids.

Which of course is ridiculous. The real "help" for Middle Class White women is called Maytag. Or Frigidaire. Or Whirlpool. Writing a gossip book about small town debs no one knows or cares about did not bring about Civil Rights either. I don't think any (Straight) guy could watch this film, IMHO something so skewed to a single sex is a mark of a good film. Action movies if they are good should be enjoyable by women; romance/women's pictures if they are good should be enjoyable by men.

I don't see any film here that seems the least bit interesting save Moneyball. Sigh.

Dragon Tattoo is from the same Puritan/Dane-law/Scandinavian society that produced Scarlett Letter and Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, and the rest. Where women are treated the best, compared to other women in contemporaneous societies, and complain they don't have it all. In Puritan New England, men who beat their wives ended up in the stocks, and divorce for cause was the law. Women had far more rights than in the Virginia Colonies, where no one would have cared about adultery but Prynne and her daughter would have starved.

Same for Dragon Tattoo -- "Swedish Nazis" are the danger, not the real Muslim immigrants who hold their own women as chattel and Swedish women as sex objects to be used and done whatever they wish to do. The novel and movie are fantasies of "real bad White guys" defeated by some hot babe who kicks ass while weighing 115 lbs dripping wet, and the "good White guy." The ugly issue of importing men and women from Pakistan and not expecting the horrific daily assaults (and its suppression by a PC media) is ignored in favor of a fantasy.

Sometimes fantasy is healthy: CS Lewis, JRR Tolkein. Sometimes it is not: Stieg Larsson, Stephanie Meyer.

For those interested, below is the Jarrett poem. It is perhaps the most haunting to come out of WWII:

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

The Fifteenth lost over 2600 men in Big Week. A true horror.

George Lucas is well known for being one of the worst screen writers in Hollywood. Star Wars originally had Luke Skywalker punching Princess Leia in the face, Leia being a 12 year old girl, a whole host of confusing characters in her entourage. Extensive script doctoring from Lucas friends including Speilberg and others saved an otherwise unmakeable film. It was rumored that Tom Stoppard was brought in to fix the movies Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. We saw what a mess the last round of Star Wars movies were when no one would tell Lucas that was a monumentally stupid idea to: have Jar-Jar Binks as Stepin Fetchit in Space, basically; an anti-Semitic "Jew Slave Trader" and "Chinese" looking evil Alien capitalists or something.

No officer, the Tuskegee Airmen were all officers, in the USAAF would in WWII gather round and chant like Ray Lewis in a steroid rage before a football game. Nor did the USAAF ever "escort" bombers in formation, that was done ahead or behind because that was were the Luftwaffe attacked (attacking on the sides, and on top or bottom would get them shot down quickly by bombers in formation training hundreds of 50 cals on them).

The Airmen did a difficult job in a segregated society in a ... mediocre at best fashion. Now they were brave in simply climbing into a plane that could and did kill pilots in training. Much less combat. But there were 1,200 aces (5 or more kills) in the US during WWII. Not a single Tuskegee Airmen made Ace. Pappy Boyington by contrast shot down six planes with the AVG flying the obsolete and outclassed P-40 Tomahawk in China. He shot down 22 more taking the worst plane in the squadron with VMF-104 before being shot down and spending the rest of the war as a POW. Richard Livingston shot down 27 Luftwaffe planes (one less than Pappy) with the P-47. They also lost 25 bombers to enemy fighters, and another 25 to ground action (hardly their fault).

There is a story here. Guys without much aviation background facing a STEEP learning curve just to survive, and then later attack, the far more experienced Luftwaffe pilots, some who shot down over 300 planes. But that is not an "incredible subject." The Airmen basically had it soft, and easy, compared to most WHITE ground fighters and certainly the 15 Air Force (all White) which by comparison in 18 months of existence lost 20,000 or so bomber pilots and crew, and another 1,000 or so fighter pilots. The Tuskegee Airmen lost 66 KIA.

Or roughly 6.6% of the Fighter pilot total, and 0.28% of all losses for the 15th flying out of Italy. Randall Jarrett's "Death of a Ball Turret Gunner" suggests that the White guys who manned that particular position had it worst of all, in total the USAAF lost about 80,000 men in the European Theatre, another 25,000 or so over Japan. You freeze in unpressurized planes, you can't move (have to fly in formation), and can't dig in at 30,000 feet. Other than being Black, the Tuskegee Airmen by the record and numbers did nothing remarkable. They represented a tiny fraction of the men in the air for the Allies and killed in Europe.

Here's where I have problems with cheerleading for the Box Office. A quick trip to Box Office Mojo shows the Grudge with Sarah Michelle Gellar made $40 million opening weekend October 2004. Two years later, the sequel with Amber Tamblyn made $20 million opening weekend October 2006.

Now, basically a movie promoted all the hell and gone, with ads EVERYWHERE and school kids bussed in (according to Deadline Hollywood Daily) made LESS (inflation) ... as a remake of a remake of a Japanese Horror movie. Starring that girl from "Joan of Arcadia."

That does not really compute. I don't see this as a success, certainly not enough to basically write off foreign revenue. Given that audiences in Asia and Latin America and the ME are cool to Black actors and casts.

Nor is the film patriotic. It is the standard "White America guilty" rap, ignoring that the overwhelming amount of killed and wounded in WWII, as in all American wars, were White men. Typical PC Hollywood stuff, and a miserable box office failure. Box Office Mojo has a production budget of $58 million (likely higher than that) plus a ballpark guess of $40 million for marketing/promotion. Does anyone here figure that the movie will even cover its costs? Let alone make a profit? Really?

It was junk. Guys from 1963 suddenly know that they are on video surveillance cameras? Can move around the world of 2012 without attracting attention. In San Francisco?

The show is basically about "arresting" the evil White male menace from 1963 by a "diverse" cast. Its typical junk. Yes WWII vets were such a menace.