Rep. Spencer Bachus faces insider-trading investigation.

Proposal for gay marriage referendum moves forward in New Jersey.

The ultimate 2012 SXSW trailers page.

Obama plans shift in birth control fight.

A star is born (and scorned).

Click here for pictures photographer Bob Willoughby took of Audrey Hepburn from 1953-66.

The video for Gloria Estefan's new song appeals to Cubans and fans of All My Children.

One of Madonna's many stalkers, this one convicted, escapes from mental hospital.

Seriously, what the fuck?

Why Martin Scorsese should win the Oscar.

Sorry, I'm angry today. Chuck Woolery sucks.

The top 10 worst cars sold in America.

A reminder that some Republicans have hearts:

Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to ed@slantmagazine.com and to converse in the comments section.

We're not exactly batting a thousand in this category, but we're pretty sure we got this year's winner pegged. Stupidly, we placed our bets the last two years on wrenching docs—one about the aftermath of the massive earthquake that rocked the central region of China, the other about a female soldier's post-traumatic stress disorder—only to see the voters indulge other fetishes. So, if topicality isn't exactly an asset for a film nominated in this category, we can safely rule out Gail Dolgin and Robin Fryday's warmhearted but mundane The Barber of Birmingham: Foot Soldier of the Civil Rights Movement, about a now-deceased activist who looks back on the early days of the movement in the days leading up to Barack Obama's victory in the 2008 election. Yes, the 2008 election, which, at least for AMPAS members with proven short-attention spans, probably now feels as old as the silent-film era.

By that logic we may also nix this year's Poster Girl, James Spione's Incident in Baghdad, which features at its center Ethan McCord, a solider involved in the tragic airstrike that was stunningly leaked to the world in grainy black-and-white video by WikiLeaks in April 2010. The most flippant and unfocused of the five nominated docs, Incident in Baghdad shocks you with images from the attack in New Baghdad that left over a dozen innocent people, including children, dead or horribly injured before focusing on McCord's rage against America's military might. Docs concerning horrifying things happening to children typically do well in this category, but they're not exactly the focus of this film, which practically screams for feature-length elaboration. One image may linger in the voters' minds: a graphic match between McCord carrying an injured child following the airstrike and the soldier horsing around with his daughter back in the States. The Academy has a history of rewarding films depicting problems "over there" happening to people "over here," but this contrived and horribly tacky cut may rightfully rub even the most easily manipulated the wrong way.

Two years ago AMPAS passed on China's Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province, and this year they'll likely give the cold shoulder to Kira Carstensen and Lucy Walker's The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom, about survivors of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami as they prepare for the beginning of the cherry blossom season. Not unlike Walker's Oscar-nonimated Waste Land in its contemplation of hope rising from chaos, this is the most poetic and distinctively made nominee in this category, two attributes that didn't exactly do much for Rabbit à la Berlin back in 2009.

God Is the Bigger Elvis's subject matter may seem frivolous when compared to that of its competitors, though it may benefit from telling the most "unknown" story, of how Hollywood actress Dolores Hart, whose screen debut was in the 1957 Elvis Presley movie Loving You, abandoned her successful career at the age of 23 to become a Benedictine nun. Idiosyncratic as Rebecca Cammisa's doc, like its subjects, may be, you have to imagine that a sizable portion of this category's voting bloc will see Hart's journey from stardom to nunhood not as an enlightenment but a fate worse than a day without Botox.

Which leaves the spoils to go to Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy and Daniel Junge's HBO-backed Saving Face, about a London-based Pakistani plastic surgeon, Muhammad Jawad, who performs reconstructive surgery in Pakistan on survivors of acid violence. "This is terrorism!" is how one woman describes the horrifyingly systematic abuse the country's men commit against their women. If this is a race between, as Eric puts it, "landscapes ravaged by earthquakes and human faces that look like they've been ravaged by earthquakes," we know which direction the Academy will sway given their almost pathological obsession with rewarding documentaries about disease and disfigurement, from King Gimp and Chernobyl Heart to Smile Pinki and Music for Prudence.

Will Win: Saving Face

Could Win: The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom

Should Win: The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom

Eric Kohn interviews Béla Tarr.

Jay-Z and Kanye West's new video may cause seizures.

The fight for gay marriage may hinge on Supreme Court's Anthony Kennedy.

Rescued dog bites anchor on the wrong network.

For Filmmaker, Cannes Artistic Director Therry Frémaux on the future of film festivals.

Ethan Hawke follows his heart.

David Phelps takes some notes on William A. Wellman's Wings.

Paul McCartney's ex-wife says Piers Morgan heard hacked call.

Click here to peruse Steve Jobs's F.B.I. file.

Soft-core peddler Zalman King, creator of the Red Shoe Diaries, dies at 70.

Here comes the culture war!

Zooey Deschanel will give you jazz hands:

Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to ed@slantmagazine.com and to converse in the comments section.

Is it just us or can the Academy's infatuation with The Artist be felt even in categories where the film isn't nominated? Grant Orchard's The Morning Stroll, about a chicken stopping a passerby on a city street dead in his tracks, first in a time when films were referred to as moving pictures, then in our present day, and finally in a post-apocalyptic tomorrow where zombies have come home to roost, is cute up to the point that its artistry adopts the very ADD it increasingly thumbs its nose at throughout. A sweeter, more quaint vision, Patrick Doyon's Sunday is in essence also a study of human routine, only this one waxes nostalgic on the different world children and adults inhabit without a shred of condescension. Both Terrence Davis and Bill Plympton would love it…and we know how many Oscars each of those filmmakers have.

The second of two nominated shorts from Canada, Marcy Page and Bonnie Thompson's Wild Life, the story of a prideful Englishman's struggle to survive in the Canadian frontier in 1909, has a starkly minimalist look that gives it the feel of an imprint, a haunting from the past. Strictly for There Will Be Blood connoisseurs, this is unanimously our favorite short in the category, which these days translates to about a zero percent chance of victory.

Locked out of the Best Animated Feature category for the first time since it's had a film eligible for a nomination, Pixar may be considered a sentimental favorite here, where it hasn't won an Oscar since 2001's For the Birds. Enrico Casarosa's La Luna, which reminded me less of past Pixar films and more of Super Mario Galaxy for the Nintendo Wii, is a perfectly lovely doodle about an old man and his son instructing the youngest member of their clan on how to clean the moon of stars. But lovely simply won't cut it in the end.

At least two of us found William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg's The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore impossibly dull, but it's easy to see why a third, upon seeing the short some eight months ago at a festival, pegged it as an Oscar winner. The initially perplexing story, inspired by Hurricane Katrina, concerns a Buster Keaton lookalike, after being swept up in a tornado straight out of The Wizard of Oz, finding his calling as a librarian in a strange land. The short, which employs 2D and computer animation as well as miniatures, practically tells the history of animation in 17 minutes, and like The Artist, its message appears to be one of remembrance—in this case, asking us to remember how cool it was when people used to read books. Somewhere, Oprah sheds a tear as she powers down her Kindle Fire.

Will Win: The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore

Could Win: La Luna

Should Win: Wild Life

A federal appeals court panel on Tuesday threw out a voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage passed in 2008, upholding a lower court's ruling that the ban, known as Proposition 8, violated the constitutional rights of gay men and lesbians in California.

Bilge Ebiri presents the Amadeus Blogathon.

David Hudson collects trailers for films in competition at this year's Berlinale.

And The Guardian selects 10 films from the festival to look out for.

Chris Christie's whole Jersey fat-guy authenticity thing is, um, wearing thin.

Press Play says Viola Davis will win the Oscar.

The Cuban embargo turns 50.

Andrew O'Hehir ponders the chicken-soup-for-the-Hollywood-soul ethos of this year's Oscar race.

The Criterion Collection is tumbling.

Matt Zoller Seitz reviews ABC's The River.

The dangers of co-opting cool.

Bill O'Reilly screams tyranny:

Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to ed@slantmagazine.com and to converse in the comments section.

Part of the intrigue of Lana Del Rey's breakout "Video Games" was its two-sided nature. It's ostensibly a love song in which the singer rhapsodizes devotion to her man ("Heaven is a place on Earth with you/Tell me all the things you want to do"), but there's a stinging quality to both the words and her blasé delivery: "Open up a beer/And you say get over here...It's you, it's you, it's all for you/Everything I do." It's unclear who's being played: the guy, who might actually think he's worth her time, or Del Rey, deluded and desperate enough to stay with somebody who's so clearly no good for her.

This slippery question of identity and intention is also, of course, what's made Del Rey the center of a national conversation in recent months. Simply put, Del Rey isn't the singer the viral "Video Games" had led people to believe she was—the "authentic" singer-songwriter ingénue plucked out of obscurity based on the merits of a DIY music video. Her Lana Del Rey persona is the latest incarnation of several years spent putting in time in the industry. Nor is she the kind of pop artist we've come to expect these days—the primetime-savvy vessel of club-ready hits. She's awkward in interviews and on stage, with a high-pitched speaking voice and vampy mannerisms, expertly imitated by Kristen Wiig on Saturday Night Live last week. She seems to be both trying too hard and not trying hard enough, stoking questions about whether she even means any of what she's singing.

Del Rey isn't the pop star we've come to expect in at least one other sense: The songs on her new album, Born to Die, aren't only small—they're powerless. Which is to say, she writes about women who are unhinged and consumed by the love their men provide. "Off to the Races" may be the skeeviest track ever written about a horse race: Del Rey quotes Lolita ("Light of my life, fire of my loins"), pinches her voice into what seems like a parody of Betty-Boop femininity, demands gold coins from her "old man," gets wasted on "Bacardi chasers," risks time at Rikers Island, and finally asks that same old man to save her. It's a thrilling, twisted vision of love gone off the deep end.

Del Rey's references are a mix of contemporary and outmoded, conjuring '50s glamor and hard-knock hip-hop with phrases like "chasing paper." She refreshes the hopeless starlet with a pose of confidence, as on "Radio," in which she boasts, "Now my life is sweet like cinnamon/Like a fucking dream I'm living in." But it's hard to believe her swagger for very long, as relationships and good times crumble all around her. By the time you get to the album's closer, the strangely poignant "This Is What Makes Us Girls," on which she laments, "We don't stick together 'cause we put love first," you might start to think Del Rey has internalized the same self-reproach of Erica Jong's "Alcestis on the Poetry Circuit": "For who can hate her half so well as she hates herself?"

Even casual Top 40 listeners have become conditioned to the almost bludgeoning sense of self-empowerment in pop music today. Nicki Minaj is her own bionic sex doll, an ideal exaggerated to the point of masculine aggression. Katy Perry asks to see her man's "peacock," and even when she's telling him to put his hands on her "skin-tight jeans," it's pretty clearly who's in the driver's seat. Lady Gaga…well, you get the point. Nowhere else in mass culture have young people, especially women, been allowed to feel so unvexed about their desires, even if those desires are constrained to the relatively superficial, glitter-sprayed longings of a Ke$ha rager: "We're taking control/We get what we want/We do what you don't."

Del Rey sings as a woman who doesn't know what she wants. She's compelled to a luxurious, romantic life, but conveys its inevitable sadness. Last year, the Weeknd was rightly criticized for its portrayal of women. What started as vague lasciviousness on "What You Need" became outright stalker confessions on Echoes of Silence, the Weeknd's third album. Abel Tesfaye had fully redirected his player's angst onto the object of his desire. Del Rey flips that dynamic, framing the story from the point of view of the girl who sticks around, trying to enjoy a fabulous party that ends up making her feel more empty and alone than anything else.

Del Rey's been called anti-feminist, though for what reason I still can't discern. She wears sexy clothes? She sings sad songs about wanting love so badly it might kill her? From this self-serious understanding of feminism, I wonder how Tori Amos's "Me and a Gun" would fare today. Yes, I just compared Lana Del Rey to Tori Amos, not only because I can imagine the former writing a song about being forced to off her rapist because she's hasn't "seen Barbados." I still don't know exactly what kind of singer Del Rey wants to be, which pose of hers is the right one, but I do know that, like Amos, she shows us a version of female desire that we're not used to hearing, one that's genuinely felt on Born to Die. For a pop singer, that's rare enough.

One could say many of the same things about 1980's Invitation to Pleasure, which played at Rotterdam. Its two male leads are a middle-aged dentist and his businessman friend who set up a bachelor's loft to have sex with young women together, each man glancing at the other as they go. In time, one wife finds out; the other's known all along. And just as the men are trapped inside their desires, the women are trapped inside a social condition. "Don't fool yourself into thinking it's better out there," the younger wife hears, and fears she's heard right; the older has long since decided not to give up the big house and nice clothes. These women's minds are dying. Is their place better than that of the screaming girls in the loft?

Like other Khouri films, Invitation to Pleasure ultimately wanders into a brutal night that won't end, as the characters must confront each other. The way in which they all end up trapped in a room together is distinctly this filmmaker's, and raises the larger point that, even as Boca filmmaking moved toward pornography, it still saved space for the auteur. That's because most Brazilian films, period, were moving that way. The country's notable films often had some sacanagem (dirty play) in them, whether Norma Bengell's beachside humiliation in Ruy Guerra's 1962 art-house hit Os Cafajestes or the stream of sex comedies called pornochanchadas that began their box-office dominance in the early 1970s. But in 1976 in particular, the Japanese film In the Realm of the Senses performed extremely well in Brazil, and in the Boca in particular producers like the industrious Antonio Polo Galante began pushing filmmakers toward showing hardcore sex.

There were an enormous number of ways to make porn creatively. One could carry comic surrealism, as Rotterdam program titles Fuk Fuk Brazilian Style (in which a dwarf lugs a box of dildos) and Sit on Mine and I Will Enter Yours (in which a man with a penis growing from his forehead finds love) did. One could go in an equally surreal, more serious direction, as Carlos Reichenbach's Empire of Desire (in which a raving lunatic wanders the beach while couples entwine inside the beach house) did.

One could also forego directly making a porn film and instead produce a commentary on them, as Cláudio Cunha's brilliant 1977 film Snuff, Victims of Pleasure (written by Reichenbach) did. Two shady producers, one of them mangling Portuguese with a British accent, set out to make a movie. "It's not a porn film!," one says, trying to convince potential coworkers, "It's a feature! It's an international production. Sure, there are some strong scenes. But the director wants realism!"

The "strong scenes" will turn their film from porn to snuff. Snuff, Victims of Pleasure began with a projection-room screening of black-and-white footage of what's said to be a real rape, which hooks the viewer's interest as to whether it actually was. Now the producers want their leading man to shoot a starlet on screen. We look through the camera lens on location alongside them, and as the movie we're watching becomes the movie they're filming our desires catch up with theirs. The lead goes mad, and rants, "I am an actor!" into a mirror, but the camera stands in the mirror's place, and so he's really talking to us. We're making his movie.

And then a little later, suddenly, Cunha shows a scene of the film-within-the-film, switching from the naturalistic color he's presented both fiction and reality in back to cheap black and white for the production. This separation—their situation isn't ours—shocks us into our seats. The recognition of what people are capable of doing to each other is scarier than anything that anyone on screen actually does. It's only a movie, we can tell ourselves, but snuff fantasies are real.

Cunha also produced Snuff, Victims of Pleasure, and marketed it so brilliantly (parking ambulances outside theaters, paying audience members to scream) that he helped the film sell four million tickets. Five years later, Cunha's film Profession: Woman met with a very different reaction. The film, which drove him bankrupt, was kept by the censors for two years, and released finally in a butchered cut.

He turned to theater, where colleagues looked down on him as though he were a pornographer. So he made an actual porn film to spite them, taking over the theater at night and shooting himself as a director guiding a troupe of eager young actors toward self-discovery. The finished film's title, Oh! Rebuceteio, has no direct English translation, though the director tells the audience it means "big confusion." An old producer asks himself, upon witnessing a stage full of sex, "I should have demanded a script. How did I expect this experimental theater?" Cunha's grinning leader sits in the audience, hands forward, urging, "Come on, everybody! Let's release our demons!"

They do so creatively. There's the scene of a day in the park, with a gigantic bear encountering frolicking ladies—and there's the Roman orgy in which women rub themselves with watermelon and carrots. My personal favorite involves a woman and a priest together in a confession box. They can't help themselves, and make new sins to confess. There have been many versions of this scene in other movies; the twist here is that the couple is soon joined by a nun. As the threesome ensues, the theater audience on screen leans forward, then back. It's guiltless fun.

The Rotterdam International Film Festival ran from January 25—February 5.

In years past, we've written off this category's most obvious UNICEF candidates by virtue of their lack of any value outside of insistent efficacy. In other words, put as many crying third-world children in glass-strewn pediatric cancer wards as you want, but if you haven't color-corrected their tears and can practically see the timecode above their deathbeds, voters are still going to turn you on your way with a pat on the head. The strategy has kept us away from making a lot of easy mistakes in this category. But we've still been wrong more often than not lately because we've repeatedly underestimated the viability of any candidates on the opposite end of the spectrum (i.e. impeccably made student movies obsessed with themselves).

To that end, we're tempted this year to give Andy Bowler and Gigi Causey's terse, one-joke Time Freak more than just the benefit of the doubt. Coming on like a Looney Tunes parody of Primer, Time Freak might just be the apotheosis of post-graduate navel gazing. Ergo, what does the T-shirted, David Krumholtz-esque inventor do once he figures out his storage garage time machine actually works? Does he go back in time to prevent wars? Accelerate progress by planting devices strategically? Take a bullet for Martin Luther King Jr.? Nope, he just wants another shot at a chance meeting with a pretty girl. And then another. And another. Time Freak is funny and, at the very least, forthright about its own self-obsession, but it doesn't have any particular stylistic imprint, like the Jarmuschian grays that likely gave God of Love a leg up last year.

Still, it's a far more likely underdog candidate than Peter McDonald and Eimear O'Kane's Pentacost, in which a soccer-obsessed Irish Catholic altar boy who has clearly fouled up one too many services is given one more chance at redemption (and permission from his embarrassed father to watch the matches once again) with the arrival of the Archdiocese. The thematic merging of piety and pep talks comes off a little jejune, but builds to a celebratory punchline that would've been a sure winner…if we were talking about the British Television Advertising Awards.

Each of the remaining three are above-the-line as far as their technical achievements are concerned, perhaps none more so than The Shore, which, starring Ciarán Hinds and having been written and directed by two-time Oscar-nominated screenwriter Terry George, is the clear pedigree item up for bid here. One of us called it the only good movie in the whole category this year in its depiction of Irish unease "post-Troubles." But, paradoxically, others among us thought it felt oddly incomplete. As the category's longest entry at 31 minutes, it feels like a truncated epic or a meandering parable, and hastily resolved in either case.

Which leaves us torn over the last two candidates because, once again, we're forced to weigh social comment against sheer formalism, only this year the choice most likely to make voters feel as though they're voting in some form of Hollywood caucuses is also significantly more slick than usual, which could prove to be its downfall. Max Zähle and Stefan Gieren's Raju starts out as exactly the sort of Brangelina porn you'd expect: A childless upper class German couple adopt a child from an orphanage in India. Every time the six-year-old boy blinks his upward-gazing, saucepan eyes, their entire marriage seems validated. But before they have spent even 24 hours together, the boy runs away. By the Nobel Prize committee's standards, Raju may as well be an episode of Breaking Bad, but once you get beyond the central twist, it's hard not to see this as another chapter in the already overloaded tome of "First World Problems."

Which means that, yes, we're somewhat reluctantly placing our bets again on the short that's neither too serious nor too flip, but just enough of both. One of us (read: not me) found Hallvar Witzø's wryly crepuscular Tuba Atlantic repulsively Scandinavian, but the rest of us all agreed that it was our personal favorite. A craggy old man by the sea gets word that he's going to die in a week's time and decides to use his time to blow up seagulls, evade the best intentions of a teenage social worker who, thus far, has failed to assist anyone in passing away ("they lived," she rues), and tune up the three-story atomic instrument that will blow across the Atlantic Ocean and, thereby, let his estranged brother hear the sweet musical sound of atonement. Alternately humorous and sentimental in the most crowd-pleasing manner, Tuba Atlantic seems poised to sound a brown note to voters, who won't be able to help themselves.

Will Win: Tuba Atlantic

Could Win: Raju

Should Win: Tuba Atlantic

A lot of talk regarding season three of Justified has centered around whether the show could successfully replace Mags Bennett. The writers have cleverly embraced the gap Mags left behind; instead of trying to replace her directly, they've used her absence to create the sense of a town on the precipice of a crime war. Many different players are eager to fill the role of Harlan's chief villain. This week's episode, however, reminds us that Mags was never truly the chief villain of Justified to begin with.

As great and as powerful a character as Mags was, the role of primary bad guy has been filled, from the beginning, by Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins). This is easy to forget, because Boyd is incredibly likable. (Surely he must be the most beloved neo-Nazi skinhead on TV.) It's a testament to Goggins and the writers that they've managed to craft a character with Boyd's background of crime, hatred, and violence, yet who still manages to be as morally ambiguous and strangely sympathetic as he is.

But when he exacts his revenge for being double-crossed by Devil (Kevin Rankin), it becomes clear that Boyd remains an incredibly troubled, deeply violent man. When Mags consoles the dying man she's just poisoned at the beginning of season two, it's truly chilling. Yet at the same time, we were just getting to know Mags. The depth of violence her character was capable of was of no surprise to us because she was yet to be defined. Boyd is a different story; as he eases Devil into death after shooting him in the chest, the scene clearly refers back to Mags's poisoning of Loretta's father, but in a way it's even more horrifying because we're seeing it from a character we've come to know. This is Boyd's "come to Jesus moment" (in Devil's words), or perhaps his version of a Tony Soprano moment—that one when we realize that this character, who we cheer for and like, and who we hope can reform, reveals himself to be something of a madman. It's another notch on the long progression of Boyd's left turns, but one that will be more difficult to return from.

The title of the episode refers, of course, to Devil himself, and serves as a send off for a character who, though secondary, has been around since the pilot. But the title also refers to Boyd, who among new characters like Quarles (Neal McDonough) and Limehouse (Mykelti Williamson), might have been forgotten in the new landscape of Harlan crime. But now Boyd's capabilities have come to the fore, and it's clear that the "devil we know" may prove just as dangerous as the newer villains we've been introduced to.

Boyd's killing of Devil also reminds us of the many unsavory things in Boyd's past, which have been boiling under the surface as the series has developed. It's not dissimilar to the manner in which the issue of race has been boiling beneath the surface and now seems about to take center stage. Despite its skinhead characters and Confederate flags, Justified has, in the past, mostly avoided immersing itself in the race relations of rural Kentucky. Now, with the arrival of Limehouse and Noble's Holler, that's changing in a big way. But it would be wrong to suggest that the issue's been simply forgotten about until now. There's actually something quite intuitive to this thematic progression in a largely segregated population. It wouldn't be difficult for the racists of Harlan County to more or less avoid the objects of their hatred—or, as this episode would suggest, their fear—until something happens that makes them impossible to ignore.

Quarles is shrewd enough to recognize the role racism plays in Harlan. In recruiting Devil, he plays on Devil's racism by referencing Boyd's attempt to work with people David would rather "see swinging." Raylan (Timothy Olyphant) also attempts to provoke Devil's racism later in the episode.

Raylan, trying to track down the recently escaped Dickie (Jeremy Davies), does as he often does and turns to Boyd for help. Their conversation is as layered and multifaceted as always, centered around Raylan recounting the story of his first meeting with Limehouse. His mother had fled to Noble's Holler for protection from her abusive husband, Arlo (Raymond Barry), and Arlo, fearless, went to get her back. The result was Limehouse badly beating Arlo in front of his young son Raylan on the bridge that leads into the holler.

In one respect, this meeting is indicative of the strange yet enduring friendship between Raylan and Boyd. As usual, Raylan is surprisingly open about his personal life and past with Boyd, in a matter we don't see much when he interacts with any other character. At the same time, Raylan's letting Boyd know that he's on to him, and his plan to steal the Bennett money out of Nobel's Holler. It's also a warning to Boyd of the trouble he might be finding himself in by dealing with Limehouse. Finally, contrary to any displays of friendship, Raylan is trying to provoke Boyd and his gang. When Raylan comments that Limehouse has no recollection of their first meeting, he suggests, "Maybe he's kicked so many white boys' asses he just ain't keeping track no more," and then turns to Devil to ask, "What do you think?" The question is obviously meant to poke at Devil's racist sentiments, the second time that happens in this episode.

We know, however, that it isn't the case that Limehouse forgot his encounter with Arlo on the bridge. Limehouse not only remembers Arlo, but in last week's episode he even addresses the very incident burned into Raylan's memory. Limehouse tells Boyd: "Give my regards to Arlo Givens; I believe the last time I saw him was on this very bridge." We understand now that this was a threat, a reminder to Boyd and his crew of just the sort of man they're dealing with, and what he's capable of.

The question is: Why did he pretend not to remember Arlo when talking to Raylan? When Raylan suggests that Limehouse forgot their meeting, Boyd counters that he may simply find it more interesting to have that appear to be the case. But maybe it's something simpler than that. Maybe Limehouse just doesn't want to drag up old altercations with a man he, for the most part, has no quarrel with.

Harlan is a place where the scars of the past, whether they be the civil war, abusive husbands and fathers, or a man's own history of hatred, are easy to ignore so long as they're not being directly confronted. Past wounds are always either being covered over or expressed violently. Limehouse is a perfectly friendly, charismatic man; his dealings with Raylan are stripped of the menace we've seen from him in past episodes. But we know this is something that can turn around quickly. Limehouse remembers the past well, and as we saw on the bridge last week, he doesn't hesitate to draw on it in the presence of a threat. The same could be said of Boyd, whose violence has been hidden from us by circumstance for some time, and becomes all the more troubling to us because of that. Perhaps this is most true of Raylan himself, who's at most times either perfectly calm and cool, or shooting a man in the heart.

Quick Takes:

• With this season's already-crowded stable of villains, it's hard to imagine much room left over for Lance (Clayne Crawford), the crooked prison medic who seems to have plans for poor Dewey Crowe (Damon Herriman) that are straight out of Dexter's notebook. I'm not sure I'm particularly interested in this thread, but it will likely be quickly subsumed into the overall arc of the season.
• If only for a brief scene, it was good to see Loretta (Kaitlyn Dever) again. She even proves to be helpful, putting Raylan on to Noble's Holler. Is she keeping any more secrets about her time as Mags Bennett's chosen child?
• At this point one can only assume that Quarles is quite honest about his love for all things Kentucky. Now it's bourbon!

Luke De Smet is a freelance writer based out of San Diego who spent way too much time obsessing about movies and television while growing up in rural northern Alberta, Canada. He's currently attempting to avoid movies and television long enough to take up surfing, but is failing miserably. You can follow him on Twitter.

The film is exemplary of the Boca do Lixo's comic style, much of which revolves around fantasy. Boca characters keep escaping into pop-culture references, and at times the entire movies do. The Pornographer is literally pastiche; its director, João Callegaro (who's spent the rest of his life since making the film in advertising), found scenes from The Public Enemy, Angels with Dirty Faces, and other classic gangster films in the trash outside the American consulate and edited them in. Callegaro then used slapstick to crash the fantasy into reality, as when the hero opens a wonderful looking gift box and a spring-wound boxing glove smacks him. Like many Boca comedies, the film gets more melancholic, in a creepy way, as it goes. The dreamer earns the wrath of real gangsters, who chase him through a fun house. As he turns and turns, fleeing certain death, he keeps confronting in mirrors what a life's worth of fantasies have helped him create: distorted images of himself.

"The film is a joke on homages," Callegaro told a Rotterdam audience, adding that his goal was to "to please friends and anger censors." Dissertations lie unwritten on how Boca films fought the dictatorship, and one of the key ways was through comedy built on a continual bursting of expectations. Among the film's funniest jokes is its general lack of nudity; locked in a bare, sterile room with a typewriter, Metralha has little time for women. Go further and see an intellectual refusing engagement with his society. Stop there and see a punk.

Carlos Reichenbach's Lilian M: Confidential Report, made five years later, is an equally weird comic-book tragedy. It came out toward the end of the Cinema Marginal movement, but has much in common with the Margin's key films. For one thing, it's self-referential. The opening shot is of a tape recorder running as a man and a woman talk off screen. "What's your name?" "Célia Olga." "No, your name in the film." "Lilian." "No, your real name in the film." "Maria."

She's one woman who's been split into many. She narrates her life in flashback to a film crew, who we revisit from time to time (after one especially shocking tale, the boom guy shakes his head and mutters, "Unbelievable"). She started her life, calm, quiet, and dull, on a farm with a loving husband, until the day a loud salesman came asking for water. "Don't judge a man by his tie, but by his talent," the little guy muttered, and soon showed a talent for sweeping her away with city dreams. But then he died in a horrific car crash (shown in slow motion, the screen drenched in red), and she made her way on her own.

In classic picaresque fashion, the woman bounces from one lover to another, and the film spins satirically by making each stand for a different link in the social chain. There's the straightforward farmer, who believes hard work will get you to heaven; the social-climbing salesman who thinks you can get rich fast; the millionaire who values improving the country, though talks more than acts ("The nation works, thanks to our financial contributions"); and his son, battling Dad through a bohemian life as a dancer. The possibility of the young man being gay or bisexual bursts one of the movie's many bubbles. Sexual liberation is social liberation, a lesson this lady learns, too, and teaches others. A few scenes later, her millionaire sits on the bed, weeping. He howls, "My moral!"

Brazil's censorship board tended to punish overtly political content more so than sexual scenes, not understanding that sex was political. As a result, filmmakers like Callegaro and Reichenbach could load free love into their movies, and amid the madcap anarchy (I haven't yet mentioned the wheeler-dealer called the Grasshopper, who tries to sell the heroine some good land in China), give hope for a freer world. "Being happy is an art," someone tells her, "You need to practice it." But how?

One of Célia/Lilian/Maria's lovers has a sister, who sits in the house all day, longing for something long lost. That's not a fate she (and perhaps any woman) can tolerate, and so keeps running, and running. The movie ends only because the crew's tape runs out. This woman's story never will.

The Rotterdam International Film Festival runs from January 25—February 5.

Why Detroit loves Clint Eastwood.

And that Eastwood ad was David Gordon Green's best work in years.

The White House responds to Virginia anti-gay adoption bill.

Press Play kicks off its Oscar-prediction coverage.

Amazon stores might invade your neighborhood.

Josh Melnick and Water Murch in conversation.

Simpsons dolls banned in Iran as "promoters of Western culture."

Abel Ferrara and Gérard Depardieu join talents, penises for film based on Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal.

Gay-marriage backers eagerly await appeals court's Prop. 8 ruling.

What if all the cats in the world suddenly died?

Mark Harris explains Hollywood's ongoing issues with race.

James Watkins discusses his film The Woman in Black:

Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to ed@slantmagazine.com and to converse in the comments section.

It may sound shocking to some that the Harry Potter franchise has never won an Oscar, despite nine pre-2012 nominations being spread across five of the films (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix couldn't conjure a single nod). Perhaps the Academy simply hasn't been able to brush off the pixie dust with which Chris Columbus ushered in the series, or maybe all those wins for 2003's The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King left voters feeling like they'd hit their literary-fantasy quota for the next decade. Either way, though Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 adds three more nods, including Art Direction, to the saga's final tally, it looks like Harry and his pals are going to ride their brooms into the history books without one nude gold man in tow.

The boy wizard's last hurrah still, however, has a better shot in this category than Midnight in Paris, which is frankly a surprising inclusion given that design-heavy entries like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows were also in the running. The amber lights and chic salons and abundant fringe of the 1920s may have been more than enough to bewitch Owen Wilson's rootless romantic, but they're not about to help Woody Allen's latest frolic yield anything more than a screenplay win. A better bet would be War Horse, which took minimalistic stage design and opened it up into a great big world where even the ravaged battlefields are picturesque. Better still would be The Artist, which, even if it can't replicate the true essence of silent cinema, still offers a full and handsome recreation of the physical Hollywood of its era.

But it doesn't seem like any contender has the arty, cohesive, perfectionist moxie to out-wow Hugo, which didn't rack up 11 nominations for forgetting to add the right brushstroke or pixel to every corner of its loaded frames. If the eye-popping ones and zeroes of Avatar can take this category, then Martin Scorsese's cinephilia-for-all commitment to making a posh 3D adventure for kids, grandmoms, and geeky uncles should take it without blinking. Head beautifier Dante Ferretti is a major industry favorite, and perpetual Harry Potter snubbee Stuart Craig is the only competitor here who can match his two-win, seven-nomination track record. Besides, in a year when the Academy chose to emphatically embrace the films that turned back time, only Hugo filled its visuals with the handy reminder of ticking clocks.

Will Win: Hugo

Could Win: The Artist

Should Win: Hugo

RECORD OF THE YEAR
"Rolling in the Deep," Adele (WILL WIN)
"Holocene," Bon Iver
"Grenade," Bruno Mars
"The Cave," Mumford & Sons
"Firework," Katy Perry

Sal Cinquemani: Predicting the top three catgories this year seems suspiciously easy. I can't see any of these songs upsetting Adele's inevitable sweep, except maybe Katy Perry, and I'm only saying that because I feel obligated to write more than 10 words here.
Jonathan Keefe: Rocket Tits is my new Black-Eyed Peas in the sense that, after writing these Grammy predictions for the past five years, I've run out of creative ways to convey the depth of my absolute, utter loathing of her and her execrable music.
Eric Henderson: As someone who nearly earned myself a toaster oven in a karoke contest busting hip rolls to "Teenage Dream," I can't fully sign off on your malcontent, but that song still represents the sole time Perry's formula struck on something winsome and enduring. "Firework," in contrast, is as arch and addicted to whip-its as anything else in her catalogue, and ergo hypocritical because of it. That still places it one notch above the smarmy nothingness that is "Grenade" though.

ALBUM OF THE YEAR
21, Adele (WILL WIN)
Wasting Light, Foo Fighters
Born This Way, Lady Gaga
Doo-Wops & Hooligans, Bruno Mars
Loud, Rihanna

SC: This category has seen worse lineups (kudos for the exclusion of what I thought were shoo-ins: Taylor Swift and Tony Bennett), but Rihanna's inclusion points to a move toward populism and consumerism rather than credibilty. Hell, even though I think Gaga's spot is well-deserved, we all know why it's actually there.
JK: This kind of WTFuckery is one of the reasons I can't ever turn away from the Grammys' annual trainwreck. They finally become aware of the rockist vs. popist schism from, what, six or seven years ago, and then they still get it completely, spectacularly backward: Only the Grammys would say, "You kids talk among yourselves, and we'll just go ahead and endorse Bon Iver as a singles artist and Rihanna as an album artist, okay?" To that end, I kind of hope Rihanna does win, but if Adele can even get nominated for an NAACP Image Award, there's no reason she can't win here.
EH: Co-sign. I can't for the life of me understand why they seem incapable of nominating three simple minutes of infectious, beat-driven fun in the category that's meant to honor that very accomplishment (well, I guess Katy Perry did manage a nod in Record of the Year, but that's a different sort of "infectious"), and yet seem to be making a conscious effort here to say that albums, at their best, function as singles-generating machines. I'm not being facetious when I say "S&M" has more business being a nominee in the other category than Loud has being one here. But, more to the point, Nicki Minaj has more right being in both.

SONG OF THE YEAR
"All of the Lights," Kanye West featuring Rihanna, Kid Cudi, and Fergie
"The Cave," Mumford & Sons
"Grenade," Bruno Mars
"Holocene," Bon Iver
"Rolling in the Deep," Adele (WILL WIN)

JK: I feel like Kanye has a shot at this as some sort of consolation for not getting nominated for Album of the Year, because NARAS always loves a good make-up win. It's the only song that could conceivably upset "Rolling in the Deep."
EH: Might've helped if they'd nominated him for one of the two he did with Bon Iver, to be honest.
SC: The fact that four out five of the nominees in this category are also nominated for Record of the Year makes picking the winner even easier. It also makes the distinction between these two eternally fraternal categories more confusing than ever.

BEST NEW ARTIST
The Band Perry
Bon Iver (WILL WIN)
J. Cole
Nicki Minaj
Skrillex

JK: J. Cole is the only one of the nominees I can't see winning. Nicki Minaj has the commercial stats and the girl parts historically necessary to win here, but Skrillex and his North Korean dictator's haircut actually have the most total nominations among this lot. The Band Perry also has the broad, country-but-only-nominally-country appeal that helped Carrie Underwood and Zac Brown Band win this category recently, while Bon Iver has those other two general field nominations to consider. If Minaj does win, I just hope we're spared one of her BFF Taylor Swift's trademark disingenuous reaction shots.
EH: Every time Taylor does that, I say a little prayer that a thread of drool tumbles out. It never happens, and probably never will until the moment she's actually caught off guard by a win. I'm pretty sure a lot voters regard dubstep as ringtones that won't stop after 30 seconds. And though the Grammys put the Best Country Album nominees among the tracks on their yearly CD aimed at people who only buy one CD a year, I think Bon Iver is a much more formidable contender against the Minajonaut than the Band Perry.
SC: Despite the fact that Bon Iver won't be performing at the ceremony, I still think they've got they best shot at upsetting Minaj. I might even give them the edge based on voters' recent history in this category.

BEST POP DUO/GROUP PERFORMANCE
"Body and Soul," Tony Bennett and Amy Winehouse (WILL WIN)
"Dearest," The Black Keys
"Paradise," Coldplay
"Pumped Up Kicks," Foster the People
"Moves Like Jagger," Maroon 5 and Christina Aguilera

SC: The cynic in me thinks Tony Bennett will take this one in honor of Amy Winehouse's unfulfilled potential, but the über-cynic in me is pretty sure "Moves Like Jagger" will win in honor of Christina Aguilera's unfulfilled potential.
JK: Even if NARAS is eager to congratulate themselves for giving Best New Artist to two acts who managed to sustain high-profile careers, the Bennett and Winehouse duet—which not even Wino could save from being dull—lets them recognize both a former BNA winner and one of their favorite veterans. It's a role-reversal from the "Here We Go Again" wins from a couple of years back in that the beloved vet won't be the party who wins posthumously, but that's the only real difference here.
EH: Hard to know exactly yet how this category will shake out, with collaborations and groups now sharing space, but the chance to award postumously and preumously seems like a sure shot to me. Watch Coldplay win.

BEST TRADITIONAL POP VOCAL ALBUM
Duets II, Tony Bennett (WILL WIN)
The Gift, Susan Boyle
In Concert on Broadway, Harry Connick Jr.
Music Is Better Than Words, Seth MacFarlane
What Matters Most, Barbra Streisand

SC: I couldn't get anyone on the Slant staff to review Duets II, so Bennett and friends FTW. On a side note, am I the only one who thinks of bug chasers when I see the title of Susan Boyle's album? I am? Never mind then.
JK: Well, I was going to get all indignant here about how I reviewed both the SuBo and the Seth MacFarlane albums, but then I noticed that it's actually Boyle's Christmas (or bug-chasing) album nominated instead of Someone to Watch Over Me, because why the hell wouldn't it be? Bennett will win, but I would love to see how much more condescending and obtuse the comment thread on that MacFarlane review could get if he were to pull off an upset.

BEST DANCE RECORDING
"Raise Your Weapon," Deadmau5 and Greta Svabo Bech
"Barbra Streisand," Duck Sauce
"Sunshine," David Guetta and Avicii
"Call Your Girlfriend," Robyn (WILL WIN)
"Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites," Skrillex
"Save the World," Swedish House Mafia

SC: I'd say that Robyn winning for "Call Your Girlfriend" would be consolation for losing to Rihanna last year, except she's once again genuinely worthy of the prize. And there isn't a major crossover hit or competing dance-pop diva for her to contend with this time around.
JK: Are we sure that NARAS voters won't see "Barbra Streisand" on the ballot and just vote for that as a reflex? Because doesn't that seem like something they would actually do?
EH: By that line of reasoning, expect Deadmau5's duet with Greta Garbo and Johann Sebastian Bach to net surprisingly deep pockets of support. Unless the same cataract-ridden set also thinks Barbara Streisand is covering "Disco Duck." Then again, they might mistake Skrillex's name for one of their prescriptions and fill in the box. These are all more likely scenarios than presuming voters will have actually danced to any of these songs.

BEST RAP/SUNG COLLABORATION
"Party," Beyoncé & André 3000
"I'm on One," DJ Khaled, Drake, Rick Ross, and Lil Wayne
"I Need a Doctor," Dr. Dre, Eminem, and Skylar Grey
"What's My Name?," Rihanna and Drake
"Motivation," Kelly Rowland and Lil Wayne
"All of the Lights," Kanye West, Rihanna, Kid Cudi, and Fergie (WILL WIN)

EH: Kudos to Grammy for awarding what is easily the laziest, least dignified track on Blue Ivy's mom's otherwise incredibly Grammy-friendly grown folks' R&B album with the record's only nomination, in a category whose title still makes it sound about as prestigious as "Best Font Choice" or "Most Beats Per Minute." "What's My Name?" might be Kanye and company's biggest threat.
JK: I love that the Grammys still haven't figured out how to refer to a guest verse. "All of the Lights" probably has this, but I'm always hesitant to bet against Beysus, even if she's thoroughly shown up by her former Destiny's step-child Kelly Rowland here.
SC: A vote for Kanye, Rihanna, Kid Cudi, and Fergie is also technically a vote for John Legend, The-Dream, Ryan Leslie, Tony Williams, Charlie Wilson, Elly Jackson, Alicia Keys, and Elton John, and I don't think the academy will be able to resist patting that many minorities artists on the back at one time.

BEST RAP ALBUM
Watch the Throne, Jay-Z and Kanye West
Tha Carter IV, Lil Wayne
Lasers, Lupe Fiasco
Pink Friday, Nicki Minaj
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Kanye West (WILL WIN)

JK: If there's a vote-split between the two Kanye albums, that could benefit Minaj, but I don't think Watch the Throne will siphon off enough of the votes to keep Fantasy from winning.
EH: No contest.
SC: Yeah, I admit to having a little bit of a fetish for watching Kanye West lose awards, but he's got this one tied up, especially given that, prior to middle America's discovery of Adele, I thought he was a sure bet not just for another Album of the Year nomination, but finally a win. And a deserved one.

BEST SHORT FORM MUSIC VIDEO
"Rolling in the Deep," Adele (Director: Sam Brown) (WILL WIN)
"Yes I Know," Memory Tapes (Director: Eric Epstein)
"All Is Not Lost," OK Go (Director: Itamar Kubovy, Damian Kulash, and Trish Sie)
"Lotus Flower," Radiohead (Director: Garth Jennings)
"First of the Year (Equinox)," Skrillex (Director: Tony Truand)
"Perform This Way," "Weird Al" Yankovic (Director: "Weird Al" Yankovic)

SC: I'm curious to know what the selection process is for this category when the creepy-cool but seemingly arbitrarily chosen "First of the Year" and the just plain creepy "Perform This Way" earn slots over clips like Is Tropical's "The Greeks" and Lady Gaga's "Born This Way." Even if Adele sweeps everything else this year, I'd feel satisified if she lost this one to OK Go's exhilaratingly original and interactive "All Is Not Lost."
EH: I'd feel satisfied if the nomination for "Lotus Flower" was, in actuality, a nomination for this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and this.
JK: It would be swell if OK Go's concept-driven videos actually made their singles more visible, but there's no faulting a video like "All Is Not Lost" on its own merits. But this isn't like Oscar's foreign-film branch, where voters actually have to prove they've seen everything nominated before they can cast their ballots, and, regardless of quality of the other four videos, Adele's clip for "Rolling in the Deep" has just been too widely seen and liked to lose here.

The 54th Annual Grammy Awards air on Sunday, February 12th on CBS. Take a shot every time we get one of our picks wrong. Seriously. Try it. You'll thank us.

The New York Giants win Super Bowl XLVI with 21-17 win over the New England Patriots.

M.I.A. upstages Madonna by flipping off the world during the Super Bowl halftime show.

And for those who only care about the ads, click here.

Ben Gazzara, the original Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on Broadway and star of numerous John Cassavetes films, passed away Friday. He was 81.

Iranian hardliners versus the Oscar.

Yesterday, the Art Directors Guild announced the winners of its 16th Annual Excellence in Production Design Awards.

And the Annie Awards spread the wealth last night.

Bill Hinzman, the first Night of the Living Dead zombie, is really dead.

From Rotterdam, with love:

Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to ed@slantmagazine.com and to converse in the comments section.

Bridesmaids is just glad to be invited, no? A "memorable" quote from the film according to IMDb: "You're like the maid of dishonor." Which makes me, an admitted fan of the film, cringe and feel as if I'm misremembering its high hit-to-miss ratio. Margin Call possibly fares worse, because is a line like "I don't get any of this stuff" a refreshing acknowledgement that market-speak is a language that even stock brokers struggle with or a sure sign that J.C. Chandor was too lazy to do his homework? Also out is Asghar Farhadi's A Separation, which faces the uphill battle of having to appeal to voters resentful of actually having to read the screenplay while watching the film. Then there's Michel Hazanavicius's blasé approximation of a silent film that would have been forgotten and lost to time—or an attic fire—had it been actually made in 1925. The reason The Artist won't win is easy:

George Valentin:         .

Peppy Miller:            .            .

George:         ?

Peppy:                           .          ,                 !

Okay, bad cinephile! Yes, all that winking and mugging, from dog and man alike, took Hazanavicius time and wit to plot out across 13 pages. Whatever. Any way you cut it, Hazanavicius can't hold a candle to the slightly more high-end costume jewelry hawked this year by Woody Allen, a showbiz legend who's possibly more overdue for an Oscar than Meryl Streep. For sure, Hazanavicius doesn't have Allen's sometimes canny ability to make you laugh at the same time as he's digging into you, and the proof is both on screen and on the page: "I'm having trouble because I'm a Hollywood hack who never gave real literature a shot."

Will Win: Midnight in Paris

Could Win: The Artist

Should Win: A Separation

Last week, Luck's introductory episode concluded with an exhilarating race that ended badly. The horse that "bug boy" (named for the bug-like asterisk that follows the jockey's name in the racing forms, signifying his apprentice status) Leon rode was put down after its front legs broke. That tragedy still hangs over the main plot of this episode (unlike most shows, Luck isn't naming its episodes). But it also thrusts Leon into a kind of limbo reflective of all of the show's characters. It's in this episode where one is first able to grasp how the different permutations of fortune (good, bad, indifferent) have washed the show's ensemble ashore onto the pretty and slightly desolate beach that is Arcadia's Santa Anita Park.

Leon's stuttering agent, Joey, is conscious that his client is haunted by the horse's untimely death and fears it might lead him down the same path as the other jockey he represents, recovering alcoholic Ronnie Jenkins (real-life jockey Gary Stevens). But it looks like Leon's troubles might manifest themselvesin a different form down the road.

Leon: I was thinking of getting a bear claw, Joey.

Joey: No, no bear claw. No, I don't need you overweight, right before you ride for Escalante.

Leon: I was thinking I could do some extra roadwork.

It's an early indication, I suspect, of future trouble for Leon in "making weight." Ronnie, for his part, is just starting to climb out of the hole he drunk himself into. In this episode's breezy first race, a practice one, Ronnie is duly impressed by the natural ability of exercise girl Rosie Shanahan (Kerry Condon), who wins riding Walter Smith's colt, Gettn'up Morning. She asks Walter if she can be his jockey. But here we see, in a reversal of that famous cliché, how contempt breeds familiarity. Walter feels guilty that he didn't do more for Delphi, a purebred horse he used to train in Kentucky who may have been killed by his owners for an insurance payout. Now Walter seeks redemption in Delphi's son Gettn'up Morning the same way Ronnie does for his own reasons. The unspoken misfortunes that struck both Walter and Ronnie, when they each ran horses in Kentucky, bond the two men in a way that locks the inexperienced Rosie out of the running.

Luck's other trainer, the paranoid Turo Escalante, continues his scheming by trying to drive down expectations on his winning horse, Mon Gateau, who paid off big—not just for Turo, but for Marcus and Jerry's gang of railbirds—in the pilot's centerpiece race. Turo's newest plan is complicated enough that he ends up maneuvering himself out of ownership of his race horse in a claiming race—in which a horse is entered with the intention of being claimed for an amount determined before the race. This spectacular race is the visual highlight of this episode, due in no small part to the wonderful cinematography of Stuart Dryburgh. Leon overcomes two jockeys deliberately penning him in and rides Turo's horse to victory. But what should be an important win for Turo, though, is marred by the realization that someone else has claimed his horse.

With his ambitious move to claim Mon Gateau, child-like Renzo hopes to continue the partnership with his fellow jackpot winners "under a new concept." It's in this secondary storyline that we see the ebb and flow of fortune's tide on display most violently. Each of Renzo's friends has an excuse for not joining in on his new business proposal. The lonely, disabled, Hall of Fame ballbuster Marcus frets about how much of their winnings his friends are starting to spend, calling attention to themselves. Jerry is pissing his money away on poker again. And Lonnie is trying to gently extricate himself from a personal injury scam involving two call girls as his accomplices—who end up nearly pummeling him to death in response.

Unexpectedly, newcomer Chris Mulligan has also put a claim on Mon Gateau. This leads to a "shake," in which two dice representing each of the claimants are shaken in a box to see who gets the horse. The shake’s outcome encapsulates Luck's stance on…luck. Fickle, heartless, and all-pervading, fortune stings those who go up against those she favors. Last week, Renzo's crew wins, Turo wins, Leon loses; this week, there is a stunning reversal for each of them.

Seemingly operating outside the tides of fortune, maybe even influencing the direction in which it flows, is the show's ostensible lead, Ace. Though he takes up less bandwidth in this entry, it's quite significant because he finally puts his plan for revenge into motion. He offers the men who allowed him to go to jail, represented by one Isadore Cohen, a profitable piece of the racetrack he wishes to purchase. We also find out the circumstances behind Ace's conviction. He lent his NYU-attending grandson a New York co-op co-owned by Ace's former business partner, Mike, who used it to stash drugs. After the cops bust his grandson for a loud party and find the drugs, unwilling to rat Mike out under pressure from the feds (and unwilling to let his own grandson get pinched),Ace takes the fall for Mike. Nowit becomes clear what part of the reason is that Ace's bodyguard Gus bought the horse, Pint of Plain. A transaction facilitated by former business partner Mike, it sets up Ace's ex-partner to expect some kind of future reciprocity from him. Ace is literally using Pint of Plain as a Trojan Horse, with Gus as his instrument of revenge.

Quick Takes:

• An inside joke: Ace glances at photographs on the office wall belonging to his parole officer (Barry Shabaka Henley). One is of Malcolm X, the other of a jazz trumpet player. Both refer to characters Henley has played for executive producer Michael Mann. In Ali, he played a Black Muslim follower of Malcolm X's, and in Collateral, a jazz trumpet player. Henley also played the theatrical version of Lt. Castillo in Miami Vice and was a regular on Mann's last TV series, Robbery Homicide Division.
• Ace's mobbed up associate (and go-between for Mike), Cohen, is played by Ted Levine. Levine's been on both sides of the law for Mann before, playing highline burglar Frank Holman on Crime Story and one of Al Pacino's task force cops in Heat.
• David Milch vets: Claim winner Mulligan is played by W. Earl Brown, memorable as hired gun Dan Dority in Deadwood. And is that an uncredited Geri Jewell (Jewel on Deadwood) watching the claiming race from the grandstands next to Marcus?
• Funny enough, Joey's stammering (noticeable enough that Turo cruelly calls him Porky Pig behind his back) disappears when he signs Ronnie up with Walter.
• You don't have to scratch too deep with the names of some of these locations. The railbirds' quiet motel is called the Oasis. The bar frequented by the track's employees is the Long Shot.

Milch-speak:

• Ace has trouble urinating for his frequent drug tests. "I have difficulty if someone's looking," he says. "What'd you do inside?" "People made adjustments." Cut to his parole officer looking away in the restroom, overseeing the exam only using peripheral vision.
• Rosie, murmuring to herself, regretting her desperate display after asking Walter for a chance to ride Getting'up Morning, "Begging, like some chancer on the dole."
• Renzo's prospective trainer, Goose Keller (Woody Copland), assuring him nothing's ever written in stone: "You know, horse ownerships tend to be fluid. That's why pencils have erasers."
• Gus winning off Mon Gateau in the claiming race: "Ace, I hit $200 on this race. Don't ever knock this fucking country to me."
• At least one of Lonnie's hookers is a "birther." One of the whores saysto Lonnie as she beats him savagely, "You think you can double-cross people or lie on your word and your promises, like our Muslim president from Kenya?"
• When Ace asks the prickly Turo what the bag of carrots in the stall costs, it's his way of seeing if Turo knows Ace indirectly started him on the path to becoming trainer. Ace tells Gus how, as a recent immigrant, Turo was selling vegetables outside of the stables. He could tell how much Turo hated it, and Ace suggested that the young man be given a chance. But: "It's him who took the bit between his teeth. He's who made himself into something. All I did was tell some trainer whose bets I'd book, 'Hey, there's a guy outside. You should hire him. Bring him in here, into the stable to shovel all our shit. Give him a start.'" Another example of luck?
• The show's Greek chorus, Marcus and Jerry's crew, not unsurprisingly, get Milch's best lines. Marcus, fearful that Lonnie's flashy threads will call attention to their winnings ("Won money. Head up ass."). Marcus tells Jerry, "I have the right to object, off him draws scrutiny on me." "Him" being Lonnie, who, sick of Marcus's scolding, says, "My mental adroitness is dulled by this constant negativity."

Tony Dayoub has written for Press Play, Nomad Editions Wide Screen, and considers all manner of films and TV at Cinema Viewfinder.

Interest in the work of legendary "pink" film director Kōji Wakamatsu has been resuscitated since his most recent film, the emotionally wrought Caterpillar, was nominated for the Golden Bear at the 2010 Berlin Film Festival. Prior to this, Wakamatsu was probably best known for serving as executive producer on Nagisa Oshima's controversial art-house sex film In the Realm of the Senses. Long considered one of the best directors working in the Japanese "pink" or soft-core industry, Wakamatsu capitalized on the relative autonomy offered by forming his own production company in the mid '60s, and by working within extremely miniscule budgets, to produce a body of work that's sexually explicit as well as explicitly political. For instance, 1972's Ecstasy of the Angels in many ways rehearses the self-destruction of United Red Army's revolutionary cell, albeit played out in a far more sexualized fashion. Interestingly, that film's writer, Masao Adachi, who would go on to write Caterpillar for Wakamatsu, in the interim gave up screenwriting altogether in order to join the Japanese Red Army, training and living with the group for nearly 20 years in Lebanon, until his arrest and deportation to Japan in 2001.

United Red Army and Caterpillar are at bottom studies in hypocrisy, ideologically complementary companion pieces that examine, respectively, the shortcomings of militant student revolutionaries and fervently patriotic (read: jingoistic) nationalists. Both films bookend highly charged fictional recreations within ostensibly objective documentary frameworks. Divided into three parts of unequal length, United Red Army's first 45 minutes employ a wealth of newsreel footage and a voiceover narrator to situate growing discontent among Japan's college students with, first, the 1960 U.S.-Japanese security treaty and then escalating tuition costs and other administrative skullduggery, resistance that was met with increasing police violence and mass arrests. Not only does this contextualization align the Japanese student movement with coeval events in the U.S. and France, to some extent universalizing the struggle, it also justifies, or at least seeks to explain, a growing sense of militancy among Japanese youth and their willingness to employ violent means. To its occasional detriment, however, this sequence barrages the viewer with so many characters, each one carefully identified by name and age, as well as filling the screen with so much text (newspaper headlines, scrolling text from political speeches, subtitles that shift from top to bottom of the screen as need be) that it can oftentimes be more than a little disorientating, a whirlwind tour of radical political movements and players.

Fast-paced informational overload turns into something of a political horror movie during the extended middle act, 90 terrifying minutes during which Red Army factions turn on each other and themselves like rabid animals, carrying out an increasingly pointless and absurd purge. More than a dozen members are beaten, stabbed, and starved to death for the slightest infraction, often for no discernible reason at all, other than the fact that an "us" always requires its "them." Faction leaders Mori (Gô Jibiki) and Nagata (Akie Namiki) use language throughout as a tool for vendetta and hypocrisy: They refuse to admit any of their followers have been killed; rather, fallen comrades have suffered "death by defeatism," their fatal flaw an inability to properly "self-criticize," a watchword (derived from Maoist doctrine) that's ultimately more accurately translated "battered."

In the most horrifying example of this self-consuming insanity, one lovely young woman, targeted by the frumpy, asexual Nagata, it's suggested, more out of jealousy than anything else, is encouraged to "self-criticize" by repeatedly punching herself in the face. Wakamatsu shoots the scene so that the violence is entirely out of frame; the viewer only hears the dull thuds of impact and cringe-worthy crunching sounds, until Nagata holds up a mirror so the girl (and the audience) can inspect her handiwork.

Mori and Nagata's hypocrisy seemingly knows no bounds. While the remaining members are busy breaking down one base camp and humping across the inhospitable wastes of the Japanese Alps to slap together another, they're meeting in relative comfort to inform Nagata's husband, Sakaguchi (Arata), that she's leaving him for Mori, out of purely revolutionary, anti-bourgeois reasons, naturally, and that it's his revolutionary duty to quietly and meekly accept this transfer of affections. Lest the scene collapse into completely one-dimensional caricature, Wakamatsu stays on Nagata's face when she's alone afterwards, allowing the actress to convey contradictory emotions, and granting the character at least a modicum of humanity.

This emotional betrayal leads directly to the film's tense final act. When word gets out that Mori and Nagata have been arrested and, what's worse, several escapees have informed the police of the group's whereabouts, the survivors decide to split up. One bunch is arrested almost immediately. The other, led by Nagata's ex, Sakaguchi, winds up breaking into a mountain lodge and taking the manager's wife hostage, leading to a standoff with police and paramilitary Defense Forces. Here, too, the psychological effects of their "training" at the hands of Mori and Nagata persists, as the militants inform the woman that she is, in fact, not a hostage, but rather a willing participant in their armed struggle to fundamentally alter the very structure of Japanese society. Then there's a confrontation over another of the men breaking the code of insurrectionary discipline by eating a cookie, "the very symbol of reactionary attitudes," as he's promptly informed. To which the other man responds, "There's no such thing as an antirevolutionary cookie!" Comedy, to be sure, a reductio ad absurdam of revolutionary logic even, yet at the same time deadly earnest, as the men—stretched to the mental breaking point by events—threaten to come to blows, or even gunfire, over one purloined pastry.

In many ways, Caterpillar plays like a smaller-scale variation on United Red Army's third act. Adapted from a short story by Edogawa Rampo (say the name fast, it should ring a bell) and filmed previously by Hisayasu Sato (of Naked Blood fame) as the strongest segment in the otherwise uneven anthology film Rampo Noir, Wakamatsu actually downplays the perversity contained in the original (and Sato's adaptation), a florid and disturbing tale that describes with relish the sadistic revenge taken by an abused wife on her incapacitated husband, who has returned from the Sino-Japanese war as a quadruple amputee with half his face burned away, his condition likened to that of the titular insect. Wakamatsu, on the other hand, seems more interested in using the situation as pretext for delving into the vacillating emotional response of the wife, Shigeko (Shinobu Terajima), exposing the degree and kind of hypocrisy displayed by other denizens of the rural village, and even providing the husband, Tadashi (Keigo Kasuya), with a moment of self-realization as he recalls with anguish the atrocities he committed for the glory of Emperor and country in mainland China.

Caterpillar's crux is the shifting balance of power between the couple. At first, Tadashi has his way. His status as "war god" (a superbly ironic euphemism) and his prior history of violence toward Shigeko force her into a holding pattern of deference and even self-sacrifice. Thus she half starves herself so the gluttonous Tadashi can wolf down her share of the rations as well. She even attempts to gratify his seemingly insatiable sexual needs. Ultimately, the futility strikes home, and she attempts minor acts of revolt: smashing some eggs, a tributary offering to the "war god," in Tadashi's face, or dressing him up in his uniform, sticking him in a pram-like wicker conveyance, and wheeling him around the village, letting him know that it's his duty to set an example for the others. Shigeko's epiphany ("They didn't send you back a war god, they sent you home a cripple!") echoes the "antirevolutionary cookie" moment in United Red Army: A character, for a brief moment, breaks through the coercive chicanery of hypocritical language to see clearly the true nature of things, only then to realize how very little can be done about it.

Caterpillar strategically complicates its nonfiction framework by opening with footage that only looks like it's stock, full of sub-Grindhouse imitation artifacts, showing Tadashi on the rampage, raping and slaughtering female civilians. United Red Army opens with a claim that all the events depicted are true, only some fiction has been used to convey them. Likewise, Caterpillar ends with statistics on wartime deaths, verifying its fiction with a documentary disclaimer to the effect: "All these events are a matter of public record." Toward the end of the film, actual stock footage begins to intrude, interrupting the final dissolution of Shigeko and Tadashi's relationship, signaling at the same time the final days of WWII: Foremost among them we see the devastation and carnage wrought by the detonation of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the execution by Allied Forces of a handful of low-ranking Japanese war criminals. Such a juxtaposition is bound to provoke questions about large-scale atrocities committed on either side, whether the Rape of Nanking or dropping the A-bomb, questions that yet remain largely unanswered, swept under the carpet of history by the broom of consensual silence.

Kōji Wakamatsu's United Red Army and Caterpillar are now out on DVD from Kino Lorber.

That a now slimmer, totally unfunny Seth has been nominated for an Oscar before McLovin' (whose take on Evil Ed was, if no patch on Colin Ferrell's smoldering Jerry in the Fright Night redo, still a more fully realized character than Moneyball's Peter Brand, movies' all-time flimsiest amalgamate) is the only kink in a category preoccupied with old men getting real with their feelings. Which is why no one should've been surprised in the slightest to see Albert Brooks given the cold shoulder: His Drive heavy had no feelings to bloviate (though the compassion he showed one of Drive's supporting characters even while taking his life away should've been more properly noted). I'm not sure whether Brooks should take it as a compliment or an insult to have been excluded, but it has to sting a little bit that Hill's downright catatonic bullpen pencil pusher usurped him in what seems clearly this year's biggest coattails nod.

Hill would seem the most obvious candidate to get eliminated from contention first, though Kenneth Branagh's lip-smacking sexual and directorial blue balls as Mr. Vivien Leigh are probably too self-defeatingly fruit-flavored to resonate. He just wants to feel up his leading lady, pure and simple. As much as voters probably heard strains of "I Know You, I Live You" every time Branagh's Olivier imagined taking a lick from Marilyn Monroe's honey pot, the tragicomedy pales compared to the other three names in the mix.

At 82, Max von Sydow is by a few months the category's oldest nominee. And though I'm probably the last Oscar blogger to point out that his speechless performance as a man so apparently stricken by (a very predictable) personal loss in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close plays awfully well in this silent movie-obsessed Oscar year, Stephen Daldry's direction turns him into nothing more emotional than a sage Magic 8 Ball. In contrast, Nick Nolte maximizes every second of his screen time, crying copious Jim Beam tears and repeatedly recreating this moment. Almost any other year we'd be calling him the frontrunner, but Oscar just awarded two hot messes in a sparring weepie last year.

Meanwhile, Christopher Plummer has earned this year's "It's time" with absolutely no resistance, and the baitiness of his part—an elderly man very belatedly blossoming as the gay man he repressed for 75 years—seals it. I can't be the only one who's now secretly obsessed with the thought of Captain Von Trapp going down on Liesl's Nazi boyfriend Rolfe in the gazebo.

Will Win: Christopher Plummer, Beginners

Could Win: Nick Nolte, Warrior

Should Win: Nick Nolte, Warrior

[Editor's Note: Poster Lab is your weekly dose of movie poster dissection, wherein the House examines the pluses, minuses, and in-betweens of the poster design(s) for a buzzworthy film.]

So, apparently David Lynch has added film promotion to his post-Inland Empire activities. How else to explain the certifiable smiling faces and wacko-subversive quotes in the character posters above? The marketing campaign for What to Expect When You're Expecting reads like The Stepford Wives by way of Twin Peaks—soulless, soon-to-be mommy-bots with naughty, rattle-the-picket-fence speech bubbles. It's a wonder there isn't a severed ear resting on Elizabeth Banks's sofa. Based on a self-help book, a la He's Just Not That Into You, What to Expect is a yet another indicator of just how desperate Hollywood is to peddle known brands, even if nobody has a clue about how to sell them. Barring the Lynch theory, it's pretty obvious what happened here: a photo crew got busy with the backdrops, basketballs, and airbrushing, while a "hip and young" writing team started digging through their Someecards. Put 'em together and whaddaya got? Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Bipolar posters.

The only one-sheet that doesn't seem looney-bin-ish is that which features Jennifer Lopez in a little ethnic switcheroo: the non-white character adopting from abroad ("I can't wait to meet my baby," it reads). Otherwise, the images are peppered with crass blurbs hovering over the baby bumps, like Anna Kendrick's "You pee on a stick; it's pretty idiot-proof," and Elizabeth Banks's “I'm calling bull$#!%; pregnancy sucks." Speaking of calling bullshit (or of things sucking, for that matter), it's rather incredible that no one bothered to acknowledge the wild mismatching of these potty-mouthed contempo sentiments with their assigned sources, and instead just expected the public to devour the ads like pickles and ice cream. And since they brought up "idiot-proof", it's pretty clear that the folks at Lionsgate think the consumption of poster art is a process as pedestrian as a home pregnancy test.

"If I knew I'd have a rack like this, I would've gotten knocked up years ago," says Cameron Diaz, typecast as the cynical bombshell bound to love her baby only when it's out from between her legs. As Sal Cinquemani noted in his takedown of Madonna's "Give Me All Your Luvin'," this is a classic case of media makers cluelessly injecting punchy slang "because, you know, that's how the kids talk now." And since every movie needs to be targeted to the 16 and Pregnant set, even one "adapted" from a bun-in-the-oven tutorial they've likely never laid eyes on, the sanctity of child-carrying has been slathered with the same transparent crudeness offered in promos for Adam Sandler's latest travesty. What to expect from What to Expect? In all likelihood, just another star-packed giggler for the garbage heap. But judging from these posters, the trash will come with screws loose and eyes wide, high on hormones and nutjob ignorance.

As long as there's a Transformers film franchise, there's a good chance Oscar nominations for special effects are going to be thrown at it like alien shrapnel. And since Michael Bay shows no signs of abandoning his clinking, clanking cash cow, expect this year's nod for Transformers: Dark of the Moon to be the second of many (2009's brain-melting Revenge of the Fallen was graciously snubbed in this category). But don't expect it to be the one that tops the 2011 field, for while the Hasbro superbots demand attention on screen, the whole cacophonous series is considerably lacking in prestige, and odds are your average Academy member isn't about to hand it his or her vote.

The other f/x contenders all have better shots at being rewarded, even Real Steel, a surprisingly heartwarming father-son rouser that plays like the benevolent B-side to all that angry Transformers mayhem (though, in fairness, the film probably owes its very existence to Jerry Bruckheimer). If we're moving forward in order of likelihood, next in line would be Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, which deserves to be here for that spectacular Ministry of Magic dragon escape alone (the movie, a certain rarity of its genre, actually gives you multiple moments to pause and marvel at its splendor, rather than just let it breeze over you like most else on your modern CGI menu).

If Hugo manages to parlay its 11-nomination haul into a mini-sweep of technical wins, it could see its buffet of automatons, derailed trains, and airborne book pages sail away victorious. But things look better for Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a critical and box-office hit that made Hollywood feel good about its glut of sequels, threequels, and prequels. A step, if not leap, forward in motion-capture wizardry, the movie sure does offer a wealth of lifelike primates, and it's home to a handful of supremely well-directed set pieces. If nothing else, a vote for effects will make some feel better about Andy Serkis's lack of a nomination for his mo-cap performance, a milestone scenario that still seems way off in the future, like, when Transformers hits its 20th installment.

Will Win: Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Could Win: Hugo

Should Win: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2

This Sunday, Maya Arulpragasam is going to the Super Bowl, which is like Harold Bloom going to Disney World. It's hard to imagine M.I.A. having much fun at America's premiere chauvinist orgy of consumption, and her recent interview with BBC's Radio 1 suggests she was still trying to psych herself up for the event. "If you're gonna go the Super Bowl," she told Zane Lowe, "you might as well go with America's biggest female icons." And indeed, it's somewhat gratifying to think of M.I.A., Nicki Minaj, and Madonna unleashing the hot pink stinker that is "Give Me All Your Lovin'" on the most hallowed ground of American masculinity, during a halftime show typically dedicated to the geezer-rock pantheon. Ultimately, though, not even M.I.A. can make playing the Super Bowl sound badass or defiant. Walking into the epicenter of the American media to sing and dance between millions-per-minute car commercials with two thoroughly mainstreamed pop stars can mean only one thing, and that's that you yourself must also be a pop star.

Each member of this trio has struggled to maintain her reputation for transgression in the face of overwhelming, and not particularly discriminating, public enthusiasm. This is probably least true for Minaj, though someday soon she's going to have to thin out that closet of characters: There's not enough room for the Nicki who wants to trade X-rated bars with Eminem and the Nicki who wants to pal around with Taylor Swift and Ellen. But even Madonna's mercilessly prolonged career contains few episodes to rival the meltdown that ruined M.I.A.'s make-or-break year. In a 2010 that should've boasted her triumphant follow-up to "Paper Planes," the single that threatened to make her as big on the charts as she'd always been with music critics, we instead got an interminable PR disaster. The unnecessary swipes at Gaga, the conspiracy theories about Google and the CIA, the painful-to-read New York Times interview that painted her as a vapid and ill-informed brat (which she dutifully confirmed when she leaked the writer's phone number in retaliation), and finally, the album.

Maya was no kind of follow-up to Kala. It was, instead, a predictable exercise in art-school nose-thumbing, proudly touting its difficulty and cluttering out its considerable pop smarts with eye-rolling provocations both sonic and political. Better received was the Vicki Leekx mixtape M.I.A. released at year's end, but in part because it was taken by most to be a concession that she had botched pretty much every decision she'd made in writing, producing, and promoting her third album. Or was it M.I.A. proving that she could make a pop record in her sleep? Less "Sorry," more "Here's the damn dance mix you wanted." Either way, "Bad Girls" was by far the mixtape's most successful moment, and while its a little disappointing to think that we'll have to wait a little longer to hear anything new from her forthcoming album, there's really no other reason not to enjoy this stunning return to form.

Of all the producers who worked on Vicki Leekx, Danja is certainly the one with the most cache in Top 40 circles—and also, notably, one of the few who played no role in making Maya. He's assisted with some of Timbaland's most distinctive post-Missy output, and pumped out some perfectly forgettable material for Keri Hilson, Pink, and Madonna. His "Bad Girls" track sounds almost exactly like it did on Vicki Leekx, though its been polished so that its Banghra-inspired riffs and eclectic percussion ring out with more clarity than they did in the original mix. The result sounds massive, equal parts Boi-1da banger and turbulent Timbaland funk. And yet it doesn't wholly abandon Maya's labored intensity. Even as a party jam, "Bad Girls" sounds the slightest bit claustrophobic, summing up the entirety of Lana Del Ray's lyrical persona with the mantra "Live fast, die young, bad girls do it well." You can dance to it, but M.I.A.'s dissociated delivery suggests desperation—her own, obviously, but maybe also that of the people dancing to it. Escapist pop music frequently tells us that we should dance even if we fear the world might come crashing down around us before the party ends. For M.I.A., we dance because we hope that it does.

That's what appears to be going on in the video for "Bad Girls," a high-adrenaline clip that ups the ante on both Jay-Z and Kanye West's car-smashing/wealth-flaunting "Otis" fantasy and the high-fashion desert dance-off that Beyoncé used for "Run the World (Girls)." And that's without even mentioning any of the four or five OMG-inspiring looks that M.I.A. rocks over the course of the video. It's sort of a Bay Area car expo relocated to Morocco, complete with scenes of traditionally attired Arab men doing stunts you wouldn't see if you watched three Fast and the Furious flicks in a row. Before you even try to speculate about whatever message might be animating the clip, give yourself two or three playthroughs just to drool over the visuals.

In the same way that Vicki Leekx seems suspiciously contrite coming from a woman known for recalcitrance, M.I.A.'s party-girl turn in "Bad Girls" suggests that she's come around to giving pop fans what we've been asking for in a way that's still not completely untroubling. For one thing, the video was directed by Romain Gavras, who was responsible for the polarizing "ginger genocide" clip that accompanied "Born Free," and like that one, it's shot in a desert. But "Bad Girls" is giddy and superficially entertaining where its predecessor was hard to watch; the contrast between the hedonism of "Bad Girls" and the blunt topicality of "Born Free" is too direct to not be intended. Backup dancers wield rifles, glamor shots of M.I.A. strutting and posing in characteristically chic outfits are peppered with explosions, and I suppose it's also worth pointing out that all of the mind-blowing car stunts also look dangerous as hell.

Compared to some of M.I.A.'s other videos (in particular, the disastrous "XXXO" comes to mind), this is a relatively focused visual statement that doesn't mistake the mere juxtaposition of cultural signifiers for an interesting statement about them. Amid the usual array of bedazzled burkas and vague evocations of political violence, the perfectly drab-looking cars featured in the video end up being one of M.I.A.'s most fascinating, multivalent symbols. When she raps, "I'm coming in the Cherokee/Gasoline/There's steam on the window screen," she acknowledges the car as liberator of American teenage sexuality; pulling up in her own vehicle at the beginning of the clip, but leaving all of the stunt driving to the traditionally clad Arab men, she acknowledges that the ability to drive has also been the object of political struggle for Middle Eastern feminists. The various shots of M.I.A. leaning out of the passenger's side (in one shot, while the car has tilted diagonally, she hovers over her audience with regal swagger) or leading a parade of revelers through the streets, depict her in positions of varying power, but she always projects her inimitable attitude.

In one of the final scenes, M.I.A. sits next to a white, redheaded boy (one of the only white people to appear in the video) that strikes me as a pretty clear nod to "Born Free." Is this the utopian, permanently culture/gender/border-fucked vision that balances out that video's dystopia? A sequel, where M.I.A. smuggles one of the survivors from the ginger roundup into her swagged-out refugee camp? In that case, the glimpses of weaponry that add a small measure of anxiety to the proceedings might be wielded against the anonymous totalitarian thugs who proxied for all types of real-world oppressors in "Born Free." If she's going to take up the pop-star mantle, she might as well wear it on behalf of the outcasts and freedom fighters, her own shadowy global counter-culture that exists only because its members don't fit in anywhere else. M.I.A. might be a star now, but that doesn't mean she has to be an ordinary one, and it's exhilarating to watch her figure that out.

From here on out, it's violence that prevails. The Map and the Territory is bound by a singular act of violence, but there's a sense that it's part of a continuum; an acute variation on the slow, spectral decomposition that inhabits the novel's every facet. The novel roughly tracks Jed's evolving career as a visual artist, but a good deal of attention is paid to his relationship with his father, an architect who retires and then falls ill. Houellebecq deals for the most part in neuroses, but here especially Jed's self-absorption actually belies an unconscious sentimentality: "For the time being, he chewed laboriously on his suckling pig, with about the same expression as if it were a piece of rubber; nothing indicated that he wanted to break the lengthening silence, and Jed, being nervous…looked frenetically for some subject that might lend itself to conversation." Jed's anxiety during their holidays together evokes the melancholy between two loved ones that have gradually become strangers Nearing the end of his life, his father confesses his own youthful—defiantly artistic, even utopian—architectural ambitions in a long and hypnotized monologue. He disappears soon afterwards, as though grafted onto the text. If the novel has a climax, it's the search that leads Jed to a Swiss suicide clinic. Houellebecq's prose is uniformly dry, and his existentialism often feels casual and affected, but that scene has a passion and an anguish that largely eludes the rest of the novel.

But what feels affected elsewhere has a purpose. The Map and the Territory is a conceptual novel, and a perceived ambivalence regarding certain conventional elements is an integral aspect of its concept. Houellebecq's terse, minimalist prose, his eccentric humor, and his utter deadpan destabilize the seriousness of his intellectual project, leaving some of his most interesting passages hanging in the balance between put-on and aesthetic gambit. Consider an excerpt from Jed's extended reflection on his new Lexus: "This car was the first one he'd bought since reaching a new wealthy status; from his first visit to the dealer, he'd been seduced by the rigor and precision of the metal assemblages, the gentle click of the doors when he closed them, all that was machine-tooled like a safe." In one sense, this is simple affect: a move to express contentment with a manufactured product veers into fetishization—in a word, a joke. In another, it's a criticism: The artist's fascination with industrial products will inevitably find itself reflected in the artist's own work. This has already been established with Jed, whose early works were photographs of pieces of industrial machinery, and who broke through to commercial success with photographs of Michelin maps. But Houellebecq has also considered how this fascination is reflected in his own work, in the novel, that high-watermark of bourgeois representation, with its own unique division of labor. Perhaps this is why The Map and the Territory is so skeletal when it comes to plot, why so little energy is spent giving characters depth, and why Jed's only romantic relationship unravels with so little resistance: "Olga was nice, she was nice and loving, Olga loved him, he repeated to himself with a growing sadness as he also realized that nothing would ever happen between them again…" No drama, no romance, only pathos and amorphous longing. There's something undeniably human about the disinterest Jed seems to show even in living out his own story, and something truer still about the friction between a plausible human life and an artist's fabrication: "Jed devoted his life (or at least his professional life, which quite quickly became the whole of his life) to art, to the production of representations of the world, in which people were never meant to live." If this is Houellebecq's own confession, perhaps the character he writes for himself is his measure of penance.

Houellebecq the character, distinct from Houellebecq the historical person (who has, among other things, won the Prix Goncourt—the French equivalent of the Pulitzer—for The Map and the Territory), first appears when Jed asks him to write the introduction to his second exhibition's catalog. He's about as sullen and as cryptic as we'd expect, and moreover shares Jed's enthusiasm to fanatical degree: "I've known three perfect products: Paraboot walking boots, the Canon Libris laptop-printer combination, and the Camel Legend parka. I loved those products, with a passion; I would've spent my life in their presence, buying regularly, with natural wastage, identical products. A perfect and faithful relationship had been established, making me a happy consumer." There is a trace of mysticism here, a lingering connection to the cult of the artisan that feels humorous and desperate by turns. "It's true, I feel only a faint sense of solidarity with the human species…" he continues, "I would say that my feeling of belonging diminishes a little more each day." Jed is drawn to the misanthropic novelist, sensing in him a kindred spirit—this is natural, of course, as Jed was only a proxy for the author anyway, and when Jed offers a portrait of Houellebecq as payment for the introduction, The Map and the Territory looks ready to take on a supreme neatness.

That is until shortly after receiving his payment, when Houellebecq is ripped to shreds by a home invader. The final third of the novel is a detective story—arguably the most frequently invoked mode of storytelling in modern fiction, literature's "perfect product"—and it's happily the most indulgent. Houellebecq seems to relish his own erasure, letting on that his killer tore him to ribbons and sprayed blood on the carpet to mimic Pollock's drip paintings. Inspector Jasselin, the lead investigator, is a far cry from the traditional hard-boiled detective; in his brisk introduction we learn that he's infertile, and that his bichon (also infertile) is a sort of surrogate child for he and his wife. What's more, he doesn't solve the murder. It's only after his retirement that the solitary break in the case—the missing painting—pays off for blind luck. One by one Houellebecq dismantles the defining elements of the policier genre, and rewires its logic. Ideologically, the detective's role is to bring the moral code to bear on those that lived outside that code, essentially to reaffirm the mythology is reaffirmed for you, the reader. The detective novel is the commoditization of that mythology; in purchasing and reading the novel, the mythology is reaffirmed for you. Houellebecq interrupts this affirmation and suggests that the code of exchange—not the relation of mythology, but the relation of commerce, in which readers actually participate when they buy The Map and the Territory—is the one that prevails. Jasselin's realization is one and the same with Houellebecq's confession: "At the start, this case seemed particularly atrocious, but original. You could imagine you were dealing with a crime of passion, a fit of religious madness, various things. It was quite depressing to fall back in the end on the most widespread, universal criminal motivation: money." Appropriately, Houellebecq requests that his headstone be adorned with an engraving of a Möbius strip.

It can be difficult to enjoy The Map and the Territory at such moments. A proud heart beats at this novel's center, and often it's difficult to blame, but its objectives are personal, and unsympathetic readers will find it difficult to love. It's certainly easy to admire. Its resolution is a kind of attenuated apocalypse, speaking as it does from a future where Jed Martin's major scholars are Chinese, and industrial period-tourism is the lifeblood of Europe. Clearly the West is in decline, but Houellebecq wants to make a different point. Jed's final productive period, at the end of his life, is as a filmmaker, shooting abstract video collages of artificial decomposition over time, first with photographs, then with figurines: "The figurines were more resilient, and in order to accelerate their decomposition, he had to use again his carboys of acid." His vision—at its inception slightly hokey or even shallow—seems to have finally aligned with his that of his author, exuding the menace and the inevitability that simmered in the first canvas when it was destroyed, or in Houellebecq's spattered blood; that waits in the fragile beauty of a civilization whose end is always over the horizon.

A banner at Jed's first solo exhibition reads: "THE MAP IS MORE INTERESTING THAN THE TERRITORY"—paraphrasing Alfred Korzybski assertion that "The map is not the territory." The map that Houellebecq provides is an open one, leading us through different territories, different versions of itself—never the destination, only the way.

Michel Houellebecq's The Map and the Territory was released on January 3 by Knopf. To purchase it, click here.

"It's a western about the third world," the news ticker says at the start of 1968's The Red Light Bandit. Its hero, played by Pablo Villaça, is a soulful, slim rapist and murderer from a favela, whose mother tried to abort him so that he wouldn't starve. He's here to complete "the most complete of all criminal districts": the Boca do Lixo.

The Red Light Bandit is an electric, legendary movie, one Brazilian cinephiles know practically by heart. Its director, Rogério Sganzerla, was 21 years old when he made it, and the anarchic energy of his "Zorro of the poor" could only have been captured by someone so young. Imagine a city kid drunk on comic books and radio plays and getting the neighbors to act them out with him. Then imagine, through the fantasy, a city revealed. "A punk tried to take a wallet from another punk," a cop says. "However, both were penniless."

The bandit, a refugee from Paraguay to Brazil, is just 26 but has 26 deaths to his name. Nobody really knows the man in dark sunglasses; he slips in and out of São Paulo's life, sometimes burgling a mansion (and leaving the modern art painting behind), sometimes driving a flamboyantly gay, cat-petting stylist's cab. We follow his exploits through a two-mouthed, radio-style bullet-pointed narration that keeps turning into fights between the male and female voices. "It's the bomb and hunger," they burst out, "In this century they separate the third world from the rest of the universe." Meanwhile, the news ticker keeps pouring words forward, and amid tales of our "Pothead Criminal" we learn that Hitler's heir is passing false dollars on a São Paulo beach.

You never forget that the bandit, "a poor devil from Freud's theories or from the slums," lives in context, and that his mission of destruction is inevitably doomed to fail. He can never knock the millionaires down to the level that he and all his family members were born at. He doesn't want to be a hero. "If you don't kill it's no use," he says, simply stating his way of life.

The more times one sees The Red Light Bandit (the bandit's from Luz, an especially poor part of the city), the funnier it gets. Jokes fly by so fast, many proudly claiming Brazilian culture (the bandit writes "merci" on a sleeping lover's ass, and a subtitle translates it "obrigado"), that only multiple viewings can pick them all up. But the film also grows sadder each time. The bandit's depressed and suicidal, and his lover (played by Sganzerla's wife, Helena Ignez) can't help him. He drinks oil and tries to dynamite himself, but like a cartoon character, he simply won't die. He can't, because he's too famous, and too useful. The tragedy of the bandit's life is that the more chaos he wreaks, the better he grows for business. A fat politician smiles at the thought of him as a symbol. "Without poverty we have no folklore. And without folklore, what do we have to offer tourists?"

But mythology is important for deprived people as well as for tourists (look at Che). A manic side character has been raving, "Those who wear shoes won't survive!" for much of the movie, and at film's end the shoeless take to the streets. Amidst footage of flying saucers (after all, the rich and the poor come from different worlds), we see favela residents dancing around a fire. Jimi Hendrix blends with Caetano Veloso. The third world has triumphed.

The Rotterdam International Film Festival runs from January 25—February 5.

This weekend, Daniel Radcliffe celebrates his first post-Potter effort with the release of The Woman in Black, a horror thriller about an axe-grinding female ghost who need only be seen to claim a child's life. The veiled phantom surely has the edge when it comes to offing the little ones, but she hails from a long line of ladies who've gone all Hot Topic for the camera. Witches, wives, and even Whoopi made this list of women who sport only the darkest uniforms, making them scary, sexy, cool, sophisticated, and in some cases, all of the above.

Margaret Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz (1939). Before she was merely a steaming pancake of soggy robes, Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch of the West was the meanest bitch ever to wield a broom, and the standard by which every future cackler would be judged. Even her pointy silhouette is forever iconic, but given her getup, she needn't be seen in shadow to give off that inky menace.

Susan G. Komen for the Cure said on Friday it was retreating from a decision to cut funding to Planned Parenthood.

Megaupload founder refused bail in New Zealand.

U.S. jobless rate falls to 8.3 percent, a three-year low.

Roseanne Barr is running for president as a Green Party candidate.

Joshua Land on David Cronenberg and the challenge of the impossible adaptation.

It's day two of The Film Experience's Oscar Symposium and the subject is invisible art and self love.

Karina Longworth and Mark Olsen discuss Sundance 2012.

Below, the video for Madonna's shittiest first single to date, featuring 10 second epileptic seizures from clowns Nicki Minaj and M.I.A.:

Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to ed@slantmagazine.com and to converse in the comments section.