Abby Olcese

How do we measure our success? Matthew 6:19-21 warns us against putting our store in earthly things, which are temporary, but American capitalist culture informs us that the stuff we have — the size, the quality, and how much of it we can afford — is what determines our own worth. As Christians, we try to focus on serving God and loving our neighbors, but often it’s a moment of crisis that reveals where our values truly lie.

The film 99 Homes doesn’t include overtly religious elements, but it features that same battle at the heart of its story, a deal-with-the-devil tale set against the 2008 housing market crash. Writer-director Ramin Bahrani presents the film in an unstylized, utterly human way that explores this question from a dire perspective: how people react when everything they’ve worked hard to earn is yanked away, and they must suddenly re-evaluate their own measures of success.

However, even among multi-tasking, family-oriented comic book stars, Nicole, the star of the new independently published series Raising Dion, is unique. A widowed, black single mother, Nicole has no superpowers of her own. Her son, Dion, is the one with emerging superhuman abilities.

The comic, created and written by Dennis Liu, aims to show readers what it’s like to raise someone who may become the next great superhero...or the most terrifying supervillain the world has ever seen.

The first issue of Liu’s new comic (available as a free download from the author’s website) introduces readers to Nicole and Dion, and tells the story of how Nicole met her husband Mark, Dion’s father. One night, on a camping trip, Mark witnesses a strange phenomenon in the sky, and is struck by a powerful flash of light. Whatever side effects Mark picks up from his experience, he passes on to his son when Dion is conceived.

When a movie examines a group of people whose stories are only starting to gain mainstream attention — and does it with honesty and compassion — it’s important to pay attention. Director Sean Baker’s wickedly funny and stylish film Tangerine dives deep into the transgender community in Los Angeles in a way that explores the strengths, vulnerabilities, and deep needs of its characters. In other words, it portrays them as real people, not as caricatures — or Oscar-friendly approximations played by a cisgendered actor in drag.

Even before it hit comic store shelves in May, Marvel’s all-female series A-Force started picking up attention — most of it well-deserved. Co-written by Marguerite Bennett and G. Willow Wilson, whose other credits include a series starring a Muslim teenage girl (see "Real Life, With Superpowers," Sojourners, August 2014),A-Force is Marvel’s new, lady-led Avengers team, who patrol and protect the island community of Arcadia.

Or as New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore said in a less-than-complimentary essay, "A-Force is a race of lady Avengers, led by She-Hulk, who come from a ‘feminist paradise,’ but I don’t know what that could possibly mean, because they all look like porn stars."

Lepore’s argument is that for all its positing as the latest in a series of progressive moves by Marvel, A-Force’sgender representation leaves much to be desired. The series features heroines who are, in several cases, female versions of existing male superheroes, rather than their own independent characters.

"Marvel is trying very hard to deal with the fact that its superheroes are mainly men and just turning them into women seemed as good a plan as any," argues Lepore, who recently wrote a book on Wonder Woman’s feminist origins.

Amy Schumer and Judd Apatow’s Trainwreck promises rude, clever fun. Does it deliver? Abby Olcese and Catherine Woodiwiss discuss. (Light spoilers in parentheses.)

Catherine Woodiwiss: Okay, so I was a little concerned that Trainwreck was just going to be an exact inversion of "the guy’s a mess, the girl’s uptight" Judd Apatow comedy set-up. And it’s not just that! But I am a little surprised how conventional it felt ultimately.

Abby Olcese: I enjoyed it. I enjoyed her getting to be a mess. Right up until the point where she breaks up with Jon Cena — which is an absurd sentence that I just said — up until that point, she’s really awful. But(Spoiler) when her dad died, and when Aaron visited for the first time and took care of him, those were very conventional story beats (End spoiler). I’m curious about that.

In her show, the Aaron Sorkin parody, the 12 Angry Men parody are really pointed, specific things and she’s using those tropes for a reason. So I wondered if that had a larger purpose in the long form. And I’m not entirely sure it did.

Woodiwiss: Amy’s style of comedy has always been a blend of pointed commentary and "do what the guys do but be a girl doing it." I thought it very subtle and clever that any on-screen nudity was male. And really, there was a significant range of interpretation of masculinity in the film — the impossibly muscular bro who was gay, the intern who was possibly transgender. Bill Hader, who is not the stereotypical leading man. And LeBron James, who is basically the Platonic form of male athlete.

But the women didn’t have the same diversity — they were all pretty stock characters.

And her dig at cheerleaders (derisively comparing them to strippers) was odd. Was that a subtle skewering of the "girl gets boyfriend and gets protective and starts denigrating other women" trope? Maybe, but it just sounded like a cheap shot.

Olcese: The last thing I wrote down was, was that really just all over the place?

Woodiwiss: Say more.

Actor and writer Dylan Marron is the creator of Every Single Word, a popular tumblr and video series dedicated to exposing the lack of racial diversity in mainstream Hollywood films.

For the series, Marron, a biracial native of Venezuela best known for his work on the cult-favorite podcast Welcome to Night Vale, chooses a well-known, recent film and edits it down to only the lines spoken by people of color. The results are damning. None of the videos in Marron’s series last over a minute. Some, like Noahand Into the Woods, which feature no actors of color at all, simply cut directly to black.

Marron spoke with Sojourners about the origins of the project, the long-term effects of poor diversity representation onscreen, and systemic struggles facing people of color in the entertainment industry.

Sometimes art is ugly. It carries with it as much capacity for violence and dread as it does transcendent beauty. This is true for film as much as it is with any other medium — it’s why we can have movies like Paris, Texas and Children of Men, and respect them in equal measure.

Difficult subject matter, particularly of the violent or sexual variety as in The Tribe, doesn’t make a film less credible. It’s what the director does with that subject matter that tells us how to react.

Sometimes art is ugly. It carries with it as much capacity for violence and dread as it does transcendent beauty. This is true for film as much as it is with any other medium — it’s why we can have movies like Paris, Texas and Children of Men, and respect them in equal measure.

Difficult subject matter, particularly of the violent or sexual variety as in The Tribe, doesn’t make a film less credible. It’s what the director does with that subject matter that tells us how to react.

Among the big releases this summer, two films offer new installments of iconic franchises. One, Mad Max: Fury Road is a master class in how to do it right. Made as a labor of love, not a studio cash-grab, it uses a familiar setting and hero to explore new artistic territory, and still maintains an insanely entertaining level of action.

The other is Jurassic World.

It’s both ironic and appropriate that the new Disney film Tomorrowland is being released exactly a week after Mad Max: Fury Road. The new film from director Brad Bird (The Incredibles, The Iron Giant, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol) is the polar opposite of post-apocalyptic. It’s a film that’s hugely optimistic about the future, and our ability to fix the world’s problems through good old-fashioned ingenuity. The movie occasionally veers towards overly naïve, and its internal logic doesn’t always work. But despite some problems, it remains a refreshing alternative to a summer movie season that’s otherwise been filled with darker worldviews.

The film starts not with a jump forward, but backward, to the 1967 World’s Fair, where boy genius Frank Walker arrives with a homemade jetpack and hopes of winning an inventing competition. There Frank is befriended by a mysterious girl named Athena (Raffey Cassidy), who takes him to the magical world of Tomorrowland, a colorful futuristic place full of advanced discoveries and retro-space age design.