Movies are a wasteland (Jonas Brothers? Chun-Li?). Early reviews for Watchmen are a mixed bag. Dollhouse does one cool thing.  There’s a bailout and a budget. Somone apparently believed Jeremy Piven’s fish tale. There’s a fetus on American Idol.

Oh, and Simpsons gets picked up for two years.

What’s on your mind?

Inglourious Basterds, the upcoming Quentin Tarantino World-War II action flick, has fanboys foaming at the mouth with anticipation. Some of this comes naturally from Tarantino’s following, but some of this may be coming from the relief that we’re transitioning away from those serious Oscar-baiting Nazi/WWII movies towards more amusing summer movie fare.

Clearly, Basterds is a different kind of movie than, say, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. Take a look at the trailer:

Tarantino is the modern king of exploitation films, and this one is no exception. And part of what gives this trailer that lurid, exploitative feel (besides Brad Pitt’s crazy monologue) is its liberal usage of swastikas. After all, it’s a powerful, offensive, and evocative symbol that communicates a lot of ideas very quickly.

Perfect for a Tarantino Nazi movie trailer, right? But how about all of those “other” World War II movies? Can we use the frequency of swastikas (and other exploitative elements) in movie trailers as some sort of proxy for the degree that a film is Nazi-sploitative or not?

With that in mind, let’s investigate the Swastika-per-Minute (SPM) Rates for the trailers for Basterds as well as some major 2008 World-War II themed movie releases after the jump. Achtung! Schnell!

[Returning guest writer John Perich takes on literature and video games today. Leave your reactions in the comments. —Ed.]

“Who was he?”

“John Galt was a millionaire, a man of inestimable wealth. He was sailing his yacht one night, in the mid-Atlantic, fighting the worst storm ever wreaked upon the world, when he found it. He saw it in the depth, where it had sunk to escape the reach of men. He saw the towers of Atlantis shining on the bottom of the ocean. It was a sight of such kind that when one had seen it, one could no longer wish to look at the rest of the earth. John Galt sank his ship and went down with his entire crew.”

—Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

“To build a city at the bottom of the sea: insanity. But where else could we be free from the clutching hand of the parasites? Where else could we build an economy that they would not try to control, a society they would not try to destroy? It was not impossible to build Rapture at the bottom of the sea. It was impossible to build it anywhere else.”

—BioShock

BioShock shattered critical expectations when it debuted in August 2007. It received some of the best awards of any first-person shooter videogame that year, or ever: 10/10 from Electronic Gaming Monthly, Eurogamer, Game Informer and the Official XBox Magazine. Not only was it the sort of engaging, tactical gameplay you’d expect from the makers of System Shock, but it boasted a vivid and breathtaking setting—the underwater Art Deco city of Rapture—and an original score worthy of a classic horror film.

But even with all this, BioShock would have stunned audiences for one point alone: it’s a video game that makes you think.

Ken Levine, head writer and creative director of BioShock, made explicit the inspiration behind the game: Ayn Rand’s 1957 doorstop of a novel, Atlas Shrugged. Atlas Shrugged depicts a world whose creative minds have fled, leaving society to collapse into self-destructive anarchy, and who build a cloistered paradise for themselves. BioShock depicts a cloistered paradise full of creative minds, and the problems that turn them into paranoiacs, murderers and mutants.

Hundreds of pages could be written about the philosophy that inspires Rand’s novel—and have been—and you could probably fill another hundred pages on BioShock’s playability as a first-person shooter. But we’re narrowing our focus today. This article will compare Atlas Shrugged to the video game it inspired, to see what was similar and what was left out.

A word on SPOILERS: I will spoil significant portions of Rand’s novel in the following article. I think this is only fair—it’s been out for 50 years, you can study it in school, it’s part of the American culture. However, I will try my hardest not to spoil the crucial elements of BioShock’s plot. I’ll tell you nothing you couldn’t learn in the first hour or two of gameplay. However, we may spoil more of the plot in the comments later on, so be warned.

[This continues our coverage of New York Comic-Con 2009]

While Miley Cyrus’ Asian Eyes were spreading controversy throughout the interwebs, a group of Asian-American comic book authors and illustrators were at New York Comic-Con promoting their upcoming anthology of Asian American superhero stories, Secret Identies. OTI’s writer of the Asian persuasion was there, of course. Not surprisingly, the portrayal of Asian-Americans in pop culture is an issue near and dear to my heart, so I was intrigued to see how their work deals with the oh-so-sensitive subject of race and ethnicity.

Estragon: Well, shall we talk about the Oscars®?
Vladimir: Yes, let’s talk about the Oscars®.
(They do not talk about the Oscars®.)

The Overthinkers troll Wikipedia for dirty pictures, discuss the nature of the umlaut, and eventually get around to talking about the Oscars®. Almost.

Tell us what you think! Call 20-EAT-LOG-01… that’s (203) 285-6401. And do us a favor and take the very short survey!

Download Episode 34 (MP3)

The new Joss Whedon show Dollhouse is doomed.  I don’t mean it’s doomed in the sense that it’s going to get cancelled within the month. (Although it almost certainly will. I mean, Friday night, Fox? Really? Really?) I mean it’s doomed in that it’s going to suck.

The thing about Joss Whedon is that his strength as a writer/show-runner doesn’t really involve hot chicks kicking ass, ridiculous high-concept premises, or elaborate mythologies.  His more successful shows have featured these, true, but they have succeeded despite them, not because of them.  What he does well, above all else, is heartwarming banter:  funny little moments that bring out the affection that his characters have for each other.  The best episodes obviously have a lot more going on, but banter is his bread and butter, and this, honestly, is what I tune in to see.

Unfortunately, the premise of Dollhouse makes this kind of writing impossible.  Problem one:  Eliza Dushku basically has to play a new character every week, which means she has no continuing relationship with any of the other characters.  Thus, no affection.  Thus, no funny little moments.  This in itself wouldn’t be a crippling weakness if the other characters were able to make with the sweet bantery goodness…. but this brings us to problem two:  all the other characters are flaming assholes.  Oh sure, Dushku’s watcher “handler”–played by Harry J. Lennix doing his best Morgan Freeman–seems like a good egg, as does the loose-cannon FBI agent who’s trying to bring the Dollhouse organization down.  But for obvious reasons these characters can never even meet, let alone establish that critical Whedonesque rapport.

Could the show surprise me?  It certainly could.  If nothing else, the Dushku-of-the-week gimmick should allow Whedon to mess around with a wide variety of genres, which is another of his major strengths.  (This week was wilderness horror, a little in-joke for fans of the 2003 Dushku vehicle Wrong Turn. Next week looks like a retread of The Bodyguard, which was at least funny when the Simpsons did it.) I plan to keep watching until it’s cancelled… but we’ll see.  There’s always the chance that it will suck without getting cancelled, which is the most depressing possibility of all.

Your loyal OTIers stayed up and livetwittered the Oscars last night. You know we love movies a heckuva lot, and it was a pretty special night. With musical numbers and stuff.

And a bunch of us also helped move one of our key contributors to a new apartment. [N.B. We didn't actually help him, Pete. He hired moviers. But we were totes with him in spirit. —Ed.]

So, while we usually upload a fresh podcast on Monday morning for you all to enjoy at the top of a fresh week, it’s going to have to wait a day.

Because if we’re ever going to pull down that coveted Best Actress Oscar, we’re going to need our beauty sleep.

Here’s what we twittered. Is this self-indulgent? Maybe. But it was pretty entertaining—at least for us—and we hope you enjoy it too.

In this Oscar Week edition of the Think Tank, the Overthinking It writers announce the first annual OTIs Awards for the year 2008.

The big news is obviously the Oscars, which we will be live twittering in advance of recording the podcast. Type in or link up your predictions and analysis.

Also, just to flame bait needlessly, let’s pile on the recent fracas in the comments: What’s the best Star Trek movie? (Obviously you have to make the case for your choice…)

Other than that, it’s been a slow week in in the popular culture. Aside from sad, scurrilous gossip (which we will not air on this site) and the black hole in the movie release calendar (Watchmen countdown, anyone?), is all quiet on the Western Cultural front.

What’s on your mind?

Be sure to add your own in the comments. I’m sure the OTI readers have some real winners up their sleeves.

Q: How many members of the Academy does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Depends on when the light bulb was released. If it was before November, none. They won’t even give it a chance to shine.

Q: Why did the member of the Academy cross the road?
A: To get to the art house cinema across the street.

A member of the Academy walks in to a bar. “Bartender,” he says, “give me a drink.” Bartender asks, “What’ll ya have?” Academy member says, “something not too high budget, released later in the year, has not too much action or comedy, and takes itself very seriously.” Bartender punches him in the face.

A member of the Academy walks into a bar. He starts chatting with the bartender, and the subject of who he nominated for “Best Original Song” comes up. The academy member says he really liked “Down to Earth” from “WALL-E” but couldn’t really think of anything else that was Oscar-worthy this year. Bruce Springsteen walks in and punches him in the face.

A member of the Academy walks into a bar. “Ouch!” he says, “I thought I raised that bar a lot higher than that with my snooty selections for best picture this year. Why is it so low? Or maybe…my stature has just increased along with my standards. That must be it.”

Thank you. I’ll be here all night.