Zimbabwean strongman Robert Mugabe has been finally and officially stripped of his knighthood by staggeringly lenient Dungeon Master Queen Elizabeth II.

This makes Mugabe officially a fighter, which is probably the class he should have been all along.

But before we look forward at the next few years of borderline-genocidal min-maxing that Mugabe will bring to his beleaguered nation once he is declared the winner of last week’s joke election (as of this writing, the votes hadn’t been counted, but, oops, SPOILER ALERT!), let’s take a look at what Mugabe loses along with his Paladin class, and what he did to let it slip away –

According to IMDB’s June 5th edition of Studio Briefing, Angelina Jolie brought up in public what many of us were thinking privately: Where in the world are Disney’s black princesses?

Disney has had Chinese, Native American, Middle Eastern, mermaid, and even Hawaiian heroines–not to mention its many dog, cat, and mouse heroines. And Latinas at least got The Three Caballeros, which featured such memorable female characters as “The Brazilian Girl,” “Mexico Girl #1,” and “Mexico Girl #2.” What about the sistahs? More importantly, as a white girl, am I even allowed to say “sistahs”?

Evidently Ms. Jolie didn’t know about Disney’s upcoming new animated feature, a film slated to arrive in more than a year and a half but has already gathered around itself much controversy.

For your overthinking consideration, I give you Mediocre Film’s hit web series, Retarded Policeman:

It stars the very funny Josh “The Ponceman” Perry, who is an aspiring professional actor and has Down Syndrome.

If you’re like me, your first reaction after laughing (it’s a good little show that’s very funny in its own right) was, “How am I supposed to feel about this?”

Discussion and more video, after the jump.

Devout followers of this blog will have noticed that I have had horror on the brain over the past few months. (To those of you who scare easily, I apologize.) I’ve been taking a class on horror movies, so I was watching a bunch of them, and hey: you’ve got to write about something. Well, the class is over now. I’m not saying you’ll never see another horror post from me, but they’ll probably be few and far between. Before I bid farewell to the genre, though, I want to share one more movie with you all. Ken Russell’s Lair of the White Worm.

As with everything I write about movies, there are spoilers ahead. And if you have even the slightest intention of ever watching this movie – which you TOTALLY SHOULD – please stop reading right now. Lair of the White Worm is so weird, so gleefully bonkers, that a full %70 of my enjoyment of the film came from the surprise factor; from the “Oh my god did that just really HAPPEN?! Am I WATCHING this?” aspect of the experience. And I wouldn’t want to ruin that for you. But if you are never going to watch it anyway – and I’ve got to imagine that applies to most of you – then by all means read on. Note: some images below the jump could be classified as NSFW. Not in the way we usually think about these things, but still… it’s a hard R, you know?

So last night, just as I was about to head to bed, I flipped across the 1969 Sydney Pollack movie They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? I ended up staying up way too late, but wow – that’s a fun movie. And by fun, I mean jaw-droppingly sad.

The movie is set during the Depression, and it’s about a dance marathon – last couple dancing gets $1,500. That sounds like it might be a fun little comedy. But all the contestants are desperate, one step away from dead in a gutter, and they dance like their lives depend on it. And meanwhile Rocky, the promoter, charges admission to watch them teeter on the brink of physical and mental collapse as the days stretch into weeks…

So recently, I noticed an ad in the subways for a new musical called:

Read on for a little analysis.

As a new blogger, mostly, what I’m worried about is picking the right subject. What is a female blogger to write about? Other media have rules for us womens, and I’m kind of lost without them.

If I were setting out to write a screenplay, for example, it would be incumbent upon me, as a female screenwriter, to write about out-of-wedlock pregnancy. The dialogue should be spry and witty, the characters quirky but attractive, the themes superficial. Write what you know, right?

Likewise, if I were a poet, I’d write about depression/oppression and die young, preferably by suicide.

I’m all about selling out and playing into stereotypes, but the one “female writer regulation” by which I cannot abide is the rule coercing vaginal novelists to entitle their books The Such and Such’s Wife or The Such and Such’s Daughter. For whatever reason, this particular commonplace really gets my goat… to vomit copiously on the carpet.

So I just watched Abel Ferrara’s trash classic Ms. 45. (Thank you, Netflix.) Sweet crap on a crutch, what a movie. Note that I don’t put an adjective between “a” and “movie”: not “what a disturbing” movie, not “what a fricking awesome movie,” not “what a confused movie” or “what a sexist movie”… although it is manifestly all of these things. Further spoilerriffic analysis after the jump, plus two soundtrack clips that are SO worth hearing, even if you have to close your eyes and click randomly around the spoiler-laden text until you come across the link.

Even as McDonalds continues to evoke freedom fries francophobia in new advertisements, there are signs that the popular culture has moved on, and that we are on the brink of a new era in French-American relations. The ambassador of this détente? None other than a 25 year old female electro-hip-hopper named Yelle. Video and analysis after the jump.