On June 14, 15 and 16 the Ashoka Foundation’s Changemakers.com will feature live podcast Twitter-interviews with Mediabistro founder Laurel Touby, Center for Responsive Politics Executive Director Leslie Harris and Center for Democracy + Tech CEO Sheila Krumholz about what inspired them to take on the challenge and responsibility of becoming an influencer in the traditionally male-dominated fields of media and technology, as well as their thoughts on empowering women across the world with tools and technology.

All questions are coming from the Changemakers Twitter following of 300,000, as well as entrants in the corresponding Women, Tools, Technology campaign.

Audio recordings of each interview will be posted to www.changemakers.com around 5pm EDT June 14, 15 and 16.

Questions for Harris, Touby and Krumholz can be still sent via Twitter @changemakers with the hashtag #WTTlivechange

First of all, Robert Downey, Jr. could read from the phone book and make it sound like Anton Chekov or Hunter S. Thompson wrote it. And his character Tony Stark in the second installment of this epic Marvel franchise is among the best-written in cinematic superheroism. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about what’s really underneath the man in the Iron mask this time around.

The enterprise starts with a bang: Tony descends (literally) upon the Stark Expo, which is basically a Trumped-up variation on the MacWorld conference crossed with a Richard Branson-style showcase. There are promises of new technological developments (because the Iron Man suit is really all there is, so building an entire expo around it baffles a bit) and Rockette-like dancers to generate the figurative sparks that complement our protagonist’s panache for generating literal ones. Why Stark Expo needs to feature an enormous Oracle banner wrapped around the biosphere at its epicenter is a mystery. Larry Ellison, the real-life CEO of the aforementioned corporation who bears many of the personal – and apparently physical – traits of the fictional CEO, makes a cameo. Cute cross-marketing campaign, I might add. The implication is that Oracle’s brand is enveloping the world like a great big hug.

Later on we get Tony roasting a televised Senate committee hearing, where he boasts that he has “successfully privatized world peace.” How Cheneyesque. And this ushers in the latest action movie archetype: the supermarkethero.

If Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight was a modernist, chiaroscuro Gothicism—painted shadows, grotesquery and even a Picasso-esque demonic clown thrown in for good measure—the first Iron Man felt like animated contemporary Pop art, bright, spare and flippant. Credit the fleet (but never flashy) director, Jon Favreau, for the refreshing take. Much of the original film’s tone has been reinstated in the sequel, but in fits and starts.

Iron Man 2 isn’t a bad movie, if for no other reason than it defies the classification. It isn’t a movie at all, in fact, but rather a collection of Oracle commercials, military propagandist featurettes and upcoming summer blockbuster teasers, wrapped in soliloquies and packaged delectably. It feels alternately timely, prophetic and retrograde.

To wit: We are immersed in the Cold War once again, courtesy of a prologue that depicts the technology behind the Iron Man weapon as a collaborative effort between American and Soviet military physicists. The subject is drilled into our heads thanks to Mickey Rourke’s portrayal of the brilliant but blighted progeny of the seemingly betrayed Siberian who co-authored the project with Tony Stark’s father. His accent, so thick you could trip over it (though he never does) is abetted by the soundtrack’s thunderous Russian war dirges, and his name is (I swear) Ivan. He’s the new kid on the Soviet Bloc. Only adding to the bluntness is the movie’s addition of a time capsule filled with film reels narrated by Stark’s father. It doesn’t help that he’s played by the wonderful John Slattery, who will forever be recognized as a partner at Sterling Cooper in that trendy mock-time capsule Mad Men.

Then there’s Scarlett Johansson, whose scenes are edited to suggest a Clairol commercial directed by the Wachowski brothers. She seizes every opportunity to divorce herself from any interactions with the ensemble other than when she’s tossing them out of her way. (Her hair, it must be noted, is the movie’s single greatest special effect, with its coils of tendrils bouncing and twirling at will, like Medusa’s python follicles.)

Why she’s even in the picture is not important – it’s nice to see her teasing the upcoming Avengers movie with her future costar  Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), who shows up halfway through. It’s at this point that Tony references a shield found in his laboratory – which is coincidentally the name of the little club of do-gooders who plan to start Avenging in a future spin-off. He calls the shield the key to his survival, and all we can do is rap our fingers and wait. The brilliant Clark Gregg is tasked with providing the only bits of intrigue by telegraphing obvious movie tie-ins and foreshadowing immediate inevitable conflicts.

It’s all executed with aplomb – and it’s a good thing. Without the distractions, we’d be stuck in a storm of futuristic technology, a mire of Reagan-era politicizing and a tangle of product placements that further blur the lines between art and commerce today. It almost makes one pine for Bruce Waynian reticence.

It's like "Sophie's Choice," isn't it?

Here’s a fascinating, frustrating and ultimately inspiring piece about our ailing health care system. It focuses on the terrifying impact childhood obesity will have on the lives of youths age 6-19 (the number has tripled since 1980), and its direct link to premature Type Two diabetes. Which, by the way, has a direct link to skyrocketing medical bills that Americans can’t afford. Which further stifles health care. From the article:

And now for some slightly different—but no less controversial—health care news. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the number of obese children in the US has tripled since 1980. Yesterday, Kansas pediatrician Erin Moga told the Leavenworth Lamp, “Along with obesity come diabetes, hypertension and joint problems.” And Darrin Nordahl wrote in the Huffington Post that the prevalence of diabetes in America will double in the next two-and-a-half decades, and that “escalating health care costs today are symptomatic of our sick nation, one in which today’s children, for the first time in history, are expected to live sicker and die younger than their parents.”

Parent Earth aims to revolutionize community consumption and launch campaigns that will make available healthy, fresh, affordable food. The key, Betancourt believes, is teaching parents to be conscious consumers, so that they can lead their little ones by example.

There’s no quick fix here, but I wonder if a different take on Crosby, Stills and Nash’s “Teach Your Children Well” is a possibility:

And feed them on your dreams (read: don’t feed your kids trans-fats)

The one they picked, the one you’ll know by. (read: give them vegetables, stupid)

Don’t you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry (read: it’s your fault that the tots don’t know the difference between a tomato and a potato)

So just look at them and sigh (read: the sighing and wheezing are from your arduous walk up the stairs to tell the kids that dinner tonight will consist of steamed broccoli)

JEFFERSON IS KILLED BY BOARD OF EDUCATION DECISION IN TEXAS, WHERE HE RESIDED IN TEXTBOOKS;
JOHN CALVIN SWORN IN

Mrs. Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson Unavailable for Comment. Former President is Struck Down by a Board of Education Vote in Austin.

When will Oliver Stone make 'TJ' the movie?

Austin, Mar. 18–President Thomas Jefferson was removed from office and killed by assassins. He died from an existential shot in the dark caused by a board vote that was fired at him while he was educating Texas children.

Theologian John Calvin was sworn in as Jefferson’s successor in the Texas curriculum minutes after the president’s death.

Mr. Calvin is 445 years old; Mr. Jefferson was 183.

Shortly before the assassination, Board of Education member Cynthia Dunbar made a motion to change a standard enabling students to study the impact of Enlightenment ideas on political revolutions from 1750 to the present. She proposed to drop the reference to Enlightenment ideas (replacing with “the writings of”) and to Thomas Jefferson. She added Thomas Aquinas and others. Jefferson’s ideas, she argued, were based on other political philosophers listed in the standards. Board member Bob Craig of Lubbock pointed out that the curriculum writers clearly wanted students to study Enlightenment ideas and Jefferson. Dunbar’s amendment was approved by the Board. And President Jefferson was eliminated.

Disciples of Enlightenment cried “Oh no!” immediately after the president was struck.

Mr. Calvin made no statement.

The blow, witnesses say, seems to have come from the right and the rear of the United States democracy constitutional republic. Reports that shots rang out were later revealed to be gavels sounding off. The Texas Public School Book Depository in Dallas is not considered to be directly involved, and Elm Street remains open.

Viragos unite!

New York Times co-chief film critic Manohla Dargis recently wrote a piece qualifying Kathryn Bigelow’s much-deserved Oscar win for best director of a motion picture, the first won by a woman in the 82 years of the Academy Awards. Dargis went full-throttle on her subject matter (much the way Bigelow did).

“It was a long time coming,” she says.

As Ms. Bigelow suggested when she appeared on 60 Minutes on Feb. 28. Her appearance, for which she was interviewed by Lesley Stahl (Steve Kroft must have been busy), was a classic of its type. During the interview Ms. Bigelow explained to the apparently baffled Ms. Stahl the meaning of scopophilia, a significant word in feminist film theory, though Ms. Bigelow kept gender out of her definition (‘the desire to watch and identify with what you’re watching’). She insisted that there was no difference between what she and a male director might do, even as she also conceded that ‘the journey for women, no matter what venue it is — politics, business, film — it’s, it’s a long journey.’

Right. But why make the dig about Steve Kroft’s absence? Had he been the interviewer, might the argument have been, “Lesley Stahl must have been busy…getting a mani/pedi”? That would have dovetailed pretty nicely with the feminist theory mentioned moments later.

Dargis also cites an article in Salon titled “Kathryn Bigelow: Feminist Pioneer or Tough Guy in Drag?” and written by Martha P. Nochimson. Says Dargis:

The heart of Ms. Nochimson’s critique is the charge that Ms. Bigelow and her ‘masterly’ [terror quotes Dargis's] technique have been lauded while Nancy Meyers and Nora Ephron have endured ’summary dismissal.’ The differences between how they have been received, Ms. Nochimson wrote, ‘reveal an untenable assumption that the muscular filmmaking appropriate for the fragmented, death-saturated situations of war films is innately superior to the technique appropriate to the organic, life-affirming situations of romantic comedy.’

That is, I think, bullshit. Movies made by women are under no more obligation to reflect romantic strife and the spillover of emotions than movies made by men are to put audiences through an evening of gangsterdom and science fiction. There is no reason under this or any other sun why a paying movie crowd delineated by gender should force the industry to pander to itself.

Dargis has gone on record as believing that the “chick flick” (by which she means a movie helmed by a woman) is in trouble because it does not have the full support of its industry. Rather it is in danger of getting compartmentalized or shuttled off to the medium’s no-man’s land: the romantic comedy. Movies about women tend to fall into this trap, but movies by women are definitely a rarer breed. Dargis and Nochimson almost have a dialogue going, even if both happen to be talking within a room of one’s own (with audiences of many).

In the Times piece, Dargis asserts that Bigelow’s success was “primarily achieved outside of the reach of the studios. She had help along the way, including from male mentors like James Cameron, her former husband, who helped produce Strange Days. But that movie did poorly at the box office, as did her next two features, The Weight of Water and K-19: The Widowmaker. It wasn’t until she went off to the desert to shoot The Hurt Locker…that she found a movie that hit on every level.”

By the night of the Academy Awards, The Hurt Locker had grossed less than $13 million domestically, the lowest ever for a best picture Oscar winner. Box office success is a fairly significant level that Bigelow’s film has yet to reach, in spite of its hitting whatever other levels there may be when one conceives of a successful motion picture.

It is impossible to tell what Bigelow’s Oscar win will mean for her as a woman, if for no other reason than it’s a piece of metal foisted on her for crafting a product that earned the respect and accolades of those who watch movies as a profession and those who participate in film as members of a league. Her womanness does not make The Hurt Locker better any more than The Hurt Locker makes her a better woman. Does her landmark award win help pave the way for female filmmakers? Not at all. It opens a door. But whether or not a director (regardless of gender) wants to walk through that door and make a film of quality (regardless of its genre) is entirely up to him or her.

Rob Reiner directed When Harry Met Sally… and A Few Good Men, which are a dandy little rom-com and military courtroom drama, respectively; he also directed Rumor Has It…, which is a bad film on every level. Maybe movie studios should have their stable of directors play spin the bottle for all future projects. Talk about leveling the playing field.