• Not that adults can’t already appreciate Muppet movies enough as they are, but The Jim Henson Co. has a new film in the works that will primarily be for grown-ups. Described as being a little Avenue Q mixed with a little L.A. Confidential and Pulp Fiction, the movie will be set in a world where humans and puppets co-exist (umm, like any other Muppet movie, uh huh), in which the latter are considered second-class citizens (still kind of like any other Muppet movie) and become victim to a series of murders (ok, there’s the adult part). Titled The Happyland Murders, this seemingly Muppets version of Who Framed Roger Rabbit will be directed by Brian Henson (The Muppet Christmas Carol).
• This should be the year to debut hot political films, not announce them, but Fox Searchlight has reportedly acquired the rights to Allen Raymond’s memoir How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative, which has been adapted and will be directed by Billy Ray (Shattered Glass).
• The boys of Peter Billingsley’s Couples Retreat have now been assigned wives: Jason Bateman gets Kristen Bell; Vince Vaughn gets Malin Ackerman; and Jon Favreau somehow gets Kristin Davis. The plot has all these pairings headed to a tropical island in order to save their marriages. There should really be an official genre called Romantic Fantasy Comedy for this one to be classified as.
• In more typical romantic comedy genre news, Amy Adams will star in Leap Year as an uptight woman who wants to follow Irish tradition and propose to her boyfriend on February 29. The script, from the writers of Made of Honor, is described as being like It Happened One Night. I’m sure.

When I first went to Comic-Con, almost a decade ago, it was purely as a girlfriend. My then-love interest and I had gone to our respective home towns for the summer, and one day he called and asked for my measurements––he was making me an Uhura dress.

I understood then that part of my job at Comic-Con was partially to avoid saying anything too cynical or aggressive to his friends from back home (including the girlfriend of his best friend, who went every year in full Slave Leia regalia). But mainly, my job was to look good. I was young, and I went along with it because I was flattered that anyone would actually want to put me on display. Still, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to it, and if memory serves, I wasn’t very good at it. I am a girl of varied talents, but that summer I learned that being passive, high-concept arm candy doesn’t make use of any of them.

Which is not to say that I had a terrible time; when we got to San Diego, I ditched the boyfriend and found my own niche. I remember there being a fair number of a girlfriends, floating around at various levels of excitement or reluctance, but there were also women who were there because they were active members of one of the communities represented, either as educated consumers or as makers, or both, and across generations, they seemed to be talking to one another. My memory could be fuzzy, but I don’t remember a single booth babe. I do remember a lot of preteens in Sailor Moon suits, but that’s another matter.

But blah, blah, blah — times change. From 2000 to 2007, Comic-Con attendance tripled. Studios started to swoop in in earnest around 2001, after X-Men and the ascendancy of sites like Ain’t it Cool taught them the power of the permanent adolescent male market. As long as we’re on the subject of adolescence, if my experience at Comic-Con 2008 is any indication, the options for young girls here have, on the surface, become quite a bit more varied than the either/or between mannequin and active consumer/producer; at the same time, most of these new options seem to amount to little more than one side of that old binary split.

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