Everyone wants kids to read, but how do you make that happen? And is all reading the same? (iStockphoto.com)

by Linda Holmes

Do required reading lists foster a hatred of reading?

That's the argument put forth by Meg Cabot, who writes a lot of popular fiction, some of which (The Princess Diaries, for instance) is aimed at younger audiences. Cabot's central question: "Why are people always making kids hate to read by forcing them to read things they don't want to read, or aren't ready to read yet?"

Cabot was responding to this article in The New York Times about how some schools are shifting away from a model where the teacher assigns a series of serious books, and toward a model where students choose what they want to read. After Cabot's comment came this terrific little essay at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books.

We talked about this at length about a year ago, but these pieces are all very valuable additions to the discussion, I think. And it's hard for me not to feel appalled, I admit, by the scoring system discussed by this parent, also writing recently in the New York Times.

I think reading Harry Potter books is a perfectly wonderful way for kids to enjoy reading, but if you're going to assign "points" to books at all, assigning those books such preposterously high values -- not to mention how Hamlet wound up earning fewer points than a Gossip Girl book -- is pretty hard to understand.

Bob Dylan circa 1965 was a young genius. Bob Dylan today may just end up inside your car. (Hulton Archive / Getty Images)

by Linda Holmes

Some news is bad, some news is good, and some news is ... fantastic.

How would you like to hear Bob Dylan coming out of your GPS, telling you where to turn, how far you are from your destination, and not to drive into a nearby lake?

That's right -- Bob Dylan claimed on his radio show that he was negotiating to turn up as a GPS control voice. It is news so wonderful that it causes a kind of joke-lock. Bob Dylan? As the "Turn left" guy? Really?

[Note: I should have known this was too good to be true. He was kidding. I shall now step up and take my licks. Fortunately, the badness of the invited jokes still stands. I profoundly apologize for not following it back far enough, though. I followed it as far as the reports of the broadcast comments, but not the original context. My fault, totally.]

(Side note: We're all friends here, so I think I can tell you that I can only get through about ten words of any article about Bob Dylan without loudly saying "Be groovy or leave!" in my Bob Dylan voice, which is entirely the fault of several guys I used to be friends with who quoted incessantly from Don't Look Back. Really, you should blame them.)

Let us break the joke-lock. I think we can assume all variations on the words "No direction home" are taken. That's too easy. That's just taking the joke they're throwing to you. It's beneath us all. All other attempts, however, are not beneath any of us. So far, I have most thoroughly humiliated myself internally with, "Don't think twice, babe, it's a right." (GET IT? I am so sorry.)

Now, it is your turn. In today's fictional universe, Bob Dylan is your GPS guide. What do you hear him saying?

Captain America is just one of many characters Disney is getting for its $4 billion. (Marvel Entertainment)

by Linda Holmes

"WTF! NOT COOL! SOOOO NOT HAPPY! Spider-man should not be co-mingling with Goofy."

Thus went a fairly typical Twitter reaction (this one from @jgibbard) to the news that Disney is paying $4 billion to buy Marvel Entertainment and its library of 5,000 characters — including Spider-Man, Iron Man, the X-Men, and the Fantastic Four.

Trying to predict what this deal is going to mean for Marvel, for comics, for superhero movies, or for Disney is pure speculation at this point. But there is an immediate problem, and it's one of perception: Put simply, Marvel has a cool factor and Disney doesn't. People who love Spider-Man do not necessarily see themselves as close cousins of people who love Donald Duck just because there's drawing involved.

There is a streak of the contrarian in comics culture — of devotion untempered by socialization. Even as comics-based movies have made untold fortunes, comics-geekery has retained a splash of oddball cool, which is a bit of a neat trick. What doesn't have any measure of oddball cool? Well, Disney, for one.

But now, Spider-Man will indeed be sitting down at the company picnic with Goofy. Will hanging with Goofy ruin Spider-Man's reputation, or will Spider-Man make Goofy seem cooler?

NBC is hoping that promoting its shows as "more colorful," as well as making ones people want to watch, will help its fortunes. The nurse drama Mercy (starring Michelle Trachtenberg, Taylor Schilling, and Jaime Lee Kirchner) is one of its limited supply of new fall offerings. (NBC)

by Linda Holmes

Expect to see the slogan "more colorful" popping up under the NBC peacock this fall. The network has decided to capitalize on the long history of the peacock and the fact that many people remember liking NBC programming at one time or another, and they're doing it by emphasizing the peacock. Everything is "more colorful," you see.

What's more, chief marketing officer John Miller says, "Our goal now is to make sure we have shows that people will want to watch."

Pardon me a moment while I bang my head against the table.

[Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump.]

Not to underestimate the power of a good branding campaign, but isn't having "shows that people will want to watch" supposed to be the goal already? All the time? What is the value of a good promotional tagline if you don't have shows that people will want to watch? And while we are asking troubling questions, can you plausibly argue that your network is becoming "more colorful" as you eliminate 10:00 p.m. dramas in favor of five nights a week of Jay Leno? I realize "lower in cost" wouldn't look as good under the logo, but there's only so far you can stretch.

It's not up there with "Imagine Greater" in the world of weird rebranding campaigns, but as someone who has indeed enjoyed NBC programming from time to time (and still enjoys the Thursday night comedy block), I'm hopeful that they have more weapons to deploy than "more colorful."

The Project Runway judges weren't too impressed with Malvin Vien's chicken-egg look. (Lifetime)

by Linda Holmes

Last night's Project Runway challenge asked the designers to put together a maternity outfit for model-actress Rebecca Romijn -- who was richly pregnant with twins she had in December of 2008, which gives you an idea of just how long ago this season was filmed.

Offerings ran the gamut from the expected draped jersey dresses that have been getting women through pregnancy forever, all the way to a tailored dress that absolutely, positively made the model's pillow-belly look like a bowling ball in a bag, just as not one but two people commented to the designer that it did. There were several very strange designs the judges did not love, including a chicken-inspired look, the aforementioned bowling ball, and a very badly designed pair of shorts.

Let's talk about the falling of the axe.

After the jump: The axe.

Continue reading "'Runway' Contestant Learns: Women Don't Want To Be Pregnant Chickens" >

Don't look so dismayed, Jeremy Piven -- you've been cleared of wrongdoing! (Sam Morris / Getty Images)

by Linda Holmes

Hey, remember that whole thing about how Jeremy Piven quit Speed-The-Plow because he supposedly had mercury poisoning from overindulging in sushi? And remember how it turned out that you should never infuriate a guy who writes witty dialogue (in this case David Mamet), because he'll say something kind of amazingly great about how you are leaving show business to "pursue a career as a thermometer"?

Well, The Piv is getting the last laugh. After Actors' Equity didn't punish him based on their grievance, the producers of the show went to arbitration, and Piven has won again. The arbitrator looked at the evidence and also cleared Piven of wrongdoing.

... And then put Piven under his tongue and came out at a healthy 98.6 degrees. But I kid Jeremy Piven!

Therein lies the rub. Piven may have won the day, but this story is entirely too funny to really go away. During a recent cutthroat game of Celebrity at the home of some friends, I watched a participant -- an actor, no less -- go through an entire pantomime in an effort to get his team to yell out "Jeremy Piven!" and as much as it may grieve Piven's heart, the entire thing involved chopsticks, sushi, and an ensuing swoon of illness.

For good or for ill, Jeremy Piven is always going to be The Big Thermometer, but it's only fair to point out that he was, in fact, vindicated. So if you see him at a club or something, do not make your funny fish jokes.

It may qualify as irony that the oldest-skewing show on Fox is Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?, featuring Jeff Foxworthy and guests like Sugar Ray Leonard. (Fox)

by Linda Holmes

Variety is reporting on a study that indicates that broadcast television has an aging viewership, and that the median age of the live audience for broadcast networks has reached 51.

That statistic is a little misleading, however, because the median age of people who watch network shows on DVRs -- as opposed to live -- is only 40. Not surprising, but worth noting, in part because it underlines just how tricky it's getting to measure audiences at all, particularly once you try to get at demographic breakdowns. Just one example: The median age of people watching CBS's The Amazing Race time-shifted is almost thirteen years younger than the median age of people watching it live.

There are some great statistics in the article, though. Among them: Don't blame some new generation of trash-loving, MTV-nurtured types for goofiness like Fox's Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader, which has the oldest-skewing live audience on the network, with a median age of 57 -- that's only three years younger than CBS's 60 Minutes. And don't blame them for ABC's Dancing With The Stars, which is its oldest show, at 56. How I Met Your Mother is CBS's youngest-skewing show, and it still checks in at a median age of 45.

by Linda Holmes

When we talked about Heathers as part of the Summer Of '80s Movies series, there had been news that there might be a Heathers musical.

But now, there is to be a Heathers television show, too. If you watch the clip above (caution: language not suitable for blasting in your cubicle), in which Veronica (Winona Ryder) meets J.D. (Christian Slater), you will note that there is some darkness to the comedy here that would be difficult to replicate on television.

(That's in addition to the fact that all the characters are said to be returning, which will require either some revisionist history or a prequel, if you know what I mean.)

Still, the concept of remaking Heathers doesn't fill me with as much dread as the prospect of some other remakes. Depending on where it winds up, a TV show could certainly manage some dark comedy about high school. It would probably need a different central thrust than the bumping-off of the popular kids, simply because that doesn't seem like an arc with a long lifespan. But the gang of mean girls with the unhappy member who's involved with an outsider and harboring viciously violent tendencies? That has promise.

I'm a little puzzled by the involvement of Jenny Bicks, whose major credits are Sex And The City and Men In Trees, but I'm willing to withhold judgment. Which is better treatment, I'd point out, than most remakes receive.

Daisy Of Love is just one of the many, many dating-oriented shows VH1 has been running over the last several years. Suddenly, they seem embarrassed. (VH1)

by Linda Holmes

Let us start with this: It is not VH1's fault that Ryan Jenkins, a participant on its Megan Wants A Millionaire show, killed himself after becoming a suspect in his ex-wife's murder. They didn't cause that to happen.

But let us continue with this: For Tom Calderone, the president of VH1, to suggest to the Los Angeles Times that something inexplicably went awry, and that "this is not what [he] signed up for" in working with 51 Minds — the company that made the show, as well as The Surreal Life and Rock Of Love and others — is absurd and disingenuous, and will hold no water with anyone who actually watches his network.

There is nobody who doesn't know that they cast people on Rock Of Love (to pick just one instance) with the clear expectation that those people will engage in bizarre, exhibitionist, self-destructive behavior, probably while liquored up to within an inch of their lives. Suggesting that you figured it was just fine to populate your network with moderately crazy booze-hounds because you did everything possible to nullify the risk that this would associate you with violently crazy booze-hounds is, not to put too fine a point on it, rank hypocrisy.

The vetting process and the problem of overreacting, after the jump...

Continue reading "Yes, VH1, This Is What You Signed Up For" >

Whitney Houston showed up at the 2009 Grammy Awards, and you'll be seeing a little more of her as she releases her new album and tries for an unlikely comeback. (Kevin Winter / Getty Images)

by Linda Holmes

Whenever a new kind of setback is invented, a new kind of comeback is invented. And leave it to Whitney Houston to make one of the first highly publicized efforts at a comeback from being the kind of celebrity that we didn't even have until recently: the train-wreck reality-show star.

It's one thing to reappear after a long absence during which nobody really knew what you were doing. That's the Mickey Rourke comeback: When he showed up in last year's The Wrestler, there was a certain "Oh, right, that guy" reaction. Because what you might call the First Mickey Rourke Era was in the 1980s, and little of note had been heard from him since then.

It's another thing when you were the subject of your own grotesque reality show that tracked your every move — and it wasn't that long ago. As she prepares to release her new album, I Look To You, that's where Whitney Houston is.

The line between different kinds of famous, the decision not to tour, and the recovering spectacle, after the jump...

Continue reading "Crossing Back Over: Whitney Houston Tries To Be Famous For Singing Again" >

by Linda Holmes

Neda Ulaby has done a comprehensive piece on the death of legendary songwriter Ellie Greenwich, so I won't harp on the breadth of her career or her staggering number of memorable pop songs.

But as someone who has listened to Phil Spector-produced girl-group-style music -- especially that of Darlene Love -- with a brand of enthusiasm many people save for religion and giving birth, I would be a miserable ingrate if I didn't pause to mention just how much Ellie Greenwich music I have enjoyed over the years. In addition to the most famous songs she wrote -- "Leader Of The Pack," "Be My Baby," "Da Doo Ron Ron," "Chapel Of Love," "River Deep, Mountain High" -- she wrote some of my favorite lesser-known tunes that came out during the period.

She wrote or co-wrote "Today I Met The Boy I'm Gonna Marry" (above), which I listened to a lot around the time of my sister's wedding; "A Fine Fine Boy," which you will never forget once you have heard it, simply because it contains the spoken line, "He's a fine, fine, super-fine boy"; and "Give Us Your Blessings," which is the most hilariously over-the-top variation that ever was on the genre -- which really existed -- of songs about teenagers fantasizing about dying in car wrecks just to really stick it to their parents.

Seriously, go listen to "Give Us Your Blessings" right now. It is utterly absurd, but it is also almost impossible not to sing along with.

I've said it a million times and I'm sure I'll say it many more: pop entertainment that endures is so much harder than it looks. There's a reason why most music doesn't survive, but this particular music -- as much as it sounds like a lot of bubbles and hopscotch -- still sounds so great.

This is not for amateurs, trying to create something that deceives the brain into believing there's not much going on while bending the ear ruthlessly to its will. "You just relax," it says. "I'll just come over here and pitch a tent in your brain for the next forty years, so that every time you hear me, you will answer the call with your little tapping foot." (Da doo ron ron ron, da doo ron ron.)

Really, facilitating this Tina Turner performance is enough for anyone to rest on. But for this, and for everything else, and for all the girls with the wiggling hips and the big hair and the minidresses, for the call-and-response, and for "My folks were always putting him down (down, down)," I pause and say: Thank you, Ellie Greenwich.

by Linda Holmes

On this week's Culturetopia: Patton Oswalt and writer-director Rob Siegel talk about the new film Big Fan and whether Oswalt took time off from mixed martial arts (it's a long story); Quentin Tarantino discusses his movie Inglourious Basterds and critic Scott Tobias expands on his review; Archie decides on Veronica (maybe); and Lovin' Spoonful singer John Sebastian carefully breaks down his favorite summer song -- The Beach Boys' "I Get Around."

You can subscribe to the podcast here and get all the delicious arts coverage you need.

This is a pretty scary scene, right? Or is it? We're wondering what really scares you. (Hulton Archive / Getty Images)

by Linda Holmes

There are two scary-movie franchises putting out new chapters this week: Rob Zombie's Halloween II is opening against The Final Destination — which is actually the fourth movie in the Final Destination series.

(Believe it or not, The Final Destination is a different movie from Final Destination, making it literally only one-half as creative as the "let's drop two instances of the word 'the'" approach to sequel naming that was pioneered by Fast & Furious.)

Horror movies of various kinds are huge business, but are they scary?

The difference between unease and assault, and some spoilers about Psycho, after the jump...

Continue reading "The Nature Of 'Boo!' or: What Does It Take To Really Scare The Pants Off Of You?" >

Lizards, New York, and love all play major roles in Fred Chao's Johnny Hiro. (Adhouse Books)

by Glen Weldon

Fred Chao's Johnny Hiro is a love story.

On its surface, it's about the love its titular hero, a hapless busboy in a Manhattan Japanese restaurant, feels for his girlfriend, Mayumi. But at its (large and generous) heart, Johnny Hiro is about the love Johnny — and the author, clearly — feel for New York City.

Of course, what drives the actual plot of each chapter is the considerably more complicated love that both hero and author harbor for various Japanese pop-cultural touchstones (giant lizards, giant robots, samurai, sushi). It's these things that Johnny finds himself facing off against as he struggles to make a life for himself and his girlfriend.

Chao revels in the mix of the larger-than-life and the precisely life-sized: that giant lizard wrecks the wall of Johnny's apartment, leaving him with a whopping repair bill. That horde of samurai chasing Johnny through the Metropolitan Opera house were just laid off from a Japanese tech firm. His expressive characters are highly stylized, manga-influenced creations set against a realistic cityscape drawn in exacting detail.

After the jump: Dream logic, Gwen Stefani, and a company logo you'll want to live in — as well as a peek at the good stuff (and by "good stuff," we mean: "big lizards").

Continue reading "The Greatest American Hiro" >

by Linda Holmes

Fox has acknowledged that the "Snakes On a Cane" image you may have been seeing brief flashes of on TV — they're stitched together in the compilation clip above — was a viral marketing effort on behalf of the network's popular drama House.

And it's fitting that the image involves snakes, because if anything is in the process of consuming its own tail, it's the kind of campaign that is commonly referred to as viral marketing.

Pressing the same button too many times, and the irony of a pun, after the jump...

Continue reading "The Thrill Is Gone: How Viral Marketing Will Inevitably Kill Viral Marketing" >

The cast of Thirtysomething dropped by Talk Of The Nation today -- but does the show hold up on video? (ABC)

by Linda Holmes

When it comes to the influential TV work of Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, I was more a My So-Called Life person than a Thirtysomething person.

(Note: Yes. They never used a capital letter. The credits say thirtysomething. That is a typeface choice. I don't refer to Lost as LOST just because that's the way they write it in the logo. Please don't e-mail me.)

But while I didn't watch the show much at the time, I was surprised to see how well it holds up as I looked at the new DVD set of the complete first season that's coming out today. (Note that the cast came to Talk Of The Nation today to discuss the show.)

Strollers and singles and ties, oh my, after the jump...

Continue reading "'Thirtysomething' On DVD: The Gold-Medal Winner At The Introspection Olympics" >

(iStockphoto.com)

by Rob Sachs

As big as reality TV is the rest of the time, it's particularly big during the summer — some of the biggest ratings successes of this summer have been things like America's Got Talent, Big Brother and So You Think You Can Dance.

In other words, trying to get your mug on TV isn't about to lose its popularity as a national pastime. But the aforementioned options (and some others like them) are fairly daunting: You probably don't want to lock yourself in an isolated house for several months, have eight (or more) children or become a master dressmaker who can transform car parts into clothing on Project Runway.

No, those methods are for the truly committed or the unusually talented. What about more humble aspirants? What about those of us who aren't prepared for a massive blow to our dignity? What about skipping your own show and settling for a few minutes — maybe just a few seconds — of screen time? Does an ordinary person stand a chance in a world where it seems like everybody wants to be a star?

To figure out the answer, I called Taryn Winter Brill. She's a features correspondent for Good Morning America and a former producer for Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? It's safe to say she's seen plenty of televised mugs in her day, and she was kind enough to offer a few ideas for anyone looking to make a minor splash on the small screen.

How to get your sign on television, why you shouldn't wear stripes, and the best places to be a humble man on the street, after the jump...

Continue reading "Getting Your Mug On TV Without Losing Your Dignity: A Few Low-Intensity Options" >

If Miley Cyrus and Cher went up against each other, you can probably guess who would emerge as the actual diva. (Frazer Harrison/Getty Images; Michael Loccisano/Getty Images)

by Linda Holmes

Look, I don't mean to be a baby about the word "diva," which I understand has come a long way since it used to be applied solely to majestic, operatic women. I understand that, according to many, you can now be a diva just be complaining about the temperature of your bottled water. I understand about cats that are divas, ten-year-olds that are divas -- at this point, in common parlance, it's mostly about complaining.

But in the spirit of complaining, Miley Cyrus is not a diva.

Back in 1998, when VH1 first started the "VH1 Divas" series of concerts, not everyone was a diva, but there was a certain diva-esque quality to the proceedings, in that there was a lot of royalty floating around. Aretha Franklin was there, Carole King was there -- yes, Mariah Carey, Shania Twain, and Gloria Estefan were also there, but the concept that the show contained diva-like qualities did not seem absurd.

The next year included Tina Turner, Elton John, Cher, Chaka Khan, Whitney Houston, and Mary J. Blige (among others). Other years, Diana Ross has been there, and Cyndi Lauper, and Stevie Nicks, and Debbie Harry, and Gladys Knight, and on and on.

This year's lineup, so far: Kelly Clarkson, Miley Cyrus, Adele, Leona Lewis, and Jordin Sparks. I would point out that three out of these five are competition-show winners (Clarkson and Sparks from American Idol, Lewis from The X Factor in the UK.

Now, they're promising additional names between now and September 17. Perhaps all the divas will be added later. Perhaps this is just the teaser. But at this point, it must be noted that you are not looking so much at a lineup of divas, or even a lineup of faux divas. You are looking at an actual diva's breakfast menu. Let's get serious: if you send Cher and Miley Cyrus in for a cage match, I know which one is coming out alive, and so do you.

Now if you will excuse me, I am off to write my pitch letter to VH1 for my new series: Cher And Miley Cyrus In A Series Of Cage Matches.

You know what a thunderstorm looks like, but do you know what one might sound like? Now, you can find out. (iStockphoto.com)

by Linda Holmes

As the entertainment world's post-summer, pre-fall lull continues, allow your attention to drift to the most fantastically perplexing new online offering I have seen in quite some time: TheWeatherChannelMusic.com.

That's right. As of today, you can personally own -- you can download! -- the music that tootles away in the background as The Weather Channel tells you whether to wear a jacket.

Some of it seems to be more Weather-Channel-adjacent than Weather-Channel-specific (I don't think Benny Goodman ever actually wrote for The Weather Channel). But some of it is rather surprising: they have an album called P.M. Edition Evening Romance. That means, it would seem, that when you are trying to innocently see whether it's going to rain at 7:30 in the evening, The Weather Channel is attempting to get you in the mood. It is waggling its eyebrows at you, saying, "Sure, it might rain, but if it does, there's [waggle] room for two under that umbrella." (I encourage you to listen to, for instance, the sample of "Ooo Baby Baby," and tell me you do not feel romantically coerced.)

This is perhaps the greatest example of an unmet need you didn't even know was unmet until they told you. Imagine how long it would have taken you, had you just been asked to brainstorm about what's missing from your MP3 player, to come up with "the music they play in the background on The Weather Channel." But now you know.

by Linda Holmes

ABC's Shark Tank bears the primary hallmark of unreliable unscripted entertainment: the name of Mark Burnett. Burnett has been producing Survivor since 2000, which is widely assumed to give him a sort of instant credibility (in this context, I'm saying -- credibility in this context).

But the rest of his history only underscores the absolute slot-machine-pull that is the experience of watching a Burnett show. Some of his shows are fun, like Survivor itself. Some of them, like The Apprentice, are fun for one season and then dull and horrible after that. Some of them are very popular in spite of having no detectable merit: Think Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?, a show that almost wrote its own dismissive jokes.

Many of his shows, however, have been unmemorable flops. Remember On The Lot? Of course not. The Restaurant? The Casino? (At one point, Burnett seemed intent on creating a series of establishment-based reality shows; I kept waiting for The Laundromat, The Bank, and perhaps The Mostly Deserted Bookstore.)

We consider the placement of Shark Tank in the Burnett oeuvre, and discuss turkey basters, after the jump...

Continue reading "How To Fold A Guitar: In Which We Admit To The Modest Charms Of 'Shark Tank'" >

Brad Pitt -- more specifically, Weird Brad Pitt -- is one of several winners after this weekend's good showing for Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. (Francois Duhamel / The Weinstein Company)

by Linda Holmes

There wasn't a whole lot opening this weekend: the big story was Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (spell-checkers around the world will be so pleased when it passes into history), with kids' movie Shorts and the comedy Post Grad both far more modestly promoted and discussed.

And that's just about the way it played out. While Shorts and Post Grad didn't do much business (the latter far less even than the former), Inglourious Basterds went smashingly well with a take of more than $37 million domestically.

Now, opening weekend box office is good for only what it's good for -- it contributes a great deal to the perception that things are successful, even though a lot can change once you find out whether something has any kind of legs or not. But in this case, the performance of Basterds is big news because of the volatile reputations of Tarantino as well as Bob and Harvey Weinstein, whose company released the movie. (The recent New York Times profile of the Weinsteins is a good read if you haven't already seen it.)

There was a lot of talk last week leading into the weekend about how badly the Weinsteins needed the film to perform well -- Tarantino says in the Times that they wanted a hit more than he did -- so you can imagine their relief.

So it's a win for them (and for the likelihood that you will soon be watching The Reader 2: The Bubble Bath), and for Tarantino, and for Weird Brad Pitt.

Jonathan Groff plays Michael Lang in Ang Lee's new film, Taking Woodstock. (Focus Features)

by Michael Portantiere

Twenty-four-and-a-half-year-old Jonathan Groff has already made two major splashes in his acting career: he was the "radical," sexually aggressive, 19th-century German schoolboy Melchior Gabor in the Broadway musical Spring Awakening, then he morphed into the persona of Vietnam-era draft bait Claude Hooper Bukowski for last summer's Public Theater revival of Hair at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park.

Groff opted out of Hair for its Broadway run, but his fans now have the chance to see their guy onstage and/or on the big screen, as Dionysus in The Bacchae at the Delacorte and as concert promoter Michael Lang in Ang Lee's new film, Taking Woodstock. We recently chatted on the phone, and I asked him to complete some sentences.

"If I could time travel back to1969 for the Woodstock music festival and could see only one artist or band in performance, it would be..."

"I can't pick just one! I'd like to see Richie Havens, Janis Joplin, and my new favorite artist, Arlo Guthrie. I guess I could still see him, because he's still performing. And, of course, I'd like to be there for 'The Star-Spangled Banner' by Jimi Hendrix on that final day."

"The greatest thing about working with Ang Lee is..."

"...you're working with a master and a true artist, so you know the experience is going to be really special. Ang gives you a lot of homework to do. He's very meticulous, which was exciting for me. You feel totally safe with him because you trust him so implicitly."

On-stage nudity, pining for Jennifer Garner, and more, after the jump...

Continue reading "Q&A With Jonathan Groff Of 'Spring Awakening' And 'Taking Woodstock'" >

Admittedly, they're not multiple-choice questions, but you can still sketch out your answers in pencil before you submit them if you like. (iStockphoto.com)

by Linda Holmes

We are reaching a changing of the seasons. The big summer movies have opened; the awards-baiting movies haven't begun. Fall television is just starting with things like Project Runway and Mad Men returning and big network shows still about a month away. There's a bit of a lull, and what's a lull good for? A moment of reflection, that's what.

So this is where I invite you to audit the culture around you -- both the good and the bad -- and consider a few questions in the areas of movies, TV, books, games, digital culture...whatever "popular culture" means to you. You can choose one, or answer as many as you can fit into the character limit, or you can comment more than once, if that suits you.

1. What has been your biggest pleasant surprise of the last three months? (This takes you, so you don't have to do math, back to late May.)

2. What has been the rudest surprise of the last three months?

3. What are you most looking forward to between now and New Year's?

4. What are you dreading most between now and New Year's?

5. If, at this moment, you could only watch television between now and December 31, or you could only see movies between now and December 31, which would you choose if you knew you couldn't go back later and catch up on what you missed?

6. If you could press one book you have read this year into the hands of ten strangers when they were trapped during a blackout with nothing to do but read, what would you give them?

7. What are you currently trying to like and finding it difficult to like?

8. If you could guarantee that five people -- actors, writers, directors, whoever -- would have their calendars filled with funded projects for the next five years, to whom would you grant full employment?

9. What do you love in spite of being outside the target demographic? (Example: "I am a nineteen-year-old dude and I loved The Proposal.")

10. If you could personally wave your wand and stop one trend -- toy movies, remakes, crime procedurals -- what would be your target?

In May 1967, The Beatles celebrated the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. They probably didn't know they'd still be making news 42 years later. (Hulton Archive / Getty Images)

by Linda Holmes

You may have heard about a hot emerging band with a lot of irons in the fire right now -- "The Beatles," anybody? I'm pretty sure they're going to be the next big thing.

Today's Beatles news is that Disney is working out a deal for Robert Zemeckis to access Beatles tunes to remake Yellow Submarine. Not only is a movie remake planned, but there's interest in a Broadway show.

In September, The Beatles will undoubtedly make huge headlines with the release of The Beatles: Rock Band, the new video game that will allow you to play along with the band. (For a whole lot more about the game, and about the Beatles, and about why people pick on guys who like to play Guitar Hero and Rock Band, see this marvelous recent article by Daniel Radosh from New York Times Magazine.)

All that is not to mention, of course, the fact that remastered versions of their entire catalogue on CD are scheduled for release in September as well.

Need more? "Why The Beatles Broke Up" is the cover story in the latest issue of Rolling Stone.

There's even some speculation that the Beatles' records could finally be coming to iTunes, but that still looks like wishful thinking as much as anything.

There tends to be a certain ebb and flow to interest in The Beatles, but this does seem like an interesting little uptick. I don't think there's any question that Guitar Hero has wildly increased the familiarity younger kids have with hair bands (I base this in part on my nephews' shockingly advanced knowledge of "Rock And Roll All Nite"); I'll be curious to watch for an increase in the visibility of Beatles tunes among ten-year-olds.

Tony Danza is all set to teach in a Philadelphia high school, and you can watch him do it on television. (Stephen Lovekin / Getty Images)

by Linda Holmes

There are as many Tony Danza jokes as there are stars in the sky: Who's The Boss jokes, "Keep On Truckin'" tattoo jokes, accent jokes, '80s-hair jokes, Taxi jokes...let's put those aside.

Those are not the reasons it's a bad idea for him to teach at a Philadelphia high school for A&E's new reality show, Teach. (Yes, this is a real thing.)

Danza has apparently studied education -- this isn't something he just came up with. And his on-screen persona doesn't mean he's a dumb guy. The ridiculousness of this idea has nothing to do with that, or with any assumption that having him co-teach a class is going to harm the students or deprive them of an education.

The superintendent says what shouldn't be said, after the jump...

Continue reading "Very Bad Ideas: Philadelphia Lets Tony Danza 'Teach' For The Cameras" >

This look on the face of Project Runway mentor Tim Gunn is not good news for this season six designer. (Mike Yarish / Lifetime Networks)

by Linda Holmes

After a very long wait, Project Runway -- which, remember, has left Bravo for Lifetime -- returns with its sixth season tonight. Season five ended in October 2008, so there's a lot of pent-up enthusiasm among people who are fans of the show, and nothing feeds pent-up enthusiasm like a little taste of the marvelously warm and funny Tim Gunn. Gunn is the show's teacher, mentor, skeptical-frowner, and source of a hearty cry of "Rally!" when a harried contestant really needs it.

Last night, he dropped by The Daily Show, where Jon Stewart chatted him up about what makes Runway so good, what the show's relocation to Los Angeles from New York has meant, and the fact that Gunn is about to show up in a Marvel comic.

The video, after the jump...

Continue reading "Tim Gunn Talks To Jon Stewart About 'Project Runway' And Being A Hero" >

by Linda Holmes

This week's Culturetopia podcast kicks off with a remembrance of guitar great Les Paul on the occasion of his passing. If you're a longtime fan -- or even if you're not -- don't miss the great music and the wonderful descriptions by NPR's Tom Cole, which help even the uninitiated understand what was special and unusual about the way Paul played.

From that poignant tribute, we move to a playful performance and discussion from musical duo Sam & Ruby, who dropped by Tell Me More to offer the lowdown on how they met and what they do. He's from Wisconsin; she's from Ghana; they met in Nashville. Beat that. Happily, my co-host this week is Alicia Montgomery, a Tell Me More producer, and she was able to offer some reflections having seen the performance for herself.

If you love animation, you're probably well aware that Hayao Miyazaki's new film Ponyo has just bowed, and Kenneth Turan's rave will undoubtedly make you even more determined to see it.

We've also got a story about a book that both is a fantasy novel and comments on fantasy novels: Lev Grossman's The Magicians.

And finally, speaking of the fine line between reality and fantasy, we have a fascinating look back at Woodstock from NPR's music librarian, who was there and has a few things to say about how to buy hot dogs for a crowd.

You can listen right here, or subscribe to the podcast and get our best arts and entertainment reporting delivered right to you every week.

by Linda Holmes

Tonight marks the return of Bravo's Top Chef, a maddeningly inconsistent show that can be (1) solidly classy and semi-educational, when people make really good food in interesting ways; (2) entertainingly goofy, when people try hard and their food comes out as undistinguished goo; (3) tame and boring, when people are very earnest about yet another seared scallop; or (4) trashy and irritating, when people fight and swear at each other.

And in keeping with this tendency to be either a lot of fun or really embarrassing, this season is going to Vegas.

In the clip above, the new batch of participants take on the first quickfire challenge, which is the mise-en-place relay. Now, without saying too much about how this goes -- the preview clip doesn't show very much of it -- it doesn't speak well of this set of contestants that four of them put together can't come up with the idea that if you are going to try to be the person who can shuck clams the fastest, you should have shucked a clam before at some point in your life, ever.

"Let's have the non-clam-shucker shuck the clams!" Let us all now clap sarcastically.

"Archie is proposing to Veronica! But -- but -- AIIIIEEEEE!" Please don't panic. (Archie Comics)

By Glen Weldon

Stand down, people; return to your homes. Stand down, CNN. Stand down, Associated Press. Stand down, guy who sold your 1942 issue of Archie #1 in a ginned-up protest over the snubbing of Betty. (That $37K you just made? Cold comfort, I know.)

Stand down, internet forum commenters expressing either alarm ("Veronica? WTF????") or arrant creepiness ("BOTH B AND V ARE HOT ARCHIE SHOULD GET EM BOTH IN THE SACK AT THE SAME TIME LOL.") You, especially, need to stand down. Just ... way, way down.

What's got some folks' argyle sweater vests in a bunch is a six-issue storyline that kicks off this week, set in the Riverdale of five-years-hence.

In Archie #600, which hits comic shops today but won't be on regular newsstands until next month (snack on that, Piggly Wiggly!), the post-college Archie Andrews pops the question to Veronica Lodge, she of the raven hair, conceited smirk and ample ... coffers. Next month, the wedding. The month after: It's twins!

(From that issue's press release: "Can Archie get through Lamaze class without causing a commotion?" A question for the ages.)

I realize this is going to sound redundant, as we're talking about a comic book that follows the wacky adventures of a kid with tic-tac-toe hair, but listen: It's just an Imaginary Story. They're not really getting married.

I shouldn't say "just" an Imaginary Story. Because the Imaginary Story has been around a long time - it's practically its own genre. It's as much a comic book staple as a comic book's ... staples.

A world of pure imagination: What Ifs, Elseworlds, and Superman and Batman as surburban dads, after the jump.

Continue reading "Archie Marries Veronica! Not a Dream! Not an Imaginary Story! Oh. Wait." >

Brett Favre has now unretired for the second time after retiring for the second time. He's harder to get rid of than many other things you would think would be hard to get rid of. (Scott A. Schneider / Getty Images)

by Linda Holmes

Yes, Brett Favre unretired. Again. Just like he did last year. We can think of nothing to say anymore except that Brett Favre is harder to get rid of than almost anything. He is harder to get rid of, even, than these 25 things.

1. Your garden's extra zucchini
2. Bedbugs wearing chain mail
3. Medically significant dandruff
4. Old couch stuffed with burning tires
5. Weird feeling that you left the iron on at home
6. Athlete's foot (exception: Brett Favre's foot)
7. Contents of huge cabinet marked "DOT-MATRIX PRINTERS (BROKEN)"
8. Movie rights to Roget's Thesaurus
9. Any tavern's friendliest drunk
10. Mustard stain on favorite shirt
11. Streaks of jelly in jar of peanut butter
12. Streaks of peanut butter in jar of jelly
13. Microsoft Word's helpful "Clippy"
14. Dark curse placed by toothless goblin during carnival mishap
15. Six-foot sphere of wadded trash bags thrown into landfill
16. Troupe of professional gadflies
17. Mall kiosk lotion demonstrator
18. Ads where guy sings about credit reporting
19. All those pennies
20. General sense that salmon was once cooked in this pan
21. Box of VHS tapes of Mr. Belvedere
22. Inherited record-breaking fruitcake collection
23. Yellowjacket nest guarded by family of armed raccoons
24. $50 gift card from Expired Food Depot
25. All lingering affection for Brett Favre

[Note: Of course famous athletes are pop culture, silly.]

Project Runway is just one of the many shows returning this fall that we could chat about on today's Talk Of The Nation. (Timothy A. Clary / Getty Images)

by Linda Holmes

One reason we're a little slow posting-wise today is that I'm preparing to show up on Talk Of The Nation this afternoon (along with The Man Who Spoils Everything In A Good Way, Michael Ausiello) to talk about fall television. It should be in the second hour of the show -- that means 3:00 p.m. in lots of places, but you can find the schedule for a broadcast near you right here.

Remember, this is a call-in show, so if you've always wanted to ask me to do long division in my head, here's your chance. (Warning: They will not actually put you on the radio to ask me to do long division in my head.)

Tom DeLay is going on Dancing With The Stars, and there's more precedent for the move than you might think. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)

by Linda Holmes

Until now, the answer to the question, "What do Melissa Joan Hart of Sabrina The Teenage Witch and former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay have in common?" was probably "Not much." But now, they are both set to appear on the upcoming season of Dancing With The Stars.

The potential for this to be highly bizarre is not to be underestimated. Do not think only of DeLay doing the regular tango, which I like to think of as the dirty dancing of the very sophisticated. Think of him doing the tango to "Beat It" or the Star Wars theme -- because in seasons past this show has set tangos to both.

Or perhaps he'd like to try the Lindy Hop dressed in gym shorts?

You get the idea. If DeLay sticks around, this could turn into a fairly spectacular spectacle. (And he's throwing himself into it, too, if his Web site is any indication.)

Still, DeLay is hardly the first politician (or former politician) to dabble in pop culture -- not by a long shot. Let's take a look back at some other "classics."

Arsenio, Nixon, Tip, and other single-namers, after the jump...

Continue reading "Tom DeLay Does The Tango, And Other Great Moments In Political Pop Culture" >

Peter Capaldi and Chris Addison play a foul-mouthed jerk and a less foul-mouthed semi-jerk in the wonderful comedy In The Loop, which you may or may not be able to see. (Nicola Dove / In The Loop Productions)

by Linda Holmes

I saw In The Loop yesterday -- it's a very effective, guffawingly hilarious political satire that features some of the best and funniest performances I've seen in quite some time. It's one of those that makes you think, "I have to go right out and recommend that movie to everyone I know."

Here's where it's playing.

So you can see it -- and you should -- if you're between Boston and D.C., or if you're around San Francisco or Los Angeles or Chicago, or if you're in one of the few other cities that's been chosen as a mid-nation representative of people who like indie movies: Minneapolis, Austin, Seattle/Portland...there are a handful of others.

But that single theater in Denver looks pretty lonely, doesn't it? Without that, there'd be nowhere to see it between San Antonio and Los Angeles.

The frustrations of distribution, after the jump...

Continue reading "Theatrical Geography: The Blanket Of Trash And The Dabs Of Quality" >

Salvatore (Bryan Batt) and Don (Jon Hamm) enjoy dinner with some new friends during the season premiere of AMC's Mad Men. (AMC)

by Linda Holmes

Last night's third-season premiere of Mad Men was called "Out Of Town," and while critic Alan Sepinwall has put forth a very viable theory that what ties it together is the concept of wishes, to me, it was an episode about travel -- or, really, about displacement.

More specifics and a call for your thoughts, after the jump...

Continue reading "'Mad Men' Kicks Off A Third Season With A Few Thoughts About Travel" >

Bryan Singer has been brought on to produce and perhaps direct a feature film version of Battlestar Galactica...but why? (Elisabetta Villa / Getty Images)

by Linda Holmes

If you were a fan of the recently wrapped Battlestar Galactica series on Syfy (then known as SciFi, sigh), perhaps you'd greet the idea of a feature film with enthusiasm. Perhaps having it come from director Bryan Singer, who did The Usual Suspects and the first two X-Men movies (along with the less well-received Superman Returns) would make a certain amount of sense.

But wait. It isn't at all clear whether the project to which Singer is now apparently attached has anything to do with the incarnation that just went off the air. It sounds at least as likely as not that it's entirely separate — a totally new approach to the same material, which might have as much to do with the Syfy Battlestar Galactica as the Syfy one did with the 1978 original. Which is to say: not much.

This seems like a bizarre move. If fans of the recent series can't be reassured that something of what they love will be preserved, then they will turn on this project with bitterness, and without them, it's hard to imagine why it should be made at all, let alone announced within months of the series' end.

According to Hitfix, this is a project Singer was working on as far back as 2001. But since 2001, there has been another entire version of this material that was very influential in sci-fi circles.

Fans might be ready eventually to see a new approach, but as Keith Phipps at The Onion A.V. Club said today, it seems a little bit ... soon for this.

by Linda Holmes

You can read more here about the winner of Ukraine's Got Talent, a woman named Kseniya Simonova, but first, check out the clip, in which she tells a World War II story with sand and light. It is, to say the least, remarkable.

Hat-tip to Metafilter.

(iStockphoto.com)

by Linda Holmes

I've discussed before my fondness for audiobooks, but news this morning about the decision to release the next Dan Brown novel as an e-Book and a hardcover at the same time got me thinking about the fact that I never read e-Books. At all.

I do know people who own Amazon Kindles, but I haven't gotten yet to the point where my desire not to carry books is worth carrying another thing with a charger and, of course, the potential to break. I'm not against them, and I don't share the "I love paper and glue" sentimental attachment that drives a lot of people to hang on to their physical hardcovers.

But I'd never read an e-Book on a PC, certainly. I'd never read one on a phone-sized device. I'd have to have one of the portable devices that would let me see a whole page at a time. And once I start envisioning that, then it seems like f it's heavy, then...it's heavy, and if it's thin and light, I'd be preoccupied with the idea of snapping it in half.

So I'm curious: Do you read e-Books? Do you like them? Is it satisfying? Do the negatives and positives balance in the right way for you? If you don't read them, what's holding you back? Is it cost? Logistics? Selection of titles? Most importantly, am I missing out?

Kate Winslet won the Oscar for Best Actress earlier this year. You may soon see her move to television. (Alberto E. Rodriguez / Getty Images)

by Linda Holmes

Variety reports that HBO may be about to pick up a miniseries adaptation of Mildred Pierce, starring Kate Winslet -- and written and directed by Todd Haynes, who made I'm Not There and Far From Heaven.

It's an interesting progression: television used to be primarily a place for people who hadn't yet made movies but hoped they eventually would, and then it became an equally welcoming place for people who have in the past made movies, and now, more and more, it's a perfectly viable place for people who remain bankable movie stars and filmmakers.

As Sunday night's premiere of the very cinematic Mad Men approaches, that line between television and film only gets finer.

(iStockphoto.com)

by Linda Holmes

Authors whose books I have read and liked: Janet Evanovich. Jennifer Weiner. Emily Giffin. Sophie Kinsella. As mentioned previously, Susan Elizabeth Phillips. So when I talk about "commercial women's fiction," or "chick lit," I am not talking down to it or up to it or through it: I'm in it. I've read it. I confess.

So when you headline an article "The Death Of Chick Lit," as Slate's "Double X" online magazine recently did for a piece by author Sarah Bilston, it at least piques my curiosity — which I guess is the point, right?

Let's put aside the following objections: (1) That the piece reads like a long advertisement for Sarah Bilston's next book. (2) That the piece does not announce, discuss or in any way imply the death of chick lit, but instead simply suggests that authors have to adjust their "commercial women's fiction" to fit the recessionary times — as Sarah Bilston did in her new book, which you should consider purchasing! (3) That the piece spends a lot more time on an author talking about her process than most people want to hear.

We will put these aside and move on to the thesis, which makes absolutely no sense to me.

I was always irritated by Carrie Bradshaw, after the jump...

Continue reading "Is The Recession Hurting Women's Fiction? Or Just Hurting Shoe Fiction? " >

You might have seen less of the presentation of a few of this year's Emmys -- but that plan was shot down after intense criticism. (Vince Bucci / Getty Images Entertainment)

by Linda Holmes

What have we learned from the dust-up over the Emmys' proposal to time-shift and slightly edit down the presentations of awards in eight categories, by presenting them just before the show and editing the footage a little? We have learned that people who are nominated for Emmys are very sensitive about the perceived slights in the way those awards are not only handed out, but televised. And now, they're getting their way.

The TV Academy has dropped the time-shifting plan, reportedly under threats from various guilds that if the awards in question weren't shown live -- and if every moment of clapping, hugging, standing around, and thanking your lawyer weren't televised -- the Academy would be punished with hefty license fees to use clips in future telecasts.

On the one hand, it seems ungracious to complain that not enough time is being spent televising yourself and those like you getting awards. It is a universe in which most of us simply don't live, where you can complain about the terms under which an award that's supposed to be an honor must be not only given but publicized. So much for "it's an honor just being nominated." Or even "It's an honor just actually winning the award."

But on the other hand, as previously discussed, how stupid was it to choose writers of dramas as one of eight awards you were seemingly demoting? It's all well and good to ask people not to take things as personal slights, but nerves are raw in Hollywood as much as they are everywhere else, and this is exactly how writers have often felt anyway -- that they are underappreciated compared to actors and directors. It's just about the most foolish and politically ham-handed way this could have been approached, for my money, and it's no surprise that it blew up in their faces.

by Neda Ulaby

This week's edition of Culturetopia, NPR's weekly podcast of our best arts and culture stories, has arrived. Listen right here, or subscribe to the podcast here.

This week: Nora Ephron talks about cooking up the new film Julie And Julia, and we hear a profile of a socially committed Senegalese rap pioneer.

We talk a little about John Hughes, the director of a number of classic 1980s teen comedies, who passed away last week at the age of 59.

We join Bob Mondello for a truly hilarious look back at a 1980s British TV series about Shakespearean acting. The series featured a bunch of unknown thespians who are some of today's biggest stars. We promise you will recognize them. The show has been released on DVD, and it makes the perfect present for the Patrick Stewart fan in your life.

You'll also hear a poignant interview with one of hip hop's first superstars, Kurtis Blow, on the occasion of his 50th birthday, and listen to professional ghostwriters expound upon the pleasures and perils of their profession. "I did anything," one says," to put ramen noodles in my bowl and a roof over my head."

Bon appetit!

From left to right: Rich Sommer, Elisabeth Moss, Aaron Staton, Bryan Batt, Vincent Kartheiser, Michael Gladis, and Christina Hendricks are part of the Mad Men cast that's raising the stakes for visually satisfying television. (AMC)

by Linda Holmes

The fawning over the attention to detail on AMC's Mad Men, which returns for a third season on Sunday night, can get a little precious, there's no question. When The New York Times spends an entire article discussing the creative process of simulating period cocktails and House Beautiful offers Mad Men-inspired decorating tips -- including a lead on a great typewriter for $140, because who wouldn't want that taking up some room? -- it feels a little fussy.

The thing is: it's all deserved, because this is the show that has made it harder than ever to claim that television is cheap-looking because it's television, and that it cannot be visually imaginative or interesting. It's the first show to build its reputation on its perfect look since HDTV came along and made that perfect look a much more important element of a high-end hour-long drama.

Continue reading "How The Luscious 'Mad Men' Is Making Cheap And Ugly Television Look Bad" >

by Linda Holmes

In the new movie District 9, it appears that we have been peacefully living with space aliens for more than 25 years when suddenly, we manage to provoke a violent confrontation. Why are we so bad at dealing with space aliens? Why can't we learn the basics, after so many years of (totally fictional) experience?

Does this look like a guy whose lease you want to terminate prematurely? (Columbia TriStar Pictures)

1. Do not try to evict giant spidery creatures that can fly and/or eat you. In the trailer above, the bureaucrat who's serving the "eviction notice" comes up to the armpit of the "tenant," and the "tenant" appears to be a lizard with a metal exoskeleton, or thereabouts. If you have convinced a bunch of super-powerful lizard-people who can leap from one building to another to live peacefully in what certainly looks to be the poor part of town, leave them alone.

The rest of the list, after the jump...

Continue reading "Five Ways Movie Governments Could Respond More Effectively To Alien Invasions" >

It's a little like The Ghost Whisperer. Well, not quite. (Image Comics)

by Glen Weldon

Someday I, your humble Monkey See comics blogger, will discover a comic. Someday I will be the first to fall in love with a new title and start talking it up with a fervor that will gratify many and unsettle more than a few.

Later, after the title in question goes on to win Eisners and Harveys and Oscars (did I mention it'll get optioned for a movie? Because it'll get optioned for a movie), people will credit me with plucking it from obscurity.

That's the phrase the historians will use, by the way: "Plucked from obscurity." My status as a plucker of discerning taste and insight will be acknowledged far and wide.

Yes, one day I shall be kingmaker, supreme arbiter of funnybook taste, bestower of Merit and Legitimacy.

Today is not that day.

Because Chew, the latest title for which I've fallen hard, has already been discovered. We're only three issues into its run, and the book's selling out, getting second and third print runs.

Inasmuch as Chew's immediate, out-of-precisely-nowhere success represents the comics-buying public deciding for itself what's good before critics get a chance to weigh in, let's just note that it HARDLY SEEMS FAIR.

Damn self-plucking comic.

We climb aboard what's already a surprisingly crowded bandwagon, after the jump.

Continue reading "Chew: Presenting The Well-Done Tale of a Medium Who Likes It Rare" >

by Linda Holmes

Fans of the musical Once will recognize its stars, Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, in this enormously charming Tiny Desk Concert straight from NPR Music, in which they showed off six new songs before finishing up with "When Your Mind's Made Up." It's impossible to convey how lovely -- how warm and genuine -- this performance was in person, but seeing the video, which really does show them sitting behind Bob Boilen's real desk surrounded by Bob Boilen's real stuff, is really stunning. More about the show here.

by Sarah D. Bunting

When I heard Jason Kersten, author of The Art of Making Money: The Story of a Master Counterfeiter, interviewed on The Leonard Lopate Show last month, I couldn't wait to get my hands on the book, which chronicles the rise of Art Williams from two-bit gangster to one of the Secret Service's most wanted manufacturers of bad money.

Williams himself cuts an interesting figure, and Kersten's writing is highly capable; he doesn't get bogged down in biographical sidebars, and when Williams' need to reconnect with his long-absent father leads to a major, and deeply pitiable, reversal of fortune, Kersten doesn't overwrite the sequence.

It's an excellent book, with lots of drama and fun factoids -- for a civilian. I am not a civilian. Friends, I am a currency nerd.

The habits, habitat, and inclinations of the currency nerd, and how to trace your own bills, after the jump...

Continue reading "Reading Microgenres: A Currency Nerd Reads 'The Art Of Making Money'" >

You can't even tell that the new Barbies based on Twilight are involved in a vampire-human romance. Or wait -- is that the point? (Mattel)

by Linda Holmes

So those are the Twilight Barbies that will be released by Mattel on November 1. For a closer look, check after the jump.

Continue reading "Passed Along Without Comment: Are These 'Twilight' Barbies Vampire-ish Enough?" >

NBC decided to preview the fall comedy Community (featuring Gillian Jacobs and Joel McHale) online. Results were mixed. (Lewis Jacobs / NBC)

by Linda Holmes

One of the fall pilots currently getting a decent amount of positive attention is NBC's Community, a comedy starring Joel McHale, the very funny host of the E! wrap-up show The Soup.

Trying to ramp up the positive word of mouth, NBC decided to post the pilot online for a few days to give people a chance to see it early. In keeping with the idea that you should start and end with the good stuff, let's sandwich the bad news in between the pieces of good news.

The limitations of social media, the importance of functionality, and the pleasures of a good joke, after the jump...

Continue reading "NBC Previews 'Community' On Facebook: Good News And Bad News" >

Rachel McAdams looks pretty happily married to the temporally mobile Eric Bana in The Time Traveler's Wife. But would that really be such a great situation? (Warner Brothers Pictures)

by Linda Holmes

Oh, sure, this one looks like Eric Bana, and it's all very romantic when he pops up out of nowhere — and the fact that you're separated by time and space at least allows you your alone time for reading.

But would being married to someone who can travel through time actually be enjoyable? I believe it would not be, and these are only the first 10 things I thought of that could potentially go wrong.

1. Wins the Oscar pool every time, and won't admit cheating by reading next week's Entertainment Weekly.

2. Lost car keys in nineteenth-century France; claims he can't go back for them due to "crippling fear of Napoleon."

3. Difficult to shop for; claims the future is a time of bounty where ownership of material goods by the individual is obsolete.

4. Separates coffee grounds from other trash and buries them wrapped in plastic sealed with duct tape; won't explain why except by shuddering and saying, "You'll know soon enough."

5. Annoys everyone at Thanksgiving by saying, "Well, that's not how the Pilgrims did it, but I'm sure whatever you think is fine."

6. Abrupt departure of his body from this temporal plane inevitably means a pile of dirty laundry on the floor.

7. Tries to milk extra sympathy for shaving cuts by claiming they're from the Battle Of Gettysburg.

8. Never shuts up about dinner with skinny Elvis; insists he co-wrote "Jailhouse Rock."

9. Really smug about having already seen all the Harry Potter movies.

10. Already forgot your next three birthdays.

When last seen, Grey's Anatomy's Izzie (Katherine Heigl) wasn't feeling well and was being tended to by her boyfriend Alex (Justin Chambers). Network television could use some TLC, too. (ABC)

by Linda Holmes

A month from now, during the week of Sept. 8, we'll be diving into the fall TV season. Yes, summer is full of a lot more new programming than it used to be, and seasons are far more fluid. But there's still a fall season, and once we hit the CW premieres on Sept. 8 and the regular-season kickoff of Fox's much-anticipated Glee on Sept. 9, it will be underway.

And yes, the top wish is "better shows." The top wish is always "better shows." Every show could be good, and the top wish would still be ... "better shows." Because as a viewer, that's what you always want. That's the easy part. And even aside from "better shows," there are a few things -- particularly at the networks -- that would help the season look a little more promising.

1. Portion control. There really aren't that many network reality shows that air during the regular season. But the ones that are on are on way too much. Even if you find Dancing With The Stars to be frothy and fun, the results show is consistently one of the least necessary hours of television around. And The Biggest Loser doesn't need to be two hours every single week. The amount of real estate these things occupy is massive, not so much because they proliferate as because they expand.

And by the way, when they eventually return, the bloated American Idol and Bachelor franchises could, no matter how you feel about their continued existence, benefit from a chop. Remember that the Idol results show used to be half an hour. There's no reason it couldn't be half an hour again. And if you remove the parts of The Bachelor that start with "Coming Up," it would be about 12 minutes long.

Two-minute overruns, saving Tim Gunn, and more, after the jump...

Continue reading "Five Pipe Dreams About Fall TV" >

by Linda Holmes

The reexamination of the best representations of teen angst continues! We have discussed John Hughes and Heathers, and now Hulu has found all 19 episodes of My So-Called Life.

Online archives of old shows can lead you right into a dark vortex of time-wasting (a friend and I recently stayed online late at night watching the famous "Intervention" episode of Party Of Five when we could have been doing more productive things, like...not watching it), but in this case, this particular show is so smart and so well-written that you don't even need to feel guilty.

Honestly, it's all worth it just so I can show you that clip up there, which is six seconds long and contains one of my favorite things ever said on television by an unhappy adolescent.

Of course, if you're looking for a nostalgia trip that's not so artistically sound, there's always the first 13 episodes of 21 Jump Street.

As Duke, Channing Tatum brings some charm to the latest toy-based smash hit, G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra. (Paramount Pictures)

by Linda Holmes

So, in what we might call Today's Consideration Of Summer Box Office, Part Two, a question: Was Paramount right about G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra?

As we discussed last week, Paramount clearly had confidence that it would do well whether critics reviewed it or not. In what the studio probably sees as vindication for that point of view, the movie brought in a robust $56 million at the domestic box office (a total of $100 million internationally) to finish first for the weekend.

But what about the other half of the equation? Paramount's decision not to screen the movie for critics seems to have been based on a suspicion that it would be panned, just as Transformers was earlier in the summer. For all the talk about letting the audience decide for itself, if they'd believed it was going to get Iron Man reviews, they'd have screened it.

And what happened?

Critics don't exactly get on board, but they don't throw flamethrowers at the train, either, after the jump ...

Continue reading "Weekend Box Office: Turns Out Happiness Is Just A Really Loud Thing Called 'Joe'" >

Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen is one of many kid-oriented movies to be successful this summer. (Paramount Pictures)

by Linda Holmes

I cannot recommend highly enough this rigorously even-handed piece by A.O. Scott in The New York Times, in which he discusses the "mass infantilization" at the movies that comes from cautious marketers wanting only to deal with proven brands and formulas that satisfy primarily children and adults' inner children. I must admit that even though I tend to tirelessly defend the legitimacy of entertainment designed to just be entertaining, there has been something vaguely demoralizing about this summer, and this piece nails it: it is the discomforting feeling that everything that's being deemed successful is something you could have appreciated as a seventh-grader.

You'll notice that Scott doesn't resent popcorn movies for being popcorn movies, or kids' movies for being kids' movies, and it's not about being too good for an action-based blowout. It's less about loss of quality and more about loss of variety. That's why he includes The Hangover in the problematic trend -- even though he calls it "riotous" and recognized in reviewing it that it's good at what it does, much of the time.

All blockbusters are not alike: last year's big action spectacles, after all, were The Dark Knight and Iron Man. This year's may turn out to be Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen and G.I. Joe. You don't have to be a poor sport -- or, as Scott puts it, a "pointy-headed grouch" -- to see something discouraging about that.

by Linda Holmes

We've been talking this week quite a bit about how much John Hughes knew about life in high school, but Daniel Waters, who wrote the 1989 blacker-than-black comedy Heathers, knew something too.

If Hughes understood the vulnerable, exposed bellies of sixteen-year-olds and the way high school can make you want to crawl inside a sleeping bag and not emerge until college, Waters understood, to put it plainly, the way high school can make you want to poison someone.

Waters understood how the overt bullying and covert sadism among high-school students is, at times, so brutal and relentless that if it took place outside the high-school context, you'd probably classify it as psychotic, or at least indicative of a very unquiet mind. Hughes understood how all the resulting anger can be turned inward; Waters understood how it might be turned outward -- and while they both wrote for laughs much of the time, you can tell that they both meant it.

Little Nicholson, why it's your friends who will kill you, and the color red, after the jump...

Continue reading "The Summer Of '80s Movies: 'Heathers'" >

Even the parts of Julie & Julia that are about Julie are really about Julia (Meryl Streep). (Sony Pictures)

by Linda Holmes

I'm not surprised by the reviews of Julie & Julia that consider it a movie in two parts, where the half that involves Meryl Streep playing Julia Child feels important and the half that involves Amy Adams playing Julie Powell doesn't. I'm not surprised by those who wish it were just a movie about Julia Child. But I think they miss the point a little.

It's important, I think, to understand that nobody is trying to compare the accomplishments of these women. Nobody is claiming that Julie Powell's year-long blog project cooking everything in Mastering The Art Of French Cooking puts her on an equal footing with Julia Child -- least of all Julie Powell. There are beats of similarity in their stories, in that they're both married, and in that they both love cooking and feel brought to life by it. But to recognize that one of these women dwarfs the other in stature isn't to undermine the movie; it's to grasp the entire point of the movie.

Great teachers and ordinary New Yorkers, after the jump...

Continue reading "'Julie & Julia': A Slightly Contrarian Defense" >

by Linda Holmes

Last night's midnight screening of G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra (uh, more about that later) was the first time I had seen this trailer for Old Dogs, from -- logically enough -- the director of Wild Hogs.

You remember Wild Hogs.

Now, here are some things in this trailer that concern me.

1. John Travolta.

2. Robin Williams.

3. John Travolta with Robin Williams.

4. Jokes about Japanese businessmen.

5. Kid-hit-in-the-face humor.

6. Golf-ball-in-the-groin humor.

7. Travolta in his womanizer guise.

8. Williams passing out with his face in his plate.

9. Justin Long with comical facial hair.

10. Camping humor.

11. Accidentally winding up in the zoo.

12. In the gorilla enclosure.

13. With a guy in a gorilla suit.

Balancing out all of this is Seth Green singing Air Supply, which could be pretty good. Okay, and possibly John Travolta being eaten by a penguin.

But as a whole, Old Dogs kind of terrifies me, as if they've taken everything about the modern whimsical family comedy that I dislike and stuffed it all into the same movie. Would it work to close my eyes through the whole thing except when Seth Green is singing?

by Neda Ulaby

This week, All Things Considered producer Sonari Glinton guest hosts on NPR's arts podcast, Culturetopia. He discusses working with host Melissa Block on an ongoing series about favorite summer songs. We'll play part of an interview with Adam Duritz, the lead singer and founder of the band Counting Crows, who tells us why he selected the English Beat tune "Save It For Later."

"There's just something about the joy of the song," he tells Block. "Like, it just seems so Technicolor to me."

We've also got a hilarious interview with Italy's most influential pop star, a look back at hard-boiled African-American detective writer Chester Himes and a story about turning Ray Bradbury's science fiction classic Fahrenheit 451 into a graphic novel...with, mind you, the master's permission.

On top of that, we've managed to squeeze in some great tape of Australian actor Eric Bana (Munich, The Time Traveler's Wife) doing some acrobatics with various accents, a moving story about a guy who writes people's life stories on postcards, and the meaning of comedy -- from writer-director Harold Ramis, best known as the one with the glasses in "Ghostbusters."

You can subscribe or download the podcast here. Or you can listen right here.

Enjoy!

As Ferris Bueller in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Matthew Broderick was one of John Hughes' many flawed but very human high-school students. (The Kobal Collection)

by Linda Holmes

UPDATE: If you haven't yet read this great story about John Hughes that's been kicking around Facebook and Twitter all day, I highly recommend it.

John Hughes never won an Oscar. He really never won awards at all. He made mainstream, popular entertainment. But for a period of time in the late 1980s, he made a series of movies, mostly about teenagers, that people still watch, still love, and still quote. And those movies have never really been replaced, because the guy knew something. These five moments are the best explanation I have of what it is he knew.

1. "Never had one lesson." There are many more famous moments in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but none is as important as Ferris (Matthew Broderick) squeaking incompetently away on a clarinet shortly after getting rid of his parents for the day, then leaning forward and declaring — in the fourth-wall-breaking style of the film — "Never had one lesson!"

Unlike a lot of the kids at the center of Hughes films, Ferris Bueller isn't an outcast; he's at ease everywhere. So if he'd conned his way into staying home to make trouble or play video games — or, for that matter, to do nothing — he would just be a brat.

But from the start, he is skipping school because he genuinely believes he has better things to do than attend high school, which is an awfully difficult premise to entirely deny. Skipping school so you can stay in your house isn't really a quest; it's just skipping school. Ferris wants something bigger than school.

John Hughes movies were very good at putting school in its place. Everything isn't about yearbook and cheerleading; kids have inner lives of legitimate importance, and not only with regard to dating. Sometimes those inner lives demand a day spent with your friends, watching baseball and seeing great art, instead of answering to your name in homeroom.

Four more, after the jump...

Continue reading "Five Great John Hughes Moments" >

In Julie & Julia, Amy Adams plays Julie Powell, who, among other things, struggles to perfectly poach an egg. (Sony Pictures)

by Linda Holmes

One scene in Julie & Julia, which opens tomorrow, concerns a series of attempts by Julie Powell (Amy Adams) to cook simple poached eggs according to the directions given in Julia Child's book Mastering The Art Of French Cooking. It was part of Powell's year-long effort to cook her way through the entire book.

And it's going to sell a lot of copies of the book, even though the recipes call for not only pounds and pounds of butter but ingredients like, say, a calf's foot. (Not available at your supermarket, probably, but necessary for the aspics — kind of like meat Jell-O — that Powell and her friends and family gritted their teeth to get through.) The movie does kind of make you want to try something. And since I am nothing if not my own guinea pig, I decided to try the poached egg.

How it went, including all the photographic evidence, after the jump...

Continue reading "Poaching An Egg Like Julia Child: In Which Deception Plays A Large Role" >

by Linda Holmes

Consider the trailer for Martin Scorsese's upcoming Shutter Island, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, to be the latest example of a trailer that appears to give away so much that it's hard to imagine what can really be surprising about the movie once you see it.

Let's go over just the information they've handed us.

Why ruin the movie before anybody sees the movie? After the jump...

Continue reading "'Shutter Island': What Could Possibly Be In The Movie That Isn't In The Trailer?" >

Judy Garland, seen here in 1942, is the star of the day at Turner Classic Movies. (Eric Carpenter / Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

by Linda Holmes

A quick programming note: August is "Summer Under The Stars" month at Turner Classic Movies. All month, they're spotlighting a different actor every day. They've already done James Coburn, Harold Lloyd, Marion Davies, James Mason, and Henry Fonda. And today, it's Judy Garland.

As of this writing, a run of her musicals with Mickey Rooney is already underway, and will wrap up with Strike Up The Band at 10:45 a.m. They'll be showing several musicals she made with Gene Kelly (including For Me And My Gal, Summer Stock, and The Pirate) as well as In The Good Old Summertime, the musical version of the same story in The Shop Around The Corner and You've Got Mail. It's certainly not a comprehensive retrospective, but there's lots of good stuff for fans.

Check out today's schedule, and look out for some powerhouse days coming up, including Bette Davis on Saturday, Cary Grant on Sunday, Audrey Hepburn on Tuesday, Glark Gable on Wednesday...there's a lot to see. The site for the series is annoying to navigate, but will reveal, if you are patient, who's featured for the rest of the month. Sidney Poitier, Elvis Presley, Gene Hackman, John Wayne...a little something for everyone.

by Linda Holmes

Any time a scary movie apparently involves a decent-sized cast of people placed in a closed environment, it's a good time to play a game I like to call Pets Or Meat.

This comes from Roger & Me, in which Michael Moore meets a woman who sells what her sign calls "Rabbits Or Bunnies - Pets Or Meat." In your average scary movie with a sizable cast, there are some characters you can look at and immediately know: That guy is going to die. They are the Meat.

Others are the ones you're meant to identify with, and they have a reasonable chance of surviving. They are the Pets. These are tried-and-true tropes, and it takes a bold filmmaker to work against them successfully: Part of what makes Psycho a classic shocker is that it kills an apparent Pet, rather than just all the Meat. Got it?

Let us examine the Pets and the Meat of this week's A Perfect Getaway, starring Steve Zahn, Milla Jovovich, Timothy Olyphant, and Kiele Sanchez, along with Marley Shelton and Chris Hemsworth.

And I will stress: I am writing this while completely unspoiled about this movie. Haven't seen it, and am well prepared to be completely wrong. The fun is in the guessing.

The difficulty of Steve Zahn here and in general, after the jump...

Continue reading "Pets Or Meat? Let's Play Guess-the-Victim In The New Thriller 'A Perfect Getaway'" >

In Wii Sports Resort, you can try your hand at 12 new minigames that improve significantly on the original Wii Sports. (Nintendo)

by Glenn McDonald

After much anticipation, Nintendo has finally shipped Wii Sports Resort, the follow-up to the Wii Sports title that's bundled with the Wii console. As an added bonus, Wii Sports Resort comes with the newest Wii hardware peripheral -- the Wii MotionPlus, an add-on that greatly improves the game's motion sensitive controls. As such, Sports Resort is a blockbuster game release, the equivalent of a summer tentpole movie, designed for maximum market penetration.

Good thing it's good.

The minigames, the new accessory, and the possible drawback, after the jump...

Continue reading "Wii Sports Resort: Socialize, Buzz The Putting Green, And Squelch Aggression" >

Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid On Earth is an example of a comic where the art is doing its job. (Random House)

by Glen Weldon

Last week, NPR Arts correspondent Lynn Neary had an enlightening piece on All Things Considered about the new graphic novel adaptation of Ray Bradbury's classic Fahrenheit 451. I say enlightening, because one learns several things upon listening to it, among them:

One:
Bradbury refers to the book as "Fahrenheit Four-Five-One," and not, as you probably do, "Fahrenheit Four-Fifty-One." Huh.

Two:
Artist Tim Hamilton struggled with the classic Adapter's Dilemma (What to include? What to exclude?).

Three:
To the surprise of precisely no one, I sound on the radio exactly like the gigantic nerd I know myself to be off the air. ("Many-tendrilled creature?" Seriously?)

Four:
Bradbury's book isn't really about censorship, it's about a creeping societal apathy toward culture in general and literature in particular.

Four Point One:
Bradbury wrote the book in the early 50's, and was way out in front of the TV-rots-your-brain movement.

Four Point Two:
A smart writer like Bradbury could see the threat TV posed to his livelihood, and no doubt wrote the book feeling the hot breath of Uncle Miltie on the back of his neck.

In the piece,I also pontificate about good graphic novels evincing "a tension between text and image." Several people have asked what I meant by that, which is my fault for talking in the abstract (see above, in re: huge nerditude, pontification).

Let me try to put it more concretely: In the best graphic novels/comics/sequential art/whatever, the art doesn't just sit there. It doesn't simply illustrate what the words are describing, because comics are more than just books with pictures.

No, the art takes over a share of the heavy lifting. It does its own, independent narrative work: it characterizes, sets the tone, advances the plot, etc.

The art, in other words, gets off its damn butt.

After the jump: Art that puts in a hard day's work, and how the Watchmen movie is -- literally -- illustrative.

Continue reading "Tension Deficit Disorder: Why Some Comics Work - And Some Don't " >

Paula Abdul has been on American Idol since day one. Is she out the door? (Jason Merritt / Getty Images)

by Linda Holmes

I think many of us who follow this sort of thing assumed that the ongoing back-and-forth between Paula Abdul and American Idol over her contract for the upcoming season was so much highly visible posturing. But maybe not.

Tonight, Abdul took to her Twitter feed to announce, "With sadness in my heart, I've decided not to return to Idol." At first, it seemed like this too might be posturing, but then Fox made a statement seemingly accepting her tweet of resignation. With the season's auditions starting within days, this is either a massive and high-risk attempt at bluff-calling on one or both sides, or she's really going.

If she does, that wouldn't seem to be good for anybody. It's not good for her, because she isn't as valuable anywhere else as she is on that show. And it's not good for the show, because for all her periodic incoherence, she had -- not a a heart of gold, but perhaps a heart of mashed potatoes, the fluffy and inoffensively comforting nature of which provided balance to the more aggressive judging from the rest of the panel (which will now apparently be made up of Simon Cowell, Randy Jackson, and Kara DioGuardi, who was new last year).

Moreover, she's the only one on the panel with a legitimate -- if brief -- history as a pop star. The Paula Abdul moment, around the time she had a hit with"Straight Up," may have been a short one, but it existed. Now, they're left with a panel of industry people -- people who do production and songwriting, but who haven't had success taking the stage to perform as solo artists, which is, after all, what the winner is supposed to do. Granted, worrying about the credibility of the American Idol judging panel is a little like worrying about the cleanliness of your hovel, but nevertheless, it doesn't help.

It remains to be seen whether the next 48 hours will suddenly bring more flexibility on someone's part. But when Abdul says she's leaving and it's a done deal, and her employer says she's leaving and it's a done deal, it takes a real optimist (or pessimist, depending on your position regarding Paula Abdul) (understanding that you may well not have one) to assume you'll be seeing her judge this year's crop of caterwaulers.

(You can read another take on this from Andrew Wallenstein of The Hollywood Reporter here.)

Colette Burson (here with her husband and Hung co-creator Dmitry Lipkin) raised a few eyebrows with her comments about the scarcity of women who are pretty, funny, and over 35. (Jason Merritt / Getty Images)

by Linda Holmes

Well, that was an unfortunate thing to say.

As part of a New York Times Magazine profile of Anne Heche, who appears on the HBO drama Hung, the show's co-creator, Colette Burson, talked about how lucky they were to cast Heche and said, "We auditioned a lot of people...It is incredibly difficult to find beautiful, talented, funny women over 35."

Zoiks.

After finding herself on the receiving end of a lot of criticism, Burson has now reached out to the blog Women And Hollywood to clarify her remarks. (Since I mentioned her comments on Twitter this morning, it seemed fair to discuss her follow-up.)

She says that what she meant to say was that there are so few roles for beautiful, talented, funny women over 35 that they've all quit in frustration, so they don't go out on auditions anymore and you can't get anyone to come out.

Upon reading it, it struck me that her explanation would make a lot more sense if she'd said, "We couldn't find people to audition," rather than "We auditioned a lot of people." The way she said it, it doesn't seem to speak to a shortage of prospects so much as a conclusion that plenty of people showed up, but they weren't talented enough, funny enough, or pretty enough.

And, strikingly, she sticks to her guns on the fact that the combination of pretty and funny is inherently rare, adding that it's "talked about in Hollywood." Certainly, pretty (in Hollywood terms) is rare, and really funny is rare, so mathematically, that would make pretty and funny rare. But then Burson says "blonde and funny" is also rare.

Blonde and funny? What is the possible rational connection between being blonde and being funny? If natural blondes dye their hair, are they funnier? Can you take a brunette and make her a blonde and make her a funny blonde? Is it genetic? Cultural? What is the theory under which brunettes are funnier than blondes?

It's undoubtedly good for business that Burson spoke out, and you can't blame her for shifting the focus to the lack of roles for women over 35, which is certainly real. And she seems to have some history taking gender politics seriously in her work (that link goes to her frank discussion of a movie she wrote about the sex lives of teenage girls, by the way).

But it leaves some interesting questions open about what's part of the solution and what's part of the problem, when it comes to casting for women who are -- as she put it -- over 35.

Paramount is aiming G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra at "mid-America." But what do they mean by that? (Paramount Pictures)

by Linda Holmes

In today's Los Angeles Times, there's a discussion of Paramount's decision not to screen G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra for critics, but instead to start with a military audience and aim at "not Hollywood or Manhattan but rather mid-America."

Let's put aside for a moment the just possibly disingenuous claim that a movie is not being screened for critics because you want a pure experience for Grand Rapids and not because, perhaps, it's not very good. Let's assume this is really the plan: "mid-America."

What does that mean, exactly? In this formulation, "mid-America" seems to include everything except Hollywood and Manhattan. It includes sort of southern-rock stuff, like marketing the movie during Kid Rock shows. It includes showing ads at the Mall of America, about a half-mile from an apartment where I once lived, which is part of the reasonably cosmopolitan and insistently high-culture-friendly Minneapolis/St. Paul area.

The irony of this attempt to speak to "mid-America," to claim to be addressing them when Hollywood so often overlooks them, is that it's a positively bizarre construct to conflate everything outside Hollywood and Manhattan as one giant "mid-America" blob -- mid-coast Maine, Gulf Coast Mississippi, the Iron Range in Minnesota, suburban Cleveland, North Dakota...it's all, under this definition, "mid-America."

And, remarkably, the L.A. Times notes that they're aiming an awful lot of marketing at "just one segment of the audience." That being the one segment of the audience that includes people at the Mall of America and people at Lynyrd Skynyrd shows, which -- I am here to tell you -- are not necessarily part of any common especially narrow segment.

The entire issue of the "flag-waving, NASCAR-loving American" as the focus of your marketing -- while lots of people certainly wave flags and like NASCAR, no matter what part of the country you're in -- seems a bit condescending, doesn't it? Not because it's accurate or inaccurate, but because it takes hundreds of cities and communities, large and small, agricultural, industrial, suburban, whatever -- and makes them one giant "mid-American" mass of humanity.

Nobody likes to feel lumped together -- Minnesota and Wisconsin are probably about as close as you can get to states that are similar in the popular imagination, and if you talk about them like they're the same, you're going to get two guys beating you up -- one will have a Viking helmet on and the other one will be pounding on you with a wheel of cheese. (So to speak.)

by Linda Holmes

In an effort to control the length of the Emmy telecast, the television Academy recently announced that it would be pre-taping the presentation of eight awards earlier in the evening and then showing edited versions during the live broadcast. The idea is to, as this year's host Neil Patrick Harris put it, "edit down the standing and the hugging." In other words, the presentation of the award will still be shown during the live broadcast, but in a sort of "Earlier tonight, this happened" kind of way.

The eight awards affected will include two each in acting, directing, writing, and producing, and the time saved will be devoted to showing highlights from the year in television -- including shows that aren't nominated.

On the one hand, it's odd to devote time during an awards show to things that aren't nominated for awards. But on the other hand, the Oscars have done this forever in their various clip packages of the year in movies, and both the Emmys and the Oscars understand that it hurts them when the big shows and movies that people actually watch don't have a presence.

The decision has actually spawned a large protest among TV writers, who already feel shafted by the lack of attention they get during the telecast and feel further slighted now.

Indeed, while most of the categories apparently under discussion involve miniseries and movies, which is at least an understandable choice, there is something particularly off-putting about adding Outstanding Writing In A Drama Series to the list, considering that it may be the single award that has more to do with the recognition of genuinely good dramatic television than any other.

It's not especially flattering to stage a protest over a reduction in the attention given to your own award, in principle, but in this case, the writers would seem to have a point. There ought to be somewhere else to find the extra seconds that writers spend hugging each other.

The Parsifal Mosaic, the apex of Robert Ludlum's career as an author of bad spy novel titles, will soon become a film under the direction of Ron Howard.

by Andy Carvin

It's been eight years since prolific spy novelist Robert Ludlum passed away, but thanks to Hollywood's penchant for milking some authors until there are no stories left to tell, we're still able to enjoy one of Ludlum's greatest gifts: the art of the absurd spy movie title.

From his very first literary offering, 1971's The Scarlatti Inheritance to The Bancroft Strategy, published posthumously in 2006, Ludlum managed to crank out a new spy novel almost every single year of his professional career. And the vast majority of them had that same three-word formula.

(The only two books of his that broke that structure were The Road to Gandolfo and The Road To Omaha, which apparently must've been gunning for big-screen premieres starring Bob Hope and Bing Crosby.)

Perhaps the best-known Hollywood adaptation of Ludlum's works is the Bourne series -- The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy and the Bourne Ultimatum -- starring Matt Damon. But there have been more than half a dozen other Ludlum films and miniseries, all of which utilized the same three-word formula, from The Rhinemann Exchange to The Hades Factor.

And now, director Ron Howard is getting into the mix, with last week's announcement that he'll be at the helm of a film adaptation of Robert Ludlum's -- wait for it -- The Parsifal Mosaic, perhaps the most deliciously ludicrous of all Ludlum titles.

Even for the entire spy movie genre, it's definitely near the top of the heap: earlier today, I saw documentary filmmaker John Pavlus quip on Twitter, "Ron Howard's next project will wrest honors for 'worst-titled spy movie ever' from Quantum of Solace."

John may indeed be right, but I think we can do even better than that. So here's our challenge to you: come up with the worst spy movie title ever, using Ludlum's three word formula. The only rule we'll require is that the first word is "The" and the third word is a noun; the rest of it is up to you. Personally, my favorite Ludlum formula works like this:

"The" + [Greek mythological hero OR theoretical physicist's surname] + [noun relating some type of situation]

...which gives us some potential titles such as The Heisenberg Incentive, The Szilard Conspiracy, The Achilles Dilemma and The Priapus Conundrum.

Think you can do better? Post your absurd spy movie titles below or tweet with the tag #AbsurdSpyMovies. We'll go through your suggestions and share some of our favorites. And maybe - just maybe - Hollywood will come knocking on your door.

You can follow Andy Carvin on Twitter here to keep up with lots of good stuff from the world of NPR social media. (And, as always, you can follow Monkey See here).

by Linda Holmes

Tonight's TV brings a lot of fairly lowbrow reality, plus a couple of new episodes of high-end cable shows, so you may consider it a blend of the sublime and the ridiculous.

Starting off, logically enough, with the threat of bloodshed, the Discovery Channel's Shark Week has become such a pop-culture staple that it inspired a 30 Rock joke (in which Tracy Morgan's character gave the solemn, carpe diem-like advice, "Live every week like it's Shark Week").

But it is, in fact, Shark Week. You can read all about it at Discovery's site, including tonight's shows, Deadly Waters and Day Of The Shark 2. (Based on the description, I don't think you'll be confused if you missed the original Day Of The Shark.) (Discovery, 9:00 p.m.)

What's overexposed, irritating and back from hiatus? Jon & Kate Plus 8, which will undoubtedly be as uncomfortable as ever. I don't point this out so much to tell you to watch it as to warn you that it will undoubtedly start popping up in the news again. So be ready. (TLC, 9:00 p.m.)

In significantly better news, Anthony Bourdain is covering street food of all kinds tonight on No Reservations, and that's almost guaranteed to be interesting. (Travel Channel, 10:00 p.m.)

And believe it or not, when I wrote about the new rash of cake shows on Thursday, I didn't realize that there was yet another cake show coming. Tonight is the premiere of TLC's new Ultimate Cake-Off, in which accomplished cake professionals compete to create "the ultimate cake." (TLC, 10:00 p.m.)

Finally, Showtime has new episodes of Weeds and Nurse Jackie, so all is not lost, scripted television fans! (Showtime, 10:00 p.m./10:30 p.m.)

by Linda Holmes

So the good news for Judd Apatow is that Funny People was the top movie in theaters this weekend. But the bad news is that it was a pretty light weekend of moviegoing, and that top spot only brought the movie about $23.4 million, which is being widely hailed as a disappointment.

It's a lot of money, but compared both to other Apatow-directed movies (specifically The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up) and to other Adam Sandler movies, it's a letdown. Of course, it's a more serious Apatow movie and a more serious Sandler movie than average, so drawing conclusions about what it means for future pure comedies from either one is a stretch. As Box Office Mojo notes, it's bad for a Sandler comedy, but good for a Sandler drama.

It's a wild overstatement to declare that this single weekend is "cold proof that Judd Apatow's hot streak is over", because -- just as we discussed with regard to Will Ferrell after Land Of The Lost bombed -- the magnitude of the streak is generally overstated to begin with.

Not every movie is Knocked Up, after the jump...

Continue reading "Weekend Box Office: Let The Overanalysis Of The Apatow Problem Begin" >

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

by Linda Holmes

At the World Science Festival in June, Bobby McFerrin did this demonstration with the audience. It's a little exercise using a pentatonic (five-note, rather than seven-note) scale, and it's really something.

Over at BoingBoing, which is where I saw it, they're having an interesting discussion in the comments about what can and can't be learned from it, but it'll give you a kick the first time you see what he's up to, and it certainly may make you think that people respond to music and musical scales in ways we only partially understand.

by Linda Holmes

Given that he's a guy who takes a lot of abuse and a guy almost everyone will gamely impersonate if given the chance, Keanu Reeves has had a much more interesting career than you'd think. In fact, if you look at his resume, he's bounced around from genre to genre as much as almost any actor you're going to encounter.

He's done action movies (Point Break, Speed, obviously The Matrix), he's done overwrought dramas (The Devil's Advocate), he's done romantic melodrama (Sweet November, The Lake House, A Walk In The Clouds), he's done highly respectable award-winners (Dangerous Liaisons, My Own Private Idaho), he's done Shakespeare (Much Ado About Nothing), he's done goofball farce (Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure), he's done light romantic comedy (The Replacements), and he's done middlebrow crowd-pleasing comedy (Parenthood, Something's Gotta Give).

He's actually kind of a fascinating guy, even if I'm as fond as anyone of yelling, "Cans! There was no baby! It was full of cans!" (Thank you, thank you.) (See here, starting at about the 6:20 mark, for the original.)

And the first movie where people really talked about him was River's Edge, which won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Film in 1987, beating out not only The Big Easy starring Dennis Quaid, but also John Sayles' Matewan.

How does it look more than 20 years later? Well...it looks, for lack of a more precise word, very, very weird.

In fact, it's appropriate that this is the movie Crispin Glover was promoting when he made his famous apparently unhinged appearance on what was then Late Night With David Letterman on NBC, because "unhinged" doesn't even begin to describe it.

A kick in the head, advice from a fashion genius, why Dennis Hopper didn't need a blow-up doll, and more, after the jump...

Continue reading "The Summer Of '80s Movies: 'River's Edge' Needs Coco Chanel's Best Advice" >

by Linda Holmes

The latest in the Summer Of '80s Movies series is 1987's Wall Street*, which won Michael Douglas an Oscar and guaranteed that "greed is good" would live on in our grab-bag of overused cultural cliches forevermore. It was also a major step in the rise of Oliver Stone, who had won an Oscar for Best Director the year before (for Platoon) and would, in the next few years, make films including Born On The Fourth Of July, The Doors, Nixon, and -- of course -- JFK.

And what's shocking, seeing Wall Street 22 years after its release, is how aggressively bad it is.

Huge cell phones, Spader problems, unlikely speeches, and lots more, after the jump...

Continue reading "The Summer Of '80s Movies: 'Wall Street' And The Gargantuan Cell Phone Problem" >