If summer means you can start catching up on your movies, these mags will tell what’s out there, from “The Avengers” to the rest. No butter on the popcorn, please, we’ll be on a summer diet.
Only a die-hard tech dweeb could love Sci Fi magazine’s June issue. The Sci Fi Channel glossy magazine for basement-dwelling thirty-something fanboys,delivers its best assessment of Marvel’s blockbuster flick “The Avengers,” which reads more like sycophantic marketing drivel than fascinating insight into the production of the burgeoning Marvel comic book move franchise. When the geeky mag isn’t shilling for Marvel Studios, it’s offering a roster of sci-fi pilots set to air next season on TV, which, based on some of their plot descriptions, appear to be utterly forgettable and destined for the chopping block.
MovieMaker magazine, a genuinely filmmaker-centric magazine, features an interesting Q&A with comedic star Will Ferrell. The Saturday Night Live alum is set to roll out his latest film, “Casa de mi Padre.” The movie is being done entirely in Spanish, a language that’s not native to Ferrell, but sure to be funny/offensive or both. Ferrell’s also set to team up with Zach Galifianakis in another movie, political satire “Dog Fight.”
If you’re looking for the art summer blockbuster movie scene, filmcomment is a very complete guide. Though there are the laughable film geek references, including one to neo-neorealist observational cinema, there are plenty of movie reviews that are easy to follow, and scads of cool lists, like critics’ best 20 movies of the year. “The Tree of Life” wins hands down.
Entertainment Weekly is the McDonald’s of pop culture magazines. It’s tasty, you don’t have to think too hard about what you want from it but it kind of leaves you wanting. Gone are the days when EW used to serve up the kind of insider morsels that would give entertainment trade magazines a run for their money. Now it reads like People or US Weekly. This week “The Avengers” gets the cover treatment and there’s a host of different covers featuring all the superhero stars, and a center spread on a round table with the director, Joss Whedon, and the stars.
The New Yorker reports that George Hotz, the 22-year-old New Jersey native who sparked a global cyberwar after hacking Apple’s iPhone and Sony’s Playstation 3, was invited to Sony headquarters last May by curious engineers, and “walked into the building eating from a box of Lucky Charms, dropping marshmallows across the lobby.” Was this to mark an escape path? We aren’t told, but we are impressed by Hotz’s “agnostic” attitude toward Anonymous and LulzSec, hacker groups whose members have been indicted after ruthlessly hacking Sony’s systems on Hotz’s behalf after he got sued by Sony. “If they were that good, they wouldn’t have got caught,” Hotz says.
Which mainstream periodical, liberal or conservative, is the most shamelessly obsessed with obscene luxury? Even the New York Times and its Dining In and Dining Out sections would have trouble competing with New York. This week, a write-up on Watergate, which finds some provocative questions in Ben Bradlee’s old papers, gets five pages. Meanwhile, we get six pages about Chloe Sevigny’s East Village garden co-op and Zach Braff’s 2,600-square-foot high-rise spread above Union Square, previously occupied by legendary Broadway director Tom O’Horgan. “I wish these walls could talk,” Braff says, despite the fact that he’s covered them all with wood from old barns.
Out of a job? Underwater on your mortgage? Freaked out about your kids’ education and your retirement? Well, don’t worry, because “America is winning,” Newsweek declares on its cover. In a supremely breathless essay that doesn’t bother to acknowledge the basics, we are told to cheer up because, hey, look at the market value of Apple, Google and Facebook. “Sure, they employ relatively modest numbers of people,” the mag admits. But “think of what iTunes has done for the publishing, music, and entertainment industries.” You mean apart from siphoning away their profits and leaving them on the brink, forcing young artists to shill for Diesel jeans to produce a record? Please, remind us.
Sci Fi Channel, Will Ferrell, The Avengers, The Avengers, Zach Galifianakis, George Hotz, summer blockbuster movie, Marvel Studios, Zach Braff, Sony
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