Fall brings foliage and a fresh look at the entertaiment mags, which are desperately seeking your attention. Here’s how the category leaders stack up:
This week’s Entertainment Weekly treats us to a very advance look at awards season, and Managing Editor Jess Cagle clearly favors “The Master,” generally known as “The Scientology Movie.” But its “News and Notes” section, a kind of pink pages for the horse race, barely mentions what it’s about. The review section gives it full treatment but includes this worrying analysis: “The movie may not be fully comprehensible on first viewing.” In general, EW is a lightweight read, unless you want to go deep and know every nerdy fact about “The Big Bang Theory.” (The sheets on Howard’s bed are from Bed Bath and Beyond.) We hope EW wasn’t paying Michael Patrick King for his guest column on his creation “2 Broke Girls.” It’s not really about vagina jokes, he says, but about the heart and how friendship makes being poor more palatable. Come on! It’s about vagina jokes.
Turns out TV Guide, the graybeard of the entertainment magazine set, is still the go-to title for your favorite shows, and it does a good job of covering the infinite world of cable, too. In fact, the guide keeps up with the times by making it known this is the Fall Cable Preview. It’s not just broadcast you need to know about anymore. So, for a relic of more quaint TV times, the guide still delivers. It even lets you know what movies are coming on demand this week. With navigating television so much more complicated these days, you might just want a guide.
Time Out New York’s attempt to give its readers the most titillating alternative entertainment options falls short. The weekly mag features an issue geared almost exclusively to New York’s most populous borough in all its Barclays Center debut weekend glory. Its various Brooklyn lists seem out of whack with the Barclays Center theme. For example, instead of pointing out the best places to eat after a night at the Nets new arena — two-dozen new bars in the area have requested liquor licenses and a number of new restaurants have cropped up in the past year — TONY oddly includes bookstore Unnameable Books and the Brooklyn Museum as go-to venues in the borough’s Prospect Heights area. Those who see TONY as an aid to scheduling weekends might find themselves frustrated as the mag doesn’t do a great job consolidating key events into a day-by-day chart. Elsewhere, TONY offers a list of new chefs setting up shop in Brooklyn, including cook Brad McDonald, who earned his stripes at Per Se and Noma and opened Colonie recently on Atlantic Avenue.
Grocery tycoon Ron Burkle tells the New Yorker he’d “rather have a root canal” than be interviewed, then proceeds to unspool a slew of equally implausible, desperate and downright pathetic assertions. Of his recent investments in Hollywood, Burkle says, “a lot of people do it because they want to meet girls, they want a producer card, whatever,” as if this weren’t something that hadn’t been applied to him by the media over the years. While his ruthlessness shines through, the story also notes how Burkle’s investors have suffered through very mixed results.
How do we know the American Dream is truly dead? When it no longer pays to be a rock star. For those who still harbor aspirations, New York’s profile of Grizzly Bear should put those to rest. Despite being one of the most successful and critically acclaimed indie rock groups of the past decade, some of the quartet’s members don’t have health insurance. The group is preparing for a sold-out show at Radio City Music Hall as it launches a widely anticipated new album, yet singer Ed Droste has been living in the same 450-square-foot Williamsburg apartment for more than six years. “I’d like to someday own a house, and be able to have children, and be able to put them through school,” Droste says. Anyway, thanks for the free downloads, guys!
In a cover story on Mitt Romney and his Mormonism, Time has a little fun with photos. There’s a picture of Mitt’s own formidable nuclear family, which features five sons and 18 grandchildren. But above it, we see a photo of his great-granduncle George Romney Sr., posing in 1911 with a staggering litter that included 35 children he produced with the help of three wives. The accompanying story, however, is as bland and wishy-washy as the candidate himself can be at times. It does note high up, however, that Mormon founder Joseph Smith believed that the US is “the terrestrial home of the Garden of Eden.”