Will you be able to buy snacks as you watch “The Hunger Games?” Just asking. There may not be enough popcorn in the world if the box office lives up to the hype.
US scores its own blockbuster with a splashy special edition on the wildly anticipated flick. It’s got 125 hot biopics of the stars, including childhood photos of Jennifer Lawrence as an elementary school cheerleader, and Josh Hutcherson as a little lad hugging his pair of spaniel pups. US packed its issue with so much insider material about the performers and the locations that it’s certain to be scooped up by the public both before and after seeing the film.
If it weren’t for the movie, People wouldn’t have much news to dish on. That’s put the mag in overkill, er, overdrive mode. Elsewhere, the magazine offers up a powder puff Q&A with The Bachelor’s Ben Flajnik, who is allowed to get away with such lines as “If you look at the pictures, I’m not kissing her,” and “I’m physical and affectionate with friends — guys and girls.” This in response to accusations that he cheated on his controversial paramour Courtney Robertson, during a break, weeks after he proposed to her on the dating reality show.
In her interview with Glamour, Lawrence doesn’t exactly come across as a young woman who reads Glamour. “I really hate shopping,” she says, violating what we guess would be Rule No. 1 for the magazine’s readers. “It’s awful. Once a year I’ll go for like an hour and fill up my closet.” Adding insult to injury, Lawrence declares, “I don’t diet.” Asked by the incisive interviewer whether she has “I can’t actually believe this is my life!” moments,” Lawrence responds that she recently began allowing herself to take candy from the hotel minibar. “Now I’m a grown-up,” she said. “I can eat things from the minibar.”
Lawrence sits down with Seventeen for a not-so-hard- hitting Q&A, but it’s the perfect forum to hear her thoughts on what it’s like to be a girl. How did this “Hunger Games” star become the woman she is today? Well, she grew up with two brothers and always had a flair for the dramatic, and she has an overactive imagination. She says she once thought the school bus driver was kidnapping her classmates and she jumped out the emergency exit.
If you’ve been wondering why Rihanna lyrics are always so raunchy, the New Yorker has a profile of the assembly line that cranks out her dirty ditties. “It is when writing for Rihanna that her inner bad girl gets freest rein,” the mag says of songwriter Ester Dean, a former nurse’s aide who neither drinks, smokes nor frequents parties.
New York has an article by dead punk-rock pioneer Johnny Ramone. This excerpt from a forthcoming posthumous autobiography presents a complicated man, posing in his military-school duds on page 35, and caressing his kitty cat on page 36. He begins with the fact that, before they formed the Ramones, he beat up lead singer Joey Ramone for being late to meet him for a movie. “There was no excuse for being late,” Johnny intones.
A new season of “Mad Men” is about to begin, which apparently is a good enough reason for Newsweek to devote an entire double issue to the year 1965. If this represents a shortage of imagination at a news agency, the vintage ads by Volkswagen, Dunkin’ Donuts and Hush Puppies nevertheless took us back. But some ads are seemingly eternal at this publication — for example, the one on page 77 hawking “quality tools at ridiculously low prices.”
Time delivers a mostly humdrum rehash of the week’s news, but a cover story on rising wages for women in the US delivers some interesting stats, and anecdotes, too. “A woman says to me, ‘He gets really upset when I want to redecorate the kitchen,’” says a female Washington lawyer. “But I also understand the husband’s point of view much better than I would like to. I understand the feeling that ‘I’ve earned it.’”