With relatives visiting for the holidays, you’ve got a choice: You can either watch Aunt Mabel pick her teeth, or find some entertainment. These mags can help you; no toothpicks included.
TimeOut New York never disappoints with its holiday guide to everything from the best New Year’s Eve parties to flicks, theater, music, eating, shopping, the best bars, sports, galleries, dating — you name it. Don’t try to go to movies or concerts without it and the help from its extensive listings. They’re nearly an art form unto themselves with hip commentary and saucy graphics. This week, it’s a valuable double issue that will get you through the rest of the year.
Entertainment Weekly is so enamored of its cover story about the much-hyped flick, “The Hobbit,” that it’s selling four separate versions — one for each oddball principal character in the film. You can buy all four online. The newsstand version splashes a highly retouched poster-style cover of Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins, the hero of the fantasy novel rediscovered by the 1960s underground set. Other end-of-the-year movies on which Hollywood is betting include a sequel to “The Hurt Locker,” titled “Zero Dark Thirty,” the movie on bin Laden’s killing that’s slated to hit theaters on Christmas, and “Django Unchained.” The best bet of the holiday releases, the mag says, is “Les Misérables,” a lavish version that’s much shorter than Hollywood’s original 1934 masterwork.
It is with the deepest sorrow, Vanity Fair, that we implore you never again to employ Judd Apatow as a guest editor. There is nothing amusing about comedy, or comedians, deconstructed (unless you’re 25 and hoping to write jokes for late-night TV). We were hoping James Wolcott’s piece on the differences between American and British humor might give a giggle, but sadly it did not live up to the headline teasing that no one delivers a takedown like the British. Then there’s the sad pre-fame story about a new comedienne, Tig Notaro, (laugh-a-minute it is not) and a feature on whether Canadians are funny. (Answer: Only when they move to a US coast.) The most appealing aspect of the January VF? An Oral History of Fox TV’s “Freaks and Geeks,” coming back to screens via Netflix soon.
It’s the typical pointless list for Rolling Stone magazine. This time it’s one on the “50 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs” compiled by a so-called blue-ribbon panel of artists and other muckety-mucks absent any apparent rhyme or reason. It overlooks some songs while over-hyping others. The Geto Boys’ record “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” takes the No. 5 spot ahead of Public Enemy’s “Fight Power” at No. 7, for example. We won’t quibble with No. 1 “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five but we would suggest that “White Lines” is perhaps an equally worthy entry over, say, any Jay-Z song. Elsewhere the glossy offers up a navel gazer that paints President Obama as dead-set on using federal might to wage a war on marijuana (Obama has said this is not a high priority) while in another article casting pot smokers as part of his secret weapon voter base in winning the 2012 election.
The New Yorker has a quirky feature about a guy from Sacramento, Calif., who invented a language designed to be “maximally precise but also maximally concise.” In a bizarre plot twist, the synthetic tongue draws interest from a militant far-right nationalist organization in Russia. Apart from that, we get a story about a Nordic cargo ship that because of global warming is now regularly and easily plowing through the once-unnavigable Arctic Circle. For environmentalists who are depressed by that, there’s a relatively uplifting story about new nature reserves that are popping up in Europe.
Time continues its excellent coverage of the crisis in Egypt with an in-depth look at the Muslim Brotherhood, which “spent years angling for power,” the magazine notes. “Now that its members have it, they’re not sure what to do with it.” The blunt assessment has been that the Brotherhood is simply incompetent, having risen to power through no cunning of its own. But reporter Karl Vick also shows what a complex place Egypt is, describing a luxury mall where loudspeakers carry the noon call to prayer past a Cinnabon, a Pinkberry and a store window displaying boxer shorts more in keeping with Greenwich Village than Tahrir Square.
Newsweek’s Egypt coverage is shallow by comparison, and its cover story, continuing a dismal tradition for this publication, is shilling for “Zero Dark Thirty.” Using the movie as a hook, the story does a decent job of discussing the outlook for Obama’s war on terror. But it begins by describing the last scene of the movie in spoiling detail. There’s an excellent article, on the other hand, about the relationship between Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, both of whom are facing grave health problems. “What remains to be seen is which one … will be the first to be summoned by the Grim Reaper,” the mag writes.