Glimpses of New: 'The Hunger Games,' 'Parenthood' S3, 'House' S8 & 'The Mentalist' S4

I was among the millions on the east coast who were without power for days – thanks Tropical Storm Irene – so on the night that the ever-so-brief first trailer for the upcoming film The Hunger Games was released I was playing Scrabble at the kitchen table by candlelight. And since I just got internet service back (believe me, it was frustrating to be an observer of pop culture when I couldn’t observe it), this morning was my first glimpse of what folks saw during the MTV VMAs.

It’s not much. It’s not very substantive. But it’s not horrible and doesn’t make me cringe, which is good. It was just too brief for me to make an assessment. My 13-year-old daughter and Hunger Games fan still has grave reservations about how Jennifer Lawrence will play Katniss Everdeen.



That being said, the promo for the third season of NBC’s Parenthood doesn’t offer us much new either, except the knowledge that the show will flash-forward in time, several months in fact, taking viewers from the moment when Kristina told Adam she was pregnant in the season finale, to her being in full bloom/almost-ready-to-pop pregnant and Adam is apparently terrified.

Wonder if Adam will have found a job yet when the new season begins? Imagine them having to move in with Zeek and Camille and Sarah and Drew?



House’s brief promo for the eighth season of the drama shows Dr. House incarcerated, not, as he was a couple of seasons ago, in a mental facility, but this time, in prison. Guess it wasn’t such a smooth move to drive his car smack into the front of Cuddy’s house, now was it?

How will House do now that Lisa Edelstein has jumped ship and will now be appearing in The Good Wife remains an open question. Her absence will leave a startlingly gaping hole, kind of like the one House left in Cuddy’s home

I’m beginning to think that House, the show, has a serious woman problem.



Another lead character who’ll be starting the fall season behind bars is Patrick Jane from The Mentalist who, in the season finale, fatally shot the serial killer in the middle of a shopping mall as said killer, Red John, was taunting him about how Jane’s wife and daughter smelled when he murdered them. Doubt that Jane will be getting many hot cups of tea in the clink.

What new show/film are you most looking forward to seeing?

Now That's More Like It; A 'Grey's' Trailer with Some Substance

Meredith Grey’s really fired? Seriously? By Richard, of all people? Well that’ll put things in a new perspective, won’t it? Does this mean Meredith will find work at another hospital? Become an at-home mom?

I’m hopeful that Derek will not continue to punish her and keep her at arm’s length, even though she did jeopardize his clinical trial which he hoped would help him find a cure to the disease he fears she may have inherited. Meredith was leading with her heart, trying to help Adele, something she’d hope Derek would do for her. From her perspective, she couldn’t save her own mother, but she could try to do something for someone else about whom she cared. But Derek can be such a sanctimonious jerk that I wouldn’t be surprised if he walks away, even though they did just get married and adopt a child together.

As for the blow-back for Alex, I hope it’s harsh and nasty. Despite all the good his character has done over the years and how much he’s been emotionally battered by life, that doesn’t justify turning on Meredith and sabotaging her. She wasn’t doing something to promote herself or help herself in a selfish way. No one would have died because of what she did. It was unnecessary.

What do you hope happens in the season eight Grey’s Anatomy premiere?

So I Finally Finished 'The Hunger Games' Series ... 'Twas a Good Thing

When I started reading Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy about which my twin seventh graders raved, my daughter said she liked the first installment – The Hunger Games – the best and found the final book, Mockingjay, kind of depressing, albeit riveting. By contrast, her brother, who also preferred the first book, found Mockingjay's conclusion “realistic” and said he appreciated that it wasn’t all tied up neatly, with sunshine and rainbows and all that.

Upon completing the series myself this week, I have to agree with them that the first book was the superior of the three, when the freshness of the horrifying premise and the abject inhumane cruelty of the Games still shocked you. (Twenty-four children, ages 12-18, are selected and forced by the government to “play” a game where the last one living “wins” as the government forces them to compete to the death by intensifying the lethal conditions and broadcasting the entire competition on live TV.)

The second book, Catching Fire, was shocking anew in that the “winners” are forced by the government into more deadly competition, both as punishment for the populace for rebelling decades ago (to warn them about rebelling against the all-powerful, dictatorship) and for the purpose of entertaining those in the opulent, wasteful Capitol. Catching Fire had more of a political feel to it as it became clearer that certain participants in the Games were being manipulated by various groups for political purposes.

I read the final book, Mockingjay -- which was indeed the bleakest, my daughter was right -- as the Arab spring of revolt, which had grown somewhat quiet in recent weeks, roared back to life in Libya as rebels tried to take down the dictatorship that had been brutally savaging its own people. Seeing people rioting in the streets, hearing the automatic machine-gun fire during live newscasts, while TV journalists donned protective helmets and bulletproof vests as they beamed images around the globe provided the backdrop for my reading of Mockingjay, where the oppressed districts of the nation of Panem revolted against their violent, oppressive ruler, with the series’ heroine, Katniss Everdeen, serving as the living symbol of the revolution in the person of a 17-year-old girl.

The ending, which I won’t betray here, did as my son said, seem to fit in logically with the overall tone of the series: Dark and melancholy mixed with a dab of hopefulness that springs eternal even under the most precarious of circumstances. But, no matter how realistic it was in the context of the book, it was a downer.

After finishing Mockingjay – which I recommend for readers middle school and up – I've turned to something completely different, Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife, a fictionalized story about the life of a First Lady, based loosely on the real life of Laura Bush. Thus far I’m on page 248 (out of 555) and I’m a fan.

Have you read the Hunger Games series? If so, what did you think?

Image credits: Amazon.com.

Not-New New Trailers: What’s Up with TV Show Promos with No New Content?

Last week I got all aflutter when I read on Twitter that there was a new trailer out promoting the fifth season of Mad Men, a show I crave deep in my bones and about which I’m still peeved is not airing new episodes yet due to the prolonged contract negotiations. Greedy for fresh Don Draper action, I clicked on over to watch the Mad Men promo only to be vastly disappointed that it contained no new footage, nary a hint of what’s to come, just rehashes of previous scenes. No Megan. No Peggy. No Joan with a baby bump. Just scenes we've already seen.




Feeling burned by the Mad Men non-new trailer, I cautiously followed a tantalizing Tweet about a season three promo for The Good Wife which is slated to commence in the afterglow of Alicia and Will finally getting together after Alicia learned that Peter and Kalinda slept together some time back.

At least in this trailer, interspersed with scenes from previous seasons, we also got a glimpse of some new footage – like Alicia Florrick rockin’ bangs -- and a sense that this season will have less of a “poor betrayed wife” vibe and more of a “reclaiming her sexuality & power” one where the chief question is: Team Will or Team Peter?



The Desperate Housewives’ promo for its final season, on the other hand, is nothing more than a highlights reel from the past seven years, reminding me of the early days when this suburban satire was actually scathingly good and insightful. While watching the past seven seasons in this trailer, viewers get nothing more than confirmation of the fact that Wisteria Lane is the most dangerous street in America, that and the fact that the Housewives have become scary-skinny over the years.



At least the Modern Family trailer -- which was entitled, “Looking Back” -- didn’t pretend as though it was going to be giving us anything new. It was clear that this was just going to be a recap of some of the funnier, previously aired moments from the best comedy on television.



As for The Middle trailer, we actually do learn something . . . that Ray Romano is joining his former Everybody Loves Raymond co-star, Patrician Heaton, on the sitcom’s season premiere. At least there's that.

Notes on Politics: Ingraham ‘Just a Pretty Girl,’ Sexism Hurts Female Pols, Pining for Hillary & Political Moms

Talk Show Host Ingraham ‘Just a Pretty Girl?’

While filling in for the vacationing Bill O’Reilly on The O’Reilly Factor last week, pundit Laura Ingraham was grilling Democratic Congressman Charles Rangel by lobbing a series of tough, rapid-fire questions his way, many of which went off the original topic. Rep. Rangel’s response, after he said Ingraham was simply issuing “mini-speeches” instead of questioning him, was to say this: “Bill O’Reilly told me he had a secret weapon. I didn’t know it was just a pretty girl that they’d bring in.” At the tail-end of the interview, he “apologized” by saying, “I’m sorry I said you were attractive.”

This was just last week. In the year 2011.

Just.

A.

Pretty.

Girl.

Sexism Hurts Female Politicians

If you scroll down on the Mediaite web site, where I first read about Rangel’s comments to Ingraham, you’ll see that many of the comments degenerated from discussing the actual content of Rangel and Ingraham’s words, to Ingraham’s looks (both positive and negative), comparing her appearance to those of other political women, calling her sexual slurs and suggesting that she had sex with another famous TV pundit.

It’s comments like the ones directed at Ingraham based on her gender that, when directed at female politicians, actually have a measurable negative impact on those women’s chances of getting elected, even if those comments are flattering, like calling someone “pretty” or “hot.” That’s the centerpiece of my pop culture and politics column this week, that even when people call Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann attractive, or put Bachmann on the cover of Newsweek looking crazy after a pundit had asked her if she was a “flake” not too long ago, or when a fashion “guru” criticizes Hillary Clinton’s clothing selections using gender-specific language, that type of commentary erodes people’s confidence in the female candidates:

“Last fall, a study conducted by the Women’s Media Center, the WCF Foundation and Political Parity found that demeaning female political candidates with sexist language and images ‘undercuts her political standing,’ USA Today reported. The Democratic pollster who ran the survey told the newspaper, ‘I was stunned at the magnitude of the effect of even mild sexism.’ What kind of effect? The survey found that in a hypothetical campaign between a male and a female and the female was criticized or depicted in a sexist way: ‘The female candidate lost twice as much support when even the mild sexist language was added to the attack’ and ‘the sexist language undermined favorable perceptions of the female candidate, leading voters to view her as less empathetic, trustworthy and effective,’ USA Today said.”

This is why, while I was researching this piece, I was happy to come across the web site Name It. Change It. whose sole goal it to point out and speak up when they see women candidates, of all political stripes, assailed by misogynistic remarks in the media. They do not let it lie. And neither should we.

The 2012 presidential race isn’t off to such a great start, as far as sexism and the media are concerned. Let’s hope the folks at Name It. Change It. can help improve matters.

Pining for Hillary

Are those who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary suffering from buyer’s remorse? That’s what Rebecca Traister suggested in her column in the New York Times Magazine this past weekend in a piece entitled, “If Hillary Were President.”

“Three years after that intense and acrimonious time, in a period of liberal disillusionment, some on the left are engaging in an inverse fantasy,” she said. “Almost unbelievably, they are now daydreaming of how much better a Hillary Clinton administration might have represented them.”

And Traister wants those who are idealizing the could-have-been Hillary Clinton administration to cut it out: “. . . [T]o say it [that they wish Clinton had been elected] – much less to bray it – is small, mean, divisive and frankly dishonest. None of us know what would have happened with Hillary Clinton as president, no matter how many rounds of W.W.H.H.D. (What Would Hillary Have Done) we play.”

Of Political Moms

Speaking of women in politics, I just received my review copy of Joanne Bamberger’s new book, Mothers of Intention: How Women & Social Media are Revolutionizing Politics in America. Bamberger goes by the handle “PunditMom” online.) I’ll report back here after I’ve read it.

Image credits: Name It Change It, Amazon.

My First Time Watching 'Six Feet Under' Finale Since It Aired

I just completed one of the most depressing assignments I’ve had in some time: Watching every single opening death scene in all the episodes of Six Feet Under’s five seasons. It was part of Six Feet Under Week on CliqueClack TV, honoring one of TV’s darkest dramas about the Fisher family, their funeral home business and their screwed up lives.

After I finished watching death, after death, after death for a post I was working on (at one point my husband, who’d just had his stomach curdled by a particularly gruesome fatal accident involving an eye and an andiron, griped, “Why did you make me watch this?”), I watched the series finale for the first time since it originally aired. That last scene. Claire driving to New York. Sia’s “Breathe Me” playing in the background. And every main character who hadn’t already passed away (such as Nate, his father, Lisa and Bernard Chenowith) aged and died, ending with Claire taking her last breath. *wiping away tears*

It was just as powerful and evocative to watch now as it was when it originally aired in 2005. Everybody dies, the episode showed us, which, of course, we already knew, but we just don’t want to envision everyone who’s close to us meeting his or her maker. In fact we try not to think about it too much if we can help it.

That’s the way the whole show was though, forcing us look at the everyday fact of death in each episode and thereby shining the light on the importance of life, of cherishing it and not wasting what time we have because the clock is ticking.

It accomplished this by spotlighting characters who were all, every one of them, flawed. They could be selfish, mean, cruel, arrogant and reckless. They could be loving, selfless, caring, clever and strong, in other words, human. And if you were going to summarize Six Feet Under it would be apt to describe it as thoroughly human, that and incredibly haunting.

Best of the Week: 'Crazy Stupid Love,' 'King's Speech,' 'Rescue Me' & Two Books on Controversial Issues

Movies

Crazy Stupid Love: I thoroughly loved seeing Crazy Stupid Love this weekend. It touched me and was emotionally affecting, so much more than an insipid, garden variety romantic comedy.

Steve Carell has again proven that he has acting chops beyond simply making us empathize with his characters’ awkward discomforts or laugh at the insane behavior that his fictional alter egos demonstrate in The Office or Anchorman. As the freshly-dumped and deeply wounded Cal Weaver, a dad of three whose wife of several decades has given him the boot, Carell was vulnerable and not in a ham-handed kind of way. His performance was like eating a big handful of those Sour Skittles you buy in the theater where the boxes are approximately the size of toaster: They’re tart at the beginning (like when Cal was publically moping around in the immediate aftermath of being dumped) and sweet in its core (like when Cal was clandestinely was tending to his backyard under cover of darkness or was recreating an old date with his estranged wife).

Ryan Gosling, who was the slick babe magnet with the uber-chic duds, was enjoyable to watch as well, which surprised me because I figured I’d loathe his character and judge him as smarmy and shallow, an over-cologned empty suit. But, turns out, he wasn’t. For her part, Julianne Moore was subtle and muted yet under-developed, while observing Emma Stone in action was like watching a glass of bubbly champagne come to life.

A grown-up love story that lived up to the critics’ raves, I echo their plaudits (Entertainment Weekly gave it an A) and recommend it to anyone who’s sick of romantic comedies that make you feel as though you have fewer brain cells upon leaving the theater than you did when you walked in.



The King’s Speech: I’ll admit it, I went into watching this Oscar winning film feeling as though I had to complete a homework assignment. Like being forced to read The Crucible.


However the movie turned out to be okay, in fact, better than okay. I was seriously tired when I sat down to watch The King’s Speech and completely expected I’d fall asleep, like I did when I watched The Queen after Helen Mirren won her Oscar for starring in that film. But I stayed awake through the whole thing. (And no, I didn’t use caffeine or other substances to do so.)

Colin Firth definitely earned his Oscar for winning depiction of King George VI heroically working on controlling his speech impediment and rising to the occasion when his country needed him on the cusp of World War II. Firth was just the right combination of intelligent, angry, mortified and courageous. It was an inspiring tale that wasn’t at all a cinematic version of Ambien.

TV

To be honest, I haven’t watched a ton of TV outside of Red Sox games and episodes of Six Feet Under on DVD in preparation to write my contributions to Clique Clack TV’s Six Feet Under Week.
The one currently-airing show that I saw this week which resonated with me was Rescue Me, reviewed here. It was refreshing to see Tommy take charge of things and not screw up, not get drunk, not lose any kids. And nobody died. But the best of all was Sheila stepping up to the plate and saving the reputations of all the guys at her late husband’s firehouse and the members of her family from the nasty campaign of character assassination that was being waged by an ill-intentioned TV reporter trying to carve a career out of someone else’s hide. Sheila’s take-down was a satisfying thing to watch.

Books

While I continued to read the third installment of Suzanne Collins’ Mockingjay, I finished Then Came You by Jennifer Weiner and Milkshake by Joanna Weiss, two books which tackled the controversial issues of surrogacy and breastfeeding. (I reviewed them both for ModernMom/Mommy Tracked.)

Both were swift, entertaining reads, although Weiss’ provided sarcastic laughter as it humorously satirized not only the extremists in the pro- and anti-breastfeeding crowds, but also political campaigns which expropriate issues about which they could care less about in an attempt to lure votes.

What did you read/watch this week that you loved or hated?

Image credit: ModernMom.com.

Do Spoilers Enhance Your Experience with Books, Films & TV Shows or Wreck It?

Do you hate it when people spoil the end of a book, movie or TV show for you, or do you like knowing what happens in the end? According to a new University of California San Diego study published in the journal Psychological Science, people actually like knowing the ending and, in fact, being privvy to spoilers increases their enjoyment.

Science Daily reported that the researchers: “ran three experiments with a total of 12 short stories. Three types of stories were studied: Ironic-twist, mystery and literary. Each story – classics by the likes of John Updike, Roald Dahl, Anton Chekhov, Agatha Christie and Raymond Carver – was presented as-is (without a spoiler), with a prefatory spoiler paragraph or with that same paragraph incorporated into the story as though it were a part of it.”

What they found is that “subjects significantly preferred the spoiled versions of ironic-twist stories, where, for example, it was revealed before reading that a condemned man’s daring escape is all a fantasy before the noose snaps tight around his neck.” One of the researchers suggested that “once you know how it turns out it’s cognitively easier – you’re more comfortable processing the information – and can focus on a deeper understanding of the story.” This rationale, they said, explains why people enjoy watching the same film or re-reading the same story multiple times “with undiminished pleasure.”

I don’t entirely buy this, not for me anyway. Maybe you might like to know what happens at the end of a book before you've read it -- like Harry in When Harry Met Sally who read the last page of every book in case he died before he reached the end -- but I don’t.

Part of the excitement of watching or reading something for the first time is the purity of your unspoiled experience coupled with the element of surprise. Once that surprise is gone, I enjoy re-reading or re-watching books and films/TV shows in an entirely different way: Since I’m no longer anxious to learn how the story turns out, I can focus on other details that I may have overlooked the first time around. Part of the anxiousness during that initial watching is part of the pleasure of experiencing a story.

Imagine watching The Sixth Sense for the first time after someone has spoiled the ending for you. You will watch it differently than you would have if you didn’t know what was coming. But by having the ending spoiled for you, you've been robbed of the chance to be surprised and to watch it in the way the filmmaker intended for you to do so.

If I went into reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince knowing what happens at the end -- that sad, shocking death of a beloved character -- my reaction would not have been the same.

What do you think about spoilers, do they ruin the experience or enhance it?

Image credit: Amazon.

'Mad Men'-Inspired Reading List

It’s summer. That means Mad Men SHOULD be airing new episodes right now. But, thanks to difficult and drawn out contract negotiations, the beginning of the show’s fifth season has been pushed back to next year. (They only just started shooting recently.)


But to keep us thinking about the deliciously nuanced and layered period drama, the show’s blog has released a Mad Men reading list:
“Betty reading The Group in the bathtub. Don Draper with a copy of Exodus in bed. Henry Francis with a whole stack of books near the fireplace. Literature always gets its due in Mad Men. But how many of the books cited in the series have you actually read?”

Here’s their recommended, show-related summer reading list by season:

Season 1: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand; The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe; Exodus* by Leon Uris and Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence.

Season 2: The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone; Meditations in an Emergency* by Frank O’Hara; Moby Dick* by Herman Melville; Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter and The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. (If you want to see that amazingly poignant scene where Don Draper reads a section of a poem from Meditations in an Emergency, go here. They've disabled the video from being embedded.)

Season 3: Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy; The Group by Mary McCarthy and The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon

Season 4: The Chrysanthemum and the Sword by Ruth Benedict; The Clue of the Black Keys by Carolyn Keene and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carre.

Which ones have you read? Which ones do you want to read? (The handful I've read are marked with an asterisk.*)

Image credit: AMC via The Poetry Habit.

Notes on Politics: More on Bachmann's 'Newsweek' Photo, Scarborough Assesses U.S. Econ Crisis

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

More Backlash on the Loony Newsweek Bachmann Cover Photo

The folks at Newsweek have attempted to make excuses for why they thought it was appropriate to select a photo for its cover that makes a politician look like an escapee from a mental institution while bestowing upon her the moniker the “Queen of Rage.” However, given the many, many photos from which they had to choose, the one they selected is clearly designed to make GOP presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann look unhinged, not to reflect her “intensity” as the Newsweek folks bogusly claimed.

That's why the former journalism instructor in me adored the rebuttal by Tommy Christopher in Mediaite where he took the publication to task and calling “bull&%$#” on the rationale its staff have offered.

“In three years of covering the White House, I have accumulated hundreds of rapid-fire shots of President Obama, for example, and there are lots of them that freeze odd-looking moments (a cough, a blink) that look jarring out of context,” Christopher wrote. “I’m sure all news photographs do. That’s why they take so many shots, so they (or their editors) can select the one that best conveys the truth of the moment.”

“Whatever the intent of the Newsweek cover, it was a specific choice, not some process of elimination,” Christopher continued. “The same is true of the outtakes [that Newsweek put on its web site], all of which have been selected from dozens of nearly-identical, but subtly different, shots.”

Additionally, I was very heartened to learn that the National Organization for Women has weighed in on the matter as well, calling the cover “sexist.” (They typically leave conservative women high and dry.

“The main reason why we would stand up for Michele Bachmann and defend her against these kind) of misogynistic attacks is we want women to run for office,” the president of NOW, Terry O’Neill told The Daily Caller. “Of course my job is to defeat Michele Bachmann and I intend to do so. But good women will not run for office if Newsweek magazine can do this to such a prominent politician and get away with it.”

‘This is Gordon Gekko’s America.’

Conservative pundit and former congressman Joe Scarborough wrote a scathing commentary for Politico, decrying how the yawning gap between those on the middle and low ends of the economic scale and those at the very top is plunging a knife through the beating heart that is what's left of the American dream. Putting the current horrendous string of economic bad news into historic context, the Morning Joe co-host said:

“Since 1970, executive pay has increased 430 percent while workers’ wages have crept up at a pace that barely kept up with inflation. The average executive’s pay has jumped over that time period to 158 times that of the average worker’s pay in those companies. It’s no wonder that the top 0.1 percent of income earners get richer by the day while millions of Americans are seeing their situations get worse.”

“This is not John Wayne’s America,” Scarborough lamented. “This is Gordon Gekko’s America. In fact, I’m pretty sure that if the Duke faced one of these CEOs in a John Ford film, he’d kick some ass and force the leech to start treating workers fair. And you can bet that my Republican father would be cheering him on from the front row of the theater.”

And as I read Michael Goldfarb’s GlobalPost piece in Salon today about the sudden, horrifically violent riots in London -- with Goldfarb suggesting that “youth unemployment” is a chief “underlying cause of the rioting,” adding that “as the government’s austerity measures begin to bite here, it’s not likely to get better any time soon” -- I start to worry. Throw in a diminished U.S. credit rating, a stock market with drops powerful enough to give the nation collective motion sickness, and a former Republican congressman, who entered Congress as part of the Contract with America class of lawmakers, calling this a “greed is good” America, and I'm more than a little unnerved.

What the Heck is Up with Newsweek & Conservative Women?

In November 2009, Newsweek put former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin on its cover. But this wasn’t any ordinary cover. It featured Palin in short, shorts next to the headline, “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Sarah?” The photo, it turns out, was a photo that originally appeared in Runner's World, where folks wear running stuff, duds not normally seen on the campaign trail.

Newsweek justifiably was on the receiving end of all manner of attack for being sexist and attempting to mock a female pol by trying to pigeon-hole her as a mindless bimbo.

Now comes this week’s cover, and another, attractive GOP woman is on the cover next to a snotty headline, “The Queen of Rage: Michele Bachmann on God, the Tea Party and the Evils of Government.”

It’s not the headline with which I take issue, it’s the photo which intentionally makes Bachmann look like a bug-eyed crazy woman. Meanwhile the actual article called her “petite and prim” with “the earnestness of a preacher.”

What’s Newsweek’s issue with high profile, conservative women pols that they need to be depicted on their covered in ways that make caricature them?

Sure, Sarah Palin has appeared on Newsweek more recently while wearing a form fitting hooded sweatshirt with the headline, "I Can Win," but the cover had this quality to it that made it seem more about sex than about policy and whether Palin would make a run for the presidency.

Image credits: Newsweek.

A Week of Pop Culture: Riveted by 'Hunger Games,' Revisiting 'Six Feet Under' and Romantic Comedies

Books

Hunger Games: Just got back from a week’s beach vacation with the family and, pop culture-wise, I spent most of my time, when not on the beach, gobbling up the first two books in the Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series (Hunger Games, Catching Fire). I would’ve continued on to read the finale, Mockingjay, only I didn’t bring that book with me. So once I finished Catching Fire, I moved on to Jennifer Weiner’s Then Came You about a surrogate pregnancy, which I read for a column I’m planning to write. (I’ll link to the column here later once it’s written.)

I was surprised by how much I was riveted by the Hunger Games, despite its sick and twisted premise: As retribution for rebelling against an evil, brutal, dictatorial centralized government, the demoralized residents who live in one of 12 “districts” in the “ruins of North America” now called Panem, are forced to give up a boy and a girl between the ages of 12-18 to participate in a fight-to-the-death games which are viciously manipulated by the dictators for the excitement of those watching as it unfolds on television.

Its political undercurrent – of a repressive government using the very symbol of the promise of the future, children, and forcing them to kill one another or be killed – along with the stark contrast of the opulence and fatted calfness of those living in the Capitol while those in the districts starve and are forced to live like prisoners inside their districts by electrified fences where their lives are controlled by the Capitol, was creepy and compelling at the same time.

As I eagerly move onto the third book – which my happy-ending obsessed daughter said she didn’t really like, while my darker elder son liked it – I’m intrigued by the political upheaval and the resistance in the world of Panem, given the real life protests popping up all over the Middle East and now in Europe. Not that I envision a fight-to-the-death reality show along the lines of Survivor or a twisted version of Lost any time soon, but still . . .

TV

Six Feet Under: In preparation for CliqueClack TV’s upcoming Six Feet Under week – to which I’ll be contributing two pieces – I’ve been revisiting the Fishers and their pitch black dramatic series that compelled viewers think about their lives, about the meaning of them and those people with whom they share it.

While watching these episodes, I remember anew why I was so drawn to it in the first place. It was thoughtful, edgy, risk-taking and challenged viewers’ sense of right and wrong. Plus Lauren Ambrose’s Claire Fisher and Peter Krause’s Nate Fisher were two of the best, full-fledged, well rounded and screwed up characters on TV.

Magazines

Entertainment Weekly: Once I got home and poured through the stack of mail that piled up during our week away, I found two copies of Entertainment Weekly waiting for me, including a large article on The Help and a cool piece on the keys to making a truly resonant, honest romantic comedy that doesn’t insult the viewers’ intelligence, holding recent release Crazy Stupid Love as the new When Harry Met Sally.

Some of the reasons why EW writers Sara Vilkomerson and Anthony Breznican said most rom-coms turn out to be snoozers: 1. “Chemistry can’t be faked.” 2. “Men don’t want to star in romantic comedies – or go see them.” And 3. “Hollywood romances often struggle overseas, so studios can be skittish about investing in them.”

Image credits: Amazon.com, HBO, Entertainment Weekly.

Goin' on Blogging Break 'Til Aug. 8

But don't fret peeps, it'll only be a short break.

Return here for pop culture/politics goodness on Monday, August 8 . . . provided that the economic world hasn't suffered a mammoth collapse because the dunderheads in Washington botched attempts to strike a deal on the debt ceiling imbroglio. Oh, and I'll have lots to say about The Hunger Games trilogy, the first installment of which I completed late last night.

Okay 'Boardwalk Empire' Fans, Sell Me on This Show

Preview Trailer #4

Since there's not much new TV on in the summer, I've been toying with the idea of partaking in a TV show marathon, catching up/starting a new TV program, in between watching Red Sox games.

One series that has intrigued me is the period drama, Boardwalk Empire on HBO, set in Atlantic City at the beginning of Prohibition. Problem is, after watching the pilot episode last year, I thought it was a huge yawner. (Maybe it's that I couldn't quite warm up to Steve Buscemi.) Couldn't get into it, and I'm a sucker for period TV (Mad Men being the chief example).

And yet . . .

Boardwalk Empire has been lavished with critical praise and Emmy awards nomination love, so I'm wondering if I've not given it enough of a chance. So I ask you, Boardwalk Empire fans, why should I invest my pop culture time in this show? Is it worth it?