'Men in Black,' 'Glee,' Joey Ramone: The Week Ahead in Pop Culture
A look at the things we're most excited about watching, reading, browsing, and listening to:
MOVIES
In theaters Friday:
Fifteen years after Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones entertained with their first big, campy, alien-busting comedy, they return with Men In Black III, which plays off Mad Men fever by traveling, for part of its duration, back to the 1960s (where Josh Brolin plays a younger Jones). The reviews are fairly promising: "It may seem like the underdog in a summer full of four-colour heroics, bats, cats and impossible worlds, but MIB 3 is enjoyable enough that we wish the series hadn't been MIA for quite so long," says SFX.
Moonrise Kingdom, Wes Anderson's return to live-action filmmaking, is drawing raves for the way it retains the Royal Tennenbaums' director's trademark tweeness while packing a real emotional punch.
MUSIC
On sale Tuesday:
Fifteen songs that punk pioneer Joey Ramone left behind when he died in 2001—solo tracks written during and after the 1976-1996 tenure of The Ramones—have been assembled for a posthumous release (actually his second posthumous release) 11 years later. Joan Jett and members of Cheap Trick, the Dictators, and the E-Street Band all contributed to get the songs finished.
Thirty years into their career, the influential post-punk Brits The Cult—remember "She Sells Sanctuary"?—release their ninth studio album, which, according to bassist Chris Wyse, has a "Zep/Stooges mix of energy."
BOOKS
For sale Tuesday:
Richard Ford, the Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Sportswriter has a new book out this week, about a 15-year-old boy whose parents get arrested for robbing a bank.
Legendary travel writer Paul Theroux's latest novel is about a man who, in a mid-divorce midlife crisis, returns to the Malawi village he served as a member of the Peace Corps. You can read an early excerpt from The Lower River here.
TV
This week is the last big week for season finales. There's The Middle, American Idol, Modern Family, Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23, and Revenge all have their last episodes of the season on Wednesday.
And then there's Glee on Tuesday night. Most people have stopped paying attention to the once-great high school musical melodrama, but disillusioned "Gleeks" should probably tune in this week: The main characters are graduating. Show creator Ryan Murphy insists they'll all be back in some form next season, at least for a little while, but this'll be the last chance to see them all while they're all full-time McKinley High students.
This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/05/men-in-black-glee-joey-ramone-the-week-ahead-in-pop-culture/257405/
