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AMC goes commercial, Danny Boyle does sci-fi, and more picks

July 17, 2007

TV: The hype surrounding Mad Men, AMC's new series about New York ad execs in 1960, is mostly deserved (we assume Thom Browne will be tuned in). Check it out Thursday, or flip over to VH1 as trivia geeks vie for $250,000 on the finale of VH1's World Series of Pop Culture. Saturday brings Bill Maher's latest stand-up special for HBO, The Decider, which proves there's at least some upside to having Dubya in office.

DVD: Another reason to stay indoors this week: Ace in the Hole, Billy Wilder's prescient indictment of the media circus (with Kirk Douglas as head clown), gets the Criterion treatment. Also new on DVD are Gunsmoke's first season and Red Dawn: Collector's Edition, possibly the single most important movie about the Soviet invasion of a small Colorado mining town costarring C. Thomas Howell.

MUSIC: Editors' second album, An End Has a Start, is as morosely satisfying as their first. Fellow Brits the Cribs return with Men's Needs, Women's Needs, Whatever, while the Kirkwood brothers reunite after more than a decade apart on the Meat Puppets' Rise to Your Knees.

MOVIES: Danny Boyle continues to steer away from the predictable in sci-fi Sunshine, Adam Sandler and Kevin James do the opposite in I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, and Natalie Portman bares her...soul as an artist's muse in Milos Forman's period piece Goya's Ghosts.

BOOKS: Originally released in 1994, Jon Longhi's collection of fiction The Rise and Fall of Third Leg, a send-up of eighties punk nihilism (with a cover by R. Crumb), is just now getting its commercial due. Also generating a bit of bookstore buzz: a 608-page story about an orphan with a magical broom.