• “What’s the meaning of Indiana Jones?” asked the Post’s Hank Stuever in yesterday’s edition, before donning the thinking cap and “dirty, pseudo-vintage T-shirts” of a film theory student to tell us that, well, there is no meaning. With Indy, what you see, is all you get. As onetime film students who wrote their college thesis on Spider-man and two other comics book adaptations, we ate up Stuever’s doomed quest for meaning behind the blockbuster franchise. Minor quibble, though: We would not have been caught dead in a faux vintage t-shirt, much less a dirty one.
• Also searching for meaning in the shallow waters of entertainment, the Times took a close look at two of our favorite shows, Gossip Girl and The Hills, suggesting they represent a post-feminist “stage of girl power television after ‘Sex and the City’” where women no longer stand united and against the world, but divided and against each other. We don't entirely buy the argument, but, speaking of Gossip Girl, the show’s season finale is tonight!
• Screened at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Woody Allen’s latest comedy, is, if we are to believe Los Angeles Times film critic Pete Hammond, actually funny. Hammond praises the cast, which includes Javier Bardem and Scarlett Johansson, but points out that, as Bardem’s feisty ex, Penelope Cruz steals the film. Now if only Hammond had said more about that supposed threesome in the film.
• Speaking of ScarJo, her album drops this Tuesday. So far, Billboard magazine has likened her singing to “a Cambridge girl doing karaoke at the campus bar,” Rolling Stone magazine has said she’s “a faintly goth Marilyn Monroe lost in a sonic fog,” and our far less imaginative friends merely point out she sounds a lot like Sinéad O'Connor. Ouch. Check out 30-second snippets of the album’s tracks here, or her live performance of “Falling Down” and let us know what you think.
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