RUMOR MILL
“One Direction is an overseas equivalent to the kind of boy groups that extend back at least as far as the 1960s, with The Monkees and Paul Revere and the Raiders."
——Ken Tucker
Monday, April 9, 2012
A WEEKEND OF WINNERS, LOSERS AND NEW STARS
Bubba, Melo, 1D, Hunger Games Bask in the Spotlight on Easter Weekend
The weekend between the Final Four and Coachella, as well as the first weekend of the baseball season—Easter weekend, in other words—had more than its share of excitement. Bubba Watson won his first major with an astounding shot out of the woods onto the green for par on the second hole of a sudden-death playoff at The Masters. Watson’s subsequent par topped British Open champ Louis Oosthuizen’s bogey, after the charging Phil Mickelson—the original mulleted leftie—triple bogied the fourth hole. Bubba thern bawled like a baby, and a new star was born. Duel favorites Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy finished the tournament at +5.
In ABC’s NBA game of the week, the New York Knicks, behind Carmelo Anthony’s 43 points, including the deciding three, completed an improbable comeback to top the Chicago Bulls 100-99 in overtime. The thrilling win prompted a euphoric Roy Trakin to tweet: “Knicks, then Mets win, against nemeses Bulls and Braves. It doesn't get any better than that...even without a no-hitter.”
Saturday Night Live continued its season of bold bookings with neo-boy band One Direction, who turned out to be ingenuous, naturally appealing and impressive in their U.S. network debut. One of the kids even resembled Mick Jagger circa 1963, though without the prominently pouted lips.
“Here in America, there's a market for this kind of clean-cut music that's currently exploited primarily by Justin Bieber,” wrote Ken Tucker on NPR.org. “But Bieber is getting older and trying to make his Justin Timberlake hip-hop evolution. One Direction, meanwhile, is sliding right into that sweet spot in which songs about telling girls they're beautiful, and that all you'd like to do is spend the night talking to them, is a pathway to mass adoration. About as adventurous as One Direction gets on this album is a song called 'I Want,' which sounds a bit like an undiscovered early work by Freddie Mercury's Queen.
“One Direction is an overseas equivalent to the kind of boy groups that extend back at least as far as the 1960s, with The Monkees and Paul Revere and the Raiders. That is to say, groups that many adults can dismiss as trite or vacuous—but which pop-music fans of any age recognize as solid craftsmanship whose simple pleasures are nonetheless real and satisfying.”
On Sunday morning, Andy Richter tweeted, Onion-style: “BREAKING NEWS: Singing Along to One Direction Using Substitute Lyric ‘You Don't Know Your Diaper's Full’ Angers 6 Year-Old Girls.”
For the third consecutive weekend, The Hunger Games ran away with the box office, grossing another $33.5 million, bringing the movie to $302.8 million total in the U.S. and Canada alone. American Reunion opened with a so-so $21.5 million, while a 3D version of James Cameron's Titanic opened with $17.4 million.
And Mike Wallace, who helped make 60 Minutes the most successful prime-time TV news show ever, died Saturday night at a care facility in New Haven, CT, where he'd lived in recent years. He was 93.
In ABC’s NBA game of the week, the New York Knicks, behind Carmelo Anthony’s 43 points, including the deciding three, completed an improbable comeback to top the Chicago Bulls 100-99 in overtime. The thrilling win prompted a euphoric Roy Trakin to tweet: “Knicks, then Mets win, against nemeses Bulls and Braves. It doesn't get any better than that...even without a no-hitter.”
Saturday Night Live continued its season of bold bookings with neo-boy band One Direction, who turned out to be ingenuous, naturally appealing and impressive in their U.S. network debut. One of the kids even resembled Mick Jagger circa 1963, though without the prominently pouted lips.
“Here in America, there's a market for this kind of clean-cut music that's currently exploited primarily by Justin Bieber,” wrote Ken Tucker on NPR.org. “But Bieber is getting older and trying to make his Justin Timberlake hip-hop evolution. One Direction, meanwhile, is sliding right into that sweet spot in which songs about telling girls they're beautiful, and that all you'd like to do is spend the night talking to them, is a pathway to mass adoration. About as adventurous as One Direction gets on this album is a song called 'I Want,' which sounds a bit like an undiscovered early work by Freddie Mercury's Queen.
“One Direction is an overseas equivalent to the kind of boy groups that extend back at least as far as the 1960s, with The Monkees and Paul Revere and the Raiders. That is to say, groups that many adults can dismiss as trite or vacuous—but which pop-music fans of any age recognize as solid craftsmanship whose simple pleasures are nonetheless real and satisfying.”
On Sunday morning, Andy Richter tweeted, Onion-style: “BREAKING NEWS: Singing Along to One Direction Using Substitute Lyric ‘You Don't Know Your Diaper's Full’ Angers 6 Year-Old Girls.”
For the third consecutive weekend, The Hunger Games ran away with the box office, grossing another $33.5 million, bringing the movie to $302.8 million total in the U.S. and Canada alone. American Reunion opened with a so-so $21.5 million, while a 3D version of James Cameron's Titanic opened with $17.4 million.
And Mike Wallace, who helped make 60 Minutes the most successful prime-time TV news show ever, died Saturday night at a care facility in New Haven, CT, where he'd lived in recent years. He was 93.
