Our reviews won't make you spend the night. (But they may make you grab a cigarette.) 

1= 95 degrees and humid, and your air conditioner is broken

2= 90 degrees, slight chance of thunderstorms, but they never come

3= 85 and sunny but you’re stuck in the office all day

4= Partly cloudy, high of 80

5= 85 and sunny with a slight breeze, on your day off

IN THEATERS

 “Swing Vote”: My car broke down over the weekend and it was going to take 2 hours to get it fixed. “Swing Vote” fit into the timeline. Kevin Costner gives a fun, scraggly performance. The rich premise could have been taken a lot further and I felt the ending was the cop out I had anticipated. Catch it on the USA some Sunday when you are doing laundry. Rating:2.5ish - Dave

“Man On Wire”: A documentary/heist flick about a rag tag bunch of circus hippies who break into the World Trade Center in order to tightrope walk between Towers 1 and 2. The trailer alone will leave you gasping for breath. After 7 years of mourning WTC, “Man on Wire” is the first movie that celebrates what it meant in its infancy. Eye popping and stomach dropping, catch it on the big screen before it disappears into thin air! Rating: 4.5 - Dave

DVD

Mad Men Season 1 – I technically watched this on On Demand (thanks Time Warner!) but it’s out on DVD too.  Just don’t try Netflixing it anytime soon; I think the first disc is up to “Very Long Wait.”  I totally dig the old-time-y way everyone speaks, and I’m irritated by the way the men treat their “girls,” but I suppose that’s the point.  Don Draper is definitely a deeper character than I expected (i.e., that mysterious past) and also a shallower one (i.e., those torrid affairs), which makes for fantastic TV.  Rating: 4.5 (half a point off for misogyny) – Lisa

Mad Men Season 1 – Okay, so the whole reason I started watching Mad Men was because I wanted to feel superior as part of a cult audience of viewers that is clued into something really special, but guess what?  It turns out that everyone is already clued into Mad Men’s specialness.  Hello, Emmy nominations!  I have to admit that the first couple episodes didn’t particularly get me hot and bothered, but by the end of the first season I was a goner.  Yes, mad about Mad Men.  And Jon Hamm.  Why is it (and he) so special?  Maybe because the show reminds me that my life could be worse – I could be a secretary being chased by a drunken male ad exec who wants to know the color of my underwear.  Or maybe it’s because Jon Hamm is just really really ridiculously good looking and sucks the air out of any room he enters.  Particularly my living room.  Rating: 4.5 (half a point off for my inability to focus on anything else when the show is on) - Veronica

MUSIC

Viva La Vida, Coldplay – My first listen of Coldplay’s latest effort was met with a half-hearted shrug of my shoulders.  It didn’t “wow” me like all the reviews said it would.  It sort of made me wish I’d spent the $15 on a few gallons of gas instead.  Despite my poor first impression of the CD, I kept it in my player, and after a few more listens, suddenly got what all the buzz was about.  It is best to listen to the disk from start to finish – letting each track roll into the next like scenes of an artsy fartsy movie.  That’s not to say that there isn’t beauty in the breakdown, like the radio favorite and title track, “Viva La Vida,” but it’s worth it to purchase the whole album rather than the individual parts on iTunes.  Rating: 4 - Veronica
 

INTERNET

Stuffwhitepeoplelike.com – If you’re the last person in cyberspace to hear of this now-famous website, don’t fret, as the bulk of this blog-turned-book still maintains a fresh, cringe-inducing feel to new Caucasian readers, causing them to exclaim, “Oh. My. God. That is totally me!” Rating 4.5 - Sam 

Mockdraftcentral.com – For those of you gearing up for another season of Fantasy Football this fall, this is a website that will help you prepare for your upcoming online draft. It’s free to join and there are hundreds of mock drafts you can join at any time on any day to help you practice for your real draft. Whether you’re new to fantasy football or a seasoned veteran, this assists you with up-to-date player valuations and prepares you for that time-sensitive environment inside a “draft room” that can fluster unprepared fantasy football players. Rating 4 - Sam

BOOKS

Everybody In the Pool by Beth Lisick – I’m on a huge personal/humorous essay kick right now, and this collection from an author raised in a “normal” family in Northern California was an easy, fun read.  Lisick’s writing isn’t as smart as David Sedaris’s, but her humor is more reliant on shock value: the abandoned warehouse she lived in in San Francisco, the bad neighborhood in Berkley where she bought her first house, the array of weird jobs she had throughout the years.  Most of the time, you can smile and shake your head in an “I’m glad it’s not me” way, but when she got into how unkempt she and her baby (read: cradle cap and infant acne) were after three months, I just started to feel sorry for her.  Rating: 4 – Lisa

Girls’ Poker Night and Ask Again Later by Jill A. Davis – I may be a little late to this party as I think her Poker was celebrated as smart chick lit when it came out a few years ago.  It is smart and funny but much like Curtis Sittenfeld, there are recurring themes that annoy – the abandoning father, the trust issues. Very beach appropriate as you can breeze through them in one session and despite the shortfalls (and perfect endings), they do make you think.  But just little, after all it’s summer, no need to get carried away. Rating: Poker 4.5, Ask 4 - Mali

The Misadventures of Justin Hearnfeld by Dan Elish – Dan Elish’s sophomore fictional effort is simply delish.  Justin Hearnfeld, a recent collegegraduate whose virginity may or may not still be in intact, is a male version of all those sad-sack chic lit heroines like Bridget Jones and the Shopaholic series’ protagonist, Becky Bloomwood.  Elish writes Justin in such a way that readers can’t help but love him and root for him to screw every chick in his path.  It makes it all the more adorably amusing when he fails.  Miserably.  Justin’s misadventures are refreshing – thank you Dan Elish for making it clear that men are just as romantically challenged as the fairer of the species.  Rating: 4 - Veronica