The lowdown on film, music, television & happenings

By Staff Writer

Television Shows:

Veep Season 6

Mark April 16th on your calendars because HBO’s hit show Veep is back for its sixth season. They say art imitates life, but in this case life seems to have imitated art. Veep, a satirical political comedy that traces the political career of Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), has done a great job so far of being one of the most relevant shows on TV these days. One will have to tune into the new season to see how they deal with President Trump. As the spring melts into summer, this is the show to watch to find the funny side of life.

Movies:

Gifted

Frank Adler (Chris Evans) is a single man raising a child prodigy, his young niece Mary (Mckenna Grace). Frank’s plan for giving the girl a normal upbringing is foiled when Frank’s mother Eveylyn (Lindsay Duncan) finds out about the child’s extraordinary abilities. Evelyn seeks custody of the child in the Florida courts, believing the child should be specially tutored to nurture her one-in-a-billion prodigious talents. The film, which hearkens back to Oscar-winning Good Will Hunting, plays on the same dilemma: what is more important, the happiness of normality, or the achievement of the super-normal? Look out for this Marc Webb directorial feature this April.

Books:

The Idiot

—Elif Batuman

It is September 1995. Selin, a Turkish-American college freshman from New Jersey, is about to embark on her first year at Harvard University, where she is determined to decipher the mysteries of language and to become a writer. In between studying psycho linguistics and the philosophy of language, teaching ESL to a Costa Rican plumber, and befriending her classmate Svetlana (a Serbian refugee from Connecticut), Selin falls in love with a Hungarian Mathematics student in her Russian class. She spends the summer in the Hungarian countryside teaching English to village children, where sad and comic misunderstandings ensue. The Idiot tackles literary ambition, female friend ship, the American dream, Chomsky-an linguistics, the Russian novel and romantic love.

Music:

Patari Tabeer