UNDERRATED/OVERRATED: MGMT’s ‘Congratulations’, Matthew McConaughey, Minute to Win It, Apple

MGMT’s ‘Congratulations’: This Brooklyn duo outraged much of its American Apparel-clad fan base with this bent follow-up to 2008’s “Oracular Spectacular,” but it couldn’t be more wrong. A stylistic leap from the band’s dance-mad debut, this dense album drops references to record-nerd obscurities such as Television Personalities that sail over our heads, but we also can’t stop listening. How did MGMT make a record that sounds like the best of 1981 in 2010?

Matthew McConaughey: If you’ve been on an airplane or watched HBO for any length of time, you’ve encountered the cinematic perpetual motion machine that is McConaughey. And though it’s easy to slam the rote romantic comedies, the ever-present drawling character tics, we prefer celebrating these as warm reminders of our first (and perhaps truest) McConaughey experience: Wooderson from 1993’s “Dazed and Confused.” Keep on livin’, Matthew. L-I-V-I-N’.

Our ‘Running Man’ reality: Even discounting the absurd challenges of NBC’s dignity-defying game show “Minute to Win It,” it’s the show’s construction that we find most unsettling. From the coldly hyper-stylized set to the instructions delivered by a soothing, faux-robot voice, the show feels like a campy, sci-fi depiction of a dystopian future — except it’s actually happening. Remember back when “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” was the end of civilized TV as we knew it?

Apple’s standing as plucky upstart: Just as fans can always find the good in their favorite sports teams, so too do many Apple-addicted apologists find the silver lining in Steve Jobs and Co.’s every move. But in the wake of the paranoid acts surrounding its lost iPhone prototype and the upcoming closure of the streaming music site Lala, Apple can be seen for what it is — a large corporation out to make money. Success must make it harder to “Think Different.”