July 2006 Archives

With Mel Gibson and Lindsay Lohan making spectacles of themselves in the news this week - he for drunk driving and spewing the anti-Semitic bile we always kinda knew was in him, her getting publicly scolded by the producer of her latest film for her "heat-related" (read: mojito-fueled) work absences - I couldn't help think that there's a great father-daughter road comedy somewhere in their mutual future.
It could end in a teary reconiciliation at a halfway house. Or maybe on a beach in Beirut, with her in a bikini while Mel rants about the airstrike at their hotel.

Critics have generally been kind to the concert documentary “Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man,�? but I think they may have feared that slagging the movie meant slagging the man. Speaking as a huge Cohen fan, I found it an almost perfectly thorough disappointment.

Some critics did note that for a film ostensibly about the singer/songwriter/poet, he sure didn’t figure much in it. Cohen’s best moment comes when he reads the wry, generous introduction he wrote for the Chinese translation of “Beautiful Losers,�? his (one presumes) drug-fueled, stream-of-consciousness, utterly unhinged ’60s novel about a love triangle. The rest of what he has to say covers pretty familiar territory if you know anything about the guy.

(Interestingly, in the film, Cohen concedes that revealing that his song “Chelsea Hotel No. 2�? concerned a tryst with Janis Joplin was “ungallant,�? making his later explication of the song “Suzanne�? – that not everything in that song really happened – seem a bit disingenuous.)

So most of the film is given over to a tribute concert in which a number of singer/songwriters perform sort of Vegas-y, overwrought versions of Cohen tunes. Cohen’s material works precisely because he largely presented it in such a subtle, unadorned fashion; he never tried to sell the hell out of it. Cohen, who doesn’t even appear at the concert, performs but one song live, a fairly rote reading of “Tower of Song�? with U2 noodling away in the background.

Additionally, many of the songs chosen, curiously enough, are rather minor offerings from his canon, with a shocking number of his undisputed masterpieces overlooked. No “Joan of Arc?�? No “Famous Blue Raincoat?�? or “Take This Longing?�? No “Democracy�? or “The Future?�? Neophytes encountering Cohen for the first time, based on the bulk of the songs presented juxtaposed with the fawning hagiography, will be right for wondering what all the fuss is about.

Finally, this may be, visually, the most unintentionally ugly film I’ve ever seen – with its limited color palate, its intense close-ups and its wan, uninspired efforts to juice up the imagery, this may be the first movie to look better on an iPod than it does on the big screen.

How utterly wrong-headed are the visuals? The song "Sisters of Mercy" is accompanied by images of religious iconography; the song itself is about a threesome.

Given all this, perhaps Antony shouldn’t have accentuated so intensely the final lines of his song: “End this night/if it be your will.�?

While Roger Ebert recovers from surgery, it has been announced that noted film historian Jay Leno will replace him in the balcony for a week on "Ebert & Roeper." Slacker auteur and noted visual stylist (ahem) Kevin Smith ("Clerks II") will follow him in the second week of Ebert's recuperation, with other people (including an actual critic or two) being considered for future installments.

A show about about movie criticism without any movie critics? Brilliant!

It's been apparent for quite some time that that show isn't about film criticism anymore. Bringing in Roeper, who isn't a film critic (but plays one on TV), was like having that weasly little Alan Colmes as the voice of the "left" on Fox News Channel's "Hannity and Colmes" -- it's simply intended to make ultraconservative Sean Hannity look better. And so Ebert's ego is assuaged because he's assured to look like he knows what he's talking about compared to his little sidekick.

Of course, if the big cheese and his ego are gone, no one's gonna watch Roeper flail about on his own. So naturally they have to tart it up with celebrities. Which, in the end, only serves to feed Ebert's ego (which, while bedridden, remains healthy) all the more: It takes someone with the stature of Jay Leno to replace Roger.

Those two big thumbs are up, all right -- someone's backside.

The brains behind "HGTV Design Star" deserve some points for letting common sense prevail and refusing to let way-out Ramona Jan become the Master P of their talent-search series. With the quirky Ramona eliminated in the first round, the remaining nine will get down to business in this Sunday's episode (9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific) by reworking a Long Island home that's been on the market for too long. Meanwhile Ramona, who cheerfully and shamelessly will transform anything not nailed down into "art," should explore opportunities in late-night cable access.

Yet another sign that Earth is completely out of balance: It is now possibly to truthfully say the phrase "award-winning movie 'Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo.'" The Rob Schneider crass comedy sequel that most critics agree never should have seen the light of day picked up the honor last night for best movie billboard at the 7th annual Sunset Strip/Times Square Billboard Awards. The good news is that the awards also gave its Billboard of the Year honor to "Weeds," a Showtime series actually worthy of your entertainment time and dollar.

During virtually every TV Press Tour session, I felt as if I was experiencing deja vu, as everyone kept waxing philosophical about the importance of writing in what they're working on.

Now, I'm not suggesting that the folks quoted below are pathological liars and their shows are junk and they're just trying to make crap sound hifalutin; a number of the shows cited below are pretty good. But if actors really value fresh, original writing, don't you think they'd cook up something more provocative than these myriad clichéd variations on the same, tired theme?:

Brad Garrett, Fox’s “’Til Death:�? “I read the pilot and I just loved the writing.�?

Skeet Ulrich, CBS’s “Jericho:�? “When you have good writing, it makes you, as an actor, think.�?

Sally Field, ABC’s “Brothers & Sisters:�? “This is a phenomenal group. Robbie Baitz is an extraordinary writer, and this kind of thing doesn’t happen very often….�?

Ted Danson, ABC’s “Help Me Help You:�? “My homework is to find the script and the writers that excite you and make you laugh and smile and all of that.�?

Anne Heche, ABC’s “Men in Trees:�? “This script came along, and I felt that it was so wonderful and such a great combination of humor and drama.�?

Gale Harold, Fox’s “Vanished:�? “…the chance to work with these guys, the quality of the writing…�?

Jason Katims, NBC’s “Friday Night Lights:�? “I can only speak to what draws me to the material. … the way Peter (Berg) wrote and directed it…�?

John Lithgow, NBC’s “20 Good Years:�? “That’s one thing I’ve always loved about this premise and the writing.�?

Jeffrey Tambor, NBC’s “20 Good Years:�? “The script really made me laugh. … My writer friend, he really hit it right out of the park. And it spoke to me and it’s true.�?

Leslie Pope, CW’s “Runaway:�? “I had great advice when I left ‘24’ from Stephen Hopkins who told me to follow the writing.�?

Erika Christensen, ABC’s “Six Degrees:�? “It comes right down to the script. … Artistically, that was really exciting to me.�?

Victor Garber, Fox’s “Justice:�? “What intrigued me was the script.�?

Beth Lacke, Fox’s “Happy Hour:�? “I think it’s so well-written. … It’s right there on the page.�?

James Woods, CBS’s “Shark:�? “…when Ian (Biederman, the show’s creator) gave me this remarkable script…�?

Virginia Madsen, CBS’s “Smith:�? “John (Wells, series creator) writes amazing stories for women on all his shows. There are really strong characters, much more so than on most of the features that I read.�?

David Kronke, Los Angeles Daily News: "Writing sucks. At least mine does. But it pays the bills."

OK, so Lance Bass is gay. Really: This is news? Someone, somewhere, is surprised?

I mean, when I took my stepdaughter to an 'N Sync concert five or six years ago, when she was 10 or 11, she came very close to the truth herself then. Watching the guys endlessly cavorting on stage, she took a break from screaming her little lungs out to lean over to me and declare, “They're so bouncy!�?

And anyway, someone unearthed this not terribly ambiguous “the walrus was Paul�? clue from five years back.

So, you want to see superheroes? Or do you want to see really cute girls in Spandex tights?

If you answer the latter, click here. Babes don't come any babier than when their skin is lasciviously laundered in Lycra.

Never has so much been written about so little.

Many of the critics I’ve spoken to during this summer’s TV Press Tour have groused that they’ve never worked harder during press tour than they have this year. Technology, of course, is responsible: Many of them were blogging nonstop or, as in my case, filing story after story for the online editions of their papers when, in the past, we’d only put the event in context for print subscribers. Several colleagues lamented that, in churning out all of this material, they’ve essentially been reduced to transcribers, not writers.

Which is ironic, since very little of substance emerges from the press sessions, just endless variations of “I really loved this script�? and “It’s all about the work�? and “Good material wins out�? and “If a show is good, people will watch�? (that last one has been disproved time and time again). So the idea that a couple hundred reporters are all making sure their readers know that Donnie Wahlberg thinks he’s perfect for his role in The CW’s lame new show “Runaway�? because “I think what really I’m able to bring in the character is, I’m a parent�? is both amusing and depressing in ways that if you have to have them explained to you, you must have stumbled upon this blog by accident or in a drunken stupor.

I’ve sort of kept up with what’s being written out there, and if Press Tour coverage is not of the “Hooray-for-Hollywood-this-is-going-to-be-the-best-TV-season-EVER�? variety, it carries a wizened, cynical tone that’s likewise not conducive to much instructive content. At least one blog I glanced upon offered a detail-by-detail account of how transcripts are created during Press Tour, which is so inside-baseball that I can’t imagine anyone finding that interesting. Rather than mainstream readers, a lot of this stuff seems aimed more at fellow critics, who, of course, are too busy engorging their own endless blogs to have time to read others’.

Meanwhile, while this orgy of publicity was erupting in Pasadena, one presumes all these newspapers were paying equal amounts of attention to the pre-party to the apocalypse that they’re currently throwing in the Middle East.

The other complaint – and one that seems sort of more pressing, if you can erase the perspective issue I raised in the paragraph above – is that all these reporters are so busy feeding their respective monsters that they’re simply incapable of divining from one another any sense of perspective on the upcoming season. Simply put, critics aren’t gauging the temperatures of the upcoming season to achieve a sense of what’s truly transpiring. One might reasonably assume that groupspeak has been laudably eradicated, and to a certain extent, that’s true. But also, a cultural perspective has been eradicated, as well. It’s as if everyone has decided to celebrate Kobe Bryant because he scored 81 points in one game and have utterly ignored the day-in/day-out contributions of a more valuable player such as Elton Brand.

I personally have vaguely noted a Zeitgeist-y trend in the upcoming season’s new offerings – one I didn’t want to share with colleagues, lest they steal my (upcoming) story – but I didn’t sense, from the sundry press conferences, that anyone else had really picked up on it. (People I individually interviewed definitely had opinions on the matter, however.) I think this is more attributable to how exhausted everyone has become while covering this event than to my own insight.

As one colleague observed today, the phrase “labor-saving device�? has disappeared from our lexicon. What has happened is that industries have learned how to use the conveniences of the new technologies to make their employees work even longer hours. And everyone with a job understands this; it’s a universal concern, scarcely unique to TV critics. What this means, in this – and only this – perspective is: TV critics are being deprived of being able to explain for viewers the context behind the creation of entertainment; no one has the time or space or inclination to explain what TV should mean to its viewers.

Admittedly, this trend is, in TV coverage, the least of our worries. But it’s something someone should opine in the broader nature of our culture. Context is king, no matter what journalists are covering, and saturated coverage of any event – be it a Presidential news conference or TV press tour – doesn’t necessarily result in better, more informed information for those who want to be in the know.

Today at TV Press Tour, the Fox network held a lunch themed around its reality show "Hell's Kitchen," with menu items purportedly from the recipes of the show's host and chef, Gordon Ramsay. Little cardboard cutouts of Ramsay dotted the tables.

Much later in the day, I wandered through the hall where lunch was held. Saw one of those mini-Ramsays crumpled on a table, its head torn off.

Final, irrevocable proof that God has abandoned us.

TMZ.com can be informative (court docs at your fingertips) and amusing (video of train wrecks like Brandon Davis), but it also crosses the bounds into the mindlessly tasteless from time to time. I want to wrap somebody's knuckles for today's pronouncement/poll on "Who's the Middle East Hottie?" It talks up Bill Hemmer, above right, of Fox News, Richard Engel, left, of NBC, and Anderson Cooper, below right, of CNN and how cool they look in their flak jackets.


Puleeeeze. These guys are among hundreds of reporters in Israel and Lebanon who are putting themselves in harm's way to cover serious combat that already is taking a very heavy toll and has worldwide consequences. Not quite the same circumstances as the brief Gulf War, when NBC's Arthur Kent was playfully dubbed the Scud Stud.

Bless me father, for I have sinned. I watch "Big Brother."

Summer's guilty pleasure for those with no cable, "Big Brother," now in its seventh season, finally upped the ante by doing an "all-star" edition with past contestants returning to the "Big Brother" house on the CBS Studios lot in Studio City for another chance at $500,000 (what, they coudn't spring for a cool mil?) The man to beat is Will, below, known as "the evil Dr. Will," who took the top prize in "Big Brother 2" by lying his way through the game and making no bones about doing so. Now Dr. Will is a dermatologist who's a vocal advocate of Botox -- and it shows. His face is a puffy, wrinkle-free facade -- perfect for the way he bills himself: "I'm just circuitry and wires on the inside."

Other tough contestants include Kayser, below left, and Janelle, right, from "Big Brother 6." While Kayser seems to be one of the smarter players in the reality-show game, he tends to make moves that look, at first like they're bone-headed, but for some reason that eludes us will pay off down the road. Then they don't. Kayser -- put 'em to the wall and play like a man. Janelle, whose occupation is listed as "VIP cocktail waitress," has an uncanny ability to win the various competitions in the show, but she's often a target of the other players for that very reason. And don't forget the stealthy, two-faced James, below right.

The other addition to "BB" this year is that losers of the food competitions do not eat only peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for a week. No, that's too good for these "all-stars," who, upon losing the fight for food, eat something called "Big Brother Slop," which looks like a stinky oatmeal derivative.

There's already been one eviction -- the annoying Allison, who also stunk up "The Amazing Race" a few seasons ago. Good riddance, I say.

In any event, the live eviction, during which host Julie Chen interviews the latest loser to be voted off the show, airs at 8 tonight. Hope I get my tape in the VCR in time to catch it. Otherwise, "Big Brother All-Stars" airs Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays at 8 p.m. Be there, or ... have something else to do.

Went to last night's opening performance of the 136th edition of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey at Staples Center, in particular to observe more closely for myself the elephants' role in the show and how they are handled. With a 2000 lawsuit against the circus wending its way toward a trial, probably next year, the endangered Asian elephants may not be a part of the show much longer if Ringling loses.
The usual number of protesters were outside the arena, and Ringling made its customary promotional push about the Center for Elephant Conservation, its captive breeding program in Florida. But what really caught my attention were the animated "talking" elephants on the jumbo screen who proclaimed that the tricks the pachyderms do in the show are "natural behaviors."
If anybody out there has seen video of an Asian elephant in the wild balancing on its trunk and forelegs, or maybe perching one foreleg on a rock or treestump and then walking around it in a circle, I'd love to know about it.

By the power vested in me, I do hereby declare this Monday, July 24, to be Talk Like A Pirate Gordon Ramsay Day. Perhaps you've had a boss like Gordon Ramsay, legendary U.K. chef and star of "Hell's Kitchen" on Fox (on which would-be head chefs compete to run Ramsay's new Las Vegas restaurant, and during which he motivates his charges by berating them and throwing things) and "Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares" on BBC America (on which Ramsay goes to failing eateries all around Britain and tries to turn them and their workers around ... by berating them and throwing things) . Let's just say that even sailors don't swear this much.

Since it's getting down to the proverbial wire on "Hell's Kitchen" (which I'm pretty sure is filmed on a converted soundstage at the Fox lot in Culver City) on Monday (8 to 10 p.m., Fox), it's time for us all to cast off our usual sunny demeanors and TALK LIKE GORDON RAMSAY.

An un-bleeped DVD of the BBC America show was so expletive-ridden, we had to turn it off when our 2-year-old woke from her nap. (Yes, I am parent of the year, and will now bask in my reflected glory. Thank you all.)

So aside from watching dozens of Gordon Ramsay-starring TV shows, which I assure you I've done, thereby making me an authority on this topic, here's a short course on HOW TO TALK LIKE GORDON RAMSAY:

1. End each and every command, suggestion or instruction with the phrase, "Move your arse!!!!!" (with a bit of lengthening on the "arse.")

2. All males who weigh more than 150 pounds shall be called "big boy," as in "Move your arse, big boy!!!!"

3. All women, all shapes and sizes, are to be referred to as "missy," as in "Move your arse, missy!!!!"

4. In the unlikely event that someone prepares you a food item, say a beef Wellington (Gordon is big -- very big -- on beef Wellington) that is not cooked to exact specifications, yell the following: "Throw it in the bin!!!" See, in British, "bin" means "trash can."

5. If no amount of arse-moving in the world will fix what's wrong with your current situation, hold your head in your hands and say, "Oh, F--- me."

6. At this point, if there's no way to salvage the task at hand, utter the following command, "Shut it DOWN!!!" and leave the room.

Then ask your co-workers to nominate two of their own. You then fire one on the spot, collect their jacket on the way out, impale it on a hook and cause their picture to spontaneously combust. That's how to Talk Like Gordon Ramsay. (Hell's Kitchen ... flames ...spontaneous combustion ... his fate in your hands ... DO I HAVE TO DRAW A ROADMAP FOR YOU? HE'S THE DEVIL ... THE DEVIL I SAY!)

P.S. It's obvious that either Heather, left, or Keith, right, is going to win this thing ... so tune in Monday, talk like Gordon Ramsay and ... MOVE YOUR ARSE!!!!

P.P.S. If you want to work for Gordon Ramsay, apply here.

P.P.P.S. Catch "Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares," as he tries to save a "hideous Italian restaurant," at 10 tonight on BBC America.

Promotional messages for new fall series are everywhere... billboards, buses, TV promos and, soon enough, radio. I'd thought the network promo creatives had tried it all when "Desperate Housewives" put "dirty laundry" graphics on dry cleaner bags. Boy, was I short-sighted. Come September, CBS will be drawing attention to its new season with logos and lame puns printed on eggshells. CBS is the first major corporation to advertise on 35 million eggs marked by EggFusion, whose process was intended to note the product's expiration date.
"We're egg-cited about this egg-clusive opportunity," the marketing honcho said in the news release.
Ugh.

(Lauren Graham, left, new producer David Rosenthal, and Alexis Bledel parse their various levels of commitment to the future of "Gilmore Girls" during Monday's TCA press conference in Pasadena. AP photo by Lucas Jackson.)

A strange thing happened during the “Gilmore Girls�? press conference Monday evening: A reporter lobbed a Scud “gotcha�? missile at the program's new showrunner, David Rosenthal.

Rosenthal joined the writing team last year, and was bumped to top dog (and “dog�? is probably the appropriate word) when Amy Sherman-Palladino and her husband Dan couldn't work out a deal with the studio. (Truth be told, stars Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel didn't seemed all that broken up by the fact. Perhaps they're just being good soldiers for the new regime, or perhaps…)

Midway through the session, one reporter (who's not a member of the Television Critics Association, and after this, may find it hard to join) asked Rosenthal about his murky past involving an obsession with Heidi Klum, and whether that really entitled him to take charge of a show celebrated for its well-drawn female characters. I'm offering a fairly diplomatic version of the way he posed the question; the way he posed his question, it was clear he wasn't expecting an answer - he just wanted to call Rosenthal out, to humiliate him.

Well, it worked. Rosenthal tensed visibly and, obviously, refused to respond; the guy tried again and Lauren Graham called for another question. Anyone with a laptop with wi-fi in the room furiously began Googling the story.

Which is this: Rosenthal, after a meteoric rise in the industry, found himself crazy rich while working on the sitcom “Spin City." Klum guest-starred on an episode.

Afterwards, Rosenthal quit Hollywood and his marriage and wrote a play, “Love,�? which played in New York shortly after Sept. 11, 2001 and was roundly condemned by critics. In “Love,�? an actor portrayed a character named “David Rosenthal,�? who delivered an expletive-laced monologue revealing that his one goal in life is to have sex with Heidi Klum. When Rosenthal sent “Love's�? script to his agents, they dropped him; when he sent it to his father, he had him briefly committed to a mental institution. Reviews expressed repulsion; the New York Times declared it a smidgen short of actual stalking.

(All this information is available online; the reason I feel it's OK to discuss it is that Rosenthal went on Howard Stern's radio show and discussed much of this stuff, and more, at length. So it's not as if the guy tried to conceal any of this.)

Two things: One, the question was posed in an utterly inappropriate fashion (that was the general consensus after the press conference concluded). Two, it's not, however, an inappropriate question.

Turning over the reins of a beloved program to a different writer invariably invites speculation. (Look at how “West Wing�? faltered for a long while after creator Aaron Sorkin was ousted.) If the reporter was truly interested in eliciting a serious answer, he should have asked Rosenthal, in private, something along the lines of: “How can you assuage the concerns of fans that 'Gilmore Girls' will remain true to its longstanding spirit when it's been placed in the hands of a man who wrote a play that was notoriously and widely considered misogynistic?�?

Also: I haven't seen or read the play, but let's briefly entertain the notion that, in the days immediately after 9/11, no one was prepared for a piece of drama that was so obviously intentionally confrontational and self-reflective and that didn't have bigger themes than one's own navel-gazing. Rosenthal may have stumbled onto a truth so uncomfortable no one wanted to acknowledge it at the time, lest they besmirch their own humanity (Neil LaBute gets away with all sorts of savage psychology in his characters). Of course, it's quite likely that the critics were right: That it was just an utter piece of self-indulgent filth that no right-minded person should have to bear to experience that made Mike Binder's "The Mind of a Married Man" seem noble and effusively big-hearted by comparison. (After the play, Rosenthal would come out to conduct a Q&A, which definitely feels like more self-aggrandizing behavior; once, the first question was, simply, “Why?�?)

It's odd that The WB or The CW didn't vet Rosenthal so that they could avoid clouding a heretofore benign show with this sort of controversy. (A colleague suggested that The CW, which has a new show entitled “Runaway,�? should team with Bravo, where Klum hosts the reality series “Project Runway,�? for another program: “Project Runaway.�?)

Or maybe the reporter should have simply asked: “So, did you and Heidi ever hook up?�?

What do you think? Is this kind of questioning appropriate regarding a light-hearted show? Do well-paid Hollywood figures subject themselves to this kind of scrutiny? Is Rosenthal, in fact, an appropriate heir to the effervescent “Gilmore Girls?�?

I wrote a story many years ago equating the cable universe with something huckster P.T. Barnum might have cooked up. This week, the cable networks at TV press tour certainly proved me correct.

There was Mr. T, trotting out the same old shtick he’s used to somehow stay in the media spotlight for the past 25 years. There was KISS’s Gene Simmons, revealing himself for the utterly cynical showman he’s always been (Barnum withers by comparison). There was legendary bad girl (and bad driver) Shannen Doherty, shedding “real�? tears and slipping in a mention that her mother was in the room in the bargain. There was Comedy Central’s “Naked Trucker,�? who appeared onstage clothed only with a judiciously placed guitar (and, as one critic critically positioned at the press conference noted, a jock strap).

Cable networks veer violently back and forth between trying to amuse their immediate audience, those reporters attending the press conferences, and the readers to whom those journalists ultimately will report. Mr. T probably rose beyond what those assembled thought of him and emerged, phoenix-like, to a new generation of media consumers. “Naked Trucker’s�? wit was likely lost on a lot of journalists and, even for those who got or liked the joke, much of it doesn’t really translate into print. Doherty has a select audience; no one else gives a crap, so her melodrama was likely a wash.

The event that had most journalists covering Press Tour talking for days after the event, however, was Dan Rather’s appearance on behalf of Mark Cuban’s HDNet. Though Rather seems to get a little too choked up at his every mention of Edward R. Murrow, whose legacy at this point he decidedly will not usurp, and though Ted Koppel is obviously more respected amongst those covering press tour and is accepting a similar drop in viewers – though Rather’s plunging from the millions to some tens of thousands – dapper Dan’s teary farewell to CBS, to being able to influence, in some small way, a nation – struck many as a poignant, lion-in-winter moment. (Rather himself suggested he was being relegated to a “wilderness.�?) For others, it was just weird, a word rarely attached to other news anchors.

For Cuban, Rather’s move is exhilarating; for Rather, it’s the sorry third act to a heretofore triumphal narrative. Hence Rather’s treacle.

(During the press conference, as microphones were being passed from reporter to reporter who jockey mercilessly for position so that they could roundly elucidate their queries, a reporter behind me kept getting shut out – not by other reporters, but by Cuban, persisting in celebratory spin. Now, I utterly admire Cuban – it would be bizarre if he owned an NBA team with any other name but the Mavericks, and he’ll respond to a reporter’s query faster than it takes for anyone else’s publicist to consider asking her superiors whether she can send an email to a colleague inquiring into whether it might be felicitous for someone to respond to a reporter’s query.

But during this press conference, Cuban’s chatter led the woman who gave the mike to the guy who couldn’t get his question asked (ostensibly, she’s an employee of Cuban’s) to exasperatedly declare (albeit sotto voce,) “He talks too much!�?)

I can't be bothered to actually tally such things, but it would seem that the most overused word in tabloid headlines these days is "bump," as in the abdominal bulge which may be a famous fetus or may just be evidence of a bean burrito consumed at lunch.
Paparazzi and the people who pay them are obsessed these days with images that suggest someone has a bun in the oven, particularly if it's Nicole Kidman or Jennifer Aniston. A snug dress or top may reveal a curve that puts photogs on 24/7 pregnancy patrol, while anything flowy has the caption writers practically panting about what the celeb is trying to hide.
Until paparazzi and tab editors decide to back off or to focus on other signs of pregnancy -- swollen ankles and Jimmy Choos, perhaps? -- we're forced to look at a bunch of "bumps," real or imagined.
Think I'll invest in companies that make Gas-X and body shapers with industrial-strength tummy control.

Sometimes you just need to put something out there into the cosmos to get the answer you're looking for. Sometimes it's the right answer.

Caught and reviewed the Odyssey Theatre's production of August WIlson's "Fences" a week ago which left me wondering what the more resourced Pasadena Playhouse would do re: casting Wilson's "Death of a Salesman" like tale of a Negro League slugger turned garbage collector and his family when the Playhouse mounted the same play in September.

The day before my review appeared, I got my answer. Laurence Fishburne, finishing up a run of the dopey Alfred Uhry play "Without Walls" at the Mark Taper Forum, would play Troy opposite Angela Bassett as Troy's wife Rose.

Yeah, I'll see that production.

Fishburne's a pro who smoulders convincingly both on screen ("The Matrix", "School Daze" etc.) and on stage. He and Bassett each got Oscar nods for playing Ike and Tina Turner in "What's Love Got to do With It." The two actors recently reunited on screen for "Akeelah and the Bee."

They've both played Wilson before: Bassett in "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" and "Joe Turner's Come and Gone," and Fishburne in "Two Trains Running." Bassett shouldn't have any difficulty finding someone to run lines with. Her husband, Courtney B. Vance, played the Maxon's youngest son Cory in "Fences" on Broadway back in 1987 opposite James Earl Jones.

As of this writing, there is no theatrical event I anticipate with greater eagerness.

TV Press Tour begins tomorrow. I hate TV Press Tour. Were I ever to commit suicide, I would do it just before TV Press Tour just to spare myself, at least, that amount of misery.

Now, I may be in the minority here. Most of those who cover Press Tour come from elsewhere in the country and are put up in a swanky hotel (Pasadena’s Ritz-Carlton) for two or three weeks, so at least they have some luxurious creature comforts surrounding them while they ponder this excrescence to the body of journalism.

During Press Tour, broadcast and cable networks trot out the stars and creators of their new and upcoming series for an exhausting, never-ending series of press conferences and “events�? that run from 9 in the morning or earlier to about 10 p.m., or around 6 p.m. if one wants to blow off the evening “events.�?

So you’re thinking, oh boo-hoo – regular work-day hours and hanging out with celebrities and parties every night, poor you. Well, sure, if you don’t care about journalistic integrity, and certainly, the networks don’t want you to. At the press conferences, those questioned will routinely lie or simply refuse to answer a question. (Usually, they decline to respond with the explanation, “I’m here to talk about the show,�? which is insulting to those covering the session in so many ways I won’t even go into it here. Unless, of course, the panel concerns “The Sopranos,�? then they won’t say anything about the show at all.)

One example: Last January, at UPN’s executive session, Dawn Ostroff played a spectacular game of “Evade the Press.�? Every single reply to a query felt false or obfuscating. Two days after Press Tour ended, we found out why: UPN was being absorbed, with The WB, into a new network, The CW. Why couldn’t the announcement have been made at Press Tour? Because then, actual news would have emanated from Press Tour, and God knows the networks don’t want that.

(The press release announcing the CW press conference was dispatched three hours – 5 a.m. Pacific time – before the press conference itself – 8 a.m. Pacific time. Which meant that not a lot of reporters managed to attend the press conference, and those that did may not have been in a position to ask the right questions. Had the announcement been made during Press Tour, there would have been a raft of pointed, intelligent questions. That’s why the announcement wasn’t made during Press Tour, and that’s why Ostroff was left to flounder during her session – she knew, but couldn’t say anything, and didn’t want to outright lie, but couldn’t exactly tell anything resembling the truth, either.)

Also, though there are a number of intelligent, professional critics and journalists who attend, there are many others in attendance, as well, and some of the questions that come from the assembled journalists are so foolish and inane as to make one embarrassed to be part of the same profession as the person posing the query. (Think about it – if you have a really good question, as a journalist, would you want to let all the other lumpenproles benefit from your brilliance or ask the question at the post-session scrum and maybe get a scoop for yourself? So not too many thoughtful questions are going to get asked by definition.) Which only contributes to the networks’ general perception that those who attend Press Tour are boobs, and certainly informs the condescension and, even, contempt they shower us with.

One year, two network executives actually high-fived one another when a critic complained that they hadn’t said anything of substance. Another year – when crappy reality programming was at its zenith (and just about to take a huge nosedive) – a network executive scolded the assemblage, saying newspaper stories about the glut of reality programming were to blame for the public thinking there was too much reality TV, not the actual surfeit itself.

So where Press Tour, to the uninitiated, might seem like glamorous fun, for me, it’s three weeks of sleeplessness and craven self-promotion and buffoonery and being condescended to. Any takers now?

Another reason to hate Press Tour: I’ll be so overwhelmed with the networks’ shenanigans that I won’t be able to contribute to this blog. The Daily News is in the process of setting up a page devoted to Press Tour coverage (much of it available only online), so you can experience my hell vicariously there.

There’s an unmistakable irony in that “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,�? which began life as a children’s program on CBS two decades ago, now finds itself an offering on Adult Swim (at 11 tonight), the late-night anarchic version of Cartoon Network.

While it’s vaguely amusing to consider what the CBS suits must’ve made of the bizarre, inspired show back in 1986, it’s even more tantalizing to consider what a broadcast network would make of this material today. In today's TV climate, this is risky TV to be put on cable late at night; back then, it won 22 Emmys.

I feared it might feel dated before watching the first episode, but the show, gratifyingly, has lost none of its surreal delight. A perverse amalgam of slightly sinister puppets, goofy clay-mation, bizarre vintage cartoons (the show’s archival department must’ve been patient and ingenious in searching for these things) that seemed to have been the product of hop-headed animators’ fever dreams, eccentric characters (co-stars included Laurence Fishburne, S. Epatha Merkerson, Phil Hartman and Natasha Lyonne) and free-associative plotting that verged on the Dadaist, “Pee-wee’s Playhouse�? is an enduring cult classic.

And, of course, don’t forget the contribution of Paul Reubens, whose Pee-wee was an innocent perpetually winking bemusedly to his audience yet somehow genuinely filled with affection for what he was doing. His spastic body language and skewed vocal intonations (he’d fill down time with a passive-aggressive “La-LAA-la, la-la-LA�?) made him a favorite of kids and adults alike (perhaps not so much the parents trying to sleep in on Saturdays whose kids were encouraged to “scream real loud�? when the magic word was said, and it was said a lot).

“Pee-wee’s Playhouse�? predated MTV2’s far more savage “Wonder Showzen�? by employing kids in delivering its don’t-toe-any-line message (“Wonder Showzen�? is merely a virulent parody of children’s shows; “Pee-wee�? was both a legitimate children’s show and a parody). And it won all those Emmys even though it only produced 45 episodes, but that, of course, was before Reubens ventured into a Florida movie theater with Pee-wee's plaything.

Personally, I’m glad when Emmy nominations come up with something so profoundly wrong-headed as omitting Hugh Laurie from the Best Actor/Drama category but nominating Kevin James for Best Actor/Comedy, because that just means Academy voters didn’t take the whole thing very seriously, so why should I?

But I’ll indulge momentarily in a little belated Emmy blather. (Regular readers of this blog, assuming there are more than one, know of my DSL travails, and for some reason you can't post entries via dial-up.)

Outstanding Drama Series: Ah, what can you say? The nominees pretty much split the difference between popular and good enough, with the exception of “West Wing,�? which is just simply fondly remembered for winning all those Emmys all those years ago (and, in fact, did improve this season). Yes, I think there are far better shows that should’ve been nominated over a few of these. (Apparently, that evening Fox spent convincing Emmy voters that “24�? actually has real-world applications – if you have a cell phone with the memory of a supercomputer and a nuclear-fueled battery – was effort well spent. Fox managed a similar successful campaign in “Arrested Development’s�? first season.) But I acknowledge that those shows probably don’t hold much appeal for Emmy’s older voting bloc so won’t humiliate them with my support.

Outstanding Comedy Series: Hey, I liked “Arrested Development�? as much as the next guy, but giving it a protest nomination is basically telling viewers, “Hey, there’s nothing else on TV worth watching, since we cancelled one of the best shows.�? (That really comes into play in the Lead Actress categories.) So the kvetching is that “My Name is Earl�? got snubbed. “Scrubs�? finally got a nomination, but it’s the only nomination that show got; “Earl�? at least got five, if in minor categories. I say “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia�? got snubbed, but no one ever expected a show that out of its mind to get a nomination anyway. So no harm, no foul.

Actor/Drama: People are calling Christopher Meloni’s nomination a big surprise, but that just means they’re not watching “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.�? Meloni’s character is slowly cracking under the strain of the grisly nature of his job, and he’s doing so in a way that’s compelling and heart-breaking to watch. By comparison, “Rescue Me’s�? Denis Leary falls apart frighteningly and hilariously. And apparently few shows on TV offer better actors than two that are among the dearly departed, so whatever I may think of Hugh Laurie, Martin Sheen and Peter Krause (who I thought got really mannered on “Six Feet Under�? by the end, but then, so did the whole show) get swan-song victory laps.

Actress/Drama: Three of the nominees are for shows that won’t be back. I mean, it’s nice to give these folks consolation prizes, but where’s the rooting factor in all this?

Actress/Comedy: This category is crazy. I guess the good news is, four of the nominees won’t be back next year, so that’ll take care of the complaint that the same person gets the trophy every year. And Stockard Channing? She, like everyone else on “Out of Practice,�? chewed the scenery like a starving person. Debra Messing? Was “Will & Grace�? even technically a comedy the past few years? And, yes – Lauren Graham, the poster gal for Emmy futility, the person most pundits point to when they try to explain why the rules were changed – still didn’t get nominated. Forget imagining how it must feel to not get something they all but handed to you: Imagine being the person who had to give her the bad news.

Actor/Comedy: Ehh. Except for that Kevin James thing, I can’t get too worked up over this. But I will say that they could’ve enter Hugh Laurie in this category and he still would’ve deserved a nomination.

Supporting Actor/Drama: Doesn’t everything William Shatner does on “Boston Legal�? fall squarely under the rubric of comedy? Ditto Oliver Platt on “Huff?�? Ditto Gregory Itzin (though for slightly different reasons) on “24?�?

Supporting Actress/Drama: Ditto Jean Smart (again, for different reasons -- that was a role, essentially, of high camp) on “24?�?

Supporting Actress/Comedy: So Elizabeth Perkins pulls a nomination for “Weeds�? and Mary Louise Parker gets nothing. So Jaime Pressly gets a (well-received, one might add) nomination for “Earl�? and, Jason Lee? Zilch.

Supporting Actor/Comedy: There are so many people who belong in this category, so except for Sean Hayes’ zillionth nomination, I’m not going to dispute their relative merits.

What do you think? What were Emmy’s best and worst nominations?

What a night! Outfest organizers sure know how to kick off a film festival. The opening night film, "Puccini for Beginners" was a real crowd pleaser with a lot of genuine laughs and plenty of heart. Well-written and smart, it moves along at a nice pace with terrfic performances from Elizabeth Reaser (pictured below), Justin Kirk and Gretchen Mol. Writer-director Maria Maggenti (director of the beloved "Unbelievably True Adventures of Two Girls in Love") shot the movie in 18 days saying "I crawled over glass to get it done." New York City-based Maggenti hopes the movie leads to some bigtime directing gigs: "I hope the lavender mafia, whoever you are, are here tonight because I came to L.A. to get a job!"

Pioneer queer filmmaker Kenneth Anger, recipient of a special achievement award, bounded onto the stage of the Orpheum Theatre in a yellow suit and white tennis shows. He started making movies as a kid with his parents 16 mm camera and said: 'I love making films and I've always been out. My grandmother accepted me, my father did not...I was the black sheep. But I wouldn't be anything else." (Loud applause followed)
Now, I'm not one to name drop (well, maybe I am), but we had terrific seats directly behind Justin Kirk and some of his friends and he couldn't have been nicer. Seated to my right was writer-director Craig Chester ("Adam & Steve) who is serving on the jury for best feature film. At the post-bash, chatted up Dreya Weber, star and one of the producers of "The Gymnast," one of the films I recommended in my earlier Outfest Early Picks post. Found out that Weber (below) is not only a terrific actress, but makes her living as acrobatic performer as well. So the amazing acrobats she performs in the film are all her, no stunt double folks.

Stay tuned for more adventures from Outfest 2006

Managed to nab tickets for my family to Monday's performance of "Love," the Beatles-inspired Cirque du Soleil production that just opened at the Mirage in Las Vegas. Judging from the crowd reaction and early reviews, it will be the hot ticket there for months to come. I've seen several Cirque performances and a few Beatles tribute concerts and I can assure you this is neither one. Conceived with the blessings of Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison and the assistance of Beatles producer George Martin, it may best be described as performance art on a helluva big budget. Through projections, dance, acrobatics and set pieces, the show relates how the times influenced their music and how their music influenced the times.

Spike TV must be taking some perverse pleasure in premiering “The Dudesons�? today, the day Emmy nominations are announced. For the show stands in stark, defiant contrast to the excellence in television the Emmys putatively celebrate.

“Dudesons�? is Finland’s answer to “Jackass.�? Or a predecessor – though the show says these guys began maiming themselves before “Jackass,�? the press material says it premiered in Finland in 2001, while “Jackass�? debuted in 2000. (This wouldn’t be the first thing these guys were confused about.)

Quite thoughtfully, Spike TV runs a title card imploring its viewers not to emulate the behavior on the show; one of the “Dudesons,�? Jarppi, has lost a thumb to his blithering antics. One wonders which of these stunts anyone with the intelligence to operate a TV remote might actually try to replicate: Tasting horse saliva? Sitting butt-naked on an anthill? Using one’s ample gut as a dartboard? (After a pal removes one dart, he tells Jarppi, “I saw what you had for lunch on it.�?)

(On the other hand, these guys are on the TV, so no doubt some yokel somewhere is seriously querying himself, “What price glory?�?)

Jarppi and his buddies sure like to trash cars (oddly, for such slackers, they sure have access to a lot of cars – not to mention, they live on their own ranch). Tonight’s first gag involves Jarppi attempting a blindfolded car jump – he doesn’t even make it up the ramp, instead careering off its side and flipping the car over.

As with “Jackass,�? these guys like to disrobe and sexually abuse one another. They pull off a guy’s pants and laugh hysterically. They smack a baseball bat on a guy’s genitalia as he sleeps and laugh hysterically. They contrive to have a guy fall into the business end of an outhouse – and, yes, laugh hysterically. They’re Beavis, Butt-head and another brother Butt-head come to life.

Like most reality TV, “The Dudesons�? trucks in train-wreck TV and, indeed, as hard as some of their antics are to watch, they’re just as hard to ignore. Unlike other reality TV, however, you half expect them to actually cause a train to wreck. Then laugh hysterically as paramedics treat the dead and dying.

“The Dudesons�? (no link, since its website is spitting out a bunch of useless pages): 10 p.m. Thursdays on Spike TV.

When I was in college, my fiction professor gave me a very stern, unambiguous edict: Never write about artists. People do not give a crap.

Artists, you see, are these ethereal, romanticized jerks who either make a lot of money for “feeling too much�? (i.e., being moody) and treating everyone around them poorly, or they complain that they don’t make any money for feeling too much and that makes them treat everyone around them all the more poorly. Normal people, my professor explained to me, don’t relate much to that.

Consider this passage from Peter Carrey’s “Theft�? (Knopf, $24), about, yes, an artist: “Artists are used to humiliation. We start with it and we are always ready to return to real failure, the (crappy) bottom of the barrel, the destruction of our talent by alcohol or misery. We live with the knowledge that, alongside Cezanne or Picasso, we are no one, were always no one will be forgotten before we are in the ground. Shame, doubt, self-loathing, all this we eat for breakfast everyday.�?

Nicely written as that is, it would seem my writing prof was right.

“Theft,�? about a dissolute, drunken painter past his prime who gets involved with a scam involving forging a painting by the man who inspired his own art, revisits territory the two-time Booker Prize winner has explored before – “My Life as a Fake�? concerned a possible literary hoax – and the artist’s brother seems a rough photocopy of Lennie in “Of Mice and Men.�? The book goes back and forth between the artist’s point of view and the brother’s, which is written with a sort of stilted simplicity that vaguely recalls Carey’s “True History of the Kelly Gang’s�? narrator.

A blurb on the book’s jacket suggests, “No matter what (Carey) decides to write or how he decides to write it, it’s a privilege to read him.�? True, unless he opts to have his protagonist wax poetic about a poorly constructed femme fatale: “She held her arms open and I held her, smelled her jasmine skin, her shampooed hair. Did I say I loved her? Of course I did. … She was my thief, my lover, my mystery, a lovely series of revelations which I prayed would never end.�?

“How do you know how much to pay if you don’t know what it’s worth?�? Carey asks, and obviously, he’s discussing more than just art there. But Michael Frayn’s “Headlong�? is a much funnier and wiser take on art and those obsessed with its market.

Now that the Daily News has run its requisite stories about the Emmys and their potential nominees, it’s probably time to unveil a dirty little secret about entertainment reporters and awards shows. Namely, we don’t take awards ceremonies too seriously.

You probably had already figured this out if you had read these blog entries by my colleague Bob Strauss, dissing the Oscars.

Part of our ambivalence to the awards spectacle is that, really, they don’t measure much. As Bob Thompson of Syracuse University’s Center for the Study of Popular Television told me, the question centers on “What is it that the Emmys measure? If they measure what are truly the best television programs by objective criteria, then you’d completely change voting. It’s never meant to be the best. It’s what the jury of their peers think are the best. It’s a Rorschach test of the attitudes of the industry itself about what’s being made in the industry. … Emmys are kept being given to the same old suspects, the same-old same-old that everybody’s talking about that says what the industry thinks about itself because, by and large, they’re not even watching (most television).

“(These new panels -- read the story!), in many ways, are trying to make the Emmys reflect something they’ve never measured before. The Oscar never goes to the best film – it merely offers information about the industry itself. The most legitimate award, really, is the (Television Critics Association) Awards. There, you can assume, most of the people are actually watching most of these shows, and that they’re professionals trained to apply criteria to their decisions.�?

(As a member of the TCA, I can assure you I did not even think to try to elicit such a quote from Professor Thompson. Mainly because I'm not sure I agree.)

The other reason we’re loathe to champion what our jobs implore us to is the notion that we’re distracting people – like so much pop-culture detritus about dopey enter-taint-ment stories – from issues that actually matter, such as these.

And then, there’s the notion that awards really don’t matter in the long run – or, even, in the short. As The Hollywood Reporter’s Ray Richmond told me, "We only think the world obsesses about the Emmys because we're in L.A. In Des Moines and Flint, they honestly could give a (crap), I imagine. The obsession illusion is merely Hollywood self-flagellation at its most annoying. The industry believes the masses care deeply about its self-congratulatory exercises because it has to believe it in order to keep its collective ego racing safely out of control. The truth is that it's mostly just the media and the media-aping blogosphere that that stokes the interest. The Emmys really are the ultimate here today/forgotten tomorrow exercise. ... The following morning, the statuette has turned once again into a pumpkin."

The people of Echo Park do like their fireworks. All evening it's sounded like CNN's coverage of the attack on Baghdad at the beginning of the first Desert Storm. Pretty major bursts are coming from about 10 different visible directions from the neighborhood. (As well as directions invisible -- it's quite the THX Dolby Stereo experience up here right now. Let's just hope none of them land, live, in one of the many fields of dry brush that have yet to be cleared, two months after the city's deadline for such.)

And I saw some of Dodger Stadium's annual explode-o-fest, up on the street with some people who showed up just for the cheap thrill. It's amusing how fireworks turn adults into hopeless children. One guy who, I'm guessing, may be named Lennie and has probably accidentally strangled a tiny, helpless animal, cheered every time a green firework erupted: "Greeeen..." One kept predicting, with unfailing inaccuracy, "Here comes a big one now!" When explosions approximating smiling faces lit up the sky, one woman announced: "Smiiiileeee!" A certain multi-pronged attack firework that erupted in waves forced another woman to declare, "That's my faaavorite!" -- every single time one of its genre torched the night sky.

Of course, what can you say? It's not like these things invite much in the way of critical discourse or deconstruction: "This enormous blue expanding globe-like firework represents our planet besieged by escalating warfare, while that tiny band of white streaks symbolizes the proletariat struggling against oppression..."

And they're still going on. From my window I can see still more smaller yet significant displays persisting into the night; they began well before the Dodger Stadium orgy of light and continue on still. The smoke is so thick now that the downtown skyline, which was perfectly visible earlier this evening, is blotted out except for its brightest lights.

Given how oppressively hot it has been the past week or so in Los Angeles, it’s curious how TNT has been sending out promotional items that have all but melted by the time they reach their recipients’ doors.

For tonight’s episode of “The Closer,�? in which Brenda (Kyra Sedgwick) turns 40, TNT mailed out a box filled with confetti – ugh, more junk to clean up – and, way down at the bottom, a little smashed Hostess cupcake (referencing Brenda’s ongoing junk-food battle). Of course, the box had been sitting in the sun for who knows how long before I found it, so the cupcake looked like a baggie filled with brown ooze; I’ll spare you any further, more graphic description. Had Brenda seen this, she’d lose her taste for such snacks.

Perhaps even worse was today’s offering, promoting “Battleground,�? the clever first installment of “Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King�? (debuting Wednesday, July 12), in which William Hurt plays a hit man who finds himself bedeviled by those tiny little green Army men who come to life with far more murderous intentions than the ones in “Toy Story.�? For this, I received some Gummi Army Guys, or at least that’s what the bag insisted was inside – all I could see was a gooey green mass, the soldiers within having welded themselves to one another in a most unsavory cluster of glop. Even now, hours later, the rubbery fellas have yet to extricate themselves from one another. Maybe this is TNT’s way of keeping my own appetite in check.

To someone a coast removed, it can be hard to figure the New York media’s nasty attacks on “The Devil Wears Prada�? author Lauren Weisberger. The bestseller, a hardly-disguised-at-all roman a clef about the writer’s days as assistant to Vogue editor Anna Wintour, received a particularly nasty review from the New York Times upon publication, taking catty digs at the author.

Gawker.com, New York’s Defamer.com-style gossip blog, mocked the early Amazon.com reviews of Weisberger’s latest book, “Everyone Worth Knowing,�? noting that those who hated it had long reviews of putting their two cents worth in at Amazon before, while its hugest fans, not so much, speculating that they may have been the work in some way of the book’s publisher. Both Gawker and the New York Daily News delighted in her latest book’s tanking (after a $1-million advance); the latter’s gossip-column headline read, “Author goes from Prada to nada,�? boasting that Weisberger’s next book has had to be scrapped after the publisher dismissed early chapters. Even New York Times op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd, an unlikely defender of the fabulously successful, championed Meryl Streep’s Miranda character in the film against the puny whining of Weisberger’s fictitious doppelganger Andrea.

I can’t state that Weisberger’s book is junk, since I haven’t read it; a friend told me it was a breezy read but that the new film mainly improves upon it in great measure. But Weisberger hardly comes off as pretentious or oblivious in interviews I’ve read; she told Salon.com, “It’s a beach read; this is not great literature. Everyone knows that.�?

Why such vitriol toward Weisberger? It can’t just be that she’s not a very good writer; plenty of bad writers appear on New York Times’ best-seller lists (Dan Brown, anyone?). But Weisberger cracked that particular code at the tender age of 26, and while many people have echoed some variation of the cliché, “I’d rather be lucky than good,�? few writers manage to be that lucky that early in their careers.

Nonetheless, the Trashing of Weisberger seems to extend even to the film version of her novel, which invites audiences to delight in Miranda’s behavior and not find so much to respect in Andrea’s, by comparison, mealy-mouthed careerism.

Casting Streep as Miranda represents a philosophical coup d’etat on the material, in terms of aligning audience sympathy: As every review has pointed out, she’s absolutely brilliant, wildly entertaining and brings layers upon layers of depth to the character that Weisberger’s maunderings couldn’t be bothered to explore. (If, somehow, Streep doesn’t get an Oscar nomination for this performance – suggesting that there will have been five better performances by actresses this year – then 2006 will be, by any measure, a banner year for the film arts. The same goes for the inspired supporting work offered here by Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci, portraying Miranda’s equally cynical, equally understanding generals.)

Anne Hathaway, by comparison, may be a fairly appealing performer (though she managed a similar makeover of her character more winning in “The Princess Diaries�?), but the fact that she gives, at best, the fourth-best performance in the film also serves to undermine Weisberger’s limp Everywoman conceit.

There’s a terrific scene in the film in which Miranda utterly punctures Andrea’s anti-fashion arrogance (a scene, tellingly, nowhere in the book), in which she offers a sage, triumphant timeline explaining how high fashion eventually inspired the low fashion Andrea’s character, at that point in the film, trucks in. Andrea’s utter and complete seduction to designer labels follows soon after.

Ultimately, screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna’s efforts to dually subvert and remain true to Weisberger’s book sort of fall apart – the finale, little of which transpired in the book, feels utterly flimsily motivated. Still, audiences scarcely seem to care, because they’ve been tilted by the filmmakers to root for Miranda in the first place; whatever becomes of Andrea (and, by extrapolation, Weisberger) scarcely matters.

The New York Times’ A.O. Scott, while less interested in Weisberger’s proxy, does seem to insightfully target the film’s obsession with Streep’s character: “The movie, while noting that she can be sadistic, inconsiderate and manipulative, is unmistakably on Miranda's side. How, really, could it be otherwise? In Hollywood, for one thing, an abused assistant is, like a Toyota Prius, an indispensable accessory — an entitlement, really — for anyone who even wants to seem powerful.�?

I would admonish anyone in the minority who found “United 93,�? a film I quite admired, to be manipulative and exploitative from seeing even a frame of the trailer for Oliver Stone’s 9/11 film, “World Trade Center.�? We’re talking aneurysms all around.

It’s hard to say what’s most offensive about the trailer (which drew catcalls at the theater where I saw it, more, even, than the indisputably execrable-looking jackass-o-rama’s “John Tucker Must Die�? or “You, Me and Dupree�?), but here are a few nominees:

* Nicolas Cage’s New York accent. It might actually be fairly accurate, but it just sounds stupid emanating from his lips, and at the very least it’s distracting, at least in the trailer. He plays a heroic New York cop, who at one point portentously declares, “We’re prepared for everything, but not this. Not for something this size.�? Which sounds like something that’d come from the mouth of Mr. Exposition than from anyone forced to endure that awful day.

* The scene of Cage’s colleagues, at his stern challenge, stepping up to help him evacuate the building. This represents the sort of Hollywoodization of the tragedy that “United 93�? so assiduously avoided, cheesy myth-making that feels false even when we instinctively understand and recognize the courage of the men who perished that day.

* The slo-mo shots of firemen running about heroically and/or embracing loved ones, placed in no context whatsoever. Further crass hagiography where none is needed. And to make matters worse – or, at least, more manipulative, we see a cop trapped in the rubble, realizing his end is likely near, scribbling “I [heart] U�? to a loved one on a scrap of paper.

* Cage, pinned beneath horrific debris, imploring a similarly imperiled colleague: “Can you still see the light?�? What, you mean under all the oppressive gloom, dust and destruction? Is this film really going to attempt to posit 9/11 as a feel-good film? Really?

* Apparently, yes. Its tagline: “The world saw evil that day. Two men saw something else.�?

* The music. Oh, my god, the music. The trailer’s untenably soaring, angelic choirs not only seek to uplift easily moved boob viewers, but to uplift monumental scads of mastodons bogged in subterranean tar pits to the aerie of the vast cosmos. Guys, tone it down a degree or two, or three. Or three-hundred.

On the other hand, there’s this New York Times story, suggesting that even if Oliver Stone is the director, it just might not suck so much.

“Psych,�? a new USA crime-dramedy debuting Friday, July 7, concerns a flip, aimless guy with amazing powers of detection that he convinces the Santa Barbara Police Department comes from psychic abilities he clearly does not have. Nonetheless, the cops are duped into recruiting him to solve vexing crimes. Starring James roday, Dule Hill and Corbin Bernsen, “Psych’s�? buoyantly, cheekily amusing.

As gratifying as it is to have a show that craps mirthfully all over serious psychic shows like “Medium�? and “Ghost Whisperer,�? it’s even more gratifying to report that USA has found the perfect companion to its other winning cop comedy, “Monk.�?

Anyway, as a promotional item for the series, USA sent critics a fat, 4�?-by-4�? book entitled “The Book of Answers,�? which is essentially a more expansive Magic 8-Ball, whose word-count-to-page-count ratio is disturbingly low and no doubt is responsible for the gratuitous and unnecessary deaths of many trees.

Here’s how it works: You ask the book a question, then open a page at random for your answer. So I decided to test it out with a series of questions about “Psych�? itself:

Q: “Psych’s�? pilot is certainly entertaining; can the show maintain that level of quality?
“Book of Answers:�? “THE ANSWER IS IN YOUR BACKYARD.�? (Note: I don’t have a backyard.)

Q: Will “Psych�? be a hit for USA?
“Book of Answers:�? “IT WILL CREATE A STIR.�?

Q: Will “Psych�? enter the pantheon of great television?
“Book of Answers:�? “A YEAR FROM NOW IT WON’T MATTER.�?

Q: Dule Hill had a sort of boring role on “The West Wing;�? on basic cable, he’s being given a chance to be kind of funny. Is swapping a high-profile gig for a potentially more rewarding job on a show that’ll likely draw fewer viewers a good bet for him?
“Book of Answers:�? “YOU WILL NEED TO ACCOMMODATE.�?

Q: Will “Psych�? receive any awards nominations?
“Book of Answers:�? “BE PRACTICAL.�?

Q: “Monk,�? in its first season, scored good ratings when ABC aired it. Since USA is owned by NBC, which is in as dire need of viewers as ABC was when it grabbed “Monk�? from USA – and, in fact, now owns USA – could NBC use “Psych�? to boost its anemic ratings?
“Book of Answers:�? “IT’LL COST YOU.�?

Q: Is Corbin Bernsen as disagreeable as his character? He sure seemed so on “Celebrity Mole.�?
“Book of Answers:�? “DEFINITELY.�?

Hmm, for the most part, this seems to be working pretty well. Perhaps I should expand my line of questioning.

Q: Will NBC do better next season?
“Book of Answers:�? “THE SITUATION IS UNCLEAR.�?

Q: Is “The Book of Answers�? (Hyperion, $9.95) worth the money?
“Book of Answers:�? “TRY A MORE UNLIKELY SOLUTION.�?

Q: Will owning “The Book of Answers�? impress members of the opposite sex?
“Book of Answers:�? “THE OUTCOME WILL BE POSITIVE.�?

Q: No. Seriously?
“Book of Answers:�? “WATCH AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS.�?

Q: Will things work out for America in Iraq?
“Book of Answers:�? “IF YOU DO AS YOU’RE TOLD.�?

Q: Is there a God?
“Book of Answers:�? “WAIT FOR A BETTER OFFER.�?

In his new novel “Adverbs,�? Daniel Handler creates a series of intertwined Moebius strips upon which his characters crawl, jumping occasionally to others, hooking up with yet other characters and incidents (including a volcano destroying San Francisco). These vague connections don’t feel nearly as artfully managed as in David Mitchell’s brilliant “Cloud Atlas;�? they feel sort of clever for cleverness’ sake and not really necessary to piece together to appreciate what Handler’s going after here. The book is probably best enjoyed more as a series of short stories than as a coherent novel, but it is enjoyable nonetheless.

Handler is best known as Lemony Snicket, the gleefully malevolent author of the children’s books “A Series of Unfortunate Events.�? (Handler, coincidentally, writes in the current issue of the literary magazine The Believer about the “Buddha Machine,�? which I discussed here a couple of months ago.)

“Adverbs�? is a book about love and its discontents, about the difficulty of making connections, of maintaining those connections and of severing those connections.

Amongst my favorite chapters is “Clearly,�? about a tragedy – and a connection – in the wilderness; “Naturally,�? in which a woman hooks up with a dead guy because, in the end, when the relationship concludes, that’s pretty much what he’ll be in her mind anyway; and “Wrongly,�? which is about how most relationships end – and, of course, begin.

In “Naturally,�? the dead guy opts not to tell his new girlfriend that he’s dead: “Now was not the time to tell her. It never is, right when you meet someone, slap them with a big secret when they’re trying to enjoy themselves. It is natural to let the worst parts of ourselves hide in the shade, while the sun shines down on our features like shimmering hair.�? Naturally, it doesn’t end well, and Handler writes, “What good are the dead if they do not haunt us, what is the point of their lives? … What matters is how they haunt us, when the love has floated away and we’re alone in the diner.�?

The book jacket blurb’s hilarious, too.