Since Sunday nights are so crowded, you’ve probably let Bored to Death slip through the cracks. Good thing then for DVR and Monday night rebroadcasts! The HBO comedy, about a Brooklyn novelist-turned-private eye isn’t necessarily the funniest new show of the fall—that would be Community [Editor's note: Modern Family!]—but it’s certainly one of the most likeable. Blessed with a brilliant cast (Jason Schwartzman, Ted Danson, and Zack Galifianakis) and razor sharp writing (courtesy of novelist and creator Jonathan Ames), Bored to Death is a series you really ought to be watching… if you could only find room in your schedule. [HBO2, 9:30 p.m.]

Tuesday: Slumdog Millionaire
We’re not sure what’s more surprising: that Slumdog Millionaire won Best Picture or that it’s already airing on cable. The Little Movie That Did was (in our humble opinion) the most over-rated and undeserving Academy Award winner since Crash, however that doesn’t mean there aren’t riches to behold within. Come for the paint-by-numbers-yet-crowd-pleasing story that can manipulate even the most hardened skeptic; stay for the closing dance number, which ranks as one of the most jubilant moments from last year. [HBO, 9 p.m.]

Wednesday: Beetlejuice
Halloween is still a couple of weeks away, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get a jump on the season with some classic Tim Burton-lead weirdness. Beetlejuice is that rare commodity: a great movie from our childhood that remains great to this day. We have Michael Keaton to thank for that, of course. He’s so caustic, angry and fantastic in the titular role, that we wish he would come out of whatever Witness Protection Program he’s been hiding in for the past few years. [ABC Family, 8 p.m.]

Thursday: Parks and Recreation
For those of you who stuck with Parks and Recreation after a lackluster first season, you’ve been rewarded during season two. Everything about the show—from the writing to the performances—has gotten exponentially better. The key has been distancing the proceedings from The Office in both tone and execution, while simultaneously allowing the fantastic cast a chance to breathe. And, oh what a cast! We’d put Amy Poehler, Aziz Ansari, Rashida Jones, Paul Schneider, Nick Offerman and Aubrey Plaza up against the denizens of Dunder Mifflin and 30 Rockefeller Plaza any day of the week and twice on Thursday. [NBC, 8:30 p.m.]

Friday: Defending Your Life
You might not think that Albert Brooks and Meryl Streep would have great chemistry together, but that just means you probably haven’t seen Defending Your Life. Mr. Brooks’ ode to the afterlife is a twisted little sweet-and-sour romantic comedy made all the better because Ms. Streep has an absolute ball playing the pinnacle of shiksa perfection. If you’ve always thought Mr. Brooks was like a sunnier version of Woody Allen, Defending Your Life will do nothing to dissuade you from that opinion. [Starz, 9:25 a.m.]

Forget about Bridget Jones’s Diary or Love, Actually (but just for a minute!). This 1995 Ang Lee film is about as satisfying a romantic film as you are going to get, compliments of Jane Austen (natch). There’s the always-fabulous Emma Thompson (who wrote the screenplay) as poor good-girl Elinor Dashwood, the sensible sister as opposed to Kate Winslet’s tempestuous loves-to-walk-even-when-it’s-raining Marianne. Hugh Grant is the stuttering swoopy-haired Edward Ferrars! Tom Wilkinson is the dad! Alan Rickman loves Kate Winslet but she loves the feckless John Willoughby (played by Greg Wise, who in real life  has babies with Emma Thompson). We’re telling you this one has it all—including an excellent but far-too-small role by our would-be husband Hugh Laurie as the grouchy (typecasting!) Mr. Palmer. Swoon city.  [HBO2, 2:00 p.m.]

 Tuesday: Broadcast News 

This will movie will make you laugh and break your heart. Albert Brooks, William Hurt and Holly Hunter star in this 1987 classic from James L. Brooks.  You think it’s nuts now with Maddow and O’Reilly and that crazy big-headed Keith Olbermann? Check out the wacky network news crowd, where Mr. Brooks is the hilarious sweaty-mess smart reporter who just can’t compete with William Hurt’s pretty boy, cry-on-camera WASP-y appeal. Also, look for Jack Nicholson in an unbilled cameo as the big cheese network news anchor. Can you imagine a world where Jack Nicholson is your local news anchor? No offense to Pat Kiernan, but that is a wonderful world indeed. [AMC, 4:30 a.m.]

Wednesday: Make Me a Supermodel

We can’t lie: We’re a little bit sad that this is the last episode of Make Me a Supermodel. Somehow those evil geniuses over at Bravo came up with a way to make America’s Next Top Model even better, cattier and more fun without Tyra Banks. We’re down to the final three (though we miss you, big-bottomed Salome!): hot underwear-model-in-the-making Jonathan, sweet American blockhead Branden, and the former dancer Sandhurst. Who will win?  And what on earth are we going to be reduced to watching when this is over? [Bravo, 10 p.m.]

Thursday: Young Guns

Gosh, remember those heady 1988 days when Young Guns had the all-star cast of man meat to make certain eighth-graders (ahem) go nutso? So you have Emilio Estevez (looking more Martin Sheen-y than ever before) as Billy the Kid, his real-life brother Charlie Sheen playing the mellow one (ha!), Lou Diamond Philips shoehorned into something kinda ethnic, Dermott Mulroney as someone else, and head-butting Kiefer Sutherland as the poet who falls in love with some Asian chick he calls China Doll … cause he loves her. Terrance Stamp is a good guy and Jack Palance is a bad guy and at one point they all get high and see things, and people die and maybe get hung and, according to IMDB, Tom Cruise plays an uncredited cowboy. Whatever, trust us: It’s amazing. Screw High School Musical, why don’t people make movies like this anymore? [Cinemax, 6 p.m.]

Friday: Close Encounters of the Third Kind

People often forget just how awesome this Steven Spielberg movie is. And sure, it came out in 1977, which was a rather crowded year considering how many other great movies came out (Annie Hall, Star Wars, Saturday Night Fever) but do not forget about this! For one thing, take a minute to think about the fact that Richard Dreyfuss was a movie star! Then think about how cool it is that Mr. Spielberg got Francois Trauffaut to appear in it, not to mention this movie has what must be the best cinematic use of mashed potatoes ever.  Eat it, Cloverfield. [Bravo, 1 p.m.]

Remaking any film is a crime against logic and sensibility, but there should be an actual law-cruelly equivalent to the smoking ban-against remaking bad films that were never worth making the first time around. The latest case in point is The In-Laws . Still reeling from the dopey, pointless Down with Love , a calamitous attempt to retro-gaze at the Doris Day-Rock Hudson comedies that were already dated four decades ago, I ask wincingly: Does anyone behind a Hollywood power player's desk in 2003 ever really laugh at anything funny? The In-Laws was pretty banal stuff in 1979, when it was directed by Arthur Hiller, with Alan Arkin and Peter Falk as a bewildered dentist and a loopy C.I.A. agent hauling stolen Treasury engravings through a Central American banana-joke republic just before their kids' wedding. The bloated, boring remake changes the Alan Arkin character, here played by Albert Brooks, to a foot doctor for no apparent reason except that the misguided writer-director, Andrew Fleming, must think bungling podiatrists are funnier than nervous dentists. What difference does it make, if the movie turns out to be a cinematic root canal? The C.I.A. agent remains the same, although the startled and unconvincing Michael Douglas plays him like he's falling from a twin-engine Cessna without a parachute. The desperation of the participants to make more of this benign farce than was evident on paper soaks through every scene like flop sweat.

In the opening gambit, Mr. Douglas makes a daring escape from a Czech danger zone, promising some kind of delivery there by Sunday. But Sunday is also the day of his only son's wedding. Miraculously, the deep-cover operative dodges the bullets of Interpol killers in Prague, lands his flaming plane in Nova Scotia, and arrives in Chicago to meet the new in-laws for dinner in a Chinese restaurant populated by the kind of Oriental spies that went out of style with Anna May Wong. Mr. Brooks does the Woody Allen bit as a square, anally retentive fussbudget who is such a hypochondriac that he wears a fanny pack containing a sanitary drinking cup to avoid germs and a couple of Lorna Doones to raise his blood sugar between meals. As soon as he takes one look at the dinner of barbecued boa constrictor, he yelps, "Have you seen the Discovery Channel? This is one of the stars!" (These are the jokes, and you learn to savor them, because there's a lot of dead air in between.) Before Mr. Brooks can declare the wedding off, Mr. Douglas drags him along on a mission to rescue a Russian runaway named Olga (more about that later). The hapless podiatrist wakes up in a stolen jet on automatic pilot that belongs to Barbra Streisand and gets mistaken for a world crime leader known as "Fat Cobra" by a gay arms dealer (the excellent British actor David Suchet, clearly slumming), who falls madly in love with the horrified Mr. Brooks and kidnaps the entire wedding party to get him back.

Enter Mr. Douglas' ex-wife, a nut-brained throwback to the beatnik years who arrives from an ashram (a humiliated Candace Bergen, sporting the frizziest humidity-fried hair this side of the Suez Canal), and his foxy assistant (Robin Tunney), who kick-boxes, makes tough-gal remarks ("We got the F.B.I. on us like trailer trash on Velveeta") and looks like cable-TV reporter Ashleigh Banfield. As the movie drags on, flailing for laughs, the Russian runaway named Olga turns out to be a submarine in Lake Michigan, and Mr. Brooks-a man who won't even buy a foreign car-is stalked by the government for buying and selling Russian nuclear missiles. Before it all limps to its wooden-legged conclusion, the prospective fathers-in-law manage to fall off the top of the Hancock Tower in the middle of the wedding rehearsal.

There is more, but you've had enough, and so have I. Humdrum direction fails to elevate an already bankrupt idea from its relentless doldrums. The moldy dialogue and steadfastly humorless performers (especially Mr. Douglas, who appears in various stages of misery, from contrition to anger, and never brings his character alive) don't help, although Mr. Brooks' nonstop tics and neuroses do produce a few chuckles, especially when he flees from the arms of the macho arms dealer in a hot tub, wearing nothing but a red thong. But the laughs are small and few, and the sight of Ms. Bergen reduced to a screeching parody of the nagging wife with a Buddhist monk in tow is enough to make you weep. The In-Laws is too silly to be aggressively offensive; it's just outstandingly dull and ordinary as it makes a brief mall stop on its way to a Blockbuster shelf near you.

Great Neck Bombshell

Under the circumstances, is it any wonder that the best new films are documentaries? Capturing the Friedmans is a fascinating and disturbing probe into the conviction of a respectable Long Island father and his 18-year-old son on charges of child molestation. It's fascinating because you've never seen a more dysfunctional family in broad daylight, and it's disturbing because it straddles the fine line between responsible filmmaking and callous sensationalism (to say nothing of invasion of privacy) in ways some viewers may find morally reprehensible. On the day before Thanksgiving, 1987, the affluent citizens of Great Neck, Long Island, were blasted out of their complacency by shocking news: Arnold Friedman, a retired schoolteacher, former bandleader, father of three sons and respected member of the community, and his youngest son, Jesse, a high-school student, were both dragged out of their home in handcuffs and charged with more than 100 counts of sodomy and other sexual abuses.

Their accusers were a group of boys who had been taking after-hours computer lessons in Mr. Friedman's basement. The bail was set at $1 million for Arnold Freedman and $300,000 for Jesse. In the months that followed, the tabloids poisoned the world against them, despite the fact that there was no physical evidence of abuse. The Nassau County Police claimed there were stacks of child porn all over the house; others say this wasn't true. Parents who defended the Friedmans or simply refused to join in their persecution-because their own children scoffed at the charges-were accused of being "in denial." Great Neck became a victimized community fueled by hysteria and chaos, and the Friedman family was destroyed. Arnold Friedman pleaded guilty and was sentenced as a pedophile to 10 to 30 years in prison-the maximum sentence-where he apparently committed suicide in 1995 to provide Jesse with $250,000 in life-insurance money. His son was left to face his own trial alone-lied to by the police, convicted by a prejudiced jury and only recently released after serving 13 years. And after 33 years of marriage, Jesse's mother-who remains baffled and disoriented to this day-deserted and divorced Arnold, remarried and moved to the Berkshires. The rest of the family has never forgiven her. Hers is the saddest interview in the film, but her other two sons-David, who now works as a popular New York party clown, and Seth, who fled to California and refused to take part in this film-are also clearly impacted by the tragedy that still haunts them.

Were the Friedmans heinous monsters who preyed on the flesh of young boys, or guileless victims of mass hysteria? Were the police all insane? Since nobody knows the answers, it isn't clear what the director, Andrew Jarecki, wants us to take away from this harrowing slam-dunk into ugliness and sorrow. Nobody tells the same story twice; everyone has a different version of the facts. But the amazing thing is that the Friedmans cast worse doubts on their innocence than any of their accusers by sharing a massive library of their own home movies, exposing the history of their rage and emotional turbulence better than any director could. They're seeking redemption and closure, but their candor has the reverse effect. As the self-destructive architects of their own downfall, the Friedmans do a persuasive job of tearing down the masonry that holds any family together, on a scale rivaling Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman . Lurid, pathetic and desperate for compassion, they make sad, reluctant voyeurs of us all.

Saving the Children

Secret Lives: Hidden Children and Their Rescuers During WWII is a sobering, complex and emotion-filled tribute to the "hidden" Jewish children of World War II and the humanitarian rescuers who helped save their lives. At the beginning of the war, a million and a half Jewish children lived in Europe; fewer than one out of 10 survived. One who did was Aviva Slesin, the Academy Award-winning director of The Ten Year Lunch: The Wit and Legend of the Algonquin Round Table and a hidden child herself. More than 50 years after the war ended, Ms. Slesin was reunited with the woman who rescued her from a Lithuanian ghetto when she was 9 months old. The emotional impact inspired her to make this film about the experiences of other hidden children. It's a wrenching but life-affirming work of great integrity and proficiency.

By 1942, Hitler's "final solution" to kill off every Jew in Europe was in full force. Many Jewish parents naïvely believed that the Nazis would never do anything to harm children. They were wrong. But some doomed parents decided to hide their children in an effort to save their lives, and they turned to resistance groups and the anti-Nazi underground for help. The people who responded-risking death themselves to help Jewish children-are impossible to categorize: They were rich and poor, college-educated and working-class, farmers and housewives, Christians and Communists. Some made a financial profit; some converted their wards from Judaism to other religions; a few were abusive. But the horror stories are rare. Mostly, they were people who couldn't resist a cry for help from an innocent child if it meant the difference between life and death. Interspersing extraordinary black-and-white archival footage and color interviews with the handful of adults who are still alive from that period, Ms. Slesin follows them back to Germany, France, Belgium, Holland and Poland, constructing a vivid and unforgettable portrait of the people who defied the odds and stood up for human decency in a paralyzing climate of terror.

Rescuers tell of hiding boys in broom closets when the Germans came around to check them for circumcision. The grown-up children remember loving the joy of Christmas and learning Hebrew at the same time. Some were able to assume new identities and live almost normal lives in the open. Others spent years hiding in holes in the floor, or sitting on wooden stools inside armoires, enduring childhood in total silence. A few grew up feeling punished and abandoned. The daughter of one rescuer admits she's been in a resentful rage her entire life because the endangered Jewish children required so much attention that she felt deprived of her own mother's unconditional love. After the war, some children were reunited with their natural parents, others were adopted by the non-Jews who hid them, many struggled with guilt, denial and shame, and none would ever be the same. You'd think the books would be closed by now, but the psychological damage was so severe that this chapter in history will undoubtedly survive even the people who recorded it. For those who feel they cannot bear one more heartbreaking Holocaust film of any kind, it's important to note that Secret Lives is blessed with a mercurial spirit as restorative as it is courageous. Most movies today are nothing, a zero-you forget them by the time you hit the exit door. This one is a profound, truthful, sensitively made (though not overly sentimental) and miraculous 72-minute celebration of heroism and humanity in a time when there was not enough of either.

O.K., everybody and his brother has done a parody of Larry King's USA Today column, so let me make this clear: This is not a parody . This is an hommage , an appreciation, a call for reconsideration.

I have to admit, I've considered doing a parody myself in the past: His column was at times parodiable, what with the apparently aimless concatenation of musings and meanderings, plugs, name-drops and nostalgia. All those one- and two-sentence assertions, questions, cracker-barrel philosophizing, along with the wisdom of Chairman Frank.

Some of the parodies have been funny (Maureen Dowd's), some have been funny and cruel (I saw one from The Onion entitled "I Am Fucking Insane").

But now that USA Today has announced that it's dropping the King column, I think I'm going to miss it, and perhaps the time has come for a reconsideration of what we've lost. A reconsideration, at the very least, of the form, the signature literary device employed by Mr. King's column: the three-dot ellipsis …

To help those unfamiliar with the form to get a feeling of the King column, here's a compression of several topic sentences from a recent one, linked by his three dots1:

"Angelina Jolie, whose film Original Sin opened Friday, tells me she has nothing in the works right now … Julie Andrews tells me she is 'certain' she will sing again … A salute also to my man, Don Imus … I'm very proud of my wife, Shawn. She's a great singer and a terrific talent who chooses to be a mother first … Steve Martini's newest thriller, The Jury … is a cracklin' good read. It's a puzzling whodunit. The only question I have is why the title? The jury plays no part in the plot. Sure there's a trial, but that's only a small part of the work … Mark Brenner who just appeared on The View on ABC has a pretty good self-help book called Tipping for Success … Mark gives you the ins and outs of the world of tipping, which I think stands for 'to insure proper service.'"

And this is from The Onion parody: "Five minutes with Walter Matthau is like ten years in an Ivy League school … It's a shame what's happening in Sarajevo … Kudos to those fine folks who make Bugles so consistently delicious … Boy, do I hate this shirt … What's that guy over there doing? … The Amish make fine houses … "

While the parodies of the King column and the mockery of sophisticates tend to focus on how antiquated the three-dot column form was, at least in Mr. King's hands, I would suggest that it should be looked upon not as antiquated but as postmodern .

Those three dots are not mere ellipses; they are aporiae , as we liked to call them at Yale graduate school. They are embodied absences, gaps and silences that speak eloquently of that which is lost, missing links that call into question the very notion of linkage.

The apparent absence of causal or logical or thematic connection expressed by the three-dot ellipses is a metaphor for the absence of causal logic in the universe itself, the gaps, the black holes in the very ground of being.

Larry King's three dots deconstruct the false notions of coherence, the bourgeois illusion of unity that conventional columnists are unwitting slaves to. His ellipses turn the stream-of-consciousness so favored by modernists into disjunctures–no longer a continuous stream, but mere individual droplets of consciousness … very postmodern.

Larry King has learned, and Larry King teaches, the lesson of the great Derrida: that to seek coherence from the written word is to whore after a false god who will always defer the illusory promise of a final meaning to a point forever beyond our grasp.

Now in attempting an hommage , in attempting to put my many disjointed thoughts for this week's column into three-dot form, I can't claim that I have achieved the haiku-like compression of Larry King. So consider this not an imitation, but a humble tribute:

Here's an arbitrary transition … From the column that's no longer there (Larry's) to The Man Who Wasn't There … It's the new film from the Coen brothers, and it's terrific (their best since The Big Lebowski ) … You won't be able to see it until it opens on Nov. 2… The point is that Billy Bob Thornton is an amazing spooky presence in this film … And what's truly remarkable is: He's a dead ringer for Gary Condit (I kid you not) … It's a black-and-white neo-noir, and Billy Bob has this haunted, vacant, empty, ghostly, bleached-out face … Tell me you don't see the resemblance … And it's set in Condit country, too … Up there in Santa Rosa, Calif. … I visited there once …

There's something else to Billy Bob's face in The Man Who Wasn't There … He's not just haunted, he's virtually posthumous … He drifts through the film like a zombie (this is not a criticism) … What is it about the lure of the posthumous state? We loved it in The Sixth Sense . We loved it (or I did, anyway) in The Others … Do we all sometimes feel a little like one of The Dead in the midst of life … Does the idea of being dead help us appreciate life … Or Larry King? Just asking.

I'll just come out and say it … In some ways, The Man Who Wasn't There really is the Gary Condit story … And speaking of Condit, I must admit that after resisting for a while, I'm beginning to get into Conditology … It's begun to attain the richness and complexity of some of the great predecessor scandal-exegesis matrices … I think what finally changed my mind was the delight Mickey Kaus, Conditology pioneer (and frequent three-dot columnist himself), has taken in the subject in his kausfiles.com online column (linked through Slate ) … His "Condit-Obsessives' Corner: Watch the Watch," a complex study of the multiple possible implications of the sneaky Condit disposal of the watchbox (but not the watch), was wonderful … Gave to the Condit story a kind of Trollopean dimension, in that it suddenly reminded me of my favorite Trollope novel, The Eustace Diamonds , which revolves (for 900 pages or so) around the issue of a misappropriated item of jewelry … But I have to admit that in his subsequent post-Chung "The Hidden Genius of Condit's P.R. Campaign," Kaus left me a bit behind in his winged flights of contrarian reverse-spin forensic conjecture … Still, I want more … No, I don't think he killed her … But I think he's still lying and hiding something … I think he met her the day she disappeared, and he's hiding something about that meeting … and it wasn't a visit to Baskin-Robbins with her discount coupons.

But while we're on the subject of death, or posthumous life … Will someone please tell me that the new Albert Brooks movie, My First Mister , is a cruel joke … I wrote a column a couple of years ago when Mr. Brooks' last film, The Muse , debuted (see: "Dear Albert Brooks: Please Don't Go Warm," The New York Observer , Aug. 30, 1999) … I talked about what I thought was a dangerous tendency in this most brilliantly gifted comic artist: to try to make himself lovable … To try to make himself a warm, audience-friendly, mainstream movie star … Who needs another one of those when there's only one Albert Brooks … But did he listen? The new film, in which he co-stars with Leelee Sobieski (directed by the gifted Christine Lahti), has him go so warm he practically melts … So warm it could be a mean-spirited Albert Brooks parody of an actor who thinks he needs to "go warm" … An actor actually obsessed with winning the "Humanitas" Award, as Brooks' character was in The Muse … So warm you want to puke … So warm it reminds you of the end of Brooks' amazing first feature, Real Life (a prophetic satire of "reality TV" and one of the two or three funniest American movies ever made) … When Brooks dons clown makeup and reenacts the burning-of-Atlanta scene from Gone With the Wind … Somebody please sit Albert Brooks down and talk with him; he obviously won't listen to me … An "intervention" might be called for. Stop him before he becomes warmed over …

Speaking of warmth, let me make a transition to the Sun … Actually to the Sun in my "Sun Studios" T-shirt … I hope you don't mind if I write about my favorite T-shirt … That's what a three-dot column is for! … I got it, of course, down at Sun Studios on Union Avenue in Memphis … It's the anti-Graceland … Sun Studios is where rock music was born, Graceland is where it died … Well, that's unfair–rock 'n' roll will never die … But rock 'n' roll was born in that great little hole in the wall where Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash first recorded … Where Ike Turner and the Kings of Rhythm recorded what many believe was the very first rock song, "Rocket 88" … (I know, I know, there's a lot of dispute over that … Get a life … ) The important thing is, Sun Studios is the locus of one of the great creative moments in modern American culture … Plus their T-shirt is, to my mind, beautiful: a big bright yellow sun on a black background with a black rooster crowing in the heart of the sun … Sun was one of the first mainstream labels to give voice to black singers … And just about every time I wear it, some dude will point to it or nod out of respect and recognition … And at parties, when anyone asks, "Have you been to Sun Studios?", I like to say "Yes, I recorded there," or "Yes, I laid down some tracks there" … Because that's the great thing–for a fee, they'll let you lay down your own vocal track on the master of one of the original rock 'n' roll classics first recorded there … on the original equipment, the original mike and sound board … The original equipment whose famous flaw–some out-of-sync thing in the sound recording– created the signature Sun echoey effect that endowed those recordings with some kind of spooky, spectral, posthumous power.

I chose to do the vocals for "Heartbreak Hotel" … I was terrible … Except for one moment, I thought, when the King goes into that whole growling "You make-a me so-a lonely, baby" repetition thing … I sincerely feel I was briefly in a zone … Afterward, when the studio engineer handed me the tape, he gave me curious look and said, "You were kinda doing a beatnik thing there, was that it?" … It wasn't exactly a compliment, I don't think, but he kind of recognized my moment … It was a big thrill … I was down there during "Death Week," the pilgrimage of Elvis fanatics to the Graceland grave site, writing about Elvis culture for The Times Magazine (the piece, "Elvis Heals," is reprinted in my collection, The Secret Parts of Fortune –hey, it wouldn't be a Larry King hommage without a plug or two).

I found Death Week perversely moving and concluded by conjecturing that our fondness for the late Elvis has something to do with the transition America has made "from the young vital innocent pioneer nation we once were … to the bloated colossus we feel we've become: the Fat Elvis of nations" …

By the way, I can still listen to Graceland –the album itself and the Paul Simon song of that name–almost compulsively at times … Anyway, I think the fact that I've "recorded" at Sun Studios earns me the right to wear my Sun Studios T-shirt almost all the time (well, I have three of them in rotation) … By the way, I'm not the only one who feels this reverential toward the place … U2 made a pilgrimage there to record for Rattle and Hum , and one song they did there, "Angel of Harlem," is one of the supremely beautiful anthems of that supreme anthemic band …

Where was I? … In Memphis … Which reminds me, in a way, of Bob Dylan. It is where he first discovered, where he first recorded, that "wild mercury sound" I wrote about recently ( The Observer , May 28) … That sound he'd been searching for but hadn't found till a recording session for Blonde on Blonde in 1965 in Memphis … You might recall that in that Dylan column, I called upon readers to send in their suggestions for the single most powerful emotional stanza–quatrain, passage, moment, whatever–in all of Dylan's work. (Mine was from "If You See Her Say Hello" on Blood on the Tracks ) … I've had a lot of provocative suggestions with explanations sent to me from perceptive readers … and now, with a new Dylan album about to come out (but not, as of press time, in my hands), I think the time has come for me to bring this contest–well, not really contest ; no prize except my approval–to a close … So it's now or never: send your suggestions soon to The Edgy Alliance, 577 Second Avenue, Box 105, New York, N.Y. 10016.

And as long as I'm giving out the address, I want to thank all of you who sent contributions to the "City Critters Stumpy Fund" to that address … City Critters is the incredibly dedicated and extremely conscientious cat-rescue group … In my farewell column to my beloved orange "mambo cat" Stumpy, I asked readers to contribute to a fund in his memory to help pay for the medical treatment of injured strays, and the nurturing and adoption process City Critters is so good at, particularly with injured or aging cats … You can check out some of the truly heartwarming results on www.citycritters.org … Click on "Stumpy's Page" and link to "Stumpy's Kids" to see cats that have been saved with Observer readers' contributions. (Please send checks made out to City Critters marked "for the Stumpy Fund" to the address above.)

And now for a completely unrelated transition … I still disagree with Donald Foster about the alleged "Shakespearean" Funeral Elegy (Mr. Foster is the Vassar professor of literature best known for having exposed Joe Klein as the author of Primary Colors , and for having identified a sententious 600-line Funeral Elegy overlooked for centuries as one of Shakespeare's last works) … But I believe he deserves more credit than he's been getting from reviewers for solving, I think definitively, a somewhat lesser but nonetheless important enigma of American literary history: whether Thomas Pynchon once used the pseudonym "Wanda Tinasky" to pen long, Pynchonesque-sounding letters to California's Anderson Valley Advertiser , a much-admired crusading weekly published in the area Pynchon was said to have inhabited during the period he was writing Vineland … I wrote about the question (in a piece also collected in The Secret Parts of Fortune ), and while I reserved judgment definitively, I found the letters strikingly Pynchonesque in a number of their arcane literary and pop-culture references … I will admit to wanting it to be true … But Don Foster, in what I think is an impressive feat of archival research, has solved it with a certainty far beyond any I would credit to his "Shakespeare discovery" … His book, Author Unknown , is worth reading just for this window into the mind of the eccentric, peripatetic, perhaps sinister character who was the real Wanda Tinasky …

Here are some other books, films and songs I urge you not to miss: Tim Riley's book on Beatles lyrics, Tell Me Why –the best piece of writing about popular music, from someone knowledgeable about music, that I've read … Thanks to Kent Jones of Film Comment , who wrote in support of my appreciation of Slacker … and to praise Richard Linklater's forthcoming animated film, Waking Life … Mr. Jones also pointed out something important I was unaware of … the "oblique strategy" cards in Slacker were part of an actual deck by Brian Eno and can be found on the web at www.rtqe.net/ObliqueStrategies/ …

I'll miss the late Robert Jones, a rare literary gentleman who was the editor of the HarperPerennial issues of my last two books …

"More Than a Feelin'," the late-70's power ballad by Boston, is immortal! … Can anybody explain to me Greil Marcus' Sunday Times Arts and Leisure piece on the new Dylan album? … I'm guessing that Mr. Dylan said, "Well, Greil, I'll give you an interview, but you can't portray it like an interview actually happened ." I'm not sure what was going on … "God Only Knows": my nominee for the greatest Beach Boy song … The book I'm most proud to have blurbed lately is Tom Frank's One Market Under God : It's destined to become a classic of American culture, the way Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday was …

And how about this to close with: It's from The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola , the founder of the Jesuits who was–I don't know how to put this delicately–a very interesting, freaky mystic, too … He believed in programming the mind for ecstatic trances (and, like, this was before raves and all that), and I came across a passage in The Spiritual Exercises which said something new and interesting, I think, about temptation and distractions: "For commonly the enemy of our human nature tempts more under the appearance of good when one is exercising oneself in the illuminative way."

Dude's got a point, I think … Until the next time, I know I plan to exercise in the illuminative way, and I hope you do, too …

The Girl Can Green-Light

Salvaging what remains of the worst summer I can remember, I am off to greener pastures where, if I'm lucky, I will not see a cell phone, a pierced tongue, a computer, a rock video, a traffic jam or a single motion picture released after 1950. Before I go, here are a few notes on how to get through the rest of August. First, don't miss The Muse , a charming broadside against the insanity of Hollywood by writer-director Albert Brooks that establishes Sharon Stone as a new goddess of comedy who will surprise and delight you despite what you think of her already.

The Muse is a fresh rumination on the malady that plagues every neurotic hack in the movie business: writer's block. Mr. Brooks, who looks like an aging schnauzer desperate for an air-conditioned kennel, stars as an Oscar-nominated Hollywood screenwriter who, in the hilariously authentic opening sequence, is being presented with an industry humanitarian award at the Beverly Hilton Hotel-a sure sign of career jeopardy for that much-maligned Tinseltown habitué. In Mr. Brooks' own words, it is "like being a eunuch at an orgy."

"Daddy, what is a humanitarian?" asks his daughter.

"It's someone who's never won the Oscar." It is also someone who must endure every insulting indignity dished out by studio moguls whose offices are decorated with props from hit movies they've never seen in a town full of obnoxious, arrogant toads with no talent of their own. Mr. Brooks knows them well. It's a miracle they still green-light his scripts. In a town where you're a has-been at 30, he actually still works and lives there. A West Coast Woody Allen.

His whimsical alterego who keeps popping up in his films to keep the rest of us amused and horrified (do serious and creative filmmakers really have to take meetings with Quentin Tarantino?) is this time called Steven Phillips. The morning after he is presented with an industry consolation prize for life achievement, he's fired and told to be out of the studio by 5 P.M. (Brian De Palma needs his office space.) Worse still, his latest screenplay is rejected, he's informed by a snotty executive who should be a parking lot attendant at Spago. He's lost his "edge," and the brats who run the town accuse him of being "past his prime." In the supreme demoralization, his "drive-on" studio pass is even replaced by a "walk-on."

Suddenly unemployable, with an expensive wife (Andie MacDowell) to support and a mortgage on his swimming pool, this poor sap turns for advice to his best friend, a hugely successful writer of trashy blockbusters (Jeff Bridges). His friend reluctantly shares the secret of his own inspiration-a gorgeous, mysterious Greek muse who, for a steep price and gigantic perks, can guide any flagging career to heights of greatness.

Enter Sharon Stone. Claiming to be one of the nine daughters of Zeus, she dispenses advice to a secret society of Hollywood success stories who depend on her for inspiration in exchange for a slice of the moon. Mr. Bridges' character credits her for all of his creative ideas. (Rob Reiner introduced them at a party.) While the muse takes him on, Mr. Brooks takes on all of her expenses, which include a $1,700-a-day suite at the Four Seasons, special dietary cuisine at all hours of the night, a limo and daily gifts from Tiffany's, just to show good faith.

Before long, she's redecorating the guesthouse, accepting late-night phone calls and emergency visits from Martin Scorsese and, with the aid of Wolfgang Puck, turning the wife into a millionaire baker of gourmet cookies. As the capricious and demanding intruder takes over his life and even pushes him out of his own marital bed, Ms. Stone becomes "the muse who came to dinner" and Mr. Brooks (or Steven Phillips, as he calls himself) grows more paranoid and hysterical. Meanwhile, Los Angeles is depicted as an alien planet of safe isolation chambers connected by miles of bumper-to-bumper freeway traffic standing still in a clogged artery of sweating jerks trying to establish a sense of reality on car phones. Anyone who has ever spent any time in this hothouse of delusion will surrender with laughter to the scene in which Steven Spielberg reluctantly takes a meeting with Mr. Brooks for old times' sake, then sends his cousin, Stan Spielberg, instead.

Eventually, The Muse must decide what kind of movie it is and what Mr. Brooks wants to say, and the comic buildup dissipates somewhat in the resolution. The script that the muse finally inspires the screenwriter to create is a comedy about a doofus who drills a hole in the ground to build an aquarium and strikes oil-a sort of Jim Carrey meets The Beverly Hillbillies . Naturally, in today's market, it goes through the roof at shopping malls. But who is the muse? To find out, you have to see the movie.

Loopy, luscious, maddening and as crazy as a germ that just caught penicillin, Ms. Stone is a cross between Goldie Hawn and Jean Harlow. She is perfect for the role of a wild card with trailer-trash hair who cheats Hollywood at its own smug game because Hollywood has cheated her so often. Clearly, she should have been playing comedy roles all along. Mr. Brooks mines her hidden talents with precision and humor, and she gives her all in a performance that is both daffy and delirious.

Even the boring Andie MacDowell seems less monotonous and monochromatic than usual. And there are roguish cameos by Cybill Shepherd, Lorenzo Lamas, Jennifer Tilly and James Cameron as well as the previously mentioned Mr. Scorsese, Mr. Puck and Mr. Reiner. It's remarkable how gracefully willing they seem to poke fun at themselves. But why the hell not? The world in which they live and work exists for the purpose of lampoon. No matter how insane you depict the movie industry, the truth is even crazier. This is the point of The Muse : In Hollywood, everything is possible for five minutes, and you can always find someone who will believe anything , until they see the grosses.

Asonce-successful screen-writer Steven Phillips, Mr. Brooks is at his funniest in his early scenes with Mark Feuerstein's hilariously gloating Josh Martin, a reptilian studio executive who insists that Steven has lost his edge as a screenwriter and must vacate his office by 5 P.M. so that it can be occupied by Brian DePalma. The Brooks-Feuerstein exchanges display the actors' unique gifts for the almost lost art of increasingly exasperated repartee in an age of deliberately dumbed-down screenplays.

Steven reaches rock bottom as a stone-cold screenwriter in Hollywood when he is humiliatingly forced to walk several miles through the Universal lot for a supposed meeting with Steven Spielberg, only to be confronted by Mr. Spielberg's underachieving cousin, Stan (played by a morosely indifferent Steven Wright as if he were off his medication). Steven's forced march to Hollywood oblivion sets up a situation of such comic desperation that the outlandish idea of a muse named Sara, straight from Zeus' stable to the aid of blocked Hollywood screenwriters, directors and producers, can be plausibly embraced by Steven on the recommendation of his unblocked screenwriter friend Jack Warrick (Jeff Bridges). When Sharon Stone finally materializes as the capricious Sara, the movie takes a sharp turn from satiric realism into a psychological sadism that beats the character of Steven deeper and deeper into the ground.

Sara's expensive demands on Steven's time and ever-dwindling finances cause complications with his wife, Laura (Andie MacDowell), first when she suspects he is having an affair, and then when she allows Sara to push her into a successful career baking gourmet cookies. By this time, Sara's ever-elusive sexuality has begun to cast a shadow over Steven's marriage more through Laura's puzzling complicity than Steven's. Mr. Brooks seems to back away in panic from the lesbian overtones of Laura's matter-of-fact decision to humor Sara by "bunking" with the muse while Steven sleeps in the guest house. When Laura, however, realizes that Sara teasingly sleeps in the nude, she retreats to the couch for a bad night's sleep.

Mr. Brooks was probably wise not to venture into a pathological extension of his nebbishy role to same-sex cuckoldry, but he would have been wiser still to avoid the issue altogether. Also, the vague stirrings of male chauvinist unease over Laura's astounding commercial success as a culinary artist, in contrast to Steven's ongoing failure, makes him a less likable victim of the system. The marriage itself, with its two annoyingly precocious children, seems somehow out of sync with a paterfamilias whose exquisite wit never falters amid all the provocations and humiliations. A broken-English, fractured conversation with a European hanger-on (Mario Opinato) becomes a symphony of wearily reluctant adjustments of Mr. Brooks to the insistent incomprehension of the language mangler, each successive adjustment getting a bigger laugh than its predecessor until Mr. Brooks walks away with a punch line out of left field.

The Muse can be faulted for its narrative structure and its facile resolution with a trick ending that is not entirely happy. One may quibble further by arguing that Steven's supposed writer's block in its Hollywood context may be nothing more than being considered too old to anticipate trends that appeal to ever-younger audiences. Mr. Brooks has always been regarded as a comedian's comedian, and this can be a curse as well as a blessing, though his writing has never seemed particularly esoteric or inaccessible to me. He remains one of moviedom's comic treasures, and thus I am willing to give him some slack on The Muse . His inspired one-liners have more than earned it.

The Second Mr. Grant, Not Unlike the First

Kelly Makin's Mickey Blue Eyes , from a screenplay by Adam Scheinman and Robert Kuhn, would be a virtually unwatchable manifestation of the misguidedly merry mobster syndrome were it not for the stellar presence in the cast of Hugh Grant, who may one day be memorialized in retrospectives as Cary Grant is today. The earlier Grant, it may be remembered, made more than his share of clinkers, but managed more often than not to transcend them with his dazzlingly complex personality, part reticence and part impudence. Our current Mr. Grant is equally complex with his mix of sly insolence and non-narcissistic self-deprecation, and, in my opinion, he is equally dazzling as well. He is admittedly working in a virtual vacuum in Mickey Blue Eyes , but while he is on the screen, which is most of the time, the movie breathes freely with a chucklesome vitality.

As far as the other players and the strenuously contrived plot are concerned, I didn't much mind them simply because Mr. Grant convinced me that he was performing a more than adequate transitional audition to show that he could do more than play a charmingly brainy Brit. I felt a little sorry for the not-unappealing Jeanne Tripplehorn as Mickey's love interest and most important mob connection because she was obviously taken along just for the ride. Her Gina Vitale has very little to do until the very end, and then she does a little too much.

The Mafia repertory company is headed by James Caan, who plays Frank Vitale, Gina's father and owner of "The Le Trattoria" (sic), a gangster-hangout restaurant, and Burt Young as a surprisingly restrained Vito Graziosi. Vito is both a godfather type and patron of his son Johnny's (John Ventimiglia) paintings with their seemingly sacrilegious mixtures of underworld chic and heavenly piety. Mr. Grant, as a reputable art auctioneer, is forced by his attachment to Gina to put up Johnny's painting for a mob-fixed auction. The subsequent complications that transform Michael Felgate into Mickey Blue Eyes play less tediously than they would read in cold print because of the emblematic mugs and demotic banter of such amiable toughs as Mr. Caan, Mr. Young, Joe Viterelli, Tony Darrow, Paul Lazar and Mr. Ventimiglia. These hobo-like hoodlums ride on the rails from picture to picture providing instant gangland atmosphere with every broadened vowel and exploding consonant in their street dialect.

The biggest laughs in the movie come from a scene only vestigially connected with the plot, involving a misplaced Chinese cookie and an unbilled elderly Chinese actress who gets the biggest laughs I have heard so far this year. There is a lesson here in gag construction that I would recommend to every Hollywood screenwriter. If I seem overly preoccupied with the art of humor these days, it may be because I am getting tired of sitting stone-faced amid all the cheap laughs engendered by the gross-out specialists. I was less impressed with the feeble wit involved in Mr. Grant's expressing mild surprise at a restaurant with the redundant sign "The Le Trattoria" and reprised at the final fadeout with "The The End." Only trivia hounds can rejoice.

The Holy Trinity Of Counterculture

Chuck Workman's The Source has clearly bitten off more than it can chew and digest comfortably, but it is still well worth seeing if for nothing else than a confirmation of Morris Dickstein's recent contention that the counterculture and various self-proclaimed postmodern movements in the arts began in the supposedly conformist 50's and not as late as the hippie incursions of the late 60's. Mr. Workman goes even further back to the 40's with the first meeting of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, who form for Mr. Workman the holy trinity of the counterculture that persists to this day in some form or other.

The most interesting element of Mr. Workman's massive assemblage of the visual and aural memorabilia of several decades are the expertly impassioned readings of the writings of Kerouac (by Johnny Depp), Burroughs (by Dennis Hopper) and Ginsberg (by John Turturro). Listening to much of this writing, which, in the case of Kerouac at least, Truman Capote once dismissed as "typing," one recognizes a distinctive sound of an era without becoming fully convinced that it will survive as readable literature on the printed pages and computer screens of the next millennium.

Mr. Workman seems at times to be trying to reconcile the drug-ridden hedonistic bohemian currents of the counterculture with its predominantly left-wing politics. But even if one doesn't buy the whole message, much of the material is riveting.

Tell him that a long time ago when he was young, and you were younger, you admired the way he screwed up his face in consternation and the manner in which he always ran his fingers through his hair. It seemed emblematic of some generational angst, a moody, grumbling counterpoint to the insufferable optimism of Ronald Reagan and, for that matter, Emilio Estevez. Tell him that you identified with him.

Then duck.

"You seem to be wanting something that's validating something in your own thing because you had an experience with it," Mr. McCarthy replied when The Observer said some of those very things to him over lunch on Aug. 15 at Joe Allen, the Restaurant Row theater hangout. He was wearing an interesting combination of gray twill dungarees (no belt) and a beige-colored linen shirt. Those full cheeks are gone; he's skinny now.

His voice was raised in frustration, and he pointed his finger across the table. Meantime, he was loading bales of salad into his mouth more like a feral panda than the well-bred preppy he played in the 80's.

He chewed and continued. He was talking about the Brat Pack, the group of young actors with whom he was lumped in the 80's. "So you want it to have been something. And it wasn't something! It didn't exist! You all had the experience that you wanted to be part of–this kind of group, with success, and it just wasn't. That's not what it was in my experience. But people don't believe that. They just hear frustration when in fact what I'm saying is that's something that you put on us . That's the magic of the movies. You put that on us. It didn't have anything to do with me!"

Mr. McCarthy seemed to be evincing a familiar emotion. Yes, it was the same rage that rose up in Blane, the status-blind "richie" in Pretty in Pink , during the prom scene finale where he finally challenges bad richie James Spader's character for disrespecting Molly Ringwald. The Observer chose not to point it out to him.

Was his life sort of like being trailed by the maudlin equivalent of get-a-life Star Trek fans?

"Sort of, but Star Trek actually has some very profound messages going on," he said. " Star Trek is different."

Once upon a time, people dreamed of hanging out with Judd Nelson, shopping at Aca Joe with Rob Lowe, passing notes to Ally Sheedy. But when Andrew McCarthy dropped out of New York University to take a part in the 1983 film Class –which entailed having an on-screen affair with Jacqueline Bisset–nothing changed in his life, except that, he says, "chicks wanted to fuck me who didn't before."

These days, at 37 years old, with 33 films since Pretty in Pink, the New Jersey native speaks of the "stigmatizing effect" of these movies–some of which reportedly earned him close to a million bucks. He makes Pretty in Pink sound like genital herpes. ("I have to work a little harder because of the stigma.… You never shed it.") Worst of all, he claims he was never even in the Brat Pack. He claims he's never even met the Brat Pack's geek mascot, Anthony Michael Hall!

"[The Brat Pack] didn't exist. It … did … not … exist!" he said. By this time, his salmon steak had arrived, and he was talking loudly again. "We never hung out–well, they may have hung out. I don't know their phone numbers! I've never talked to a single one of them since we wrapped [ St. Elmo's Fire ]! It's all just some lazy fucking journalist lumping it all together."

The journalist to whom he's referring is David Blum, who wrote the June 1985 New York magazine cover story "Hollywood's Brat Pack"–which coined the term. Mr. Blum, who now writes for television and magazines, said that by not including himself in the Brat Pack, Mr. McCarthy is being something of a revisionist historian. "Draw your own conclusions," he said. "Anybody who was remotely connected to St. Elmo's Fire has to carry that with them for the rest of their lives."

Back in 1985, Mr. Blum was assigned a story about how actor, writer and director Emilio Estevez was trying to turn himself into the 80's answer to Orson Welles. Shortly before the release of St. Elmo's Fire , Mr. Blum went out in Los Angeles with Mr. Estevez and his friends, among them Judd Nelson and Rob Lowe. He then changed the focus of the article to include all of the acting young lions in Hollywood, with the notable exception of Mr. McCarthy, who had been considered something of a loner on the set and who was not there that night.

New York magazine hit the stands and immediately created a stir in Hollywood. The stars were angry, and their publicists all got on the phone and chewed out then- New York editor Ed Kosner. "I always thought [Mr. McCarthy's] anger had something to do with the original cover photo for the piece," said Mr. Blum. "We used a publicity still from St. Elmo's Fire … . Andrew McCarthy was also in that picture, but because I didn't talk to him or really deal with him much in the story, we actually cropped him out."

All these years later, Mr. McCarthy still remembers that New York magazine story. In fact, he uses the photograph as evidence that he was never, ever a member of the Brat Pack. "That was my elbow!" he said of the only part of his anatomy that made the cover. But it was something written within the article that stung the most. While Mr. Estevez was dubbed "the unofficial president," Tom Cruise "the hottest of them all," and Sean Penn the heir to Robert De Niro's acting throne, Mr. McCarthy received only this passing mention, and worse, it was a jab from one of his own: "[O]f Andrew McCarthy, one of the New York-based actors in St. Elmo's Fire , a co-star says, 'He plays all his roles with too much of the same intensity. I don't think he'll make it.'"

For a moment, Mr. McCarthy's chalkboard green eyes betrayed more hurt than anger. "Whenever you have a contemporary trash you in some nasty way, it usually means they're envious," he said.

Like the Matt Dillon movie, that was then, this is now. A few of those mentioned in the Brat Pack story–notably, Mr. Cruise, Mr. Penn, Matthew Broderick and Nicolas Cage–somehow emerged from the Brat Pack association untouched by the curse. Others associated with the teen ensemble films, like Demi Moore and Robert Downey Jr. (prison notwithstanding), managed to eke out a decent living far past 1985.

And truth be told, so did Mr. McCarthy. There were the dogs like 1995's Dream Man ; the forgottens like 1997's Stag , about a bunch of guys who accidentally kill a stripper at a stag party. There were a couple of pretty good ones, too, like 1994's Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle . Good or bad, he was always working. "I have a wonderful career," he said, perched over his salad. "I'm in a Broadway play, a Tony-winning play. You know, it's not going badly."

He got tapped to play Clifford in Warren Leight's Tony Award-winning play, Side Man , a part previously played by both Party of Five 's Scott Wolfe and Christian Slater (two guys who most certainly would have been members of the Brat Pack if only they'd gotten started a little earlier), after playing A Long Day's Journey Into Night and Horton Foote's The Death of Papa at the Hartford Stage last season. Ironically, Mr. McCarthy, who seems to be forever running away from anything smelling of juvenilia, reverts to playing a 9-year-old for much of his time on stage in the memory play. He plays Clifford with a mix of vulnerability and bitterness.

And people still recognize him, of course. Apparently, 1989's hide-the-body flick Weekend at Bernie's made a dent. He said that an inordinate number of truck drivers stick their heads out their windows and yell, "Hey, where's Bernie?"

Others are not so kind. Mr. McCarthy is occasionally confronted by sidewalk critics. "They'll say, 'Why did you do that movie? That sucked!'" he said, shaking his head at the memory. "So why are you coming up and bothering me then? Go fuck off!"

The Rich Shall Inherit Mortimer's

Thanks to the efforts of a certain community as galvanized as a velvet Red Cross in a deluge, Mortimer's, the society watering hole scorched a year ago by the death of proprietor Glenn Bernbaum, will be reborn, renewed and improved, on Labor Day or very soon thereafter.

As attorney Richard Golub explained recently, he was retained, in accordance with Bernbaum's will, to "close Mortimer's down." But this spring, the death of Mortimer's and the dearth of agreeable restaurants in the 10021 ZIP code were being compared to a month of Sundays "in the Gobi desert," to quote House & Garden editor at large Carolina Irving. To resurrect it, parched investors were found from the restaurant's inner circle: Nan Kempner, Mario Buatta, Anne Eisenhower, Gale Hayman, financier James Arcara and 15 or so other regulars made pledges.

They didn't raise enough to outbid Jean de Noyer, the owner of La Goulue, for the Mortimer's building at 1057 Lexington Avenue, but it was enough to take over the lease of the Kiosk, a restaurant owned by Nell Campbell and Eamon Roche two blocks south, a location Bernbaum would have considered "downtown." The rebirth of the restaurant was organized by Robert Caravaggi, longtime maître d' of Mortimer's, Stephen Attoe, the restaurant's chef for nearly 20 years, and Peter Geraghty, Bernbaum's personal assistant in charge of its finances for the past five years. Mr. Caravaggi said they raised about $500,000 toward the new space, not a great fortune to float a restaurant in this neighborhood, but a start nonetheless.

"I think I understand why he didn't leave any provisions for keeping Mortimer's going," said Mr. Attoe of his former boss. "Glenn couldn't deal with his emotions, so he made his death as impersonal as he could."

More likely, Bernbaum didn't need anyone pointing out the sins of the father once he was gone. Inside his new E-shaped dining room on April 19, Mr. Caravaggi revealed what would be different about the new Mortimer's. "None of this looking people over the way Glenn did. That worked for him, for a while. We only worked for him; it wasn't our policy," he said, clearing his throat.

Indeed, like all great divas, Mortimer's is benefiting from some ace surgery and repositioning. For instance, it's no longer called Mortimer's. It's new name and trademark is Swifty's, for Bernbaum's pug, who predeceased his owner. Decorators Anne Eisenhower and Mario Buatta are performing the last of several gentle procedures (apricot walls). And Mr. Buatta is putting the finishing touches on a logo.

"We're taking the best of Mortimer's … the food, the ambiance, the social mix and improving upon the worst. We're a little more youthful," said Mr. Caravaggi. "We want this to be an inclusive restaurant and we don't want to exclude anybody."

The restaurant will accept reservations; Mortimer's didn't for parties under six unless you were a friend of Bernbaum's. He sat you only if, and when, he wanted to. Amusing at first, while the demand for tables lasted, that policy backfired when people gave up trying. Often in the last years, one would look in at night and see, say, Brooke Astor at Table 1A in the window, a few of the tables behind her filled with genteel sorts, and the restaurant otherwise empty in candlelight.

Mr. Attoe described the new menu as "smaller, more condensed … offering more specials in season. "Risottos, pastas, game … But we'll have Mortimer's favorites. The chopped salads, chicken salad, twinburgers, crabcakes and soufflés to order." There'll be lunch and dinner, seven days a week. Catering is also available.

"To tell you the truth," said Nan Kempner, "I didn't like the way Glenn left his staff. These boys are terrific. They worked for him practically from the beginning. I was delighted to invest. It'll be fun and delicious and intimate and filled with pals with the same great food. Yum …"

Part of the allure of Mortimer's was its (relatively) low prices. "The rich love a bargain in food, but they don't care how much a drink costs," Bernbaum used to say. "Our prices will be in line with Mortimer's–moderate to medium," said Mr. Caravaggi. "Our wine list will be excellent and well priced."

Mr. Caravaggi wants to clear the tables near the bar after about 10:30 P.M. each night, to draw people in for a nightcap or late supper. There are French doors on Lexington Avenue to open in the summer. A launch party for Swifty's will be held "about a month after we open, after we've worked the kinks out," Mr. Caravaggi said.

Something else: The restaurant is small. If the back room is more commodious than the front room, and the kitchen is downstairs, where's the best table at Swifty's?

"Wherever you are," purred Mr. Caravaggi.

–William Norwich

The Transom Also Hears

… The long hard road of Keith Richards' face ended in a wry smile. "It's the first time we've met and basically we agree on everything," said the Rolling Stone as he cocked his mug at the woman sitting next to him. Mr. Richards was referring to actress Lauren Bacall, his tablemate at the post-premiere party for Albert Brooks' new movie, The Muse . The Bacall-Richards pairing was the talk of the evening, but actually it was typical of the eclectic crowd gathered in the private upstairs room of Le Cirque 2000.

Like Mr. Richards and Ms. Bacall, everybody seemed to be in a sociable frame of mind. Police Commissioner Howard Safir kept jumping out of his chair to eagerly press flesh with the celebrity crowd, especially Harvey Keitel and Mr. Richards. Meanwhile, Mr. Keitel, who earlier had been concerned about who was at his table, seemed to hit it off with the newly single Andie MacDowell, who co-stars in The Muse . Also in the room were Happiness director Todd Solondz, Howard Stern sidekick Robin Quivers, Heather Locklear, Richie Sambora and Sopranos star and E Street Band member Steven Van Zandt.

Even Mr. Brooks seemed determined to see everyone happy. After his first question-and-answer with The Transom, Mr. Brooks concluded, "They're not great quotes, but I just got here." Later in the evening, he gave it another go. Asked about the cameo appearances that directors Martin Scorsese and James Cameron make in his film (a highly caffeinated Mr. Scorsese tells Mr. Brooks' character that he wants to remake Raging Bull with "a really, really thin guy–thin but angry"), Mr. Brooks replied: "It even surprised me a little bit because Scorsese does not like to fly.… He was asking me all these non-movie questions like, well, how windy is it out there [in Los Angeles]? He was asking me aeronautical questions. Is LAX safe?" Mr. Brooks' voice took on a weary, yet reassuring tone. "Yes, Marty, Yes.

"And [James] Cameron called me back. I didn't know her." The Transom laughed, thinking Mr. Brooks was being funny, but he quickly corrected his gender mistake. "Him," he said. Apparently, Mr. Brooks had been distracted. "I just saw Robin Quivers. I have to say hello to her," he said, walking away.

As for Mr. Richards, his being in total agreement with Ms. Bacall might have been a smart bit of self-preservation. When The Transom admitted that we were not aware that she was opening in Noël Coward's Waiting in the Wings in December, Ms. Bacall replied, "I can see you're right up-to-date," and immediately gave us the distinct impression that the conversation was over.

Frank DiGiacomo is on vacation.

Warmth: Look how it ruined Robin Williams who once had a gift for brilliant, laser-sharp riffs that cracked you up but could cut deep, too, lacerating the pretensions of pop culture and pop sensibility. He once did what the best satirists were supposed to do: hold a mirror up to nature even if that mirror was streaked with the remnants of white-line fevers, or acted like one of those scary motel-room magnifying mirrors that turns each pore into a bottomless abyss .

A couple things set me thinking about this-about the way warmth, the lust to be beloved in a fuzzy, cuddly way has ruined Mr. Williams. First there was a message I got when I was traveling recently, that someone from the Los Angeles Times wanted to get a quote from me "about Robin Williams and the Holocaust." At least that's what I think it said, since the words were garbled by the bad reception of the in-flight Airfone, and I wasn't able to get back to the caller, and I didn't figure out what it was really about until a few days later, when I was in a theater, watching the previews, and I gazed with growing horror at the trailer for Mr. Williams' forthcoming Holocaust "warmedy" (the TV sitcom term of art for life-affirming fun), Jakob the Liar . I realized the L.A. Times call must have been prompted by my recent column attacking Roberto Benigni's Holocaust warmedy Life Is Beautiful ("Benigni and Chaplin: The Arrogance of Clowns," April 19), which I characterized as a "feel-good fable about the Holocaust."

Now I don't want to prejudge Jakob the Liar , but the trailer alone was sick-making, featuring scenes of a warm and fuzzy Mr. Williams (his warmth-induced self-destruction as a performer began when he first grew a beard and started looking warm and -literally-fuzzy in Moscow on the Hudson ), Mr. Williams receiving the grateful appreciation of ghetto Jews for his beautiful, life-affirming, life-is-beautiful antics. I felt a kind of physical revulsion: Haven't Jews suffered enough without having to be depicted as grateful supplicants to the healing "hilarity" of Patch Adams? The estimable NPR commentator Elvis Mitchell once characterized the execrable Mr. Benigni as "the Patch Adams of the Holocaust," and it suddenly made me wonder if Mr. Williams had read that-or misread it-as a compliment and decided, "Gosh darn it, that's just what I'll do in my next film: I'll be the real 'Patch Adams of the Holocaust.'"

Have you seen Patch Adams , by the way? You know you've been on the road too long when your hotel room Spectravision habit becomes so perverse, you watch something you know you're going to hate just to relieve the cabin fever. Whoa: Patch Adams was intense, like being force-fed canned cake frosting. Patch Adams was soooo desperately warm, soooo hysterically steeped in generic "humanity" and clichéd "healing" wisdom, you just wanted to puke. It's a wonder Mr. Williams' friends, the ones who aren't on his payroll, haven't tried to do some kind of intervention on this guy. Jakob the Liar looks like evidence that if they tried, they failed.

Am I being too harsh? Consider the way the emotional fraudulence of Patch Adams ' warmth discloses itself in a way Mr. Williams may be too warm in the head to even realize. It's in the allegedly "stirring" Patch Adams speech to medical students about his supposedly "patient-centered" medical philosophy. It's a line that is featured in all the promos for the movie: "You treat the disease, you win you lose. You treat the patient, I guarantee, you'll win no matter what the outcome."

Now think about that: Notice how this supposedly patient-centered aperçu is really about how the doctor feels , about finding a way for the doctor to feel like a winner, all warm and O.K. with himself even if he happens to lose the patient. Um, if you really want to be patient centered, Doc, Patch, Robin, be less concerned about how you feel and a little more about how your patient feels-how he's gonna feel knowing that you're feeling all warm about yourself when his corpse is in the cooler.

That's what's so sad about Mr. Williams' desperate and deluded attempt to shove his Mr. Warmth persona down our throats: his evident contempt for what he once was so good at being, a "mere" comedian. As a "mere" comedian, as the brilliant satirist mimic he once was, he had a pitch-perfect ear, a genius for satirizing self-deception. He could have seen right through his Mr. Warmth persona, the pretense that it's really about giving when it's really transparently about getting -getting love, making himself a mainstream movie star, getting the more lucrative leading-man roles. His warmth feels like a coldblooded career calculation that doesn't give, but instead cheats his audience-and himself-out of his true talent. You just know that, deep down inside, Mr. Williams has to see what a con his Mr. Warmth act is. Or hope he does. It would be even more sad if he was too far gone to know.

Anyway, I was thinking about the way warmth ruins comics.

I was thinking about it and getting worried because I was due to attend a screening of Albert Brooks' new film The Muse , and the trailer I'd seen made me nervous that one of my all-time favorite comics, one of the most wickedly, sneakily daring comics, was about to Go Warm.

When I say Albert Brooks is daring, I don't just mean in a loud, bombastic, Sam Kinison way. Yes, Mr. Brooks can make people laugh harder than even that; he's a legend, particularly among fellow comics, for his convulsively incendiary riffs. But, perhaps because of that, I don't think people really appreciate just how deep his comedy cuts-particularly in his first three films, Real Life , Modern Romance and Lost in America . I'm still surprised, by the way, that there are intelligent people out there who have yet to see Real Life . If you haven't, you really should rent it now, tonight. It's not just a brilliantly prescient satire of media exploitation and showbiz ego that deserves to be ranked with the immortal Spinal Tap , it also features two of the three most painfully funny scenes ever put on film.

But beneath the belly laughs you find, in all three films, Mr. Brooks creating a genuinely daring persona, one that nails an aspect of the American male character with surgical precision. You might call it the critique of pure charm or the critique of fake warmth-the way charm and warmth, even self-deprecating charm, becomes the fig leaf, the enabler of both deceit and self-deception, the mask of predatory narcissism. Mr. Brooks nails it in a way Neil LaBute's crude caricatures of the obvious fail to, nails it more subtly than David Rabe's more sophisticated (than Mr. LaBute's) caricatures of men in Hurlyburly (although you should rent the film version of Hurlyburly for Sean Penn's tour de force performance)

What makes Mr. Brooks' persona so daring, if sometimes painful to watch, in those first three films is his refusal to make himself lovable on screen. Funny, charming, but in the most important ways a subtle, self-deceiving monster of narcissism. One who can mask his reptilian scales with the mantle of fake warmth. His early work, then, is about the exposure of fake warmth rather than the manufacture of it, Robin Williams style. But in his last two films especially, Defending Your Life and to a lesser extent Mother , there were signs that even Mr. Brooks had decided to Go Warm, that some studio exec, agent or shrink who wanted to be a studio exec was telling him, "You can be more than a comic, you should be a star , a leading man, and leading men have to be lovable. Give yourself a little warmth. Make yourself a romantic hero."

I'm not sure how else to explain Defending Your Life , which, while often very funny in a Brooksian way, seems intent on being taken seriously as a Lesson in Growth, in Facing Your Fears and Expressing Your True Feelings. Less a film than a group therapy session. Same with Mother . There was this need to be loved not just by his mother but by his audience. As a matter of fact, if I could put on my Dr. Ron, Shrink to the Stars, hat for a moment, it seems evident that the mother in the movie (Debbie Reynolds), whose approval and love Mr. Brooks' character so desperately craves, represents the great American mass audience that Mr. Brooks-as-actor craves, the mass audience for which he's tempted to Go Warm to get.

And so I could honestly say that, as the minutes ticked away before the screening of The Muse , the suspense was killing me: Would this be the moment Mr. Brooks Went Warm for good? Heightening the suspense was the fact that the screening was to be followed by a reception afterward (at Le Cirque!), where Mr. Brooks would be present and I might feel compelled to confront him on the question. In the moments before the lights went down, three of us, my friend Virginia Heffernan, the only editor of Talk magazine finishing up a Harvard doctorate, and my former colleague Stephen Schiff, now an A-list screenwriter, and I were making lists of which comics had, and which had not, Gone Warm. It happened to Richard Pryor, alas, at least in his movies; it happened to all those SCTV guys; it happened to Bobcat Goldthwait after Shakes the Clown . It didn't happen to Sam Kinison and Andy Kaufman, maybe because they died first. It hasn't happened to Howard Stern (well, maybe a little in his movie, but not if you've ever seen his Saturday night TV show, which keeps redefining extreme). As the light went out, Stephen Schiff whispered, "Redd Foxx!"

So now I guess you want to know what I really thought about The Muse and whether Mr. Brooks has Gone Warm, and I'd like to frame my answer in terms of the brief but illuminating exchange I had with Mr. Brooks himself at the reception afterward. An exchange about the concept of "edge," a concept that bears a direct relationship to the Going-Warm question, a concept that is at the heart of his new film. The Muse is about a screenwriter played by Mr. Brooks, a fairly successful one who's been Oscar-nominated and has just won a humanitarian award for a recent script, only to be told by young, hipper studio execs and agents that he's "lost his edge."

What's interesting is the way "edge" seems a double-edged concept in The Muse . It's ridiculed in its caricatured flavor-of-the-month, transient-hip version. But you also sense that at some deeper level Mr. Brooks is interested in the idea of "edge," worried not so much whether he's lost it so much as whether to sacrifice it for mass appeal. That perhaps he's "thematizing," as the lit crit types say, his own dilemma about whether to Go Warm to get a mass audience: Will it mean that he loses his edge, loses his identity?

At first I worried about The Muse in this respect, worried that despite many hilarious Brooksian moments it seemed, on the surface at least, to dumb down this dilemma. The screenwriter character that Mr. Brooks plays turns in desperation to a goofy muse (Sharon Stone doing Cameron Diaz) for inspiration and edge. But inspiration and edge as defined how? By his progress in finishing the "summer comedy I always wanted to write," a piece of dimwit pap that The Muse 's "brilliant" inspiration rescues with a dopey ending in which the owners of an endangered aquarium strike oil "just like The Beverly Hillbillies "?

This was so pathetically second-rate that I found myself wanting to believe that this was Mr. Brooks' sly way of making The Muse an audience-friendly warmedy on the surface but, at another deeper level, a far more bitter satire: In Hollywood, even the Muses have become dumbed-down airhead hacks. I hope it's the latter. I hope Mr. Brooks is still satirizing fake warmth rather than manufacturing it.

Still, uncertain of my reaction to what was really going on in The Muse , I was reluctant to approach Mr. Brooks at the reception afterward, although as someone whose column title gives him a kind of proprietary interest in the question, I did want to ask him about his concept of the "edge." At the reception, Mr. Brooks was playing the genial host. When he entered the room to a standing ovation, he hailed the crowd by announcing with mock solemnity (on the day of George W. Bush's front-page evasions), "I have not used cocaine." And afterward, as he was circulating among the other tables, Virginia Heffernan prodded me to overcome my pathological shyness in the presence of artists I really admire and ask him a question. So I threaded my way between such other guests as Keith Richards (a god of edge), Lauren Bacall, Dwight Yoakam, Donald Trump, Police Chief Howard Safir and Howard Stern sidekick Robin Quivers to press my question upon poor Mr. Brooks.

I told him how much I admired his work and then asked him: "How would you define 'edge'?"

He hemmed and hawed at first. "I don't know … Um, I really don't know … How would you define it?" he asked me.

"Um, maybe intensity, testing limits …"

As I trailed off, he came through with a remarkably coherent response: The edge, he said, is "something that draws you and yet you want to stay away from it at the same time."

I've been thinking about that ever since. First of all, the scene reminded me of The Simpsons episode where Homer and Apu travel to a mountain in Tibet to meet the grand lama of the Qwik-E-Mart stores, and the grand lama grants them Three Questions. Upon which Homer says, "Are you really the grand lama of the Qwik-E-Mart? You? Really?" thereby forever forfeiting their three chances for Wisdom.

But I think there's something more to Mr. Brooks' vision of the edge than guru-speak. It paints a picture, sets a scene: the edge of a cliff, a place you're drawn to because you long to look over the edge; the parapets of Elsinore that put "toys of desperation" in the mind of those who gaze at the sea-surge below. You want the thrill of the vision, even though you know it's dangerous physically and metaphorically to gaze into such depths. You risk losing yourself, disappearing, plunging over the edge.

And who knows, maybe for a guy like Mr. Brooks, warmth itself is the edge-that which he's drawn to but fears losing himself in. For some, war is hell, but one imagines that for Albert Brooks warmth is hell , and perhaps we should salute his courage in flirting with the edge of the warm inferno he fears.