"Hey girl."

Hey ladies. You know, on this very special Valentine's Day, you're not looking for a dozen roses or a bear holding a box of chocolate. You're not looking for hearts, or balloons, or even a book of homemade coupons offering "I O U = One (1) Free Massage During a Screening of Crazy, Stupid Love on Our DVD Player (Your Choice, Non-Transferable)."

No girl, what really gets your motor running (pun intended) is to have artist/actor/Grand Marshal for the Daytona 500 James Franco show you the collection for his latest installation exhibit in Berlin, "Gay Town."


"This one is based on how much I hate people only recognizing me for my work in Spider-Man."

"This one is about how mad I am that Kristen Stewart cheated on R-Patz whilst filming Snow White and the Huntsman."

According to the press release, Mr. Franco's work touches on "a variety of themes that are central to Franco's artistic practice, mainly issues related to adolescence, public and private persona, stereotypes and other societal concerns such as society's preoccupation with celebrity," and that they were conceived "in hotel rooms, makeshift studios and other temporary locations whilst completing other projects, mainly motion pictures." So basically, he's doodled a bit while in between his other projects, and now these doodles get to be considered their own project--as some sort of commentary on the "metacelebrity" moment that Franco finds so compelling as it relates to himself, and apparently "K-Stew."

The space in Berlin.

The Lower East Side’s Horton Gallery will host a second season at their 1,100 square foot-space in Berlin, owner Sean Horton announced today. The new season also comes with a new gallery director for the space.

Much of the motivation for the move, Mr. Horton told The Observer, was a desire to discover Berlin talent and bring it to New York. The Berlin gallery director Colin Huerter has been there since March, making the rounds.

“It’s a slower pace,” Mr. Horton said. “Which allows for a much more engaging dialogue about the art whereas the conversation in New York is very much about the market, which is not a negative necessarily, but the conversation you can have in Berlin is a much slower pace you can spend time with people coming in the gallery.”

“New York, it’s very market-driven, very career-driven,” he added.

Mr. Horton spent four months there last year for the gallery’s first season, but is eager to return. Mr. Huerter comes from a diverse background as a curator, art consultant and poet. His most recent show for Horton Berlin is a group show titled, "A Momentary Stay Against Confusion," a phrase used by Robert Frost to define a poem.

If so, he's got some justification. He's shown in highbrow gallery exhibitions, made soap opera appearances billed as performance art, published a collection of short stories, persued a Ph.D. in literature, done readings with the likes of Gary Shteyngart, and dressed up in drag for Terry Richardson. He's done all this while tackling weighty and well-received roles in juicy Oscar-bait films. Yet, the public often treats his extracurricular activities as mere curiosities.

What about Europe, then? Instead of opening his first solo gallery show stateside, which he most certainly could do, Franco's chosen to take his artwork to Peres Projects in Berlin, Art Info reports. The space is owned and operated by Javier Peres, who's known Franco for eight years and also worked with Dash Snow and Terrance Koh. The show is set to open in February to coincide with the Berlin Film Festival, and will riff on "The Dangerous Book Four Boys," which showed in New York over the summer.

Peres suggests that his buddy James picked the German city to have the public focus on his work, not his star status.

"Generally speaking, the notion of celebrity in Germany is not what it is in New York or Los Angeles," Peres said. "We don't have the same general fixation on it in Germany. In Berlin, really famous people can walk down the street without problems or bodyguards. Here, James will be judged based on the merits of work."

No word on how exactly he'll fit an art show into his very busy February, as he has to be halfway across the world in L.A. to host the Oscars and film episodes of General Hospital. But that's standard procedure for everyone's favorite phone-throwing writer-student-artist-actor!

nfreeman at observer.com |@nfreeman1234

Click for Scandal Report: And Then The Model At Diddy's Party Burst Into Flames

The names on editor Martin Baron’s desk were expected to include business columnist Steven Bailey and Pulitzer-winning investigative reporter Stephen Kurkjian.

Mr. Baron declined to comment on his timetable or on how many staffers had submitted paperwork.

“I’ll make the decision in consultation with the appropriate people,” Mr. Baron said.

It’s been 14 years now since the Times Company bought The Globe, spending $1.3 billion. Instead of Northeastern regional synergy, the result has been mutual disappointment—and an ever more newspaper-colonialist management style.

In January, the Times Company wrote down the New England Media Group—which includes The Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette—by $814 million and announced that 125 jobs needed to be cut from the two newspapers. Besides the 19 editorial cuts—17 in the newsroom and two on the opinion side—55 jobs in advertising and finance at The Globe are due to be outsourced to Bangalore.

And while the business jobs are going abroad, journalism jobs are being brought home. Also in January, Mr. Baron announced that the paper would be closing its last three foreign bureaus: the Jerusalem-based Middle East bureau, Berlin and Bogotá.

In case the paper’s four foreign correspondents would rather not cover Woburn, the Times foreign desk has already spoken to them about possible positions, according to a Times source with knowledge of the newspaper’s hiring practices. The potential poaching targets are the Berlin bureau’s Colin Nickerson, Bogotá’s Indira Lakshmanan and the Middle East–based husband-and-wife team of Anne Barnard and Thanassis Cambanis.

Back in the Bay State, staffers with 10 years’ seniority at the newspaper were informed that they were eligible for buyouts some six weeks ago. Globe sources said the terms were similar to those offered 18 months ago, when employees accepted packages ranging from about $150,000 to $200,000.

While that buyout met its target, the new one is oversubscribed. A Globe staffer said that reporters and editors are losing confidence in the newspaper’s future under the Times Company, and that they feel this might be the last chance to take a buyout for several more years.

The sense of encroachment grew stronger on March 14, when a story from the West Bank appeared in The Globe with a New York Times Wire Service tagline. The article was by Times reporter Steven Erlanger, himself a former Globe reporter. The following day, the Boston Phoenix’s Web site noted that it had been the first use of Times wire copy in The Globe’s news pages.

The Globe has been occasionally running Rob Walker’s “Consumed” column, which originates in the Times Magazine, since July 2006. But till this month, though The Globe had used foreign stories from The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and even the Times-owned International Herald Tribune, Times news copy had been off-limits.

On Feb. 8, when Times Company C.E.O. Janet Robinson and Globe publisher Steve Ainsley held a town meeting at the paper, a staffer raised the prospect of using Times wire copy in The Globe. At that time, Mr. Ainsley said that he didn’t see any reason not to, but that it would be strictly a newsroom decision, according to several staffers who were present.

Two weeks later, Mr. Baron spoke to Globe staffers, principally about the buyouts, but also to discuss the use of Times stories.

“A few years ago, [using Times copy] was such a big debate,” one staffer said. “But now so much is happening here that it just got overshadowed by the general tumult.”

The man appointed as chief curator of this department is Klaus Biesenbach, 40, a German national, who has been a curator at the museum since 2004. He’d also worked at P.S. 1, the contemporary art center in Queens that is a MoMA affiliate, since the mid-90’s. Sleepwalkers, jointly commissioned by MoMA and Creative Time, is, in many respects, Mr. Biesenbach’s coming out.

It has many times been said—mostly by people outside the art world who favor ostentation, or those within it who do not—that curators are the new rock stars. Over the past decade, there has been a major infusion of capital, in all its precious metaphors, into the art world. Curators are often the brokers and handlers of this currency, moving among different worlds, drawing from one to complement the other.

“In the young, hip group, there are not so many people interested in having the, you know, Van Gogh scholar over to dinner,” said P.S. 1 executive director Alanna Heiss. “It’s very much related to this sense of tension and anxiety and drama, the sexiness of contemporary art in general.”

Mr. Biesenbach has always unashamedly invited celebrity personalities into his purview. He began his curatorial career in Berlin, immediately after the Wall fell. That’s when he and a group of young art enthusiasts occupied an old margarine factory on a street called Auguststrasse in the largely abandoned former eastern city center. They gave it the name Kunst-Werke (now called just KW), and bit by bit built it into a major center for contemporary art and theory. Then Mr. Biesenbach, looking around at what was still missing from the Berlin art scene, founded the Berlin Biennial in 1996.

The openings of exhibitions he curated at KW were often glamorous affairs. He even got someone to open a nightclub in the basement.

“Soon there was this mixture, which is now common to the art scene—this mixture of pop stars, cinema stars, the glam world and the art world,” said Niklas Maak, the chief art critic of the influential German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “But at that time in Berlin, it was shocking, because the art scene was something completely different from the pop and glam business. So, the moment I described in my little article, where Matthew Barney and Charlotte Rampling were dancing the tango in Auguststrasse, which now is the cliché of the merger of two scenes and, you know, the atmosphere of Auguststrasse—so, I mean, if someone would have told me that that was the first scene of a film of a fiction on Berlin, I would have said, ‘Please, take it out, this is too much!’ But the thing is: It happened.”

Mr. Biesenbach explains his immersion in celebrity culture simply: It’s a German thing; you wouldn’t understand. Some years ago, he wrote a controversial article, also published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in which he posed the question “Why are there no global pop stars from Germany?” The answer is complicated, involving a messy batch of historical and psychosocial issues. But Mr. Biesenbach wasn’t waiting around for his countrymen to sort it all out.

“I could ask you,” he said, raising one finger, “who do you know, on a pop star/singer/film director/film actor level, who do you know in our generation that in the last 15 years—not a politician! Not like Mrs. [Merkel], our chancellor, or so—I’m thinking about people like Pedro Almodóvar, like Björk, like Hugh Grant—is there anybody from Germany who made it to a certain recognizability? There’s none. So that’s Germany: being against giving too much attention to one person. But if you play that game … it’s really true, there’s nobody.”

Mr. Biesenbach, who has silvery hair that he keeps almost shaved, does play the self-branding game like the best of them. Like Anna Wintour’s bob, Tom Ford’s hirsute sternum, Philip Johnson’s glasses, his trademark is snug-fitting Jil Sander suits and black-on-black shirt-and-tie combinations. This past July, Berlin was caught in a heat wave, and Mr. Biesenbach, who was passing through KW one morning to pick up a set of keys en route to a vacation on the Italian island of Stromboli, appeared in jeans, sandals and an open-necked sports shirt. It might have been less jarring to see him naked, said someone in the courtyard.

Like a faithful godfather, he shows up wherever German cultural producers of a certain edge—the fresh, the new, the prior-connected—are attempting to make their mark in New York. When the young art dealer Leo Koenig, who belongs to an art-world dynasty in Germany, opened his first gallery in Williamsburg in 1999, Mr. Biesenbach attended the inaugural exhibition. He ended up selecting one of the artists for inclusion in a group show at P.S. 1.

Just over a year ago, he went to the solo exhibition at Lehmann Maupin Gallery for Juergen Teller, the photographer who shoots Marc Jacobs’ ad campaigns. Amid the throng of visitors on the street outside the gallery, he listened patiently to a youthful artist who looked like a big college jock imparting thoughts about his work. Then, during last September’s Fashion Week, he perched front-row at the As Four defector Kai Kühne’s show. The designer’s parents, distinguished-looking seniors, sat nearby. Mr. Biesenbach greeted them formally in German. In these moments, he prefers to step back from the searchlights and let those he’s come to support shine brightest. “Shall we not pay attention to the situation?” he rebuked a reporter interviewing him before the models hit the runway. “Like, it’s disrespectful to Kai. I feel like I’m monopolizing the situation.” Then, for equilibrium, he laughed. “I’m very close to fashion, to music, to film, to architecture, to design,” he said. “Like, we’re here now at a design show. And I know many designers and musicians, but they have to be really experimental and really contemporary and really innovative. That’s the only criteria.”

A few weeks later, on Halloween, he popped in at the launch party for a stylish architecture magazine, Pin-Up, founded by Felix Burrichter, a sociable twentysomething from Düsseldorf. “I can’t stay long,” Mr. Biesenbach said, bypassing the bar. “I have to pick up my costume. I’m going to Courtney Love’s party as a vampire.”

It seems less important to wonder whether Mr. Biesenbach wants to be a rock star and more pertinent to view him as a rolling rock. He belongs to an informal network of foreign-born and transnationally oriented curators with high visibility and mounting influence at American arts institutions. MoMA director Glenn Lowry said that “we had looked over the course of several months at several candidates” to head the new department, but Mr. Biesenbach won out for his “broad international practice.”

Curators similar to Mr. Biesenbach include Okwui Enwezor, of Nigerian origin, who rose from editing a periodical about African art published at Cornell to be selected in 2002 to curate Documenta, the Wimbledon of international art exhibitions, which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. In the wake of this honor, he was snapped up by the San Francisco Art Institute to serve as its dean of academic affairs and senior vice president. “Okwui is a headmaster now,” his longtime friend, Ike Ude, the publisher of the flashy style mag aRUDE, recently said. In turn, Mr. Enwezor deputized Hou Hanru, a noted curator from China who’d been residing in Paris since the early 90’s, as SFAI’s director of exhibitions and public programs. Mr. Hanru, it was reported on Friday, Jan. 19, will also be the man to direct China’s pavilion at the Venice Biennial this summer. And speaking of biennials, remember the kerfuffle last spring over the Whitney Museum of American Art’s appointment of two foreign-born curators—Brit Chrissie Iles and Frenchman Philippe Vergne—to handle its own biannual best-in-show? “How American Is It?” ran one headline. “Beats me!” came the critically engaged chorus.

At the moment, it’s rough going trying to force a collar of “local” or “national” on culture of any form. Artists are crisscrossing the globe, their works laced with worldwide references. The ubiquitous “lives and works” line on artists’ bios has, for many, become the thing that changes most often from one major exhibition to the next. And institutions are responding in turn, pulling in curators who are themselves as migratory in their lives—hence their outlooks. Case in point: the New Museum, the city’s only museum devoted exclusively to contemporary art, recently tapped the globetrotting Massimiliano Gioni to join its curatorial team. Mr. Gioni curated (along with another Italian national and one American) last year’s Berlin Biennial, Mr. Biesenbach’s brainchild.

“I actually think that there is a change of paradigms,” Mr. Biesenbach said not too long ago. “I think until the 60’s, the linearity of things—as in modernism, as in avant-garde—reflected an idea of time as linear, whereas after this, I think we are understanding more and more that things are happening simultaneously, and it’s not Paris giving modernity to New York and New York being the city where everything happens. We have Los Angeles, we have London, we have Glasgow, we have Warsaw, we have Rio, we have Mexico City, we have Berlin, as huge centers of artistic production. So it’s not New York as a single situation.”

The buzzwords for some time in the contemporary art world have been “transnational,” “transcultural” and “internationalism.” Uttering that hieroglyph of a term, “multicultural,” in contemporary art’s inner sanctum is akin to dropping “politically correct” in a conversation with hard-core activists: It belongs to the discourse of a bygone age. Even the word “curator” as a moniker is being reconsidered.

“I don’t think the title ‘curator’ would be that necessarily important to him,” said P.S. 1’s Ms. Heiss, of Mr. Biesenbach. “I think he could find another title. It’s a very overused word anyway. It goes up and down; it’s a little passé right now.”

Mr. Biesenbach is noticeably tight-lipped about his background, and even more so about his inner life. Like Faye Dunaway’s career-obsessed TV producer character in Network, who can talk about her feelings only in the language of ratings and audience appeal, Mr. Biesenbach responds to questions about his self-image by referring to the various exhibitions he organized.

One example: Is he a different person when in New York than in Berlin?

A long pause. “Not so much,” he says softly, “not so much”—followed by a lengthy disquisition on art installation.

“He doesn’t have his own family,” said the performance artist Marina Abramovic, who has known Mr. Biesenbach since he was 21 years old. “He sacrificed a very large part of his private life for the work. Basically, all his life is the work.”

In the early years of their acquaintance, the two experimented with a romantic relationship, despite the 20-year gap in their ages (she just turned 60 last November).

“It was a very short time, yah, yah, about three months,” she said in her sumptuous Slavic accent. “It was really a disaster. It was really funny. We devoted three months together, and we decided we can have like a ‘house life.’ He would make the apple pies, but they were always burning!”

Hermann Weizenegger, a Berlin-based industrial designer, remembers running into Mr. Biesenbach, whom he’s known for years, while on a trip to Rio de Janeiro. The two went to a nightclub, where at one point Mr. Weizenegger drew Mr. Biesenbach’s attention to a young man with an unusually striking appearance. “He went directly to the boy and he talked with him,” Mr. Weizenegger remembers with awe. “They talked for a long time.” About what, Mr. Weizenegger doesn’t recall, but that wasn’t the point. “Klaus doesn’t stop himself,” he said. “He will talk to anybody he pleases or pleases him.”

“I think that what he has an ability to do is, he sees things very specially, and he has almost a filmic understanding of how people move, the direction they’re going—as if situations could perhaps be described on storyboards,” said Ms. Heiss. “Because he knows a great deal about film, he knows a great deal about theater. So, it would be likely that he can be detached enough—it’s perhaps true or not—to see a social event very clearly, you know. He wants to talk to someone because that’s an interesting person, and that’s what he’ll do.”

“It’s a world of simultaneities,” said Mr. Biesenbach. “I do not feel disconnected; I do not see it so linear. I see it more like simultaneous plots that happen at the same time.”

To understand why, it helps to go back to the artist’s American debut—one of the happier discoveries in recent memory—at Tilton’s old Soho space in 2003. From his home base in Berlin, Mr. Kiesewetter recycles scrap metal—industrial bits and pieces whose original functions remain, for the layman, something of a mystery—into creations possessing a crude Constructivist vigor. Placed upon pedestals of the artist’s making (unpainted wood often punctuated with knotholes), the sculptures exuded an endearing, almost folksy clunkiness; finesse was markedly absent.

It’s an ungainly strain of comedy. Angles and planes are disjointed and askew; arcing lines bounce off straight and thrusting supports. Funnel-like shapes and sloping rectangular planks add up to a surprisingly pliable geometry. Mr. Kiesewetter’s shapes, rhythms and tensions feel simultaneously offhand and choreographed, seemingly arbitrary and immaculately poised. Each piece strains dramatically against the limits of its constituent parts, like a drunken construction crane or a ventilation duct attempting a pirouette.

The materials bring along with them a degree of loss and vulnerability—found objects often do, given that they’ve outlived their practical purpose. Mr. Kiesewetter thwarts nostalgia—the pitfall and sometime curse of those trading in secondhand ready-mades—by treating those materials casually, though not without affection. He does show an interest in historical patina, but his aim is transformation, not reiteration. He’s an artist who believes in the independent viability of form.

Allusions to the figure are fairly obvious; Mr. Kiesewetter is only nominally an abstract artist. Certainly the sculptures are proportioned to the body, notwithstanding liberties in logic, and their verticality reinforces this suggestion. In these jaunty, muscular, kinetic accumulations of stuff, gesture counts for a lot.

The figural references can be straightforward: Several pieces have legs, one has arms, most are topped with heads (or something like them, anyway). Wild and slippery torsions bring to mind animal life: This piece has flippers, that one sniffs its rear end, another walks like a duck. There are moments (probably more than an admirer would like to admit) when the work becomes too literal or cartoonish. One sculpture could be cousin to a Keith Haring glyph—not good.

More auspiciously, Mr. Kiesewetter’s art recalls the junkyard totems of Richard Stankiewicz and the welded-steel constructions of David Smith—artists who, for better and worse, never shook off the figure. Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, a grandiosely impractical architectural model that was never realized, has been cited as another key to understanding Mr. Kiesewetter’s vision.

More to the point are the primitivist sculptures of Julio Gonzalez, the metal smith who significantly influenced (and taught welding to) his good friend and fellow Spaniard, Pablo Picasso. The blocky effigies of Joel Shapiro come to mind as well, though Mr. Kiesewetter’s loosey-goosey buildups don’t share Mr. Shapiro’s minimalist take on classicism.

Alas, Mr. Kiesewetter’s recent pieces—or at least the majority of them—don’t “wow” like the previous work. The dispassion they prompt has less to do with sculptural form or artistic growth than with material integrity. Was it a commercial consideration to cast seven of the pieces in bronze? Multiples do, in theory, mean greater monetary gain: Bigger bucks are likely when selling an edition of three than in selling an “Ed. of unique” (as the gallery oxymoronically puts it). But bronze places an all-but-fatal damper on the artist’s piecemeal élan. The effect is akin to taxidermy.

The enjoyment we experience when viewing Mr. Kiesewetter’s wobbly personages has everything to do with the individual processes that created them, as well as the weird, silly and propitious contrasts that result from disparate materials coming together.

That’s why the two uncast sculptures at Tilton benefit so much from comparison to the bronzes. They thrive on such an inventive confluence of media: thin sheets of metal, staples, wire, wood, paint, what looks like concrete and—a new material for Mr. Kiesewetter—cardboard. Their motivation and shaping are dexterous and clear, their surfaces varied, their movements winningly true-to-life.

Once all that is stifled, sculptural vigor—and with it, Mr. Kiesewetter’s witty, humane absurdism—is considerably diminished. A venerable process like bronze-casting is antithetical to this sculptor’s whimsies. Bronze is too freighted with gravitas to suit them.

We don’t expect Larry, Curly and Moe to do Hamlet; we shouldn’t expect—or want—Mr. Kiesewetter to do Donatello. Neither should he.

Thomas Kiesewetter is at the Jack Tilton Gallery, 8 East 76th Street, until Feb. 10.

The film’s target is East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi, which held sway over the populace from 1950 to 1989, when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, signaling the end of the Cold War. But what makes The Lives of Others especially compelling as dramatic narrative is its remarkably stirring portrayal by the distinguished East German actor, Ulrich Mühe, as Capt. Gerd Wiesler, a fanatically and almost comically committed Stasi surveillance officer who experiences a change of heart that leads him to sabotage his own investigation of the theatrical people he has come to pity and admire.

Mr. Donnersmarck, the 33-year-old writer-director, recalled the genesis of his project as follows: “Over the years, there were two things that led me to make the film. First were many childhood memories of my visits to East Berlin and the GDR (the German Democratic Republic). As a boy of eight, nine or ten, I found it interesting and exciting to feel the fear of adults. My parents were afraid when they crossed the border: they were both born in the East and thus were more closely controlled by the police. And our friends from East Germany were afraid when other people saw that they were speaking with us, Germans from the West. Without these early experiences I would have had trouble finding the right approach.

“The idea for the film came to me as an image that just suddenly popped into my head: the close-medium shot of a man sitting in a bleak room, wearing headphones and listening to beautiful music even though he did not want to hear it. This man pursued me in my dreams and evolved over the years into Captain Gerd Wiesler.”

The action of the film begins in 1984, seven years before the fall of the East German regime, in an interrogation room where Captain Wiesler is browbeating an escape facilitator into naming his accomplice. Later, he is shown lecturing a class of aspiring Stasi students on his interrogation methods, which some of his pupils find cruel and inhuman. Wiesler insists that these extreme measures are necessary to uncover treasonous conspiracies against the state. His parting piece of advice to the class is to always remember to collect a piece of the suspect’s clothing and store it away in a jar, in case the police dogs need to sniff it later.

At this point, the film begins taking on the aspects of satire or farce. Mr. Mühe’s unchangingly severe expression as Wiesler seems disciplined enough to last for an eternity.

The captain is invited by his superior, Lt. Col. Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), to the opening night of a play by a writer named Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), starring the playwright’s girlfriend, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck). During the intermission, Grubitz is summoned by a powerful government minister, Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme), and instructed to begin an investigation of the theatrical couple—not because of any political activities, but rather because the horny Hempf is determined to make Christa-Maria his bedmate by using the investigation as a way to force the girl to comply with his wishes.

Grubitz entrusts the investigation to Wiesler, who promises to supervise it personally. While Dreyman is absent from his apartment, a team of Wiesler’s agents wires every room for maximum surveillance, to the point of tearing up the wallpaper and replacing it after all the wires have been installed.

As the glittering lights of the East Berlin theatrical world swarm into Dreyman’s apartment, Wiesler with his earphones listens to all their gossip—much of it seditious—and types up the gist of these conversations, even the most intimate ones between Dreyman and Christa-Maria. Meanwhile, Hempf presses his advantage, trying to seduce a struggling Christa-Maria in the back of his limousine. We come to see that Dreyman tends to live in a fool’s paradise, assuming that his great theatrical talent makes him immune to the machinations of the Stasi. Christa-Maria is more realistic about the situation, and she is willing to capitulate to Hempf rather than jeopardize Dreyman’s career and her own. But when Albert Jerska (Volkmar Kleinert), Dreyman’s favorite director, commits suicide after having been blacklisted for a long time, Dreyman at last becomes sufficiently aroused politically to write an article to be smuggled out and printed in West Berlin’s Der Spiegel, about East Germany’s high suicide rate and the government’s censorship of those statistics. Given all the surveillance of his apartment, this action would normally have ended in a long prison term for Dreyman. But at this precise moment, Wiesler ­becomes disillusioned with the regime and begins to misrepresent the results of the surveillance to his superiors. He even approaches Maria in a bar before her scheduled rendezvous with Hempf and—presenting himself as a devoted member of her huge audience—persuades her that she is too great an artist to surrender herself to the Hempfs of this world. What makes this scene electrifying is the way Mr. Mühe can convey Wiesler’s moral transformation entirely from within his unchanging exterior.

In the end, only Dreyman escapes unscathed from the melodramatic escalation and acceleration of events set into motion by Hempf’s revenge-seeking, and Grubitz’s belated suspicions about Wieland’s lack of progress in his ­investigation. Mr. Donnersmarck may have piled on one or two too many coincidences in his frenzied series of climaxes, but the world he has created never loses its sociological reality. For one thing, the Stasi, for all its diabolical intrusiveness into the lives of the citizens, was never a particularly bloodthirsty organization like Hitler’s Gestapo or Stalin’s OGPU. Its vampirish thirst for personal information, however, is indicated by the mountainous heaps of files that were found in Stasi headquarters when the organization was dissolved. The film was actually shot on the premises where this data was compiled, and Dreyman is shown consulting these files in the film’s epilogue, which is set in 1991 and finally settles all accounts and reveals all secrets after a revival of his play in the unified East and West Berlin.

The Lives of Others is a cautionary tale for all societies, not least our own, with its ominous mantras of secrecy for the sake of a conceivably endless war on terror. Though Mr. Donnersmarck hasn’t editorialized excessively on the subject of state snooping, his narrative is damning enough in itself. Indeed, his film serves as a rebuke to the still-widespread nostalgia, in ­Germany and elsewhere, for the perceived social and economic idealism of the German Democratic Republic, despite its shameful suppression of all civil liberties.

This is not to say that the current globalization of capitalism is producing heaven on earth for all the world’s inhabitants. But whatever system we live by or under, the same problems arise. In the writer-director’s own words: “In the film, each character asks questions that we confront every day: how do we deal with power and ideology? Do we follow our principles or our feelings? More than anything else, The Lives of Others is a human drama about the ability of human beings to do the right thing, no matter how far they have gone down the wrong path.”

This the film does admirably, with a splendid ensemble cast and a marvelous sense of proportion.

The Gray Areas

Claude Chabrol’s Comedy of Power (L’Ivresse du Pouvoir), from a screenplay by Odile Barski and Mr. Chabrol (in French with English subtitles), is the seventh film on which Mr. Chabrol and actress Isabelle Huppert have worked together. The collaboration began in 1978 with Violette Nozière, followed by Story of Women (1988), Madame Bovary (1991), La Cérémonie (1995), The Swindle (1997) and Merci Pour le Chocolat. Mr. Chab­rol’s latest excursion with Ms. Huppert turns out to be a very subtly ironic “comedy” at the very thin line separating the uses and misuses of power on both sides of the law. Ms. Huppert’s character, a Parisian judge named Jeanne Charmant Killman, is based on the real-life examining magistrate Eva Joly, whose seven-year investigation into charges of fraud and bribery at the French oil company Elf Aqui­taine launched the biggest and most scandalously publicized fraud investigation in Europe since World War II.

Though much of the film is centered on Jeanne’s professional activities as an examining magistrate, which are much like those of the much threatened and maligned Ms. Joly, the narrative flows freely between the storms of her public life and those in her private life.

The film begins curiously with the last day of freedom enjoyed by C.E.O. Michael Humeau (François Berléand) as he prepares to leave on a brief vacation after arranging tickets for his mother to attend the French Open in Roland Garros Stadium in Paris. As his limousine door is held open by the company driver, Humeau is intercepted and whisked to jail by two detectives, who drive him away in another car. In this way, Humeau is strangely humanized before he is charged by Jeanne the next morning with corruption and embezzlement as the C.E.O. of a gigantic state-supported company. It turns out that Jeanne has intentionally used her power to have the allergy-afflicted past-middle-aged Humeau spend a night in jail before she confronts him with her charges. Jeanne produces one document after another attesting to Humeau’s abuse of his fiduciary authority with the company’s funds for his mistress and himself to enjoy all the luxuries in vacation spots across Europe. As Jeanne continues her judicial torture of Humeau, her own marriage to Philippe (Robin Renucci), a moody physician, begins to disintegrate. Philippe resents Jeanne’s workaholic ways as a magistrate. Her home life is made even more difficult for Philippe because of her greater conversational affinity with her favorite nephew, Felix (Thomas Chabrol), who has been staying in their apartment since the break-up of his marriage. Felix is a happy-go-lucky type, who believes in living each moment to the full, unlike his more work-obsessed hosts.

As Jeanne sweeps more big corporate fish into her net, the male powers that be, with their big cigars and smug, sexist attitudes to women, discuss ways to retaliate against this “female Robespierre.” Their first very crude attempt at intimidation consists of tampering with the brakes on her car. In the ensuing car crash, Jeanne is only slightly injured—after which, she gets two permanent bodyguards. They then decide to smother her with kindness by “promoting” her to a larger office and lightening her workload with a female assistant magistrate, Erika (Maryline Canto). The idea is that two women of the same rank are bound to hate and betray each other if they work together. Here again, the male establishment is confounded when Jeanne and Erika become warm and mutually trusting friends.

If Jeanne has an Achilles heel, it’s the charming Sibaud (Patrick Bruel), who briefly seduced her before she realized that she was being ­exploited. When Jeanne drags in Sibaud for questioning of his own corrupt practices, the wise men with the cigars feel that only an enforced vacation for Jeanne would get her off their backs. At this very perilous juncture in her professional life, Jeanne’s husband jumps out a window in an apparent suicide attempt. Yet, when police discover that he was in possession of a loaded pistol, which the film makes it a point to show us earlier, they begin to inquire why Philippe did not use it to end his life instead. Jeanne ­realizes that in his pathetic way, Philippe was simply trying to get her attention.

At the same hospital in which Philippe is slowly recovering from his injuries, Jeanne encounters Humeau chained to a wheelchair. Their exchanged glances suggest that these two onetime-bitter antagonists now share mutual feelings of sympathy toward the other. Jeanne finally realizes that the powerful forces arrayed against her will never surrender their privileged status, no matter how hard she struggles to bring them to account. The system itself is too corrupt, and the biggest fish will always be beyond her reach. Her final words in the film are, aptly, “The hell with them.” She turns her cases over to Erika, who promises to prosecute them. Jeanne believes in her, and there is a glimmer of recognition on Jeanne’s part that she may also have been corrupted by possessing too much power over others.

One cannot imagine a similarly sophisticated fictional treatment of the Enron case from the point of view of both the accusers and the accused; in Hollywood movies, there is only right and wrong. Mr. Chabrol’s Comedy of Power is much wiser than that, and his audience can derive considerable pleasure from the exquisite ironies that the film generates.

More Morricone!

Film composer Ennio Morricone is the driving force of a three-week, 26-movie retrospective at Film Forum, from Feb. 2 through Feb.22. I would recommend every film on the list, both for Mr. Morricone’s music and the overall quality of the individual entries, which is strikingly high. My own personal favorite is Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) on Sunday, Feb. 4. The series begins with Elio Petri’s somewhat underrated Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970) on Friday and Saturday, Feb. 2 and 3.

Mr. Morricone is also receiving a special award at this year’s Oscars, and he is giving a first-ever U.S. concert at Radio City Music Hall on Feb. 3. The honors, as always, are long overdue.

In this vulgar, stupid mess, one of the few actresses over 50 who can do nothing wrong ends up doing nothing right—proving, as Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett did before her, that even a mega-gifted comedienne of the first rank is only as funny as her material, her director and her cameraman. In Because I Said So, a great star is abandoned by all three and left for Hollywood road kill.

The number of contemporary directors who know anything about comedy today (not to mention two things called talent and taste) can be counted on one hand, and Michael Lehmann is not one of them. (His career was jump-started by something called Beaver Gets a Boner. Your move.) The scriptwriters, Karen Leigh Hopkins and Jessie Nelson, are two women who wrote Stepmom, which nobody liked but me. None of them is the next Billy Wilder, but that’s no reason for all three to turn into hopeless, humdrum hacks.

Into their hands, which are like lethal weapons, now falls the remarkable Ms. Keaton. The audience sits aghast with horror as they run her through one embarrassing torture after another, hoping she’ll escape and wondering how she’ll save herself. Watching her reduced to sitcom one-liners and bombastic sight gags that would make Betty Hutton retch, I found my skin crawl with humiliation. Even in an age when just about everything on the screen has hit rock bottom, this is still not the reaction I was taught to expect from a lifetime of growing up in the movies.

For starters, Ms. Keaton is relegated to a meddling mother-from-hell role that in the old days would have been rejected by Gertrude Berg. In the kind of movie that defies logic, she’s the kind of obnoxious old bag (she looks younger than her three daughters put ­together, which I guess makes her an obnoxious young bag) who poses for a smiling family portrait and asks the photographer, “Maybe it’s just me, but why ‘cheese’?”

These are the jokes, and they don’t improve as the film drags on. Nothing about the characters is what you might call clear, but Daphne (Ms. Keaton) appears to be a designer of exotic, impractical cakes, which nobody eats, but which give the star a number of props to drop, burn and smash her face into like Lou Costello. When she’s not flat on her face in the butter-cream frosting, she’s on the Internet combing mate-finder Web sites, neurotically obsessed with drumming up a husband for her youngest daughter, Milly (Mandy Moore), who has given up on men after a series of disastrous affairs with guys who are married, gay or narcissistic jerks.

In a montage of freaks from Central Casting, Mom interviews ventriloquists, xenophobes and conjoined twins, until two dreamboats show up: Jason the architect (Tom Everett Scott) and Johnny the guitar player (Gabriel Macht). Jason knows the romantic inns in the hills of Tuscany and the price of fine wine, while Johnny is saddled with an uncertain career future, a horny father, and a maddeningly hyperactive little son with a case of the child-actor cutes who suffers from diarrhea of the mouth and attention-deficit disorder. Which isn’t all that unusual, since everyone else in the movie seems to have been diagnosed with the same thing. But where did the alleged “filmmakers” get the idea that it’s funny watching a golden retriever that watches Internet porn, or a child who asks adults an endless array of penis-vagina questions?

The entire movie is written, directed and performed at a bullet-train speed of contrived jabberwocky rapidly approaching a nervous breakdown—moving furniture, knocking over candles, smashing crockery. Even the golden retriever humps the ottoman. It’s heartbreaking to watch Diane Keaton get mangled in the traffic. She finally screeches herself into laryngitis, and instead of waving her arms like a spastic scarecrow, she is forced to write her lines down (“There’s turkey meat loaf in the fridge …. What does an orgasm feel like?”). The dialogue is no funnier written than spoken, but I found myself grateful for the silence.

After an hour and 10 minutes, Because I Said So switches gears from exasperating to endearing when Ms. Keaton finally goes to bed with the guitar player’s father (Stephen Collins). The daughters feel betrayed by Mom’s lies, the guys feel deceived by Milly’s double dating, and everybody stops speaking except Mom, who wears out her cake pans and her cell phones. Which guy will Milly choose? Will her sisters (Lauren Graham and Piper Perabo) make up and find their own moral center? Will Mom finally have her own orgasm? Will Mandy Moore ever learn how to act? Will this holocaust ever end? You find yourself asking questions you shouldn’t even be thinking about. I am still the self-appointed president of the ­unofficial Diane Keaton Fan Club, but it’s a triple-decker disappointment to watch her knock herself out in wreckage silly and hysterical enough to cause acid reflux.

Here is an actress of great charm and versatility who is too easy, open, appealing, free, witty, smart, pulled together and tightly wrap­ped to appear in dross. It grieves me to see her in something that eats her time and talent and gives her nothing back but mortified fans and bad reviews. She’s so special I’m tempted to ignore how appalling this movie is and just let her warmth and giggle get me through it.

But movies as dumb and expensive as Because I Said So should neither be ignored nor encouraged. They give the whole industry a black eye. Diane Keaton does everything she can to breathe life into a movie that is D.O.A., but the script is so bad that it just makes her look spastic. The entire project seems like a diabolical conspiracy to destroy one of the few icons we’ve got left, but luckily that’s where it fails most of all. Ms. Keaton still has Carole Lombard’s glamour, Sandy Dennis’ stuttering twinkle and a smile warm enough to melt February. She may never find another Annie Hall, but long after this fiasco is forgotten, my money is still on the icon.

Stasiland

From Germany, the first powerful, engrossing and unforgettable film of 2007 has arrived. The Lives of Others, an Oscar contender in this year’s foreign-film category, is one of those rare two-hour-plus films with subtitles that runs long but seems absorbingly, rivetingly short. Set in East Berlin under Communist rule in 1983, six years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, it traces the final days of the dreaded secret police in the German Democratic Republic called the Stasi. The Nazis were gone, but the Stasi introduced a new word synonymous with terror. With a subtle script, a superb cast and sensitive direction by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (a remarkable debut), The Lives of Others is a political thriller that covers the same ground as those incomprehensible Cold War spy novels by John Le Carré in which secret intelligence officers roamed freely, surrounded by checkpoints and barriers and villains galore, and got away with everything.

This one is more of a human drama, about a dull bureaucratic Communist henchman for the Stasi, aptly named Wiesler (fantastic performance by the nugget-faced Ulrich Mühe), who becomes so obsessed with his prey that his infatuation has disruptive, life-altering effects on all their lives. Drilled by his superiors to “Know everything about the lives of others,” the doggedly determined and avid Socialist is assigned the duty of spying on a celebrated theatrical couple—writer Georg Dreyman, an apolitical but controversial playwright (dashing Sebstian Koch, who in a dramatic reversal will soon be seen as a Nazi S.S. officer in Paul Verhoeven’s fabulous Black Book), and his mistress Christa-Maria (Martina Gedeck), a beautiful stage star and audience favorite of the German people. Wiesler wires their apartment, taps their phone, listens to them make love, and slowly changes from a solitary, impassive drone to a man awakened to the passions of sex and love that he has never experienced before.

In his metamorphosis, his undeterred search for nonexistent treachery leads to such disillusionment with the very principles of the socialism he worships that he eventually falsifies records and hides evidence without their knowing it. As the byzantine plot unfolds, tragedy ensues, combining the frigid intrigue of Francis Coppola’s The Conversation with the cruel inquisitorial tactics of Orson Welles’ The Trial. The film ends in 1991, in free West Berlin, with a devastating finale in which the once-powerful Wiesler, demoted to the status of a janitor, experiences his ultimate epiphany. It would be dastardly to reveal more (part of the masterful hypnosis of this movie is finding out what happens to the hunter and the hunted alike), but prepare yourself for a jolt that is original and deeply moving.

Mr. von Donnersmarck’s confident, atmospheric direction creates a claustrophobia that is oddly rapturous—as peaceful as it is frightening—and the performances by Mr. Koch, as the government-approved author targeted as a possible subversive, and Ms. Gedeck, as the alluring actress whose composure cracks under surveillance, are both wonderful. But it is the ghoulish Mr. Mühe—wiry and balding, with gray skin and bloodless eyes—whose profound discovery of the link between art and politics informs the film with an overwhelming impact.

His captivating story is reminiscent of Werner Stiller, the spy who turned over 20,000 pages of microfilmed documents to the West before his defection and forced the unmasking of Stasi uber-director Markus Wolf, “the spy without a face,” who orchestrated the downfall of Chancellor Willy Brandt. Wolf died in 2006. It’s mesmerizing to see how master spies worked, invading the privacy and exploiting the affairs of innocent citizens for personal career gains. But instead of nostalgia for a time of political turmoil and cultural censorship in the East Berlin of yesteryear, The Lives of Others is a blistering indictment of Germany’s substitution of one Kafka­esque regime for another, as well as a human reminder of how some reviled instruments of repression turned out to be more complex than we ever dreamed about. A great and seminal work, and the most acclaimed film to come out of Germany in a decade, it is not to be missed.

I went to the Urban Outfitters site today and now you can't even see the picture of the scarf; and the retailer announces:

Score another victory for Abe Foxman! This is actually fascinating as a symbol. Because truly, the antiwar movement in this country is now divided/stymied/unable-to-coalesce because of the unwillingness of many liberal Democrats to identify the Israeli Occupation as a source of problems in the Middle East.

Identifying the neoconservatives as Jewish is one of those unspoken/spoken things in public life today. Two years ago, Wolfowitz was asked a question about the neoconservatives at the American Enterprise Institute and quipped, "Don't you mean Jewish?" He was being ironical; his point was that the identification was itself antisemitic.

This is not very straightforward. Before W&M came along, two Jewish conservative scholars wrote books that described the neocons as Jewish. The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy, by the late Murray Friedman. And The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State, by Benjamin Ginsberg.

Ginsberg's book came out in 1993 and is an important work for anyone trying to understand Jewish power, the Jewish presence in the American establishment. Indeed, though Ginsberg's politics are opposite to mine, I admire him for doing what an intellectual should do, and working to describe new social patterns. Ginsberg's historical theme is simple: Jews have risen again and again because our skills have proven essential to states trying to become modern. We made Spain what it was in the 15th century. We allowed the German and English states to rise in the late 19th century. "Jewish academics, intellectuals, and artists were the leading figures in German theater, literature, music, art, architecture, science and philosophy.... " Etc. The words "Jewish financier" appear countless times in Ginsberg's book, for an obvious reason: the Jewish genius for finance has lifted and empowered the modern state. (Yivo, which burlesqued the issue of Jews & Money by inviting the vapid Niall Ferguson to talk about it, should invite Ginsberg to make up for the lapse).

Ginsberg wrote out of trepidation. The Jewish rise had been followed by expulsion, discrimination, extermination. Thrown out of Spain, concentrated in the Pale, gassed in Germany... Ginsberg feared, and presumably still does, that the remarkable rise of Jews in the U.S. will result in a backlash.

These fears did not stop Ginsberg from talking about "predominantly Jewish neoconservatives" who had moved to the right "inexorably" because of "their attachment to Israel." During the Reagan administration these neocons had worked alongside the "Israel lobby," which was thought to be Washington's "most powerful lobby," to oppose the Soviet Union. They "used their access to the print and broadcast media..." (Including the New Republic!) They had helped cement American support for Israel by working with "high ranking Jewish officials" in government.

Ginsberg regarded this Jewish presence as a good thing, though he feared the rise of a populist backlash, evidenced by such statements as Pat Buchanan's description of Israel's "amen corner" in the U.S.

Since Ginsberg's book in 1993, it is amazing to consider that we have been attacked on 9/11, in part because of our support for Israel's humiliation of the Palestinians, and entered into one of the greatest disasters in our country's history, Iraq, in part because of concerns for Israel's security, and the pattern he described has not been raised in the mainstream, only murmured by Chris Matthews and others, till Walt and Mearsheimer landed with all four feet last March in the LRB to try and force the issue into the U.S. discourse, and were then smeared by many leading newspaper writers (who have never read Ginsberg) as antisemites.

At a time when The New Republic thinks nothing of raising Mitt Romney's Mormonism as an issue—and legitimately—it is really amazing that no leading newspaper or broadcast outlet has done the simple, honorable thing of reporting on the Iraqi neocons' attachment to Israel.

This is a great lapse. The reasons for it are twofold: 1, American journalistic culture has a strong Jewish strand. (Ginsberg on London and Berlin: "Jewish financiers and newspaper publishers were important participants in [the British imperialist power structure]... Of the 21 daily newspapers published in Berlin during the 1870s, 13 were owned by Jews and four had important Jewish contributors. All three newspapers specializing in political satire were controlled by Jews") A great number of journalists now working in powerful positions exulted, as I did in my elementary school, in June 1967 when Israel pasted the Egyptian and Syrian air forces; devotion to Israel is something we grew up with and were inculcated with, and therefore do not tend to question as being not in America's best interest. 2, Iraq is a disaster. Jews fear that Americans will blame the Jews. We have racial memory; we know that the Holocaust grew out of resentment over Jewish numbers and influence. It could happen here.

Ginsberg and my father worry about that. They are smart guys. To dismiss their fears would be foolish. The only intellectually honest response is: Of course it could happen here...

Yet it is the American way to talk about real issues, and that is, again, W&M's great contribution, to take a subterranean conversation, unhealthy for American democracy, and approach it with academic rigor. In that sense, they are scholars of Jewish history. For as Ginsberg (and the California scholars Albert Lindemann and Yuri Slezkine) has shown, the rise of Jewish elites, including thinkers and financiers, is a theme of western history, a necessary component of modernism. Charting the rise of the neocons in the U.S. is part of that historical study.

I've gotten into that study because of the debacle of Iraq, and the Jewish braintrust that played a role in the disaster. I feel engaged in this discussion Jewishly; the neocons' Jewishness has brought me back to my own. I recognize that many Jews are made defensive by the neocons' contribution to our blasted Middle East policy. "In Dark Times, Blame the Jews," the Forward reflexively dismissed Walt and Mearsheimer, and many liberal Jews feel a similar disdain for W&M. For my part, I would say that these dark times present a crisis in the identity of 21st century Jewry; there are better ways to be Jewish than to demonize Islam and support the occupation of Arab lands.