Billy "Cool Beard" Bob Thornton (Getty Images)

Well, someone just saw Vincent Gallo's autobiographical blowjob in Brown Bunny: Variety has just announced that facial hair/hat combo trendsetter Billy Bob Thornton will be co-writing and directing a movie based on his relationship with ex-wife Angelina Jolie.

Because you guys remember that, right? Billy Bob Thornton was married to Angelina Jolie? Okay, he's just making sure.

The film is tentatively titled And Then We Drove, which is already being shortened in the press to Drove, making it sound like a sequel to this year's hottest Ryan Gosling feature. Won't teen girls be in for a terrible shock when they buy their tickets and get this instead:

Thornton said the film is about "a guy who's on a road trip and picks up this girl along the way, and what happens to them. It's about the question of life: 'What is this? Where do I fit in?' "

An insider said the film is partly inspired by Thornton's wild and well-documented relationship with ex-wife Angelina Jolie, which (producer Alexander) Rodnyansky confirmed.

Well, insofar as it includes the star-crossed duo sharing vials of each other's blood and swapping tattoos, Drove could basically just call itself My Freaky Marriage to Angelina: A Documentary. Hopefully starring Ryan Gosling.

A rancid load of swill called The Informers, from a depraved 1994 book by Bret Easton Ellis, is, like The Soloist, a look at the underbelly of L.A., but the resemblance ends there. This indolent trash wallow finds nothing of any redeemable value in the City of Angels, before or after dark. Mr. Ellis is the creepy, perverted literary soul mate of Jay McInerney, both of them chroniclers of the live and deaths of a generation of rich kids in the 1980s who have everything but remain clueless about what to do with it. They specialize in the burned-out boredom of self-destructive excess no amount of Botox can reverse. Like Mr. Ellis’ Less Than Zero and American Psycho, the human rubbish in The Informers thrives on his usual fictional trademarks—alcoholism, heroin addiction, infidelity, male prostitution, pornography and puttin’ on airs. The time is 1983, the people are sleaze bags with manicures snorting cocaine around heated pools overlooking the lights of Hollywood. The film opens when one of them is smashed and killed by a drunken driver in the driveway of a swank party where nobody runs out of cocaine long enough to mourn. What follows is a satirical rehash of every catatonic cliché.

Since The Informers is a plotless, meandering series of disjointed vignettes, there’s no point in attempting a coherent synopsis of the narrative. You just have to follow the bouncing lost souls from needle to needle while they all vomit and throw up on each other in a miasma of sickness and pain. Graham (talented newcomer Jon Foster) is a bisexual drug dealer whose father (a sallow, emaciated Billy Bob Thornton) is a dope-addicted movie producer working on a project about a rock star sleeping with an alien. Graham’s mother (Kim Basinger) is a doped-up sex addict who is sleeping with Martin (Austin Nichols), one of her son’s best friends. Sometimes Graham sleeps with him, too, alone or in a threesome with his girlfriend Christie (Amber Heard), a wanton slut whose father is “on location” but never seen. Sometimes Christie sleeps with four or five guys at the same time, complaining of a strange rash, while the radio blasts warnings about a strange “sexually transmitted new plague” that everyone ignores. Another friend named Tim (Lou Taylor Pucci) is dragged off to Hawaii by his alcoholic father, Les (Chris Isaak), who spends his time picking up underage “jail bait” while trying drunkenly to save his son from being gay. Graham’s miserable, brain-damaged parents talk about getting back together, although Dad is not over his affair with an over-the-hill has-been newscaster (Winona Ryder). When he drops by, he pulls down his pants, says, “I need a shot—do you have a needle?” His wife produces a syringe she keeps on the makeup table with her old lipstick tubes, and shoots him in the rear. With what? No attempt is ever made to bring any of these characters to the level of real life. They just shoot up with everything. Oh, I forgot. In the hotel where they stage all of their orgies, having no homes of their own to park their Jaguars, there’s a desk clerk (Brad Renfro) whose uncle (Mickey Rourke) kidnaps little boys and sells them to preppie child pornographers in the slave trade. Everything revolves around a stoned rock group called “The Informers,” which is as close as this thing gets to an explanation of the title. After the big concert, Christie gets left on the beach covered with lesions, to die of AIDS. Since she has already slept with just about everyone in the movie, I assume the other characters will soon die, too. Not a moment too soon, if you ask me.

The script, adapted by Mr. Ellis with an assist from Nicholas Jarecki, sounds like a death rattle already. The direction, by Australia’s Gregor Jordan, makes a wan attempt to establish Los Angeles as the field of action, although it seems to take place on the moon. Not only is it depressing, amateurish and stupid—it is also utterly pointless. We learn nothing from the 1980s we didn’t know already. So those rich, privileged kids with no guidance, role models or focus, and no moral centers, all came to a bad end and died young. Tough titty. Why do we have relive their trashed lives all over again? There is nothing pleasant, challenging, erotic, witty or thought-provoking here. Director Jordan, in the press notes, insists the film has renewed relevance in a post-conservative era “now that Bush is gone.” That’s the only laugh connected with The Informers.

rreed@observer.com

Gossip Girl had a casting call in Southampton this past weekend and no one showed up. [Daiyl Intel]

Jay-Z dined with Governor Paterson at the Spotted Pig. [P6]

Denise Richards lies on her reality show about not being a husband-stealer and the number of pets she has. [P6]

Mary J. Blige helps out the needy by buying them Diane von Furstenberg dresses. [P6]

Billy Bob Thornton says Angelina Jolie is just going through a high school phase and dating the quarterback. [AskMen]

Ernest Sewn store is slated to open in the Hamptons this week. [The Cut]

East 66th Street, Tom Freston’s townhouse. “Arianna’s the most protean person around,” said Ed Kosner, of Arianna Huffington. “Look it up. Not protein.”

The former Daily News editor in chief was leaning on a rail, waiting for his wife. He blogs for Ms. Huffington’s Huffington Post. “It’s fun.”

“She’s very inventive and very intelligent and has good English education,” said Mr. Kosner. “I think she has always been fearless, from the first time she came to New York. I don’t think she’s changed any—I mean, her politics have oscillated around.”

“There is not a correlation between being fearless and having your politics change or not change,” said Mr. Kosner.

The party was mainly restricted to the second floor of the four-story manse. It once belonged to Andy Warhol. Hi, Barry Diller! “You know, the thing is, about this Web thing, is, you know, all of it is word-of-mouth,” Mr. Diller said. “There’s virtually no marketing—so when you have a real voice, then you really do resonate.”

He couldn’t quite put his finger on what exactly her voice was. “She’s always had important people who like her.”

Tom and Kathy Freston like her. Earlier this month, after 26 years at what is generally called Viacom, Mr. Freston, then CEO, was abruptly handed his walking papers.

“Tom, I need to talk to you this week,” said Charlie Rose. Sumner Redstone, Mr. Freston’s former boss, was soon to be a guest on his show.

“I told him that when you consider what’s going on there and how Sumner Redstone is behaving, I think he’s lucky to be out of there,” said P.R. king Bobby Zarem. “He said the amount of money he got wasn’t as large as it was said to be.”

The amount of money Mr. Freston received in severance was said to be $60 million.

“Tonight’s about Arianna,” Mr. Freston said over and over again.

But later. “Since this happened, I really don’t know what I’m going to do,” he told The Transom. “We’re going to Asia for a couple weeks.”

“I have much more time for traveling now,” he said.

The house was lathered in worldly artifacts as well as pictures of his two sons.

“One of my sons is a senior in college. He’s working on his thesis and too busy to hang out with me. The other one’s a junior in high school. You know, when you’re a junior in high school, you’re not exactly excited to hang out with your father.”

Mr. Freston said he’s still been too busy lately to look at Ms. Huffington’s Web site. His wife blogs there. He hasn’t given any consideration—“not a thought”—to taking up blogging himself.

Lynn de Rothschild made a speech about Ms. Huffington from the staircase. “I’ve known her for a long, long time, through different generations. Through each of her lives, she has always been this perfect creature—and the fact that fear was behind all of it is kind of stunning to me.”

Ms. Huffington made a short speech. “You know, Socrates, my compatriot, says that courage is the knowledge of what is not to be feared,” she said. “And so often we are afraid of shadows. And for me, the only way I could write this book is by being raw, intimate and vulnerable. So wait until you get to the sex chapter.”

Later, Ms. Huffington removed her heels, as she often does at parties. At 57, few things scare her anymore, she said. “I’m terrified of curling my eyelashes. I think that I’m going to poke my eye.” She said she was recently struck by fear when her daughters—she has a 15-year-old and a 17-year-old—began tossing around the term “friends with benefits.” “They’re too young to know anything about ‘friends with benefits’!”

She declined to comment on the fear involved with her 11-year marriage to millionaire former Congressman Michael Huffington—who came out as a bisexual shortly after their divorce. “He’s a great father and a great friend.”

She said she is certainly not afraid to take another whack at love.

“Arianna doesn’t need any advice from me,” said Ms. Freston, who is a self-help author and a spiritual counselor. “She’s a star in life and she’s a star in love.”

Nine p.m. The lights flicked on and off. Ms. Freston shook hands as guests filed out. She appeared stressed; there were hushed apologies.

Apparently, there had been some unpleasantness with a blogger who had been taking pictures of the Freston home.

Reached on Monday night for comment, Ms. Huffington did not side with her fellow bloggers. “Yes, there is a difference between fearlessness and foolishness. That was not appropriate—to take pictures of what is on people’s desks. There are certain conventions to be followed; that was not some public place. There are certain unstated rules.”

She said Mr. Freston had already gotten over the incident by the time he sat down for dinner later that night.

Ms. Huffington’s book— On Becoming Fearless—was, you might by now imagine, organized around a theme. Could she imagine tiring of the word fearless at some point?

“No, never,” she said. “I will continue talking about fearlessness until an epidemic of fearlessness has spread across the country.”

—Spencer Morgan

Eligible Bachelors

“I don’t leave the house much anymore,” said Billy Bob Thornton at the School for Scoundrels after-party at the Stone Rose on Monday night. Mr. Thornton, now 51, dressed all in black, said that his wild bachelor days are over. He said he rarely leaves his hotel room now when he’s in town. In School for Scoundrels, he plays a confidence coach who advises geeks on how to get girls. In reality, Mr. Thornton said, “I have only bad advice.”

Nowadays, he’s focusing on fatherhood. His daughter, Bella, just turned 2. And yes, he and his ex-wife, Angelina Jolie, have discussed getting their tots together for a play date. “She’s all over the world, you know. But someday we’ll get them together.”

Nearby, Kristian Laliberte, an events coordinator/men’s buyer, was checking out the men on the new Gotham mag list of “NYC’s 101 Most Eligible Bachelors.”

He marked off all the dudes he knew to be gay. “Like, half of these guys are gay,” he said. He’d put stars next to 27 of the pictured bachelors he knew to be gay—including himself. He was amused by the straight-laced answers that many of his fellow gays had offered as their “relationship deal-breakers.”

“If she doesn’t pass the ‘mother test’” was P.R. maverick Jonathan Cheban’s deal-breaker. Over that, Mr. Laliberte had scrawled three stars.

He also wrote “SO GAY” next to Mr. Cheban’s picture.

Doesn’t anyone talk about bisexuals anymore?

Anyway! Actress Sarah Silverman is also in Scoundrels. She said that Jon Heder, who plays one of Mr. Thornton’s girl-phobic students, is actually quite a smoothie. “He’s really cool; he’s an open book.” She particularly admires how he handles being a Mormon. “He’s so cool about it. And you know, he can’t swear because of his religion, so he would come up with some really creative ways to get around it. One time we were all joking around, and he came out with the word ‘ball-meat.’”

What now?

She gestured at her crotch. “You know, like meat from your balls.”

—S.M.

Expecting Maguire

Last Friday afternoon, Jennifer Meyer, Tobey Maguire’s very pregnant wife, had a leisurely lunch with a blond girlfriend at the Beverly Hills eatery La Scala.

“She’s so loud,” said an eavesdropper at the table next to Mrs. Meyer’s. “She was like, ‘My doctor says I need to eat all the carbs!’ She ordered a chopped salad with grilled chicken and a plate of pasta Bolognese.”

“She was giving advice to her friend,” said the source. Ms. Meyer looked gorgeous in a long black dress. “She was saying how she and Tobey were doing so great, and how they go to therapy and it helps so much.”

Ms. Meyer, 29, and Mr. Maguire, 31, got engaged earlier this summer.

“She said she could tell Tobey’s gonna be an amazing father, because no matter where he was, he always found time to fly home and check on her,” said the source.

But life isn’t all beer and skittles for Ms. Meyer. The couple is conflicted about what to name their baby girl. “She said she likes guy names that also work for a girl, like Cameron. But Toby doesn’t like that. She also said she likes old-fashioned names like Evelyn, but that Toby didn’t like those either.”

The oldest daughter of Universal Studios C.E.O. Ron Meyer and a jewelry designer by trade, Ms. Meyer did most of the talking during that lunch, said the source.

“She was like, ‘I feel so bad for all our friends who have no direction and don’t know what to do with their lives.’ Her friend was like, ‘Yeah, I know.’ Then Jen was like, ‘I’m so happy I’ve always known what I wanted to do with my life.’ And then her friend was like, ‘Yeah, me too!’”

—S.M.

Prince Half-Nelson

It was a meeting of worlds last Wednesday at Asprey, the oh-so-English specialty boutique, currently in temporary digs on 57th Street, where the American Associates of the Royal Academy Trust held its annual pre-gala cocktail party.

“We celebrate the Anglo-American association,” said executive director Dorothy Kauffman. Her dress was vintage Pucci. “It belonged to my mother, so it’s very special for me to be wearing it tonight.”

The Royal Academy was founded in the 18th century, the American Associates in 1983, as a “respectful nod to each other across the Atlantic,” Ms. Kauffman said. “The spoken word is deeply impactful. We”—Americans and English—“share a common language and cultural heritage. We can read each other’s novellas, prose and poetry and get it.”

Ms. Kauffman is fluent in French; her husband of 13 years, Stephen Hollowell, an Englishman, is proficient in German.

Before moving to the U.S., Mr. Hollowell worked as a detective in England. In his youth, he was a headbanger—“Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd”—but without the telltale long hair. “I had short, short blond hair and the bovver boots,” he said. He sounds a bit like the actor Bob Hoskins. Standing one flight up on a balcony overlooking the store’s entrance, he wore spectacles, a gray suit, a patterned tie and a shirt in ultramarine blue, from Asprey.

“All the women were all over him and all the men sort of stayed back,” he said, describing the scene when a group of American Associates on a tour of London scored an audience with His Majesty Prince Charles. “So my wife said, ‘I want to introduce you.’ I said, ‘Nah, you don’t have to introduce me.’” Ms. Kauffman insisted, and Mr. Hollowell acquiesced—but with one non-negotiable condition: “I am not bowing.” The two men made each other’s acquaintance. “Prince Charles said, ‘Oh, very lovely to meet you.’ And I said, ‘Hey, how’re yah doin’?’”

—Nicholas Boston

Such Globes

“It’s a great honor to be called upon to be a figurehead, I guess—to spearhead something that’s so culturally important, especially when New York City is, in my opinion, the cultural star in this country of ours,” said Law & Order: Special Victims Unit star Christopher Meloni. He, along with his wife Sherman, was playing host at a gala for the New Globe theater at Valentino last week.

The barrel-chested construction worker turned actor was dressed more like he’d been spending time with the Queer Eye squad. Earlier that day, he’d been given a Valentino makeover. He was wearing: a black velvet blazer (“Touch it, it’s soft!” he said; it was pretty soft); a “lilac” dress shirt; some shiny slacks.

“It’s nice,” he said. Valentino had pledged to donate 10 percent of a week’s sales to the New Globe cause—and one velvet blazer. “I fuckin’ better be able to keep it! I mean, I came in and got fitted,” Mr. Meloni said. “No, but this jacket isn’t going to fit anyone else. Between these shoulders”—big and broad—“and my little ass”—heck of a waist line!—“no one’s gonna be able to wear this.”

Russell Simmons and Mr. Meloni’s partner in sex-crime prevention, Mariska Hargitay, dropped in for some lightning-fast photo ops. The initiative to build a modern version of the London Globe Theater on Governors Island has relied heavily—almost exclusively—on the generosity and spearheading gusto of celebs like Mr. Meloni.

“In this day and age, you almost need a few celebrities to get people to pay attention,” said Mr. Meloni. Almost? Anyway. “New York is about culture, not war museums.”

Jane Krakowski, of Ally McBeal and now of 30 Rock, said that as an actress, supporting the New Globe was a no-brainer: “It works twofold—it would be a great thing for New York, and also maybe we can get hired there one day as well.”

Sadly, none of the stars made their way to the after-party at Bungalow 8. Club owner Amy Sacco is also a New Globe “friend” and was happy to host another of Ms. Romer’s parties. The evening’s auction had raised $35,000, but event organizers still weren’t totally satisfied. “I was really hoping Ralph Fiennes would make it,” said one.

—S.M.

It's a sad fact that the best thing filmmaking brothers Joel and Ethan Coen had their names attached to last year was the surprise comedy hit Bad Santa . Considering that they were only its producers makes it even sadder. But that's the only sad thing about this movie.

Pickings were slim in a year where Lost in Translation was considered enough of a comedy to win a Golden Globe. Director Terry Zwigoff's excoriation of the Christmas spirit proved just what the box office needed, and the movie racked up more than three times its budget in the U.S. alone. Ho ho ho!

In the film, Billy Bob Thornton plays a misanthropic, foul-mouthed alcoholic who takes jobs as a suburban-mall Santa Claus in order to gain access to the mall's ample stashes of winter-holiday cash. With a reckless disregard for the current MPAA's neo-Victorian prudishness, Mr. Thornton makes Bill Murray's Scrooge feel like a whitewashed product of the Hayes Code. (Mr. Murray was actually signed on to the project before he passed it up to do Lost in Translation .)

The constant dropping of the F-bomb-147 times to be exact-feels like a refreshing spring rain, conjuring the unadulterated joy of Lenny Bruce at his combative best. "Little person" actor Tony Cox plays Mr. Thornton's partner-in-crime, an elf. And in the last film before his death, John Ritter is a prim mall manager, his face constantly scrunched up in discomfort at Mr. Thornton's lewd behavior. One particularly funny scene involves Mr. Ritter's character catching Mr. Thornton having an unconventional form of fitting-room sex with a patron of the women's Big & Tall. Three's company, indeed.

In the end, the bad Kris Kringle reforms his naughty ways with the help of a portly kid (Canadian actor Brett Kelly) and his Santa-fetishizing girlfriend, played by Gilmore Girls gal Lauren Graham. Fortunately, Mr. Zwigoff inserts enough bah-hambuggery that the movie never becomes too saccharine.

[ Bad Santa (2003), R, 93 min., $29.99]

MONDO MAMMA

Mamma Roma , the second film in the brilliant but short career of Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, never had a proper theatrical run in the United States. The first time it was seen here was as part of a short-lived 1990 Pasolini retrospective. So in large part (I'm looking in your direction, Leonard Maltin) the 1962 movie has been a forgotten relic.

This doesn't sit right. Starring Anna Magnani, one of the most popular actresses in Italian cinema, the film is about a reformed prostitute trying to make a better life for her estranged son (Ettore Garofolo), while keeping the secret of her past from him. Shot on the outskirts of Rome, where an outcropping of decrepit apartment buildings sits amid a desolate wasteland, it becomes clear quite soon that there is no hope for the boy. But to follow his journey into adulthood-as he falls in love, loses his virginity and finds a job-is to gain a window onto a neglected generation of postwar Italy.

Pasolini's muted eroticism and mixture of Marxist and Catholic themes was not well received by the Italian moviegoing public. The police declared the movie immoral, and despite excising five naughty minutes from the Rome premiere, Pasolini was assaulted there by a neo-fascist youth (he should've had Michael Moore's protection detail … ).

But the movie continues to be an inspiration to some of the world's greatest living directors. "I was watching someone inventing cinema," remarks Bernardo Bertolucci, who was Pasolini's assistant on his first film Accattone , in an interview recorded for the Criterion Collection DVD release of the film.

To see the world through Pasolini's eyes in this once-forgotten classic is to be inspired by the emotional breadth of film itself.

[ Mamma Roma (1962), NR, 110 min., $39.95]

BRIT'S PRICK FLICK

After Oscar Wilde, but before George Michael, there was carousing British playwright Joe Orton, found dead in his apartment in August 1967 by Paul McCartney's chauffeur, bludgeoned with a hammer by his lover and partner of 17 years, Kenneth Halliwell. Orton's work has generally been overshadowed by the sensational circumstances of his death, and therefore fails to resonate in the public consciousness quite the way it ought to, though it is still some of the most incisive and comic examinations of British social structures to be found anywhere.

Yet there is something American about Orton's ferocious individualism-his defiant, reckless ascent over barriers of class, education and sex.

Prick Up Your Ears is based on terminally fussy New Yorker theater critic John Lahr's biography of the playwright's life, taken from the title of a play/movie that Orton had been working on for the Beatles. Stephen Frears (one of England's finest and least categorizable directors) collaborated with Mr. Lahr and screenwriter Alan Bennett to put together a portrait of the Pygmalion -gone-sour relationship that Orton shared with Halliwell. The latter (played with loving revulsion by the underused Alfred Molina) never received adequate accolades for his work, because his greatest work was Joe Orton himself (played here by a cockily self-assured Gary Oldman). Unfortunately, Halliwell's Galatea grew so far beyond his creator that death was the only way to return them to a state of equality.

Their relationship is portrayed accurately and elegantly. The problem with this film is one of narrative: Orton's death occurs in the first moments, after which his story reverts to childhood and continues chronologically. The two tragic heroes are swiftly sent down a predictable and methodical downward slope, without any of the aberrations and fluctuations so natural to life and love-even a manipulative one such as this.

[ Prick Up Your Ears (1987), R, 110 min., $14.95.]

-Jessica Joffe

Billy Bob Thornton plays Willie, the bad Santa in question, with a perpetually hung-over scowl for anyone foolish enough to seek holiday cheer on the basis of his seasonal attire. In fact, Willie is a professional safecracker who merely uses his Santa costume as a cover for casing the department stores that hire him with his partner in crime, Marcus (Tony Cox), a mean-spirited African-American dwarf who masquerades as Santa's elf. Much of the movie is merriment, and the dramatic arc arises from our gradual realization that Marcus is not only the brains and driving force of the covertly felonious team, but that he is also becoming ominously displeased with Willie's drunkenness and un-Santa-like womanizing. Willie and Marcus are initially so broadly drawn as diabolical inversions of all that is supposed to be lovable about Santa and his elf that the moral divergence between Willie and Marcus is much less perceptible-which is part of the film's subtlety. Also, as much as Willie and Marcus present themselves as cynical predators, the world in which they find themselves is hardly all sweetness and light and limitless credulity. Indeed, the only out-and-out "straight" character in the mix is Bob Chipeska (the late John Ritter), the store manager whom Willie and Marcus terrorize with the threat of an anti-discrimination lawsuit on behalf of minority "little people" when he proposes firing them both for improper behavior.

Willie and Marcus are less successful in gulling the store's security chief, Gin (Bernie Mac), an unflappable African-American con man in his own right. Having seen through their scam from the outset, Gin coolly cuts himself in for half the booty following a hilarious session of one-sided haggling between the supremely confident security chief and an extremely frustrated Marcus. But this little transaction sets up a surprisingly dark dénouement that rearranges the moral alignment, with death and near-death disrupting the genre conventions.

Willie's moral redemption is realistically slow in coming, but Mr. Thornton's restraint in his moments of potentially explosive surliness enables him to control the pace of his character's gradual awakening out of an alcoholic haze to the feelings of tenderness and love that had been slumbering in him. If Mr. Thornton had pulled out all the stops in his initially roguish period, he would've gotten a few big laughs from the audience, who would then rapidly tire of his one-note character. By keeping so much in reserve, and letting it out without much fuss, Mr. Thornton gives one of the best performances of the year in a part that could easily have degenerated into facetious farce. That it didn't is also a credit to Mr. Zwigoff's direction.

The two essential instruments of Willie's redemption are a fat, easily bullied little kid (played with marvelously imperturbable patience by Brett Kelly) and a sweetly amusing lady bartender named Sue (Lauren Graham) with an unrealized sex fetish for Santa since childhood. The kid, whose father is away in prison for embezzlement, invites Willie into his luxurious home, in which the only other occupant is his comically somnolent grandmother (Cloris Leachman), while Sue invites Willie-in his Santa suit-into her bed without coyness or conditions.

In contrast to Willie's easy, uncomplicated relationship with the very maternal Sue, Marcus is hitched up with Lois (Lauren Tom), a cold-as-ice Asian barracuda as ruthless as he is. The clues are all there for the film's final confrontation between good and evil, except that there's still an element of surprise involved. Willie and Marcus make such an engaging comedy team that we're conditioned to expect them to exit together smiling and happy. But Mr. Thornton's (and Mr. Zwigoff's) Willie is made of much sterner stuff.

Cerebral Cartooning

Sylvain Chomet's The Triplets of Belleville has received rapturous notices from most of my esteemed colleagues, but my first reaction was somewhat different: It was too cerebral, too strange and too art-gallery conscious for my taste in animation-which, I'm embarrassed to say, hasn't progressed much since Dumbo (1941). Part of the problem is that I've spent my life in the fantasy apparatus of narrative live-action cinematography-a tantalizing medium that merges creative art and recorded reality. Animation, for better or worse, is all creativity with varying degrees of anthropomorphic allegory. Though I've been moderately amused by some animation over the years, it's not really my turf.

Still, as more and more of my friends have talked to me about The Triplets of Belleville , I've begun to savor isolated images that have stuck in my memory. Above all, I love Bruno, the dog that grows old, fat and clumsy pursuing his obsession for barking at moving trains ever since a toy train ran over his tail as a puppy. Significantly, Bruno is the only character in Belleville with a dream life of his own; the sight of him lumbering up the stairs is as moving an image as any I've ever seen. Perhaps it's the recurring rear view that makes Bruno so, well, doggedly human.

There are some other, equally interesting characters in the story (besides the triplets themselves). The old, round-faced grandmother and her equally round-faced grandson are drawn in minimalist lines, making them emotionally distanced from the more accessible parent-child figures of conventional kids' cartoons. The grandmother single-mindedly looks for something to interest her mostly catatonic grandson, and when he shows a liking for his new tricycle, she begins training him in earnest for the Tour de France. He grows up to be a perpetually exhausted, beak-nosed freak with outsized leg muscles. But on his first race, he's kidnapped by the French mafia, who force him to compete in a bizarre indoor replica of the Tour de France. (Using a process-shot screen simulating the distance traversed by the cyclist, the gamblers in the gallery bet on the computed outcome.)

The triplets themselves are a French version of the Andrews Sisters, but much jazzier. They are first seen in their youth as performers on a televised variety show, but for most of the film they're withered yet still rhythm-conscious hags who help the grandmother rescue her grandson from the hoodlums in ways that defy gravity and every other law of physics and probability. Belleville itself is part Paris, part New York and part Montreal, though entirely populated by the clinically obese-a painterly mannerism that reads as an anti-American message to some reviewers. I think that's a bit of a stretch.

When the grandmother puts her foot out and sends the pursuing gangsters' cars tumbling to their doom, I couldn't help thinking of my own brave mother, who once faced down a gun-toting would-be burglar and made him run for his life when she picked up an ax. The comparative abstractness of Mr. Chomet's vision allows the mind to wander freely. So I guess I must've liked the Triplets of Belleville after all.

War Crimes

Norman Jewison's The Statement , from a screenplay by Ronald Harwood, based on the novel by Brian Moore, makes the most reprehensible antihero imaginable into its protagonist. Pierre Brossard (Michael Caine) is still on the run, 40 years after he is shown murdering French Jews during the Vichy era. Now in his 70's, he's the object of a two-pronged manhunt: the first by an avenging half-Jewish magistrate (Tilda Swinton) and a conscientious French Army officer (Jeremy Northam); and the second by mysterious forces within the Catholic Church and the French government intent on silencing Brossard before he reveals the identities of his protectors for the last four decades.

The problem with the scenario is this: Who exactly are we supposed to root for? To his credit, Mr. Caine creates a credibly unheroic, guilt-ridden religious fanatic, a Mel Gibson–type reactionary Catholic who opposes the liberalizing tendencies in the church-explicitly in the movie, the church's abandonment of the Latin liturgy. Yet Brossard remains a formidable adversary for his enemies, managing to kill two of his would-be assassins during the chase.

Another problem: It's bad enough that the performers, a largely British cast of well-known actors, are pretending to be French-but on top of that, they're speaking English. (And this at a time when more and more English-language films set in foreign locales are resorting to incorporating the native tongue.)

Still, the human dimensions of the story are subordinate to the real moral issue at the center of the film: the Catholic Church's active role in the Holocaust. But as the youngest possible Holocaust criminals reach and pass their 70's, 80's and 90's, and the rest die off from natural causes, one wonders how much longer this subject will be relevant to the political situation in Europe. A new wave of anti-Semitism is being nurtured under the cover of supposed sympathy for the stateless Palestinians, and an antipathy to the state of Israel. (Why do these sentiments rarely correspond, for example, to a sympathy for the Tibetans, and an antipathy to China?)

Nonetheless, it's good to see such estimable performances from Mr. Caine, Ms. Swinton, Mr. Northam, Charlotte Rampling, Alan Bates and Ciarán Hinds, who are all gainfully employed on an increasingly outdated subject.

Film Classics

The adventuresome Film Forum is giving discerning cineastes an early Christmas gift: An 18-film retrospective of Josef von Sternberg's dazzlingly visual career runs from Dec. 12 to 25, beginning with the highly recommended new 35-millimeter print of Shanghai Express (1932) on Dec. 12 and 13, as well as the new 35-millimeter print of The Devil Is a Woman (1935) on Dec. 14. Even more strongly recommended are Underworld (1927) and Thunderbolt (1929) on Dec. 15, with both classic silent films being shown for a single admission. Less recommended are Jet Pilot (1957) and Anatahan (1954) on Dec. 16; but you can't afford to miss The Last Command (1928) and Dishonored (1931) on Dec. 17, and Morocco (1930) and The Docks of New York (1928) on Dec. 18. Also highly recommended is Blonde Venus (1932) in a new 35-millimeter print, screening on Dec. 19 and 20. Moderately recommended are An American Tragedy (1931) and Crime and Punishment (1935) on Dec. 22 and The Shanghai Gesture (1941) and Macao (1952) on Dec. 23. And the highest recommendation for last: The Blue Angel (1930) and the documentary The Epic That Never Was (1965) on Dec. 24 and 25. The Film Forum is located at 209 West Houston Street; call 212-727-8110 for further details.

The Gift , superbly directed by Sam Raimi, with a dark and brooding script by veteran screenwriters Tom Epperson and Billy Bob Thornton, is a chilling, suspenseful thriller with supernatural overtones that features a smashing performance by Cate Blanchett as a character with psychic powers, loosely based on Mr. Thornton's own mother. She is Annie Wilson, a widow with three kids living in a backwoods hamlet in Georgia full of eccentric oddballs right out of the pages of Carson McCullers. Annie is a kindhearted soul who makes ends meet by using her gift for E.S.P. to see into people's futures. It's a gift that helps distraught clients like Buddy (Giovanni Ribisi), a manic- depressive garage mechanic with suicidal tendencies, and Valerie (Hilary Swank), a poor housewife who suffers savage beatings from her violent redneck husband Donnie (Keanu Reeves). Annie is the closest thing in this backwater wasteland to a shrink, but her gift is regarded by some with fear, prejudice and anger.

When the town slut (Katie Holmes) is murdered, Annie's psychic powers lead the sheriff to the location of the dead woman's body and the subsequent arrest, trial and conviction of the crazy, homicidal Donnie. But Annie's troubles are far from over. Her gift tells her that Donnie was not guilty, and the real killer was somebody else in the town who will stop at nothing to silence her. Was the fiend really the monstrous Donnie, who was cheating on his wife, or Donnie's jealous wife Valerie? Everyone is a suspect, including the prosecuting attorney (Gary Cole) who had an affair with the dead girl himself. When Annie joins forces with the victim's clean-cut, respectable schoolteacher fiancé (Greg Kinnear), the nicest guy in town, using her clairvoyant gift to solve the case and uncover the true identity of the killer, her compassion puts her own life at risk and she has to race the clock before she becomes the next body in the lake.

The script seems lightly constructed, but it's got enough white-knuckle tension to keep you guessing while it builds to a surprising climax of nerve-jangling terror. Everyone in the distinguished cast is against type, and astoundingly good. Greg Kinnear has never shown this much of a stretch, and Keanu Reeves is so scary he makes you wonder why he hasn't been making horror movies all along. If a good fright is not your idea of an ideal start to the new year, you should still see The Gift for the mesmerizing accuracy, strength and commitment of Cate Blanchett's supercharged performance. This is a far cry from her Oscar-nominated work in Elizabeth , but she's as striking and boldly riveting in faded cotton as she was in royal vestments.

For a supernatural murder mystery, The Gift is as logical as it is hair-raising, 10 times more effective than the phony stuff in The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable , and a movie that could teach the overrated M. Night Shyamalan a thing or two about real filmmaking.

Mary Cleere Haran at the Carlyle

As the new cabaret season begins, the game of musical chairs continues. First, Barbara Cook fled home base at the Café Carlyle and set up shop at Feinstein's at the Regency. Now, Mary Cleere Haran has deserted her annual perch at the Algonquin to begin 2001 at the Carlyle. Ah, the divas, bless their pointed little heads. The musically deprived will follow them anywhere. Ms. Haran, who has been away from the microphones much too long, is worth a special trip to 76th and Madison. Her retro songs and nostalgic patter about New York in bygone days blend as perfectly with the Bemelmans murals at the Carlyle as her plunging Harlow gowns. She calls her new act "Sweet and Low Down," and she's not kidding.

Although every night is New Year's Eve at the Carlyle, Mary undulates her way into a crowded room full of noisy people guzzling Veuve Clicquot and waving credit cards, cleverly works her way through all the seasons of love, marriage, parenthood and the rocking chair explored in myriad daunting choruses of Cole Porter's "It's De-lovely," and reduces the inattentive revelers to a hush. From there, it's her room for the night. Great lyrics can illustrate, magnify, define, reflect and intensify the emotions we all feel but fail to express, and in this act she seems determined to tackle them all in an effort to prove "America's cultural heritage did not begin with the Eisenhower administration."

Toned and lovely, with a dance-closer voice that would have made her a big recording star in the gone-forever days of the big band era, Ms. Haran occupies a respected position in the American musical spectrum for her refusal to sing junk and her devotion to keeping alive the songs of Tin Pan Alley and Hollywood. I admire her for her unshakable faith in true-blue songs you do not hear on the radio, and for the responsibility she obviously feels for turning people on to lyrics while educating a younger generation about old songs, even though some of those songs are so old they've grown beards. Those of us who have heard songs like "Lullaby of Broadway" and "Fascinatin' Rhythm" a million times-my ears bear witness-are always pleased by the way she sings them all over again. But most of the material in this show comprises recycled tunes from the early 1920's, much of it by the Gershwins, penned at about the time when sex was first being discovered by Elinor Glyn. Given my choice-and who is asking, please?-I'd prefer the more sophisticated songs from the 1940's. When a hip lady with a dreamy voice dredges up a silly ditty like "Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil," it may suit the feminist sensibility of a late bloomer shaking off the binding ties of an Irish Catholic girlhood, but it's still a big waste of time and talent.

But why grouse, when everything she does is accomplished with so much style and finesse? From the satiny caress of a ballad like Rodgers and Hart's "The Blue Room" to the blasé homesickness of Josephine Baker on Irving Berlin's "Harlem on My Mind," she fuses vocal artistry with the craft of acting on every song. On the humorous "Way Out West on West End Avenue," she's a cross between Cass Daley, Judy Canova and Minnie Pearl, and then replaces Marilyn Monroe's familiar tongue-in-cheek approach to Buddy De Sylva's suggestive lyrics for "Do It Again" with raw animal sex. Hanging a left to the West Coast, she tackles movie songs, brassily belting out Busby Berkeley golddigger songs from black-and-white Warner Brothers musicals of the 1930's with a Joan Blondell heart of pure platinum. "A Fine Romance" milks the sarcasm out of Dorothy Fields' canny lyrics. Meltingly, haltingly and introspectively, "I'm in the Mood for Love" shines a light on the vulnerable side of Ms. Haran's feline intelligence, while the overdone "S'Wonderful" is creamier than usual, almost conversatonally romantic.

Moving with assurance and poise from passionate chronicler of Broadway lore ("Bojangles of Harlem") to giddy, bubble-brained Betty Boop flapper ("The Girl Friend") she builds characters and weaves informational patter through the fabric of her songs like the two-ply threads in a complex carpet sewn by blind Portuguese nuns. An excellent actress and a charming singer with power, intonation, vibrato in all the right places and a stunning presence, Mary Cleere Haran is just what the cynics need for what ails them. This act coincides with the release of her new CD Crazy Rhythm: Manhattan in the 20's on the Sin-Drome/After 9 label. She is ably assisted on both occasions by the tasteful bass lines of Linc Milliman and by the distinguished pianist-composer Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, who occasionally joins in on vocal duets. While I long to hear them polish off headier stuff from richer musical periods in the American song book, I can't think of a better group to have around if the stock market crashes again; they've already worked out the songs. They're at the Café Carlyle through Feb. 17.

What a scam. Now that the year 2001 is approaching, maybe it's time to declare brunch over, dead-cold as yesterday's hot cakes.

What killed it?

1) That old, brazen "potluck" gambit. We all know that some guests are going to spend all day slaving over a 500-degree stove producing sourdough bread from wild yeast starters they conjured from thin air, only to be confronted with some other guest's half-smushed Entenmann's box-and that person gets equal credit! Totally undemocratic.

2) Timing. Is it at 11 o'clock? One? three? Who can say?

3) The horrible proliferation of those $8.95 brunches, entire sad little strips of which now line Second Avenue in the East Village and Columbus Avenue on the Upper West Side. By night, these are average restaurants; by day, they reincarnate themselves as "cozy brunch spots," slinging viscous eggs Benedict, suspicious hash browns and little piles of mesclun, with one pathetic free drink per person. And speaking of drinks-

4) Admit it, the entire concept of Bloody Marys is disgusting: Who wants to think of blood in the morning? And just what is a mimosa, anyway? Why ruin perfectly good champagne with some pulpy orange juice? Didn't that lose its novelty in, like, sophomore year of college?

5) A city's fitness craze. Much harder to hit the Nordic Track with a bellyful of Belgian waffles.

6) The rise of Internet news services. It used to be a trope of intimacy in a new relationship to spread one's bagels and lox over The New York Times. But Yahoo? Picking out crumbs from a keyboard is a procedure best performed soi-même.

7) Starbucks, since it could be argued that a gigantic latte is, in itself, brunch.

In sum, this unhappy mingling of day- and nighttime foods, which can leave you wondering when to have dinner and what in God's name you should do with the rest of your sucked-up day, is long overdue for obsolescence.

Three little words for 2001: Breakfast is back!

-Alexandra Jacobs

Pretty Horsies

Arriving in movie critics' mailboxes last month, Cliffs Notes on McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses is a 75-page booklet written by Jeanne Inness, Ph.D. Cliffs Notes is a widely known and widely disparaged line of literary summaries with distinctive yellow and black covers. Other titles in the series include Cliffs Notes on Miller's Death of a Salesman, Cliffs Notes on Defoe's Moll Flanders and Cliffs Notes on the Bible.

Background and Introduction to the Text

This particular Cliffs is a digest, in approximately 25 percent of the original page count, of Cormac McCarthy's 1992 National Book Award winner, All the Pretty Horses. It is being provided to film writers in an attempt to ride the slipstream of Miramax Films' publicity blitz for its Matt Damon–Penélope Cruz vehicle, All the Pretty Horses, directed by Billy Bob Thornton.

In an accompanying letter, Cliffs describes its product as an "in-print trailer" for the novel, a "quick, riveting read" filled with "insider information." This is a rather pumped-up retake on the regular, sober-sided, this-is-not-a-cheat-guide Cliffs Notes pitch, which emphasizes "intellectual exploration" and warns that "thorough appreciation of literature allows no short cuts."

A Brief Synopsis

When a work of Lit. Fic. attains a certain level of fame and success, it unavoidably becomes a commodity-or rather, it changes from one kind of commodity to another. All the Pretty Horses was in its first incarnation a spectacular triumph. It is a plain and sharp-paced adventure yarn about a teenage Texas rancher, John Grady Cole, who runs off to Mexico with his best friend in 1949: Boy meets horses, boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy keeps horses. The story is elevated by Mr. McCarthy's totalizing, minimally punctuated voice-of-God prose, laconic and thundering at the same time-Hemingway titrated into Faulkner, against all laboratory protocols-and thickly spiked with technical cowboying lingo, O.E.D. vocabulary and untranslated Spanish dialogue. It left its readers feeling braced and awed, proud to be American and literate.

With that accomplished, the question is how to spread that sense of worthiness to a greater audience-one that doesn't necessarily read novels, or at least novels that don't put quotations in quotation marks and that toss around words like gutta-percha, incoordinate, and hackamore. One theory is that you can force young people to read the book and to write term papers on it. This is presumably why Ethan Frome and The Scarlet Letter are adored from sea to shining sea-which is to say, this is why Cliffs Notes is in business. And taken at face value, as a study aid, the Cliffs volumes address an actual need. Bookworms may snipe, but they're not the ones who need a leg up.

The other theory is that you can eliminate the reading bit altogether. For Miramax, the novel's certified greatness is something fungible, to be leveraged for its own ends. The company has raised Oscar-mongering to a science by flattering the Academy's sense of purpose. With Shakespeare in Love, the point was that the Bard of Avon was, at heart, a fellow entertainment-industry toiler. This year, with Pretty Horses, the message is that quality cinema is the sibling of quality literature. Indeed, movies can supplant the source text. Fans of the novel, browsing the M's in bookstores today, will find that its stark and iconic black-and-white cover-title, ears, mane, landscape; the cover that made Chip Kidd Chip Kidd-has been replaced by a full-color movie-poster rendering of Mr. Damon and Ms. Cruz.

Critical Commentaries

Plying film writers with Cliffs Notes would seem to be a thoroughly pointless stunt: If people are going to see the movie instead of reading the book, they're going to see the movie instead of reading the synopsis, too. It's Miramax that ought to be trying to co-opt Cliffs' customers, not vice versa.

But after stripping away the daunting bits, Miramax ended up not with its hoped-for easy-watching sentimental oater, but a mess. Mr. McCarthy's prose, it turns out, doesn't just sound taut-it is taut, so economical that when you try to retell the story, the plot goes sprawling all over the place. Mr. Thornton's first cut reportedly checked in somewhere in the four-hour range; chopped nearly in half, the movie lurches from set piece to set piece, with yawning gaps in the story. Somewhere, one half suspects, film-company execs may be thanking Cliffs for offering to brief critics on missing motives and events.

Unless, that is, they've read the notes themselves. Forget the repurposing business about the Cliffs being a "quick, riveting read." They exist not to alleviate drudgery for unwilling readers, but to organize and systematize it into the sort of Themes, Comparisons and Interpretations that English class demands. In an age where kids can hook prefab term papers off the Internet, the Cliffs stand for a rather old-fashioned kind of hard work.

But Jeanne Inness, Ph.D., has not kept faith with her public. Like Mr. Thornton, she is overmatched by the novel; her Notes are addled and wrongheaded, clanking with instructional jargon and oiled with bogus generalizations. The boys in the novel "have suffered abandonment." John Grady's horse-training technique is "eclectic and creative …. This is the American way-solve the problem and forget the rulebook or the blueprints." It would be nice to hear what Mr. McCarthy, author of the gore-sodden anti-Western Blood Meridian, would make of that reading.

Nor can the reader turn to the Cliffs for help with the facts. The reader will learn, correctly, that John Grady is 16, fluent in Spanish and a master horseman-none of which, it should be noted, describes the 30-year-old Mr. Damon-but the rest is caveat lector. Ms. Innes warns the reader that Mr. McCarthy introduces characters without naming them, then promptly names a character without introducing him. She transposes events, misdefines vocabulary and puts words in the wrong mouths. At one point, she spends three sentences explaining the significance of the boys' eating yeasty "readyrolls" after a diet of tortillas; in the novel, the readyrolls in question are cigarettes.

Review Questions and Essay Topics

The Notes compare the prison scenes in the novel, without explanation, to prison scenes in Dostoyevsky, Camus' The Stranger and James Jones' From Here to Eternity. Compare and contrast them to prison sequences in John Woo's Face/Off.

A film critic, like a struggling English student, may conclude from the film or the Cliffs Notes that he or she just doesn't "get" Literature. Or is it something else this person doesn't get?

-Tom Scocca