The Four Seasons Restaurant, 99 East 52nd Street, (212) 754-9494, 6:30-9:30pm, by invitation only.

Goodbye strangers, it's been nice! (CW)

One time we tried to watch an episode of Gossip Girl. It was 2007, and Obama was gaining grass-roots support among young voters thanks to the hard work and dedication of Will.i.Am, Scarlett Johansson and two teenage newcomers, Blake Lively and Penn Badgley.

Yes, these two--dare we say--heroes had stood up together (in accordance with CW regulations) and announced in a commercial that they were voting for Barack Obama. The two co-stars, who, from the little we had seen of their program, were not especially interesting but found themselves endlessly fascinating, were given special celebrity passes because they were dating both on and off the show. And that's always fun.

But it's no longer the beginning of 2008. It's the end of 2012; the end of an era when Kristen Bell smugly narrated the lives of spoiled, jet-setting, New York prep school teens as they blossomed into spoiled, jet-setting, socialite monster nightmares. And in last night's finale, the one where the irrepressible rapscallion Chuck Bass--whose two defining character traits as we remember them were the ability to say his own name in a sexy voice and a desire to show up his dead father--finally stopped dicking around and married the dark-haired girl. Ugh, what was her name. Bonnie? Blaine?

She was the mean one, but actually they were all "the mean one": a hive of Queen Bees and their lovers, all of whom were as toxic as they were. (Except for the blond one that looked like a cardboard cutout, and had a similar acting range).

These were the kind of people of whom the nicest thing one could say was that it probably wasn't their fault they were so awful, since you only had to take a look at their manipulative, gold-digging moms and lazy, guitar-playing and/or deceased dads to see that the apple didn't fall far from the Park Avenue tree.

So last night's finale: Did we watch it? Sure. It's the end of a television era, and that needed to be celebrated. Even if that means accepting that Dan Humphrey is a woman on the Internet. He's been the one chronicling all his friends' lives with the bitchy lilt of Kristen Bell and calling himself "Lonely Boy."

The two more-awful people got married, making sure that there will be plenty of more little Basses in the sea one day. Serena and Dan may have also gotten married. Nate, who works at a newspaper, got to publish Dan's Gossip Girl memoirs, because this show took place in an age when even a spoof of The New York Observer would run a book-sized chronicle of every minutia of these kids lives.

"You'll never guess what Blaire told her maid today!" We would tease in what would have to be a 20-year column. "Tune in next week!"

That being said, what is more fun than watching a soap opera of the most self-referential kind (since Soap) about New York socialites?

Perhaps The Carrie Diaries.

Lady Gaga's maternity wear (Getty Images)

— The Church of Scientology has written a strongly-worded letter to Vanity Fair about Maureen Orth's cover story on Tom Cruise and the woman auditioned to be his girlfriend, Nazanin Boniadi. It's eight pages long. In it, the church threatens, "If Vanity Fair goes forward with publication of such defamatory allegations, now that it is on notice that the story is false, the stain on its reputation will last long after any reader even remembers the article. The sting of the jury verdict will last longer still; far longer than any pleasure from racing to publish a poorly researched and sourced story."

— Gossip Girl’s Blake Lively is eating more food than she normally eats, and you know what that means ... healthier body images for women on television! Just kidding. The only explanation is that she's hiding a secret pregnancy with a shotgun wedding to Ryan Reynolds.

— Lady Gaga is also pregnant, according to reliable source Kelly Osbourne. She's going off the fact that Gaga stopped bleaching her hair and wore a burka to Fashion Week, but she totally forgot the fact that the singer smoked weed on stage in Amsterdam Tuesday. Lady Gaga says she's just fat.

— Fiona Apple is in jail in Sierra Blanca, Texas, for having hash on her tour bus.

— Amanda Bynes continues to go toe-to-toe with Lindsay Lohan for the title of world's biggest train wreck. She also happens to be the most histrionic train wreck, believing that Ms. Lohan's recent car crash was "karma" for the Mean Girl’s mean tweet about her.

Kitsch, Lively and Johnson in Savages.

What I know about the internecine workings of Mexican drug cartels you could fill in an egg cup—and still have enough space left over for the egg. But this I know: It’s a subject and a subculture that has got to be more fascinating than anything in gonzo director Oliver Stone’s deadly, hateful, preposterous and cliché-riddled movie Savages. He even makes the violence look dull.

Based on one of those Don Winslow carnage epics that appeal to grown men who still read comic books, Savages boogies to the beat of an assault weapon, cutting back and forth between the cold-blooded drug lords in Tijuana and the stoner gringos of Southern California, fighting it out for billions in the Baja Peninsula. The convoluted plot, which would be difficult to decipher with the aid of a microscope, is as familiar as any one of a thousand cable network television series—and Mr. Stone’s dialogue is as wooden as a rocking chair, possibly because his script was co-written by the dubious Shane Salerno (Alien vs. Predator) and novelist Don Winslow, whose grasp of the way real people talk is as phony as reality TV. The American potheads, unconvincingly depicted as tattooed hunks with romantic notions of Butch and Sundance on reefer, are Chon (camera-ready Taylor Kitsch, who keeps stalling his PR-funneled elevator to pop stardom by pushing the down button) and Ben (Aaron Johnson, the British star of such monumental motion picture milestones as Kick-Ass). Best friends since high school, Chon is a combat veteran who worked as a Navy seal in Iraq, starting the business by smuggling cannabis seeds from Afghanistan, and Ben is a soulful Berkeley graduate who invests his share of lucrative profits from the weed trade in noble world causes. Together, in Laguna Beach, they share tattooed washboard abs and cuddle up in the same bed with a bottle blonde named O (Blake Lively). It’s a perfect soft-core porn arrangement (lots of nipples, but no real nudity) until their wacked out ménage a trois is rudely interrupted by greedy and villainous drug lords from  south of the border ruled by Goth queen Elena (Salma Hayek in a tossable wig of lacquered bangs, looking like a cross between Louise Brooks and Cleopatra) and her depraved henchman, the psychopath Lado (Benicio Del Toro, who has traveled down this homicidal highway before, in better films than this). The best smoke in the world, apparently, is not from Thailand, Jamaica or Saigon, but mass produced in Chon and Ben’s pot factory, a foundation with branches in Africa, Asia and West Hollywood. Elena and her ruthless gang want a piece of the boys’ 15 million satisfied customers by forcibly encouraging them to join the Mexican work force, but when they resist (opting to retire and—are you ready?—invest their illegal fortune in solar energy), she kidnaps O and threatens to cut off her fingers, one by one. In retaliation, the boys kidnap Elena’s beloved daughter and war erupts. Stirring the pozole is Dennis, a creep from the Drug Enforcement Agency who plays both sides against each other, rejoicing in the ensuing brutality and torture. Dennis is played with demented glee by John Travolta, who looks like a Pleistocene Era warthog.

They are all savages, and when Mr. Stone runs out of ideas about what to do with them, he borrows every crime-thriller cliché, from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction to Tony Scott’s Man on Fire, bathes the bloody decapitations and rapes in the glow of lush cinematography, then distracts the viewer with camera tricks, black-and-white conversions, cell-phone images, classical music and, finally, a maddening finale, narrated by O. Then the movie backs up like a VHS tape on rewind, and there’s an alternate cop-out ending, even more infuriating than the first.

Mr. Kitsch is pretty, despite the unnecessary battle scars on his face designed to illustrate character but signifying nothing more than the hours he spent in the makeup chair. Mr. Johnson’s changing moral compass, from pacifist to killing machine, is as contrived as Mr. Travolta’s epiphany from invulnerable monster to sympathetic family man. Ms. Hayek, as the Mother Goddam of the Mexican drug cartel, is the best thing in the movie. To be fair, the actors all work hard to keep the audience awake, but the sloppy direction and drugged-out script make Savages hard to rise above. Continuity and logic have never been Oliver Stone’s strengths, but this movie is barely credible. What makes drug lords hard to arrest is their unexceptional ordinariness. In real life, they all look like plumbers and accountants. The predators here are so beautiful and exotic and camera-ready that any law enforcement officer with half a brain would have no trouble spotting them a block away. Worse still, they’re boring. They blow off their victims’ kneecaps, and you don’t even notice. These are neither good people nor interesting savages, and they’re not worth caring about. Neither is the movie.

rreed@observer.com

SAVAGES

Running Time 130 minutes

Written by Shane Salerno, Don Winslow and Oliver Stone

Directed by Oliver Stone

Starring Aaron Johnson, Taylor Kitsch and Blake Lively

1/4

Chloe Grace Moretz and Blake Lively

Derick Martini is stuck in a rut of coming-of-age movies. His first feature, the 2008 artistic failure Lymelife, was a coming-of-age opus about dysfunctional young people struggling to get out of Long Island and survive miserable marriages, a real estate crisis, the doomed economy and Lyme disease. His new one, a deadly dud of a horror called Hick, is a hopped-up coming-of-age road movie about a dysfunctional, filthy-mouthed 13-year-old runaway named Luli (Chloë Grace Moretz) who is trying to hitchhike her way from a hick town in Nebraska all the way to Vegas. I can’t say I blame her for getting the hell out of Nebraska, but the way she does it is the stuff autopsies are made of.

Based on a smarmy novel by Andrea Portes (who adapted the screenplay), the movie opens on Luli’s 13th birthday, when she gets a Smith and Wesson .45 for a present and decides to make the most of it. What’s she got to lose by hitting the road? Her skanky mother (another cliché-riddled performance by Juliette Lewis) and alcoholic stepfather are both dead-end nightmares who spend their nights getting obnoxiously tanked, then rutting like farm pigs. So Luli packs up her gun—it will come in handy later—dressed like Shirley Temple in heat (ghastly thought, but no worse than anything in this picture) and gets picked up by a broken cowboy named Eddie with a Stetson hat and a permanent limp from his days as a failed rodeo rider. Eddie seems charming because he’s played by the wonderful, charismatic Eddie Redmayne, but he’s a bona fide psychopath whose sole aim is to work out his sadistic S&M fantasies on Luli as a nubile sex object. She also meets a grifter named Glenda (the aptly named Blake Lively), who becomes Luli’s cocaine-snorting fairy godmother. From here on, the movie careers downhill with the speed of an unhinged kangaroo with one foot. People are beaten senseless and shot to death in filthy motel bathrooms. There’s a near-rape by a pool shark. Someone urinates in a drink.

Instead of trying to bring some troubling insight to the tragedy of boring, small-town adolescence, director Martini concentrates on painting a pretty lurid picture of the American countryside—bowling alleys, Dairy Queens, brothels, Motel 6’s. Eddie shoots Glenda. Luli kills Eddie. Alec Baldwin, who owns a camp in the woods, makes scrambled eggs, growls, “Eat your goddam fluffy eggs,” and drives Luli to the bus station. Following the ho-hum you-can’t-go-home-again theme, Luli goes home defeated to find her former home turned into a Walmart. The pace is funereal, the dialogue consists of brilliant lines like “Rise and shine, sugar tits!” and the result is pointless even as a coming-of-age fable since Luli never develops as anyone with the brain of a cockroach. The acting is feisty but forced, and after the sensitive and dynamic Mr. Redmayne won the Tony award for Red, followed by a riveting centerpiece performance in My Week with Marilyn, it’s anybody’s guess just who talked him into lending his name to this trash. Nothing he does can be ignored, hence this one-star review. The rest of Hick adds up to nothing more than a tax write-off.

I guess the only real theme of Hick is: Life is crap, and then you write about it.

rreed@observer.com

HICK
Running time 97 minutes
Written by Andrea Portes (novel) and Andrea Portes (screenplay)
Directed by Derick Martini
Starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Blake Lively and Rory Culkin

Mayoral advisor Blake Lively (Getty Images)

Unsatisfied by his recent date night with Lady Gaga, Michael Bloomberg is to immerse himself further into pop culture with a meeting with the cast of Gossip Girl today. (Even his culture tastes are centered around the city's ultra-upper crust!) The meeting is meant to publicize New York's busiest year ever for TV production, but we're more curious as to what Blake Lively--and whether it would've been the cast of 30 Rock meeting with Mr. Bloomberg if Tracy Morgan and Alec Baldwin knew how to stay quiet and look pretty like Blake Lively. What will Blake wear? What will the Mayor?!

Catherine Zeta-Jones (Getty Images)

Catherine Zeta-Jones, who's enjoying a mini-comeback with a slate of upcoming films including the musical Rock of Ages, has reportedly been cast as a doctor in Side Effects, an upcoming Steven Soderbergh thriller wherein Blake Lively takes pharmaceuticals to mute the effects of her depression. Ms. Zeta-Jones previously appeared in Mr. Soderbergh's Traffic and Ocean's Twelve, and in an interesting congruence, bravely went public with her own bipolar disorder last year.

Everyone who was anyone attended the fashion show, which included glitter, disco balls, leather bomber jackets, and something that was described by the Associated Press as an "animal-print-meets-tropical-sunset tank dress," which is burning our brains with Miami fever just trying to consider what that might look like.

Here's what you missed from the show, if you weren't lucky enough to snag a seat.

(Photos via Getty)