On the one hand, we see the intensely detailed contemplations of such modern-girlhood rites of passage as the piercing of tongues and navels-defiant displays of decorative self-mutilation. And then there's Tracy, played by Evan Rachel Wood, who slashes her wrists and arms in a bout of self-loathing that is hardly convincing compared to Maggie Gyllenhaal's obsessive self-harming in Steven Shainberg's Secretary (2002). The protagonist in Secretary , an emotionally blocked young woman who gets a small measure of emotional relief by hurting herself in secret ways, is entirely believable. By contrast, Tracy expends so much energy screaming at her hapless mother, Melanie (Holly Hunter), that it's amazing she has any energy left to draw blood from her veins.

Indeed, I got the feeling that Tracy and her bad-influence gal pal, Evie (Nikki Reed), were putting on a show-less for their peers in the PG-13 audience (this R-rated vehicle is off limits for those impressionable teens) than for those middle-aged critics and parents alarmed by every well-publicized media manifestation of presumed juvenile joie de vivre . Certainly, the mature Upper West Side audience I sat with seemed a little bit baffled by all the critical hoopla for this aesthetically skimpy effort. When I asked one patron how she'd liked the movie, she made a face and confessed that she'd been led to expect a three-and-a-half-star picture, and all she'd gotten was a two-and-a-half-star effort instead.

Ms. Reed is also credited with the screenplay, which is reportedly based on her own experiences as a troubled teenager. Truth is stranger (and messier) than fiction and all that, but it also often lacks the artistic structure and logic of the best fiction.

To put it simply, Thirteen just didn't make much sense to me. Here you have Tracy, a quiet, sensitive A student with a budding writing talent, suddenly seized by an obsession to hang with the "in" crowd, a culturally mixed and mixed-up gang of shoplifters, druggies and vaguely defined sex-orgy types. To demonstrate her delinquent credentials, Tracy filches an older woman's handbag while its owner is talking on her cell phone, and then presents it like a trophy to Evie and her girlfriends. Their ill-gotten gains fund a reckless shopping spree; one vice leads to another, and soon Tracy is so zonked out in class that she fails her classes and is left back in school.

Meanwhile, we're granted hallucinatory glimpses of the chaotic home lives of Tracy and Evie, whose two divorced mothers seem to be teetering on the brink of simultaneous nervous breakdowns. Tracy's father pops up intermittently full of guilt and futile good intentions, while Melanie's current lover is too busy battling his own drug addiction to be of much help. With schools, houses and neighborhoods lacking any structural sociological consistency, there is simply no there there, as Gertrude Stein once said-and she was talking about Oakland, Calif., not La-La Land.

This is Ms. Hardwicke's directorial debut, and her cinematographer, Elliot Davis, photographs almost everything in a swirling, subjective haze to evoke Tracy's descent into near-delirium. Then, in a bizarre plot twist, Evie the "bad girl" turns golden as she runs sobbing to her heretofore catty mother Brooke (played by the almost unrecognizable, usually strong character type, the redoubtable Deborah Kara Unger). Mysteriously, Brooke is abruptly transformed into a concerned parent as she warns Tracy to stop corrupting Evie with her dissolute ways. This touch of melodramatic contrivance struck me as a tad amateurish in the context of all the feigned "realism" that preceded it.

I can't see the point of a movie like Thirteen . The subculture to which it refers would never accept all the gloom-and-doom about ultimate consequences, and the rest of us are not given enough sociological information to make any judgment on the various characters. By making everyone muddled and distracted, it's hard to see any alternative to all the confusion. There's a kind of expressive fallacy at work here that seems to be designed to exploit the prevailing paranoia of our debauched, media-polluted times. And behind all the playacting in this film is the unspoken suggestion that we're all responsible for causing this kind of adolescent self-destruction in the first place.

Of course, Thirteen wouldn't have been taken half so seriously if it had drifted into genre territory by bringing mortal violence into the not-so-pretty picture. I'm not saying that the movie would have been improved by dragging in death and the gendarmes, but as it stands, Thirteen is neither one thing or the other-neither an in-depth, dialogue-driven character study nor an enjoyable teen-noir melodrama. Instead, it's a pretentious piece of Valley Girl vileness masquerading as social commentary. Finally, I wasn't much impressed by the highly touted performance of Ms. Wood, whose portrayal of Tracy starts out much too nice and ends up much too shrill, with very little gradation in between. As the bad girl Evie, Ms. Reed is too one-note all the way through, while Ms. Hunter, as the stressed-out Melanie, does a fine job of demonstrating why it's so wrong to try to look as young as your teenage children.

The Band Played On

Iztván Szabó's Taking Sides , from the play and subsequent screenplay by Ronald Harwood, tries to go against the polemical tendencies of its after-the-Holocaust theme through the character of Major Steve Arnold, played by Harvey Keitel. Major Arnold is an interrogator for the American De-Nazification Committee, on the hunt for evidence of pro-Nazi complicity against Wilhelm Furtwängler, the world-famous conductor of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra during the Third Reich. But Mr. Keitel's character is so abrasive in manner that he functions more as an inquisitor than an official investigator: In fact, Major Arnold has been given instructions to prosecute "Hitler's bandleader" ruthlessly. True to his mandate, he treats Furtwängler (Stellån Skarsgard) as if he were guilty until proven even guiltier.

The theatrical origin of Taking Sides is obvious. Major Arnold's relentlessly dialectical rhetoric intends to transmute facts into truths, and Furtwängler's alleged inaction in the face of evil translates into criminal culpability for all the corpses in the death camps. The paradoxes of Mr. Harwood's allegorical arguments are embodied in Arnold's assistants: David (Moritz Bleibtreu), a German Jew whose parents died in the Holocaust, and Emmi (Birgit Minichmayr), whose father was executed for plotting against Hitler. Despite their real grievances against the Nazis, these two witnesses to horror are driven by the American's self-righteousness to be more tolerant of Furtwängler.

Taking Sides has been kicking around the film-festival circuit for a couple of years, and rumor has it that it's finally been released now only because Mr. Harwood recently won an Oscar for the screenplay of Roman Polanski's The Pianist . Whatever the case, the complexities of the subject matter are deftly and intelligently handled.

Kate and Bob's Big Adventure

I never met either Katharine Hepburn (1907-2003) or Bob Hope (1903-2003) face-to-face, although I did catch a glimpse of Hepburn late in her life, through an illuminated window in her Turtle Bay townhouse, as she ate a solitary dinner. Still, I felt closer to Hope: He was a welcome guest in our house on the radio from early childhood on. The only Hepburn movies I saw back then were Mary of Scotland (1936), in which she was woefully miscast in the title role, and Stage Door (1937), in which she was less appealing than Ginger Rogers. Over the years, she was never my favorite actress, which is to say that I didn't love her as I have loved some others. But I liked, respected and even admired her. She was somewhat underrated as an actress until she got older and less threatening to her detractors. Who remembers Morning Glory (1933), but who is allowed to forget The African Queen (1951)? In her memory, here's my list of her 10 best pictures:

1. Holiday (1938)

2. Bringing Up Baby (1938)

3. Woman of the Year (1942)

4. Alice Adams (1935)

5. Little Women (1933)

6. Morning Glory (1933)

7. Love Among the Ruins (TV, 1975)

8. Summertime (1955)

9. Stage Door (1937)

10. Pat and Mike (1952).

Among my guilty Hepburn pleasures are the somewhat underrated Sylvia Scarlett (1935), Break of Hearts (1935) and Keeper of the Flame (1942). Her most overrated vehicles are The Philadelphia Story (1940), The African Queen (1951) and On Golden Pond (1981).

As for Bob Hope, he was a man for all media. Movies were only one arrow in his quiver. I know it's fashionable to say that he outlived his vogue, and even at the time of the Vietnam War, he was reportedly booed by some of the troops he had come to entertain. Still, it's hard to imagine anyone in showbiz today choosing to get in harm's way in Iraq to entertain the troops; it's hard enough to get the current breed of celebrities to a film festival when the terrorists are growling. Yet Hope's marginal movie career was always hampered by the tendency to stereotype him as a laughable-coward type. He was among the rare comedians who, like the very talented Red Skelton, could project a serious straight-man quality when given half a chance.

The fact remains that Hope didn't enter feature films from the Broadway stage until he was in his mid-30's. Alongside Shirley Ross in The Big Broadcast of 1938 (1938), he warbled "Thanks for the Memory," a rueful ode to a failed marriage. From that still-memorable beginning, he went on to make more than 50 movies (not counting cameo appearances), until he was pushing 70. His film career is a mixed bag at most, but it had more than a few interesting moments here and there: The Cat and the Canary (1939), Never Say Die (co-written by Preston Sturges, 1939), The Paleface (1948), Sorrowful Jones (a Damon Runyon subject, 1949), My Favorite Blonde (with Madeleine Carroll, 1942), Son of Paleface (a second comic turn with Jane Russell, 1952), Beau James (with a leggy Vera Miles, 1957) and The Facts of Life (with comic equal Lucille Ball, 1960). Road to Utopia (1946) is the best of the Road series, followed by Road to Morocco (1942), Road to Singapore (1940) and Road to Zanzibar (1941). Thanks for the memories, Bob.

What did it feel like to be Bob Hope?

"You feel invulnerable," said Dave Thomas, the 54-year-old founding member of the legendary comedy troupe Second City, and the pre-eminent impersonator of Bob Hope for the last 20-odd years. "You have to adopt his confidence and you know you've got the gags. These gags are going to kill because I know how to make them kill. You're kind of bulletproof."

A week after his subject died at age 100, Mr. Thomas, the man who played the beer-besotted Doug McKenzie in the 1983 Canadian sendup Strange Brew , called The Observer from Los Angeles to talk about it. It was the first time he'd spoken with the press since Hope's death, and when he went into his "Bob Hope" voice, taking on that familiar helium lilt, smirking through the phone line as if on an old radio show … it was eerier .

"How about that Al Qaeda? Aren't they somethin'?" he said.

He was imagining Bob Hope in Afghanistan after Sept. 11, where he said the comic surely would have entertained troops had he not been hobbled by age. "It's great being here in Tora Bora, where a mujahadeen family of five can get a luxury cave for five dollars a day."

"Jihad? That's Arabic for 'I'll believe anything these crackpots tell me.'"

Mr. Thomas was demonstrating the Hope delivery, the boom-boom-kick of his bad-joke rhythm, which he has done hundreds of times since the late 1970's. Back when the cast of SCTV-Rick Moranis, Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara, Harold Ramis-was looking for parodies to skewer the stupidity of TV, out-riffing Saturday Night Live with its acid takes on pop culture, Mr. Thomas set his sights on the man whose monologues he knew intimately from childhood, whose winking presence towered over everybody like a totem of everything American-a perfect foil for countercultural abrasion. And after years of parodying Hope, Mr. Thomas, born in Canada, became intimately entangled in his subject-to the point where Mr. Hope even invited his part-time doppelgänger to perform monologues for him in the later Hope specials.

The first Bob Hope skit Mr. Thomas did was of a golf game in the Middle East with Menachem Begin and Yasir Arafat. "They were playing golf with Bob Hope while trying to negotiate a Middle East peace settlement," he recalled. "It combined the two aspects of Hope, golf and war."

SCTV writer Brian Doyle-Murray, brother of Bill, helped him write the material, and the day of the performance, the impersonation still very shaky-"I didn't think I could pull it off," he said-the makeup artist, Beverly Schechtman, transformed him with a wax nose and a crucial suggestion.

"I needed a chin that jutted out," he said, "and she said, 'Why don't you stick your jaw out?' It was like the key that unlocked the impersonation for me."

And it became legend. At first, Mr. Thomas' Hope was a cold, self-absorbed hypocrite, a flashpoint for everything the Baby Boomers rejected about the World War II generation. "Most of the things I did were based on shows he did," said Mr. Thomas. "I didn't have any background information."

He said his best Hope piece was a parody of Hope's visit to China, when he had actually done a monologue with a Chinese interpreter.

Mr. Thomas' Bob Hope transformed over the years-it got more accurate, spookier. Even Hope's friends recognized in Mr. Thomas the Bob Hope they knew. Things got really weird in 1981, when SCTV hired Jeff Barron, one of Hope's own joke writers.

"I was getting real Bob Hope jokes," said Mr. Thomas, "and hearing about the real Bob Hope."

Shortly after, Mr. Barron introduced Mr. Thomas to Hope in Toronto. Hope loved the China parody! After that, "I started to bump into more people and they started telling me stories and I met his friends and they started telling me stories. It got to the point where it had real Bob Hope shit in it."

The act also changed Mr. Thomas's feelings about Bob Hope. When Steve Allen came to Mr. Thomas wanting to interview him for one of his books, saying he had "captured 'the essential coldness of the man'-that set off alarm bells for me. I said, 'Don't attribute that to my stuff.' I begged off. I didn't want to talk about it."

Later, Hope's publicist, Ward Grant, summoned Mr. Thomas to Hope's house in Toluca Lake. Hope was in his 90's then, and when Mr. Thomas arrived, he was sitting in front of a large vanity mirror, lost in his thoughts. "I said, 'Hi Bob,' and he looked at me and said, 'Hi Dave. What are you doing here?' 'Well, Ward said you wanted me to come over …. ' 'Well, what do you want ?'

"Rather than getting into it with him, I said I wanted to see the picture he had of General Patton pissing in the Rhine," said Mr. Thomas. "Then he lit up. He jumped up right away." Hope showed him the photograph-the only copy not owned by the Patton estate-plus hundreds of others, pictures of Old Ski Nose with astronauts, starlets and four ex-Presidents-the whole Road to the 20th Century, right there. "It was amazing," Mr. Thomas said.

One of Mr. Thomas' last encounters with Hope was in 1993, at the comedian's 90th birthday NBC special. Before the show, Hope was perusing the monologue meant for Mr. Thomas, thinking it was his own. When he told the producers, "'You gotta change this line,' they told him, 'No, no, that's Dave Thomas doing you.' He said, 'Well, change it anyway!'

"I had Hope punching in my monologue!" marveled Mr. Thomas. "It had come full circle. From the inside, I lost my satiric edge."

Mr. Thomas gave it one last turn on the Jiminy Glick Show in 2001, with former SCTV colleague Martin Short as the fat, scabrous guest host. Mr. Thomas did a withered 99-year-old Hope.

Hope : "I just thought I'd come on and plug my special."

Glick : "What is the special you're doing?"

Hope : "We're doing a big hundredth birthday special out at Edward's Air Force Base where the government is going to set off a 20-kiloton bomb in my honor."

The Observer asked Mr. Thomas if this was the end of his Hope routine, now that his subject was gone.

"I don't know," he said. "Probably. Rick Moranis wants me to do a one-man show on Broadway. I would never go to a one-man show , I would never do that. No way! Yeah, I think it's retired."

Mr. Thomas said he understood that comedy has a context, it loses its purpose with time, it changes with the culture. At first, he was angry that younger comedians didn't genuflect to Bob Hope. "They're dipshits," he said of some young comedy writers. "You can't be a comedy buff and not know about Bob Hope. That's just stupid. To understand where comedy is , it's good to know where it was …. "

Mr. Thomas caught himself.

"When I start talking like that, I start sounding like an old guy," he laughed. "I work on SNL with young writers, and they don't know the old stuff, but at some point you have to let it go. It had its day. Let it go."

Today, E! presents True Hollywood Story: Joey Heatherton , about the jiggly go-go girl who performed on many U.S.O. tours with Bob and who SCTV immortalized as Lola Heatherton, often performing with Bobby Bittman on his classic TV specials. [E!, 24, 1 p.m.]

Thursday, August 7

Speaking of young writers at SNL , some young writers at SNL tell NYTV not to expect any parodies of Bob Hope in the upcoming fall season.

"It's still too early, man," said Leo Allen.

"It's too painful," concurred Eric Slovin, also an SNL staffer and Mr. Allen's writing partner.

"Show some respect!" Mr. Allen added.

"When a man who is 100 years old dies," said Mr. Slovin, "it takes 20 years before people can joke about it."

"Nobody can even start to think about jokes about Bob Hope yet," said Mr. Allen.

If Mr. Allen and Mr. Slovin sounded insincere, that's "Slovin & Allen"-their touchstones are Steve Martin and SCTV , which minted Dave Thomas. They come from the anti-entertainer entertainer school, like everyone who ever worked on SNL . But on Sunday, Aug. 3, "Slovin & Allen" sat down in Mr. Allen's studio apartment on West 56th Street to watch Road to Zanzibar , the 1941 Hope-Crosby–Dorothy Lamour movie that takes place in Africa in which Bob Hope gets chased by a guy in an ape suit, which Bing finds highly amusing.

"In the comedy world," said Mr. Slovin, a balding 35-year-old, "I don't think there's so much awareness of the past beyond, say, the 70's. People are fans of Richard Pryor and Monty Python and SNL in the 70's." Slovin and Allen created the SNL skit "The Falconer," in which an off-the-grid wacko has a falcon sidekick, who unbeknownst to him, lives a fabulous A-list lifestyle while he's away looking for food.

On stage, they do absurdist skits-two guys at a business seminar whose boredom devolves into shooting smack and masturbating one other-and faux-vaudeville bits that digress into off-kilter nonsense, like their version of Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First?", where in place of "Who," "What" and "I don't know," they use actual names of Yankees players-then they do it in French, and then in sign language.

They took out Road to Zanzibar and put it into the DVD player. "I think it will be boring," predicted Mr. Allen as the opening credits rolled. "It's not about anything. It's just, 'Bob Hope is funny and Bing Crosby is there too.'"

"But they're really good," Mr. Slovin insisted again, not entirely convincingly. "They're just really good ."

About 30 minutes into it, while Bing was crooning and being carried around a jungle set by black natives, Slovin and Allen grew bored-the movie was ejected.

The next day, Mr. Slovin sent an e-mail.

"As soon as you left last night we ran to Kim's Video to buy Road to Zanzibar . We watched the whole thing four times. We stayed up all night. Neither one of us had the confidence to admit that we liked it while you were there, because you seemed to hate it so much. You obviously didn't get it. I'd explain it to you, but it's very complex. Does sarcasm read in e-mail?"

Tonight, turn off the TV and go watch The Road to Morocco with Bob and Bing at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center. Then go see Slovin & Allen at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater. Shop and compare. Then vote by writing jhagan@observer.com.

More SNL reruns if you want 'em. [Comedy Central, 45, 5 p.m.]

Saturday, August 9

As Steve Martin once said: "Enough! Comedy! Jokes!"

Tonight, 48 Hours Investigates something very, very serious, people.

[CBS, 2, 8 p.m.]

Sunday, August 10

On the Sunday, Aug. 3, edition of The McLaughlin Group , founder and host John McLaughlin ended the show by calling Bob Hope, in his stentorian Brahmin-ese, a "great wit and a great pat -triot."

If you feel like it, you can go to The McLaughlin Group Web site and rate each of the panelists on a scale of one to five, with five "meaning that you received enlightenment of a metaphysically profound nature never to be duplicated, before or in the future." [NBC, 4, 10 a.m.]

Monday, August 11

Tonight, it's the Party with Spike World Premiere , a showcase of programming for the new Dudes-R-Us channel. With rare appearances by Kid Rock, Pamela Anderson, Ice-T and Carmen Electra …. Make it stop! [TNN, 36, 8 p.m.]

Tuesday, August 12

7 The only way to cleanse thy soul of Kid Rock: Watch Images of the Armenian Spirit , about the 3000-year struggle of a people. Seriously, it's good. [WLIW, 21, 8 p.m.]

Pool par-tay! It's not boding well for August …. The execrably unfunny Joel Stein is back on the Times Op-Ed page; select members of New York's Finest have lost all dignity, tootling around on motorized pogo sticks ; and Manhattan women-whose fashion consciousness apparently sinks to zero the second the mercury hits 90 -are padding around the streets in those cheap-ass glittery mesh slippers from Chinatown …. Can you blame a gal for wanting to throw her hands up and plunge into a pool , per the old Nestea ads? But since a Hamptons manse ain't exactly forthcoming (hel- lo !), we're resorting to the naughty-sounding "Swim Shorts II: Wetter and Wilder" - not a special edition of Maxim , but an aquatic theater festival at the rooftop pool of a Holiday Inn . (When our big-cheese editor heard the phrase "aquatic theater festival," he got sort of wild-eyed and muttered something about Ethel Merman, and we said: "Sorry, bub, we're too young to know who the heck that is") …. Anyway, tonight's play, Tugboat Love , is about a shy little tugboat named Li'l Toot, who's trying to work up the courage to confess that he wants to rock the boat with the Statue of Liberty. "She's this bodacious bronze babe, and she's all that!" said director Robin Rice Lichtig from the Upper West Side, where she has the perfect marital arrangement (i.e., her husband lives in New Jersey ). "The seats are all around the pool, which will be my New York Harbor. The actor who plays the tugboat will probably be in a big fat inner tube ." Audience members can pay five bucks extra to go swimming after the performance, which seems too gross to contemplate, but we'll bring our favorite tawny cabana boy just in case ….

[The Holiday Inn Rooftop Pool, 440 West 57th Street, 7:30 p.m., 917-509-7531.]

Thursday 7th

Do-si-do, girlfriends: It's the inevitable collision of American Idol with Queer Eye for the Straigh t G uy : a forthcoming reality series called American Pride , wherein pretty cowboys compete to be declared America's first openly gay country-music superstar …. That's "openly" …. Creator, Grammy nominee and N.Y.U. songwriting instructor Larry Dvoskin told us he drew inspiration from a strip club he visited in Dallas. "I walked into this club where people were two-stepping, and it was like putting my hand in an electric socket!" he said. Bzzzz . "It was alive! It was turning the stereotype of a gay man upside-down. Outside there were gun racks on pickup trucks, and inside were a bunch of gay men and women having a hoot ." But why no butch dykes in this contest? "Cowboy is the last macho stereotype," Mr. Dvoskin said. (Cue Village People flashback.) "In the Southern Bible Belt culture, it's the Howard Stern mentality, where two women together is a fantasy but two guys banging boots is like: 'No freaking way!'" There will be a woman, a "drag king" named Murray Hill clad in a little mustache and polyester suit, helping host the program. "She looks a little bit like Ralph Kramden," Mr. Dvoskin said. Alternatively, there's a screening of Guys and Dolls out in the lesbian-and-Frisbee part of Brooklyn- check it out before those d*mn brothers Weinstein remake and ruin it!

[ American Pride auditions, SIR Studios, 312 West 52nd Street, noon to 3 p.m.; Guys and Dolls , Prospect Park Bandshell, Ninth Street and Prospect Park West, Park Slope 8:30 p.m., 718-855-7882, ext. 45.]

Friday 8th

Remember how, when you were little and Daddy was at work, Mommy used to plop you down in front of the television to watch Mr. Wizard while she went out and "met with clients" even though she didn't actually have a job? Or is that between you and your therapist? Meet Steve Cohen, 32, whose show Chamber Magic -"a big mishmash of psychology, hypnotism and trickery," he calls it- is basically Mr. Wizard minus the science cr*p , or perhaps David Copperfield minus the Claudia Schiffer cr*p. "I'm probably one of the most expensive people in the business," Mr. Cohen told us from Steamboat Springs, Colo., where he was performing for some anonymous business magnate (Ron Galotti?). "I didn't go to Hogwartz! I studied with my uncle, who was a student of Harry Houdini. I'm a trained hypnotist. I majored in psychology at Cornell"- oooh -"so now I can utilize mind games and psychological techniques to get audience members to subconsciously give up information about themselves." Jeez, be careful! Mr. Cohen, who clearly hasn't discovered the secret to a happy marriage (see Ms. Lichtig, above) lives on the Upper West Side with his wife, a writer, and their 3-year-old tyke, Alex. "My son thinks that all the papas can do magic," he said. "He'll have a play date with another kid and he'll take a quarter over to their fathers and say, 'Make this disappear!'" Watch your $52 disappear tonight as this freaky dude performs in some fancy suite at the Waldorf.

[ Chamber Magic: A Demonstration of Modern Conjuring , the Waldorf Towers, 100 East 50th Street, 7 p.m. or 9 p.m., 917-361-8751.]

Saturday 9th

Where's Ashton Kutcher? Who, frankly, cares? But tonight his poor beleaguered ex, Brittany Murphy -who was perfectly darling in Clueless and then dropped a scary amount of weight and became "edgy," which is Hollywoodese for "skanky"-premieres in Uptown Girls , a sort of Nanny Diaries –esque movie co-starring Dakota Fanning, who was perfectly darling in I Am Sam ; let's hope she escapes Ms. Murphy's fate …. At the after-party: Heather Graham look-alike Marley Shelton , sparkly designers Mark Badgley and James Mischka , twinkly hairdresser Frédéric Fekkai (can he do something about our recent chop, s'il vous-plait? ), socialite designer Alexandra Lind plus hubby, are-they-or-aren't-they-a-couple Andre Balazs and Katie Ford and-anticlimax alert-Ralph Macchio. Meanwhile, over in Bridgehampton, people auction off plates designed by yoga-lovin' designer Donna Karan , cartwheel-lovin' designer Betsey Johnson and fair cosmetics exec Evelyn Lauder . This will somehow benefit Artists Against Abuse. Wanna talk abuse? The thing costs $100 and there will be some coffee or cocktails, but-despite the many plates present-there will be no dinner. That's the crazy logic of dem Hamptons!

[ Uptown Girls premiere, United Artists Southampton Theater, 43 Hill Street, Southampton, 7 p.m., after-party at the Atlantic Hotel, 1655 County Road 39, Southampton, by invitation only; Artists Against Abuse, 1927 Scuttlehole Road, Bridgehampton, 5:30 to

8 p.m., 631-329-4398.]

Sunday 10th

We smell a rat: More proof Manhattan is going down the tubes: It's 85 freaking degrees outside and Pottery Barn is already putting out earth-toned chenille throws?! Puh-leeze …. Playwright Julia Edwards, a Brown semiotics major, fights back against this kind of slick corporate hegemony with The Rats Are Getting Bigger , an Off Off Off Broadway musical set in a new Manhattan of pigeon-free streets, soy-based hot dogs and graffiti-less walls. The "kooky" plot: The heiress to the Bloomingdale's empire, one Mrs. Bloomingdale, "spawns a half-rat/half-human baby" (El Raton) and flushes it down the toilet, where it rises up in the sewers as leader of a rat army. (Kind of like The Nutcracker meets Rosemary's Baby .) Meanwhile, human paramours Ernest and Ariana start a revolution. Ms. Edwards, 33, elaborated: "At the beginning of the play, Ariana finds a pair of her panties that she swears have been eaten by a rat, but Ernest doesn't believe her. Later she ends up being stolen away by El Raton, and eventually is seduced by the rat." Hmmm …. Ms. Edwards added she "used all sorts of culture theory and applied those theories to the analytical side of the play." Don't say we didn't warn you about August.

[Wings Theatre, 154 Christopher Street, 10:15 p.m., 917-304-2857.]

Monday 11th

Hope floats: Poor Bob Hope … first his obit gets written by a fellow dead guy, Vincent Canby (what's next for The Times , d'ya think-reportagefrom Miss Cleo?), then Christopher Hitchens thunders in Slate that Mr. Hope was "a fool, and nearly a clown … but never even remotely a comedian." Is nothing sacred? How about a nice, innocent film festival at Lincoln Center celebrating Mr. Hope's 100th birthday? Tonight: Road to Utopia , Road to Morocco , My Favorite Brunette and our personal favorite, My Favorite Blonde . Just don't bring popcorn, 'cause the middle-aged Lincoln Center crowd tends to consider itself above all that.

[Thanks for the Memories: Bob Hope's 100th Birthday, Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th Street, plaza level, call 212-875-5600 for showtimes.]

Tuesday 12th

Fine feathers have their place, but let's face it: sometimes paying good cash money to go to all these "benefits" filled with hydrangeas, 5-foot-9 guys trying to get laid and socialites with the same names as our childhood pets gets a little tedious, ya know? To the rescue is Elsa's Ark , a worthy animal charity based in East Hampton, which is staging a super-low-maintenance Stay at Home Black Tie Ball ce soir . The best part? Nobody has to go to East Hampton! Instructions for attending "ball": send a check, then remain in your apartment feeling smug, as though you've advanced two spaces on the Game of Life. Incidentally, we're twittering with excitement over the prospect of spending an evening with our two new pet parakeets, Blue and Jesus , who in their short term of residence have already given us hours more pleasant conversation than our past five suitors, easy. (Just don't tell Elsa's Ark we actually had to trade in the original Jesus because she squawked a little too loudly …. )

[Stay at Home Black Tie Ball, Elsa's Ark, East Hampton, 631-329-2900,

elsasark@optonline.net.]

Wednesday 13th

A fit of cotton pique? Aw, we take it back-benefits are the greatest! The New York Junior Tennis League ( thwock! ), bereft at the recent withdrawal of both defending champs from the imminent U.S. Open, throws a "Summer Gala with the Stars" with the Arthur Ashe Endowment for the Defeat of AIDS (the late Mr. Ashe hailed from an era when tennis nymphs were far too dignified to pose on the cover of Maxim or its 1960's equivalent, Playboy -though they did occasionally wear cute little pom-pom socks) . Tonight's stars: David Dinkins, Mr. Ashe's widow Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe and Alec Baldwin -who, as you read this, is already lining up, anxious not to miss first pass at the buffet, not to mention first pass at Anna Kournikova ….

[The Boathouse in Central Park, 6:30 p.m., 718-786-7110, ext. 146.]

Unlike the costume epics that have made the Merchant-Ivory team famous, Le Divorce is a hip, contemporary romantic comedy, but it has all of director James Ivory's informed compassion for lavish detail, his usual all-star ensemble of stylish personalities spread across a crowded canvas of complex emotions, dozens of settings throughout Paris, and another script of wit and intelligence by Mr. Ivory and the unofficial third member of the Merchant-Ivory team, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. The elements blend smoothly to create a delightful blend of American sensibility and French chaos in a movie that is sunny, surprising and consistently entertaining. Based on the 1997 novel by Diane Johnson, it's the chronicle of an American-style marital smash-up dressed in a fashionable and sophisticated couture of manners and morals that is decidedly French. Amidst the fabulous food in four-star Michelin restaurants and the stratospheric shopping sprees on the Rue St. Honore (talk about a location shoot that looks like quel fun!), three plot lines converge: the Parisian-style coming of age of Isabel (Kate Hudson), a California peach with a Technicolor smile who arrives in Paris to find her pregnant half-sister Roxy in the middle of a domestic crisis; the emotional upheaval of Roxy (Naomi Watts), an expatriate poet married to a pompous, irresponsible French scoundrel who has now deserted her for a lusty Czech mistress who is married in turn to a jealous American psycho (Matthew Modine); and the two sisters' battle to save a family heirloom from being confiscated by the French-a valuable Baroque painting, created in France but brought over from Los Angeles, now wanted by three museums. Very complex stuff, peppered with characters that come and go like aperitifs, and it gets denser scene by scene.

While helping Roxy through her pregnancy and depression, Isabel gets a job working for Olivia Pace (Glenn Close), another American expatriate who is writing her memoirs after decades of sexual, political and literary adventures in the City of Light-a combination of Mary McCarthy and Susan Sontag, no doubt, but, as played by Ms. Close, looking more like Janet Flanner. Isabel also researches her own definition of l'amour fou with a much older, very married French diplomat (French heartthrob Thierry Lhermitte), who also happens to be the uncle of Roxy's two-timing husband. Add to the bouillabaisse the girls' parents (Stockard Channing and Sam Waterston), who want to drag poor, deserted Roxy and her priceless painting back to Santa Barbara; the Getty Museum's art curator (Bebe Neuwirth) and the pompous art expert for the Old Masters division of Christie's in London (ribald Oscar Wilde look-alike Stephen Fry), two rivals in the art world with material designs on Roxy's painting, both fighting to smuggle the canvas out of France; and Suzanne de Persand (Leslie Caron), Roxy's imperial mother-in-law and the controlling matriarch of her son's upper-class family, who will stop at nothing to apply the tenets of French divorce law for her own domestic materialism. Somehow it all comes to an explosive head in a spray of melodramatic bullets on top of the Eiffel Tower, with Matthew Modine getting even with everybody, perhaps for the smallness of his role. The ersatz ending, which I won't spoil, is unconvincing enough to be the one disappointment in an otherwise radiant experience. But even if you tire of the pace, the plotting and the population, you'll love the jewels, the 17th-century furniture, the excursion to Leslie Caron's country estate, Mr. Lhermitte's sexy bachelor den in Montmartre, the luxurious lunch at Laperouse, the arrondissements which architecturally change personalities as fast as the people who live in them … in short, all the things that make Paris Paree. Kate Hudson, as the film's centerpiece, more than makes up for the lame work she's done in her last four films, and the rest of the performances are juicy as profiteroles and stylish as Lanvin. Pierre Lhomme's bright, polished cinematography bounces off the retina like holiday sparklers, the memorable music by Merchant-Ivory veteran Richard Robbins is rich and sensual, and the masterful editing by John David Allen is a moving collage of images, sounds and tempos that keeps the movie on its feet from start to finish.

In a summer of wet noodles, Le Divorce is a Sunday picnic in the park with a modern, zonked-out George.

Turkey Time

Everyone has machine-gunned the catastrophic Gigli for an infinite number of perfectly justifiable reasons, but as tired as I am of the lousy, misguided Ben Affleck–Jennifer Lopez duet, I still don't find their vulgar, overhyped love song as sour and off-key as the one once howled by Sean Penn and Madonna, or Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley. If only they would restrict their boring public affair to the lenses of the paparazzi and not the cameras of the motion-picture screen, saving sane and paying customers hours of undeserved punishment, and move it to somewhere private we don't want to know about, like a mud slide in Bosnia. But here they are, in torturous closeups, on a mall screen near you, reminding the world how superficial, badly advised, greedy for fame and fanfare, desperate for money and attention, and pathetically incompetent they both are in the only two things that matter in career longevity-craft and talent. As oblivious as they are to criticism, and as unwilling as they are to learn from past mistakes (would you believe they've got yet another movie on the way?), they seem doomed to frivolity and make-believe. I predict the worst. Remember, even Mrs. Lincoln liked a good play.

Trying to analyze Gigli is like constructing a rocket ship out of paper clips. It's a moronic maze about a bungling Los Angeles hit man named Gigli (rhymes with "feely"), dispatched to kidnap the mentally disabled kid brother (Justin Bartha) of a federal prosecutor. Joining him is another Hollywood contractor (J. Lo) who does yoga and gets a lot of unintentional laughs quoting Eastern philosophy. She is also a lesbian who blabs a lot of contrived bilge about the power of vaginas that cannot be quoted here. As a matter of fact, the dialogue in this fiasco is so filthy and inane you can't even write it down. Shapeless and without a shred of originality, the movie mimics and copies pieces of a number of old movies, all superior in every way. The kid counts sunflower seeds and sings hip-hop songs and gets on your nerves faster than Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man . Though it defeats the purposes of motivation and logic, Mr. Affleck's tough, tattooed mob slob falls for the man-hating lesbian the same way he did in Chasing Amy , mysteriously converting her to heterosexuality when she throws him on the bed, mounts him for the silliest sex scene in movie history and announces, "It's turkey time!" (A line that makes no sense without a baster.) Turkey sex apparently softens their hard hearts, if not their hilariously fumbling accents. There's a big deal about feeling blue about cutting off the retarded kid's thumb and mailing it to his brother. So they break into the morgue and saw the thumb off a corpse with a plastic knife while the kid sings the rap song "Baby Got Back." The two stars are only slightly less plastic than the knife, but a great deal phonier. They are undeniably buff and wear as little as possible to prove it, but they remain pitifully clueless when required to pronounce a word containing more than two syllables or play a scene for even the most minimal dramatic impact. Writer-director Martin Brest offers no help in the direction of realism. While the garbage mounts, he distracts from our irritability quotient with screechingly dissonant cameos by Lainie Kazan, Christopher Walken and Al Pacino, who won an undeserved Oscar in Mr. Brest's Scent of a Woman and doesn't mind trashing his reputation to say thanks. Will anybody see this movie, or-like Madonna in Swept Away -will it vanish without a fingerprint to prove it ever existed in the first place? Lurid curiosity seekers may check it out, like the ambulance chasers who flock to fires and the freaks who would pay anything for a front-row seat at a public execution.

I would consider it miraculous if any of the victims of Gigli ever spoke to each other again, but knowing Hollywood, they are probably already planning a sequel.

Hope Springs Eternal

Bob Hope lasted a whole century, and for the next 100 years they'll probably still be rewarding him for it. Although he made few films of any impact or lasting importance, he did win five Oscars-not for his acting, but for humanitarian causes and industry contributions. He was more famous for his sarcastic one-liners, celebrity golf tournaments and flag-waving, morale-boosting trips to the battlefronts of every war where the American military saw action than he was for his movies. Still, the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center is celebrating this show-business institution from Aug. 8 to 14 with a 13-film salute called "Thanks for the Memories," which was planned long before he died on July 27. The Film Society of Lincoln Center has creepy but perfect timing, if you ask me.

While the menu spans the highlights of his comedy career, it offers few surprises. Four of the best Bob Hope movies- Fancy Pants and Critic's Choice , both with Lucille Ball, and Sorrowful Jones and The Lemon Drop Kid , both based on Damon Runyon tales-are curiously missing. Three of the seven popular but now hopelessly dated Road pictures he made with Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour are included, as well as two films that hold up better- The Paleface and The Facts of Life (also with Lucille Ball). What you won't see much of-and this is an area of his achievement people always overlook-is the positively amazing number of songs Ol' Ski Nose introduced on stage and screen. Before he ever journeyed west in 1938, Leslie Townes Hope had already sung Jerome Kern's "You're Devastating" in Roberta and performed Cole Porter's "It's De-Lovely" with Ethel Merman and Jimmy Durante in Red, Hot and Blue . But he really made history in 1936, when Ira Gershwin teamed with Vernon Duke to write the score for the musical revue Ziegfeld Follies of 1936 . This sensation starred Fanny Brice, Josephine Baker, Gertrude Niesen, Judy Canova and the dancing Nicholas Brothers, but it was newcomer Bob Hope who stopped the show, singing "I Can't Get Started" to bored showgirl Eve Arden while she yawned and manicured her nails. Hollywood called, and the rest is history.

At Paramount, Hope's warbling abilities were under-utilized, especially after he teamed with Crosby. The writing team of Burke and Van Heusen created several musical masterpieces for those dopey Road pictures, but they were all sung by Der Bingle. Still, in The Big Broadcast of 1938 , his first Hollywood film, Hope turned "Thanks for the Memory" into a popular standard that became his theme song for the rest of his life. In the western spoof The Paleface (1948), he turned a throwaway ditty by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans called "Buttons and Bows" into such a smash hit that the song won an Academy Award. I laugh every time I see Bob Hope saddle up to voluptuous Jane Russell on the lyric line "My bones denounce … the buckboard bounce." Three years later, in The Lemon Drop Kid , the same songwriting team provided Hope with another blockbuster, and "Silver Bells" became an annual holiday classic. The king of wisecracks was also no slug when it came to plugging tunes.

Bob Hope: funny icon, international hero, buried wearing more medals than General Eisenhower. A bigger celebration seems mandatory. But let's face it-death at 100 years old lacks a certain spontaneity.

It crossed my mind that this could be his idea of a come-on. I'm pregnant, and showing, which made it even stranger. " Bubeleh , relax," he said. "I am massage therapist. One twenty-five an hour, but for you? You are already like mishpocheh ! I do it for 75."

Before I could respond, he commenced to kneading my neck with hands that felt like they could halve a turkey. "I massage Shirley MacLaine, Magic Johnson," he said. "I massage millionaires! But for you I make an exception. I also work in immigration."

"Ach, how you need it," he added with a hiss. He was right. I hadn't been paying much attention to my body, which was responding with waves of relief. I wanted him to touch my hip. There was a shooting pain there-probably the result of the new weight I was carrying-which I'd been hoping every night would just go away by morning.

"Look how everyone is jealous of Avrahim touching you," he said. I glanced up and in the mirror above the bar saw the entire restaurant (four tired drunks and some out-of-towners seeking a snack) looking at me, a trifle alarmed. My food came, and he went out to his car. "Don't go anywhere!" he said, but before I could decide to run away, he'd returned, panting, carrying the a large green table wrapped in plastic. He also had a gym bag. "Do you have microwave?" he asked casually, as we rode up in the elevator together. "I have oil."

I figured if he tried anything, I could just scream, and someone from the hotel would come save me. Now we were inside my room. "Do you mind if wear shorts?" he said.

"Um-" I said.

He started setting up the table, and I went in the bathroom to change. It was a cheap hotel, and there was no phone in the bathroom. I wasn't sure who I'd call. I put on my nightgown and went back out; now he was wearing only shorts-no shirt or shoes. He had a beach-ball belly, blanketed with hair.

"Don't you think it's hot in here?" he said.

"I-"

"Are you ready?" he asked cheerfully, rubbing a plastic bottle of oil ("Almond Evenings") between his palms. Not knowing what else to do, I started to climb on the table. "Oh, but you must remove your nightgown!" he protested. I stammered something about not wanting to be naked, because I was pregnant. "Ach!" he frowned. "Cindy Crawford had massage when she was eight months pregnant, believe me. Why not you?" And he pulled my nightgown over my head, like a grandma, and I let him.

He started working on my back.

"Are you Jewish?" Abraham said.

"Yes," I said, head down in the table.

"Yes, this is the ass of a Jewish girl!" he said approvingly. "You ever been to Israel? You should go. You would see all your sisters there."

"Your husband Jewish?" he went on.

"Yes," I lied.

"Good," he said. "We make nice husbands. We are warm, we give. I am married to the same woman for 25 years until two months ago. She is too old for me now. I want to go out and have fun! We have one son; he is 20; he is deejay."

He squeezed my ass.

"Ach, feel these pain muscles!" He gasped. "Why is your husband not massaging you?"

I didn't have a husband, but I didn't think I better tell him that. "I didn't know I needed it," I murmured.

"Oh, bubeleh , this you need!" he said. "Bob Hope he gets massage every day for three hours, and he is 97 years old. All his friends-Sammy, Frank, Dino-all dead! But he is going strong, shalom aleichem ."

"You from New York? I used to live on Fifth and Park," he said.

"That's impossible," I told him.

"On 40th Street," he corrected himself. "I did not like it, I came running here. I have clients they fly on the Concorde every 10 days to see me! They say, 'Oh Avrahim, I love you, baby.'"

I didn't know what to make of his claims of being a celebrity massage therapist, but I knew how he was making me feel: I was in heaven, I was melting. All the weight seemed to be falling off-of financial concerns, of pregnancy concerns, of being alone. I was floating. Then he touched my hip; I inhaled a sharp breath-

"Oh, baby, this is bad over here," he said. "You have to take better care of yourself, you are going to be a great mother, I see because you have so much love in your body. But you must learn to love yourself."

All I said was, "O.K."

We fell into silence. He gently turned me over, and started working on my neck and shoulders. My hand flew up. His hairy belly was smashing in my face.

"Oh, I am sorry, shaynala ," he giggled. "I forget, I am bigger than you are! Do not worry. With these hands I can apply 50 pounds of pressure, but you will only feel one pound …" He began to massage my belly. And I felt a little thump … it felt like having your name called when you least expect it, like being suddenly awakened.

I almost sat up. "Did you feel that?"

"Of course I felt that," he said. "She is like woman's soccer player. She's trying to make a goal."

"I never felt it before!" I told him. "I mean, not like that!"

"Ah, it's affirmation," said Abraham. "She is saying, 'Yes, Mommy, please take care of yourself.' She's going to teach you a lot, this baby."

After that, I was happy and I fell asleep. When I woke up, I was in my bed. He must have carried me there. I opened my eyes and looked over at the desk, where he was, in his clothes, fussing over a billfold.

"You see, I am carrying 1,000 dollars, I have no time to go banking!" he said, laughing uneasily.

I got up and put on my robe.

"I never made a lot of money. I have to work for money, but I am not complaining," he said. "To complain is an insult against God. Look, see … Four hundred forty dollars I got for three hours of massage! I have no time to cash it …"

"Oh Abraham,"-I realized-"I forgot to pay you!"

"I would do it for nothing, shaynala , but I-" He looked sad.

I told him how he had helped me. I told him how much it had meant to me to meet up with him tonight.

"Yes, we are each other's karma," he said, smiling. "And tomorrow, believe me, you're gonna be saying, Avrahim, I love you, baby.&quot: We hugged like mishpocheh .