What could go wrong?

Earlier this month, several members of the New York Observer staff took one for the team and tried out AeroShot Pure Energy, a "breathable caffeine product" that Senator Chuck Schumer has been campaigning to outlaw. It didn't go so well.

Yet despite the liveblogging of our panic attack and possible allergic reactions to the products, the company behind AeroShot sent us more of their products, including their line of Le Whif "Whiffable Chocolate Powder." This time, we videotaped the results. For science!

The flavors of Le Whif come in Chocolate Raspberry, Chocolate Mint, and just regular chocolate. After a brief moment of confusion over how to work the inhalers, we took our shots. Not half bad! At this point, we're almost getting used to the suffocating sensation of the burning powder as it sprays directly into our gullets. Now we know what it would feel like to suck Swiss Mix through a tracheotomy tube.

Still, we're still not positive that Le Whif is a product that should be put on shelves. Should we really be teaching kids that the best way to consume delicious treats is through huffing them. From there, it's only a short step to tanking Whip-its in order to create a hot chocolate combo. We'll have a nation full of Demi Moores before you know it.

Pursemonkey was on the way back from hanging backstage with Diplo, who was playing at the well-documented Vimeo and NIKON party at the vast Seaholm Power Plant in Austin, when he and the Kutchers stopped for a photo with GroupMe's SXSW delegation.

And with GroupMe mascot, the hash-eyed Poundy:

The app-curious star couple also stopped by the Foursquare party on Saturday, where Pursemonkey was briefly balanced on founder Dennis Crowley's shoulder.

Mr. Kutcher is a known GroupMe groupie; the app is on the home screen of his iPhone.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pU6EY2YR38A

It was the unofficial stoner holiday, 4/20, yesterday and Stephen Colbert expressed his displeasure with the entire concept. Best part? When he cracks himself up in the beginning.

And finally, Kate Gosselin got voted off Dancing with the Stars, meaning you can officially stop caring about Dancing with the Stars.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tJ4KmpB7lA

One star out of Four

The inmates are running a different kind of asylum in Happy Tears, a vulgar, happy-as-cancer aberration that takes the dysfunctional family idea to a new low. Whimsical, yes. Happy, never.

Two estranged sisters with nothing in common are forced to return to their seedy family home in Pittsburgh to deal with their father, who is suffering from advanced stages of Binswanger’s, a rare neurological disorder from which there is no cure. Jayne (Parker Posey) is an incompetent neurotic who can’t face reality on any level, and from her first scene, in which she spends thousands of dollars on a pair of knee-high, stiletto-heel leather boots from a shoe salesman who turns into a buzzard, there is some indication that Binswanger’s might be inherited. Her focused, take-charge older sister, Laura (Demi Moore), grapples with the problems of dealing with three kids and a gay husband while traveling around the country testing the quality of the local water supply. Both sisters once worked as strippers.

Joe, the senile father (played with maximum obscenity by a grotesque Rip Torn), is an incontinent old retired blues singer who sits half-naked at the kitchen table throwing up on himself. He is also being nursed (and ripped off) by a floozy named Shelly (Ellen Barkin), a sexy crackhead and check forger who wants her own piece of the hidden fortune the old geezer is rumored to have buried on the property. While they pretend to deal with real problems (selling the house, disposing of the contents in a yard sale, sending the old man to a nursing home), everyone gets waylaid by a script that is up to its imploding cerebellum in a dementia of its own. Laura spends her time dragging Joe from the table to clean up his very visibly soiled diapers. Jayne is married to Jackson (Christian Camargo), a rich California art dealer and would-be painter who slashes his wrists and paints canvases with his own blood. No wonder she talks to her sex organs and sees people disappear through patterns in the carpet. Shelly wears a stethoscope around her neck and eats with her bare hands while Joe tells his daughters, “She’s had two kids, but she’s still real tight.” For family bonding, they pile up in bed and watch The Mummy together. Later, the family photos turn into Boris Karloff.

Happy Tears was written and directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein, a memorable actor (Streamers, The Lords of Discipline) and an original thinker with a kinky sense of humor who has unfortunately developed no distinctive skills as a writer or director of substance. (His first feature, Teeth, was about a woman with teeth in her vagina.) He is also the son of renowned artist Roy Lichtenstein, and his mother did suffer from dementia, but he insists the film is not autobiographical and claims he did not base the character of Jackson on himself. This is probably true, since nothing in the film smacks of reality. Aside from Demi Moore’s grounded portrait of the world-weary Laura, nothing rings true. Everyone says and does freaky things, but nobody ever comes to life. Even the occasional attempt to focus leads to irrelevant gimmicks and distracting dream sequences: Shelly drinking Joe’s blood like a vampire; Jackson in a straitjacket, bouncing off the walls of a padded cell. During a discussion about long-term nursing, while the doctor is explaining Joe’s dementia, Jayne hears Hawaiian hula music. After a while, you stop scratching your head and start checking your watch. There’s a fine line between lovable eccentrics and certifiable lunatics. The twisted sisters in Happy Tears are not much fun as either.

rreed@observer.com

“My dad always said 'I'll believe when I hear it from the horses mouth,'” was the message his subscribers received. “twitter is the horses mouth. no more 'well the news said ...'”

By Friday, April 17, Mr. Kutcher became the first “Twitterer” to attract a million readers. He beat CNN.com's continuous headline feed, also syndicated to Twitter, by a half an hour.

Mr. Kutcher did not dismiss the Hollywood press corps in fewer than 140 characters. They've done it themselves, and the words keep pouring out about it.

Once upon a time, Variety owned the town of Hollywood. It was the hometown paper. Something only became news after it was reported in Variety. And if that ray of sunlight ever hit and you finally found yourself reading your own name in Variety, then maybe one day you’d be a “topper” somewhere.

And then—as the now-familiar story of journalism goes these days—the Internet happened, and so did the imploding economy. And so a vacuum of power, that motor of everything in Hollywood, opened up in the Hollywood press corps.

“Along come the blogs, and now they share that agenda with us,” said Neil Stiles, the publisher of the Variety Group. “There’s no question about that.”

“The agenda of the day,” he added, thinking aloud, “where we once had that on our own, we now share that.”

Of course, they're not all sharing nicely.

Or, put another way, Variety ceded its grip on the town entirely, and now the Hollywood press corps is in a state of revolution. There is no power structure. It’s all turned inside out and upside down. Everyone claims victory, but no one seems to have it, nobody is powerful enough to measure it. And, above all, it’s one nasty, mean, shrill place.

“For people working in the industry Variety and The Hollywood Reporter gave information,” said Sue Mengers, the original super-agent, reached at home. “You could see what movies are casting. What movies are shooting. Newspapers could never publish that information.”

Has she noticed anything different lately about Variety?

“Well, yes. It’s thinner—there’s less content,” she said.

Variety's Spicy Life

“In the universe there are 1,000 news sources,” said the veteran ICM power agent Ron Bernstein. “I’m just stating the obvious. Now there are a million alternate sources for news.”

And the business model for Hollywood news, everywhere, fell to pieces. Between Variety and The Hollywood Reporter—once a worthy competitior to Variety that has been ushered to the sidelines—the business has been tanking, but also, everywhere.

Between 2007 and 2008, IMS, a third-party tracking service, said that ads and barter ads in Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and The Daily Gotham went down 26 percent; according to an internal hand count by Brian Gott, the publisher of Daily Variety, they are down 31 percent in the first quarter for the three publications.

For years, Variety made money hand over fist. It was a machine. Recently, former editor Peter Bart said that “niche journalism is the most profitable sector if it works.”

If it works. And somehow it stopped working for Variety. Reed Business Information, its parent company, recently cut 7 percent of its staff, including 8 percent of the Variety Group.

Mr. Bart, the longtime editor, got kicked upstairs in favor of longtime No. 2 Tim Gray.  Mr. Stiles, its publisher, outlined a few core reasons the business started tanking. The writers’ strike started it; the credit crunch followed; and then the Academy Awards season, said Mr. Stiles, was considerably smaller—fewer movies and fewer ads, particularly after Christmas, when big studios gave up on any chance of putting up a campaign against Slumdog Millionaire.

“From early on it looked like Slumdog Millionaire was going to clean up,” Mr. Stiles said. “So companies backed off a bit and said, ‘Look, we don’t have a prayer of winning so we might as well back off on the ad units because there’s no point in trying to influence people.’”

And there went the all-important “For Your Consideration” ads that buoyed the trade, targeted at Academy voters.

In many ways, the Slumdog phenomenon shows how the problem with the Hollywood press corps is only an extension of the churning of the larger Hollywood power structure. After all, who made Slumdog a winner? Not the studios themselves. There was already a wolf at the door.

Sure, Variety.com was a huge traffic generator—but there was a problem, the same one that is dawning on all major newspapers around the country. Bundles of readers and page views doesn’t translate into cash.

“Everybody has figured out how to build the traffic,” said Mr. Stiles. “What they didn’t work out is that when you get to the Promised Land, is it worth being there? The fact of the matter is, the business model is never going to be attractive.”

And it wasn’t: as a business, the magazine has taken a hit, and as everyone has learned—The New York Times included—digital advertising money is pennies to the (diminishing) print ad dollar.

Mr. Stiles said there needs to be a new focus—online will charge for some content, but not all. News should be free, but the archives and some specialized content will be entirely behind a paywall, which he believes will bring in money.

But, we asked him, if Variety isn’t on top now, what will it take to get back?

“It wasn’t, then it was, and now it isn’t again, and it will be,” said Mr. Stiles, the Variety publisher. “We just have to own that space again.”

“It might be Variety, it might be—I don’t know,” he continued. “I’m aiming to make sure it is Variety, but I wouldn’t be so arrogant as to assume we will be.”

Across town, the L.A. Times has never been able to fulfill its potential as a must-read in Hollywood. For years, the paper has been grappling with its identity. Dean Baquet, the former editor of the paper, liked to troll the hallways and say that the Times was going to own Hollywood!

But that never happened. The L.A. Times became hamstrung by too many internal conflicts (competing desks going after the same story, staffers upset that the Web site gives into celebrity link-baiting temptations) and, of course, a staff that is less than half the size of what it was eight years ago.

And they suffer from a similar problem to Variety. Bloggers like Nikki Finke have been nimble and fast, and while an L.A. Times reporter is on the phone waiting for confirmation, Nikki puts it up regardless if it’s right or wrong.

So perhaps in an attempt to combat Nikki Finke, the L.A. Times has restarted Company Town, which will be written by Joe Flint, a former Wall Street Journal reporter.

“We’ll be able to do things like a rumor of the day,” said one staffer. “Newspapers need to figure how to do this, to report on the things that we know—we know— are true, but that no one is confirming. And that’s where Nikki kills everyone. She goes out there and says it, and sometimes it’s true, and sometimes it isn’t, and no one holds her for account for what’s not true. And everyone credits her when she’s right. Hopefully, [Mr. Flint] will be able to figure it out.”

The Replacement Killers

“The trades have become increasingly irrelevant,” said Sharon Waxman, the former New York Times reporter who has started a blog of her own, The Wrap. “I used to get the trades. I used to get Variety every day and it’s been a long time since I got Variety every day.”

“When I started the Web site, I think people were—not surprised— but I think people realized ‘Oh my God, here’s the truth! This is not the pabulum that I’m getting every day,’” said Nikki Finke, the writer behind the daily blog Deadline Hollywood.

“The L.A. Times has a very strange relationship in Hollywood,” Ms. Finke said. “Sometimes it’s in bed with them, sometimes it’s not. It’s changed owners, changed editors, changed focus and—along with The New York Times—the L.A. Times has desperately needed advertising by the studio and networks and they have become more groveling. You just don’t see those negative stories that you used to.”

Whether it’s true or not—she would argue that everything that she says is true—it’s what gave her an opening and a following.

The Web site launched in March 2006, and by time the writers’ strike hit in the fall 2007, it was a bona fide hit and a must-read among everyone in Hollywood (and earned Ms. Finke our Media Mensch of the Year award).

“Nikki is the one to beat right now,” says the now-retired longtime Hollywood reporter Anita Busch.

Ms. Finke reported on her blog that Variety wanted to buy her (Mr. Stiles, the Variety Group publisher, said there was an early conversation, but it didn’t get much farther than that). Business Insider reported that Arianna Huffington was interested in buying Deadline Hollywood as well.

“We are not in any conversations to buy Nikki Finke,” Ms. Huffington said when we asked her about it. But had she ever entertained the idea? “We’re not in any conversations now. That’s all I can say.”

It might have been a good move.

“What is clear—what is absolutely clear—is that people in Hollywood have been hungry for an alternative,” said Ms. Waxman.

Ms. Waxman has a full-time team of six people, and a series of other contractors, many of whom are on one-month contracts, and her largest single investor is the venture capital firm Maveron, which was co-founded by current Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz and Dan Levitan, a former managing director at Schroders who helped with the Starbucks IPO.

In her office, in her West Coast home, she’s got a list of words up that can’t be used by contributors at The Wrap.

“We are not the trades,” she said. “We’re just not. Inevitably, people have come to us who are from the trades. So if I have to beat it out, I will do that! I do have a sign up that says I don’t want to see any of that industry jargon that is incomprehensible to the average reader. ‘A starrer! A helmer! A lensman!’ None of that stuff goes in The Wrap.”

She said she wants to watch her spending because when there’s a shake-out, which she said will inevitably happen with the trades and the broadsheet papers, she wants to be there. "They've come to The Wrap in great numbers because they want to read a site that doesn’t have an agenda and doesn’t have a nasty tone to it that is interested and knowledgeable about their lives and their business and their world and wants to report on it in a way that is lively and has a pulse, but isn’t mean-spirited.”

It sounded like a not-so-subtle jab at Ms. Finke, and before we knew it, we were in the middle of yet another fight.

“People around Hollywood are terrified of her,” said Ms. Waxman. “I’m surprised how terrified people of her. A journalist only has so much power as you give them.”

“I can’t believe that she’s saying that with a straight face,” Ms. Finke said. “Her site is getting no traffic and is inaccurate and boring. And no one in Hollywood is talking about it. She must be desperate.”

Several posts on The Wrap—down to analyzing how much Deadline Holllywood could sell for and another where a contributor calls Ms. Finke “emblematic of a true danger that now exists in journalism: the unchecked reporter”—have come after her.

Ms. Finke, characteristically, returned the fire.

“When I started my Web site, Sharon would say to me, ‘I hate your Web site,’” said Ms. Finke. “She said, ‘You take all your time and everyone is talking about you and I hate it.’ And I said ‘Sharon, if you’re my friend, aren’t you pleased? If you had something going for you, I would be pleased for you.’ Then she said ‘No, I hate it, I hate it.’ Then she lied to me about what she was doing! She said she was going to start a blog about politics. Totally lied to me!  I had to hear from everyone else that she was going around to people and saying she was going to compete with me. What friend does that to another friend!”

Ms. Waxman called that account “inaccurate,” and added: "Nikki has her own view of reality which does not always accord to reality as others see it. The way she twists things and the way she always manages to bend the facts—and I put facts in quotes—is in a way that suits her.”

‘A Small Town, Filled With Sociopaths’

We asked Mr. Bart if he ever saw Hollywood like this before.

“Absolutely not,” he said. “During my first stint [at The New York Times], it was downright clubby. To the real old-timers, this harkens back to the days when there were giant feuds between Luella Parsons and Hedda Hopper. They would go at each other in screaming fits of rage. It’s a reminder of that era.”

Throw a line out and you’ll find dozens of feuds tumbling in.

In fact, we did just that, with Anita Busch, who didn’t take long to start a feud from beyond the journalistic grave.

“I do think it’s kind of surprising that Sharon Waxman even has a blog,” Ms. Busch told us. “I think she’s even one of the worst journalists I’ve ever encountered. I’ve never seen anybody that ignores the basics of Journalism 101 as she does. I find it surprising that she’s got this blog.”

“I try not to click through on Sharon’s Web site because I don’t want someone who doesn’t care about journalism to succeed,” she added, for good measure.

(Ms. Waxman replied: “I feel sorry for Anita Busch for saying such a thing like that. I think that’s a pretty sad statement. I think it says more about her than me.”)

Patrick Goldstein of the L.A. Times and Brian Lowry of Variety threw jabs at each other as well. Mr. Goldstein frowned upon the way Variety did business—serving as a mouthpiece for a studio, essentially.

Mr. Lowry, in a blog post singling out Mr. Goldstein, calls him lazy, petulant and a weak reporter. “Now you have this blog, ‘The Big Picture,’ so I’m thrilled to see a newspaper that has laid off more than half its staff since I left in 2003 has finally dictated that you squeeze out more than 800 words a week,” wrote Mr. Lowry.

It goes on. Variety did a piece on bloggers—Ms. Finke was mentioned in a not so flattering light. Then she slammed back hard as well.

“I was told that Peter Bart and Mike Fleming of Variety were going around town telling Hollywood to stop giving scoops to Nikki! Ha-ha!” she said. “Hollywood was laughing at that, saying, ‘You’ve got to be kidding! What, do you think we spoon-feed her? She finds stuff out on her own!’What they didn’t understand, there’s something called reporting.”

We told Mr. Bart this.

“I think that’s childish,” he said. “Once again, the idea that’s a little presumptuous is that I would advise people how to handle Nikki Finke. I’ve got more interesting things to do.”

“The important people don’t talk about the media noise,” said Mr. Bart, almost aspirationally.

And maybe that is the problem.

“We’re seeing that the entertainment vertical has become a one-stop shop where you can get the latest news in and from the Hollywood community,” said Arianna Huffington, the creator of The Huffington Post. “We’ve had members of the community like directors, producers want to go directly to the user with blogging.”

That is: Why drop your message with a trade, a newspaper—even a blogger—when you can reach a million readers without any of them?

Ms. Huffington pointed to the self-defense she published on her Web site by Ron Howard responding to the Catholic League that his upcoming movie, Angels & Demons, is anti-Vatican. Scarlett Johansson wrote about why it’s “reckless and dangerous” for celebrity rags to obsess over the weight habits of movie stars. Alec Baldwin recently lectured his Huffington Post audience about the need for newspapers: “Journalism is what is required now. And, yes, some commentary. But more journalism than commentary. That's what a newspaper does.”

Even proximity to a tweety star gives you a voice, as when Demi Moore, called "wifey" in a tweet by husband Ashton Kutcher, barked at him not to suggest an unhealthy dietary cleansing routine to his many fans.

When celebrities doing journalism lecture journalists about doing newspapers, for Web sites that compete with newspapers and magazines to cover the industry the celebrity works … Wait, what?

“For one thing, you have bloggers who need traffic and are desperate for attention,” said Mr. Bart. “The overriding truth of the blogging community is they’re trying to figure out how to monetize their endeavors. So you have to call attention to yourself. On that side, you have a clear motive.”

Put more bluntly, Ms. Busch said, “Hollywood is a small town filled with sociopaths. And when you’re assigned to cover that? You really have to be on your feet.”

As long as you don't get your legs broken, that strategy will work just fine.

On Sunday night, Mr. Kutcher was giving another “status update” to his million-strong audience. Celebrity news, straight from the horse's mouth!

“Off to a suprise b day party for … ,” he wrote; then, “Uh maybe not.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article characterized Howard Schultz as an invididual investor in The Wrap, instead of co-founder of the venture capital firm that made the investment.

The early reviews have been split down the middle, with the fanboys drooling (spoiler alert: Harry Knowles loved it!) and the real critics meeting the film with a shrug or worse. Says The Hollywood Reporter’s Kirk Honeycutt in his pan: “Bottom line: Ouch."

That hurt! Still, love or hate, everyone seems to agree that “visionary” director Zack Snyder has succeeded in painstakingly recreating Alan Moore’s graphic novel. (Just prepare to be disappointed if you’re looking for the giant squid.) But from where we sit, the one thing he missed is the casting!

Oh sure, Little Children co-stars Patrick Wilson and Jackie Earle Haley, playing Nite Owl II and Rorschach respectively, are ideal. Mr. Haley is adept at doing creepy and pathetic; Mr. Wilson, the very definition of “hot, but impotent." And while in some quarters the feeling is that Robert Downey Jr. should have been The Comedian, we think Jeffrey Dean Morgan will be just fine. Simply, Mr. Downey Jr. is way too nice to play a role like that. Mr. Morgan, on the other hand, has always seemed like a bit of a jerk (playing a ghost on Grey’s Anatomy who got to have sex with Katherine Heigl might have something to do with that). It’s the rest of this motley crew that leaves a lot to be desired! So join us as we recast Watchmen.

Demi Moore as Silk Spectre I: Watching the two female leads in Watchmen was a difficult task. Between the nudity and the general misogyny directed towards all women in the graphic novel, we doubt a lot of A-list actresses were banging down Mr. Snyder’s door to appear. That being said, is it written, Slumdog Millionaire-style, that Sin City co-star Carla Gugino has to appear in every adaptation of an acclaimed graphic novel? Give us the older and just plain better Demi Moore instead.

Cameron Diaz and Maggie Grace as Silk Spectre II: If you’re going to cast Cameron Diaz look-alike Malin Akerman in this role, why not just go for the real thing? As for those pesky flashback scenes, we’d slide in former Lost castaway Maggie Grace. If she can play a teenager in Taken, we’re sure she can do it in Watchmen. Too bad we can’t find any room for Boone.

Javier Bardem as Dr. Manhattan: Billy Crudup possesses a lot of useful character traits, but being laconic isn’t one of them. And unfortunately for him, Dr. Manhattan is a soulless and dead-eyed bore—words like “tachyon” are just not said in anything other than a Ben Stein-like monotone. So how about we go with Javier Bardem? Dr. Manhattan might be an All-American, but Mr. Bardem’s rumbling baritone, used so effectively in No Country for Old Men, would suit the big blue guy just perfectly. And this time, he wouldn’t need that ridiculous haircut.

Ralph Fiennes as Ozymandias: We really like Matthew Goode—so effete in Match Point, so dastardly in The Lookout—but he’s way too young for this role. And, no offense, we have a hard time thinking of him as the smartest man in the world. Ozymandias is the type of guy who would affect a British accent just for the hell of it; a man who seems bored with his own intelligence. Mr. Fiennes, come on down! An actor of his caliber could liven up the pages and pages of exposition that Ozymandias is forced to deliver in the final third of the story. We’re already trembling at the thought of Mr. Goode pontificating about the greater good while wearing a gold lamé headband that’s straight out of Barbarella.

in May. My excuse was a long-standing engagement, but that wasn't the real

reason. As much as I've admired many of her films, Ms. Fonda's career-watching

her morph from Barbarella to barbells-brings out a sense of confusion and

embarrassment. Demi Moore taps the same strain of acute ambivalence. As they

literally change shape from decade to decade, both Ms. Fonda and Ms. Moore show

too clearly the strains of trying to define oneself as a physical and spiritual

woman in a feminist age. We don't give them enough credit for the things

they've done well, both within films and as champions of women, because they

remind us, irritatingly, of our own internal contradictions. Flaunting their

sexual assets one minute, asking us to take them seriously the next, their

endless gyrations reek of discontent and uncertainty, parts that don't fit

together-body obsession, body despair.

It used to be that this dread neurosis was a seasonal thing.

In spring, when a young man's fancy turned to love, a young woman's turned to

the terror of trying on a bathing suit in front of a three-way mirror. The

gourmand pleasures of winter would be laid aside for diet pills and cottage

cheese. But now we're trying out for A

Chorus Line all year long. Chronic female insecurity about body flaws,

combined with the baby-boomer belief in freezing time and fixing what ails,

have led to Image Awareness Month 12 times a year, siren calls to reshape the

body through surgery or diet, and messianic fitness gurus beamed into our

living rooms 24 hours a day. Does this invitation to make yourself over

represent a new sense of empowerment or merely encourage overload as life

becomes a never-ending dance between new possibilities and new insecurities?

Among the 340 mostly useless channels that have invaded our

houses and taken over our lives, I've developed a fondness for the Health

Network. Amidst the garish mixture of kitsch advertising (Bobby Vinton CD's,

anyone?) and self-help psychobabble are some genuinely helpful shows, including

exercise programs low-tech enough for someone who'll never see the inside of a

bikini again, but who wants to flop around on the beach without embarrassment.

I had hoped to grow old staying moderately fit with Margaret Richards'

long-running Body Electric , aired

locally on Long Island public television. But dear low-key Margaret, with her

engaging girls-together humor and phony palm-tree sets, is apparently as

out-of-date as the generic word "exercise." Her show has disappeared from its

New York home channel. (Not Type A enough for the tristate area?)

Almost as old-school as Margaret, gung-ho Denise Austin

appears on Lifetime from Boca or the Disney cruise ship or Hawaii, doing yoga

on one show, aerobics on another, but it's too early and too cheerful for me,

and too full of self-promotional tie-ins. So I'm left with Yoga Zone and Bodies in

Motion , the two Health Network shows I like. The biggest drawback about

this network is the constant self-advertising: When their commercials are not

actively promoting their videos, the shows themselves are product placements

for their locations, in Jamaica and Hawaii, respectively. But on the plus side,

one or the other is on every half-hour all morning-they're the Law & Order of fitness programs-so

that they not only alternate at reasonable hours, but you can pick one to suit

your mood.

Gilad Jancklowicz, a charming hunk in a black body suit who

hosts Bodies in Motion , shows you how

the Israelis went from being the neighborhood weaklings to the tough guys on

the block. He's sexy with a dancer's grace as he performs modified kick-boxing

moves-but, except for the occasional ringer roped in from the beach, his

satellite team is a depressing group of standard-issue shiksa bimbos. On a

recent show I was surprised to see, among the inner circle of adepts, an obviously

middle-aged woman, dark-haired and a little lumpy in sweats, going through the

paces, but it turned out to be Gilad's mother. Yoga Zone , my favorite, is a refreshing half-hour with different

instructors and different body parts in play each day, relaxing and toning with

no obligatory 15 minutes of just breathing.

But I can barely manage an hour tuned to the Health Network

without getting a disturbing sense of the cultural disconnect, the warring

messages regarding women's body image. There's a 10-minute pitch for Bloussant,

an "all-natural herbal breast enhancer" that promises to "regenerate" your

mammaries within two weeks or refund your money. Ignoring the high-decibel

warning that Bloussant has not been medically proven, smiling overdeveloped women

offer testimonials to its transforming power, not just of their upper-body

cells but of their self-esteem. No longer feeling old and undesirable, they now

walk proudly into rooms, exulting in the attention. From that uplifting

spectacle, we move on to a spot for something called Serevent, apparently for

asthma sufferers, that promises "fuller breaths"-a phrase that, if you're not

paying close attention, you might be forgiven for mishearing. Fullness is all,

until moments later we return to Yoga

Zone , where women with small breasts and limber bodies and gangly guys look

inward as they quietly announce that "less is more."

In films I recently saw back to back, two leading ladies put

it this way: "Women are darn fools!" The two women-Claudette Colbert and Lillian

Gish, no less-share the line in movies made 20 years apart. Colbert, poor,

unmarried and about to give birth in Torch

Singer (1933), is speaking to a similarly afflicted fellow inmate (Lyda

Roberti) in a Catholic home for unwed mothers. Gish, guardian angel of a brood

of illegitimate children in The Night of

the Hunter (1955), says it of her oldest charge, a teenage girl who, moony

with the discovery of boys, will no doubt soon furnish her with another little

bastard.

It seems that since then, instead of our becoming less

foolish thanks to wider professional options and what should have been a more

robust sense of self, our foolishness has just spread to other fronts. Our

ongoing conflict between essence and appearance seems to be: Does self-worth

lie in the breasts, the brain or-as Hillary Clinton ruefully suggested-in the

hair? Isn't it time to sit back, take a few big breaths-that's "breaths", not

"breasts"-and relax? Or, as they say in Yoga, "Namaste."

Mission: Impossible was one of the worst movies ever made. Naturally, it grossed a fortune. Now comes the dreaded sequel, called (what else?) Mission: Impossible 2 , better known as M:I-2 . The title looks like a highway marker, and you will need a map to find the plot. But who cares? With Tom Cruise, an astronomical budget, an endless parade of explosions and car crashes and a brainless summer audience eager to substitute noise and stunts for character and content, M:I-2 will probably break the records its moronic predecessor set in 1996. Get ready to rumble.

With Hong Kong action guru John Woo smashing stuff, thrills are guaranteed. In the first shot, a Russian molecular biologist carrying a briefcase with a deadly chimera virus leaves Australia for the disease control center in Atlanta; but he is murdered, his germs are stolen and the plane is exploded in midair by a villain wearing a Tom Cruise mask. All before the opening credits even begin. Cut to Tom as secret agent Ethan Hunt on vacation, climbing a mountain of solid rock with his bare hands, and rudely called back into service in time to find those missing chemicals.

This time he's got a new partner and love interest in sexy Thandie Newton, who plays a civilian jewel thief who also happens to be the ex-lover of arch-villain and renegade agent Sean Ambrose (Scottish heartthrob Dougray Scott), the man wearing the Tom Cruise mask. The real Tom must convince the girl to lure her old boyfriend back into bed so he can track their location with a microbe he injected into her pretty ankle that shoots information up to a satellite and then into a laptop operated by computer hacker Ving Rhames. That's the only way, see, they can confiscate the chimera virus before it destroys the world. Wouldn't you know the plans go haywire, the girl gets injected with the virus herself, Tom has 20 hours to save her before she infects the world like Typhoid Mary and the villain gets rich controlling the sale of the vaccine!

To hell with the plot. Let's get to the action stuff. There is plenty of it, and although the credits list 45 professional stunt people, producer Tom Cruise wants everyone to know that actor Tom Cruise does most of them himself. See Tom wreck two gorgeous Maseratis on hairpin curves miles above sea level! See Tom snap a neck bone with his powerful thighs! See Tom do miraculous things with automatic weapons that haven't even been invented yet! See Tom on a motorcycle, crashing his way through a barrier of fire using only one tire! See Tom leap from a helicopter and fly like Superman!

With a screenplay by the esteemed Robert ( Chinatown ) Towne, M:I-2 is only slightly less asinine than the original. This is not a movie about characterization or logic or even the most basic suspense that might hold it together. It's a movie about Tom Cruise's new hairdo, and it's even sillier than James Bond because he takes himself so seriously. Never mind that you might occasionally pause between explosions and jaw-cracking fistfights to ask "Who is he?" He is Tom, moving away from the artiness of Stanley Kubrick in the iconic direction of John Woo action heroes, and taking home countless millions while doing it.

Anthony Hopkins makes a brief, unbilled guest appearance, playing Q to Tom's 007. Ms. Newton is as delicate and lovely as any pistol-packin' mama the screen has introduced. Mr. Scott often seems more charismatic and photogenic than the star. But they're all robots in the lens of John Woo, who will stoop to any cheap trick to make audiences retch from the violence. Telegraphing every emotion with thunderous music and ear-splattering sound effects, he's a shameless master of pain. When one trick works, he repeats it 10 times. The movie is so preposterous I thought it was a comedy, but the audience around me stared at the screen with the kind of deadly, poker-faced seriousness usually reserved for watching a documentary about the plight of starving cholera victims in Pakistan.

Oh, well. Summer is here. Enjoy that opening shot of the Sydney Opera House. It's as close to culture as you'll get in M:I-2 .

Double Demi, Twice as Bad

It could be worse. You could get stuck with Demi Moore in Passion of Mind . This pretentious fiasco strands the diminutive and recently unemployable star of Striptease in a twilight-zone psychosis from which nobody escapes unscathed. When first we meet Marie, she is the widowed mother of two, living in an isolated French farmhouse in Provence. When she goes to sleep at night, she wakes up as Marty, a career girl in the bustle of New York. In France, she's a literary critic. In New York, she's a literary agent. Two worlds, two identities, two lives. One is real, one is a dream. But which is which? Only one thing is certain–both of them are boring.

Her best friend in France (the fine actress Sinead Cusack, criminally wasted) sends her to a Viennese shrink who diagnoses a "multiple personality disorder." Meanwhile, her New York psychiatrist (Peter Riegert) thinks that she created the life in France as a fantasy to escape from Manhattan stress. Personally, I think she's been reading too much Sylvia Plath. While the plot meanders from French herb gardens to New York taxis with something less than an adrenaline rush, it doesn't take long for Marie-Marty to fall in love with a different man in each world, both dull. In France, it's William (played by Sweden's Stellan Skarsgård), a novelist she's given a rotten review. In Manhattan, it's Aaron (William Fichtner), a tax accountant with a fondness for Julie London records. (Remember "Cry Me a River"? It still goes swell with merlot.) Much confusion ensues, especially when she tells each man about the other, and everyone smokes furiously and constantly.

In all the psychological angst, the guys get jealous and force her to choose. With the poor girl facing total schizophrenia, it is never clear why they don't just check her into Bellevue. If only she could stay awake! But then we might never learn that her two daughters are really her , and her best friend is really her dead mother ! If you make it this far in Passion of Mind , you'll realize she's not the only one who needs some over-the-counter No-Doz.

Beautifully photographed in almost two different styles–muted impressionist colors of French chateaux and hill villages, and the clean architectural lines of Manhattan's concrete canyons and connecting bridges–the film (and Ms. Moore) provides more than its share of eye candy. But from the star to the production team, everybody connected with Passion of Mind is living on past laurels. Rarely has so much talent been wasted on such weightless fluff. Director Alain Berliner is on board for only one reason: His debut feature, Ma Vie en Rose , was an unexpected success. Eduardo Serra, the cinematographer, won much acclaim for his softly muted camera work on The Wings of the Dove . Loose-limbed, smoky-voiced Ms. Moore gives it all she's got. Yes, there is life after Bruce Willis, and her gifts are obvious, but she still hasn't found a proper vehicle in which to display them. They're all floating without a compass here.

Pretentious beyond words, this twaddle was produced and penned by Ron Bass, a high-priced screenwriter with easy access to outside financing, who won an Oscar for Rain Man , runs his own production company and grinds out scripts as fast as the checks roll in. He has also written Stepmom , The Joy Luck Club , Snow Falling on Cedars and My Best Friend's Wedding ; he is currently working on no fewer than six screenplays at the same time. Only a scriptwriter with that kind of track record could get the financial backing for a movie this dopey. Smart guys can make mistakes, even in Hollywood, but when I think of all the wonderful unproduced screenplays written by writers with no contacts, I consider it a crime to see a mess like this land on the screen for no reason other than that Ron Bass has clout. He's written some fine films and will continue to do so, but this one should have been tossed under the bed to gather dust balls.