Britton and Burns in The Fitzgerald Family Christmas.

Seventeen years after his impressive 1995 debut film The Brothers McMullen, writer-director-actor and indie-prod summa cum laude Edward Burns returns to the working-class Long Island landscape of his first success with The Fitzgerald Family Christmas. You can’t go home again.

In this overly familiar and ultimately meandering exercise in tedium, Mr. Burns also plays the lead—Gerry Fitzgerald, the oldest of seven children in an Irish Catholic clan overwhelmed with personal problems, struggling to get through the holidays without an act of home sweet homicide. After their father deserted them 20 years ago, the unmarried Gerry sacrificed his own life to stay home, care for his miserable mom (the wonderful Anita Gillette), and become a surrogate father to his six siblings, without one word of appreciation or thanks. Now, three days before their mother’s 70th birthday, he’s still trying to drum up some family spirit, but everyone is too preoccupied to so much as bake a cake. Sister Dot is divorcing her husband and having an affair with the boy who mows her lawn. Sister Sharon and her rich older boyfriend F.X., joined by brother Quinn and his much younger fiancé Abbie, all abandon the birthday dinner and run away to the Hamptons for the weekend. Another sister, Erin, is too busy being conflicted, with a Jewish husband to please and a Christmas tree to buy for their new baby’s toys. When the fourth sister, Connie, announces she’s pregnant, her depressed, unemployed husband J.J. slugs her, and the whole family comes rushing to her side to bodily evict him from his own house. Stranded in the Hamptons without a car or an explanation, the enraged lovers of Sharon and Quinn end up together, quite understandably, in a bubble bath and fall for each other. In this growing pile of clichés, holiday hell really breaks loose when baby brother Cyril arrives after a long absence in drug rehab, and Jim, the long-lost father nobody has seen in 20 years, shows up dying of advanced pancreatic cancer and begs to spend his last Christmas with the family. These issues play like the season finale of a dull, draggy television sitcom with disastrous ratings that faces imminent cancellation.

Instead of a warm, fuzzy Linus blanket of a Christmas movie like Meet Me in St. Louis or The Family Stone, the conventional plot lines, predictable soap opera clichés and exhaustingly labored verbosity of Mr. Burns’s screenplay just make The Fitzgerald Family Christmas a miserable ordeal. Every member of this vast, obnoxious family has an ax to grind, which means a seemingly endless stream of long-winded discussions, arguments and true confessions that nobody wants to hear in the first place. The characters are so self-absorbed, self-centered and self-indulgent—not to mention self-righteous—that they don’t even like each other, much less convince the rest of us of the value of unbreakable family bonds. When one sister finally announces “I think families are overrated,” you may want to cheer.

The actors are fine—especially the senior cast members, Ms. Gillette, Joyce Van Patten and Ed Lauter—even though they never stop whining. But as a writer, Mr. Burns has forgotten to make the characters likeable, and there are so many of them you need a diagram to both connect them and tell them apart. Dysfunctional families during the Yuletide season are nothing new, but you usually grow to like them before the turkey is served. Spending Christmas with the Fitzgeralds is like being locked up in a psycho ward with a gang of manic-depressive drunks in Santa Claus suits

THE FITZGERALD FAMILY CHRISTMAS

Running Time 103 minutes

Written and Directed by Edward Burns

Starring Kerry Bishé, Connie Britton
and Edward Burns

rreed@observer.com

Blame Kevin Smith, or perhaps Edward Burns. They took their little indie films (Clerks and The Brothers McMullen, respectively) to the festival circuit in the mid-'90s, grabbed a distribution deal and went on to fame and fortune. "The popular story that got everyone's attention at the time was the young filmmaker who put the entire film on his credit card,"  actor William H. Macy told The Observer. "His parents mortgaged their house and he sold his car, and it went to Sundance and Harvey Weinstein brought it for $8 million and everybody got healthy.

"But for every one of those stories, there's a Colin Fitz. There are a lot of very expensive home movies out there."

The long and (rather incredible) winding road for Colin Fitz, in which Mr. Macy co-stars, ends on Wednesday, Aug. 4, when the film is resurrected as Colin Fitz Lives! and available on demand via Sundance Selects. For those keeping score at home, that's more than 13 years after it premiered in competition at the Sundance Film Festival, in 1997.

Colin Fitz is a very witty film about two security guards (Matt McGrath and Andy Fowle) guarding the grave of rock star Colin Fitz on the anniversary of his death. Over the course of the evening, beers are chugged, epiphanies are had and a bunch of very familiar faces show up in supporting roles-in addition to Mr. Macy, there's Martha Plimpton, John C. McGinley, Julianne Philips, Mary McCormack and Chris Bauer.

Shot over two weeks at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx for $150,000-and completed in postproduction for an additional $100,000-Colin Fitz went from table reads to the film festivals in six months. "It was pretty crazy how fast it happened," said Colin Fitz screenwriter Tom Morrissey.

But that was just about the only thing that went quickly: Despite the positive reception the film received at festivals-New York Times critic Caryn James called it a "deftly amusing dark comedy" when it premiered at Sundance, and it was named "Best of the Fest" at the Austin Film Festival-finding an acceptable distribution deal proved difficult. "Deals were offered," director Robert Bella said in an email to The Observer, "but unfortunately none of them would cover all of our finishing costs. ... I tried for over a year after Sundance to try and secure a deal that would allow me to pay everyone back and get the film, as well as myself, out of hock."

For Mr. Morrissey, it was a hurdle he never expected to encounter. "It was terribly disappointing," he said. "It started to feel that it was easier to write and make a movie than it is to get it distributed. You have to answer the question from your aunts and uncles and everyone you know: 'When am I going to get to see your movie?' It was very frustrating-'I don't know ... maybe soon?' And then your voice just trails off."

Said Mr. Macy: "There can be bit of shame attached to [not getting a deal]. We went to Sundance and didn't sell. It's like when someone goes into rehab, you don't want to go, 'Hey, I heard you're a drunk!'"

While friends, family and the general public weren't able to watch Colin Fitz, the film had a loyal following. "There was a cult status that it went into-people writing about it online, scenes went onto YouTube," said Matt McGrath. "People were carrying this torch for this thing."

Those fans plus the persistence of director Robert Bella kept Colin Fitz alive. "For nearly a decade, I slowly paid down the debts and bought back the pieces," Mr. Bella said. "Little by little, the total amount owed got smaller and the finishing costs were reduced, which ultimately made it much easier to sell the film."

That and some new, never-before-seen talking-head interviews (including Fitz fan Harry Knowles), which further fleshed out the film. "IFC felt that the new footage helped frame the original story in a great way, while allowing them to release a new film, rather than one from 1997," said Mr. Bella. Arianna Bocco, IFC/Sundance Select's vice president of acquisitions and distribution, purchased this version of the film, newly titled Colin Fitz Lives!, from Mr. Bella over drinks.

"It just sounded like, 'Are you kidding me?' After 14 years-we made it in 1996-I didn't even think Robert was still plugging away at this," said Mr. McGrath. "I'm curious to see it, especially this version."

Mr. Bella told The Observer that he paid for the delivery of the original Sundance cut to IFC, and hoped that they would release both versions of the film eventually.

As for Mr. Morrissey, forgive him for still having a bit of trepidation, even on the eve of the release. "Honestly, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. I think after 13 years, I was entitled to think that. But now that it's finally here ... will I tell my aunts and uncles to go watch it? Definitely."

editorial@observer.com

But this fall, a sign was posted to the entrance, dated Sept. 15, announcing that the pet spa had been “forced out” of its lease.

In fact, the departure of WoofSpa from the meatpacking district was the culmination of a prolonged legal struggle with its landlord over tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid rent, as well as numerous regulatory violations and customer complaints of less-than-luxurious animal accommodations.

WoofSpa owner Keith Acker, who on more than one occasion during the life of his business spoke to trend-spotting reporters eager for pampered-pooch stories featuring him, wouldn’t comment on the shuttering.

“Neither I or WoofSpa will be responding to or commenting on your inquiries,” he wrote in an e-mail to The Observer.

But an attorney for the building’s management, acknowledging the legal struggle with the business, said that WoofSpa had not been evicted.

“They just got up and left,” he said.

The sudden shuttering came as little surprise to some disgruntled patrons, who became dissatisfied with the upscale dog-hotel.

“With the fake Le Corbusier sofas and fake Warhols, it was very much geared toward the West Village aesthetic done doggie-style,” said one neighborhood dog owner and former client, who wanted her name—and that of her precious pooch—withheld. “Keith really tapped into something, knowing that there was a certain comfort level that us West Village–meatpacking [district]–Chelsea residents felt in leaving our dogs somewhere stylish.”

Conversations with several patrons revealed that however luxurious-looking the place may have been, a kennel is still finally an indoor place where lots of dogs spend lots of time; dogs with rich owners, it turns out, don’t smell any better than the less fortunate of their species, making the prospect of an upscale kennel seem, at best, paradoxical.

And indeed, beyond its chic-looking lobby, behind the large black doors, the style-conscious anonym (and several other visitors) described a backroom with cages and fenced-in playpens more typical of a traditional shelter.

In the center of its cement floor, they remember seeing a large drain reminiscent of a communal shower.

For months, she reported no problems while her little dog “hung out in the lobby every day on the leather sofas and looked out the window,” she said. “He loved it there.”

But one day, her dog was bit in the face by another dog. And though WoofSpa employees responsibly rushed the pup to the vet and even covered its medical bills, she wasn’t pleased to hear that her dog’s attacker was also readmitted to WoofSpa.

Then, one day in the summer of 2004, she was tipped off by an internal WoofSpa whistleblower that her precious pooch had been caged up and locked in a closet in the back, with no water. Sure enough, that’s how she found him. She demanded her money back and vowed to never return.

Ever since, she and another dog owner—whose pet was also confined to the same closet—have referred to the place as “doggie Abu Ghraib.”

“You hear bad stories about all of them,” she said of dog-care providers in general. “But I’ve never heard WoofSpa-caliber stories about any place else.”

Another less frequent WoofSpa patron, Mary Ann Puccia, said she swore off the place after just two visits. The second time she came to pick up her tiny Papillon, she said, employees couldn’t immediately recall what they’d done with him. It turned out that her pet had been stuck inside his zippered carrier and stashed behind the reception desk.

“God knows how long he’d been in there! He may very well have been in there since the moment I dropped him off before 9 o’clock in the morning, and it was after 6 when I picked him up,” said Ms. Puccia, adding that it appeared her pup hadn’t been fed, either.

“The food container in the side of the bag was still there,” she continued. “All these huge dogs—including a malamute—were loitering and sniffing around his bag when I picked him up. The other dogs were probably sniffing out the food.

“Ever since that experience, he’s a maniac in his carrier,” she added. “It was very traumatic.”

Jordan Kaplan, owner of the Petaholics dog-walking and sitting service, has heard many similar WoofSpa tales.

“New Yorkers have a very high expectation of how they want their pets treated,” said Mr. Kaplan. “But, with that being said, this was just far and above any other companies that we were hearing about. Just a lot of bad news. Not just one disgruntled client, but a lot of people.”

Despite the negative pet-community chatter, WoofSpa was never once reported to the Humane Law Enforcement Office of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, a private entity that routinely investigates complaints of animal abuse throughout the state.

But WoofSpa’s record with city regulators is not so uneventful.

In 2004, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene cited WoofSpa for lacking the very permit necessary to operate a pet-care facility. The business eventually got one, according to a health-department spokesperson. But the business also went on to rack up multiple citations for its employees lacking the proper animal-care certification, as well as for regularly failing to file the required self-inspection reports.

WoofSpa was further hounded by Department of Buildings, which sent inspectors there at least four times and issued two citations for “illegal use of space for dog kennel.”

Zoning regulations, it turns out, don’t allow for dog-boarding facilities in residential and most commercial districts, classifying such places in the same category as human crematoriums, “[p]oultry or rabbit killing establishments,” and other semi-industrial enterprises that involve “offensive noise” and “odorous matter.”

Of course, no self-respecting Manhattan pet-care center would ever market itself as a “kennel,” even though many do provide overnight accommodations for mutts en masse.

“We tend to not shun that word, but we don’t like to toss it around because we’re really not a ‘kennel’ atmosphere,” said Rachel Deichman, manager of WoofSpa rival Biscuits & Bath in Greenwich Village, a self-described “cage-free facility” that instead provides “glass-enclosed corrals” for pets that stay the night.

For WoofSpa, the Building Department’s insulting “kennel” designation initially amounted to only a $400 fine, city records show. But the issue did come back to bite the dysfunctional doggie-care center during legal proceedings earlier this year.

As the landlord moved to evict WoofSpa over more than $40,000 in unpaid rent—which Mr. Acker attributed to adjacent construction driving off his customers with noxious fumes and vermin spillover—a lawyer representing the building’s condo owners further strengthened the case for removal by pointing out how WoofSpa’s “use of the premises is in violation of the zoning regulations,” according to court papers.

On July 31, the WoofSpa and its landlord reached an agreement to keep Mr. Acker in business so long as he made weekly payments of more than $12,000 to pay back his debt. He further pledged to operate “in accord with all zoning regulations.”

A month and half later, the WoofSpa moved out, leaving behind a pile of boxes and chewed-up furniture on the sidewalk, as well as a sign indicating that management was planning on “re-establishing our business in a new location.” (Calls to a posted cell-phone number were not returned.)

Real-estate broker Faith Hope Consolo, who’s now marketing the former WoofSpa space, declined to comment on Mr. Acker’s abrupt exit but said she expects the next retail tenant to be “more typical of the neighborhood.”

Since nothing I've seen merits more than a passing yawn, it's a good time to catch up. Lumping the new releases together in no particular order, the misery I suffered in the Russian horror House of Fools, directed by the ridiculously overrated Andrei Konchalovsky, does deserve special scorn, but I don't have the stomach to rehash it. Need I say more than that it's a freak show about an insane asylum during the first Chechen war. (Now there's a subject that will have them lined up to get in.) After two squalid hours in which the inmates of the violent ward-many of whom are played by actual schizophrenics and other handicapped, crippled, facially deformed or brain-damaged patients-line up for toilet privileges and live on a diet of porridge and cocoa, I'd had enough. Comedy or melodrama? Who cares? When I bolted, a helicopter had just crashed behind some lunatic with an accordion, who stood in the flames playing a polka.

Poach Motel

Coherent thrillers are rare, but Identity doesn't bother to make even the briefest shred of sense. If every new film coming out of Hollywood these days seems recycled, Identity is Agatha Christie Visits the Bates Motel. (That purloined promise actually hints of more thrills and chills than this moribund flop ever delivers.) It's a stormy night. Somewhere in the desert, the roads are flooded. A man, his wife and their little boy are smashed in the blinding rain by a reckless limo driver. The wife is in a coma. The cell phones aren't working. They head for a sleazy Nevada motel, where they're joined by a cast of character clichés from Central Casting we've all met before, in better films-the hooker with a bag of money (Amanda Peet), the has-been movie star (Rebecca De Mornay, who has seen better days), her chauffeur (John Cusack, who is clearly slumming after last year's Max), a young couple on their wedding night, a cop (Ray Liotta) transporting a handcuffed prisoner, and a demented, eye-rolling, mouth-drooling desk clerk who makes Tony Perkins in Psycho look like an ad for Vacation Bible School. From here on in, the camera creeps through a series of dark motel rooms while a maniac wipes out the cast, one by one. The actress goes first, and her severed head ends up in the laundry-room clothes dryer's spin cycle. Each new corpse is accompanied by the motel-room keys in descending numbers. Ten victims, all born on the 10th of the month, in 10 motel rooms. It's not nice to steal from Agatha Christie; one character even references 10 Little Indians, sometimes called And Then There Were None. Unfortunately, nothing about this version is anywhere near as good. When the plot narrows down the victims to the final one, who will be alive to identify the killer? Ah, these are the hooks that keep fools sitting in their seats, praying for a surprise.

Alas, there's no payoff. This dumb, pretentious rip-off was helmed by James Mangold, director of the dreadful Kate & Leopold, and written by somebody named Michael Cooney, who both wrote and directed Jack Frost II: Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman. So much for skill and craft. Both are too obsessed with technology, special effects and infuriating red herrings that defy convention to deliver a thriller that could remotely be misconstrued as logical. The script is laughable, the characters ludicrous. Why does the limo driver-also an ex-cop who masters the art of sewing human stitches in 30 seconds-read Jean-Paul Sartre when he isn't detonating bombs? And the mystery's elaborate explanation is so confusing and unmemorable that you'll forget it even as you're watching it unfold. Sometimes the movie runs backwards, like Memento; then it cuts abruptly to a judge reviewing the case of a maniac named Rivers. A psychologist (Alfred Molina, in a career sinkhole after Frida) argues that Rivers is too insane for execution. What does any of this have to do with the rest of this movie? Good question. By the time we get around to Rivers, the entire cast of Identity is dead, including the hero, played by Mr. Cusack-or is he? In the end, Rivers the killer turns out to suffer from "disassociative identity disorder," which means he is, in effect, several maniacs put together-i.e., the same maniac who killed off the people you've been watching during the previous endurance test, but with many separate identities-or maybe he's just one of the surviving victims, or maybe all of the victims put together, who only exist in the hero's imagination. I'm not supposed to spoil the party by revealing too much, but trust me: This movie is so preposterous, contrived and souped up with metaphysical gumbo that, no matter what I tell you, you will end up with another solution entirely. As the movie self-destructs like a suicide bomber, comes the dawn: The identity of the killer back at the Bates Motel doesn't really matter at all! And neither does Identity, a lame-brained nut job in search of an identity of its own.

Scam Sham

Confidence achieves new meanings of "boredom" undreamt of in the Random House Dictionary. Ed Burns heads a gang of confidence men who will con insurance companies, bookie clubs, the cops-anyone that comes along. This time around, they make the mistake of scamming the mob, represented by a big-shot L.A. porno king, smarmily played by a gum-chewing, scene-stealing Dustin Hoffman. Since he can't repay the money, Mr. Burns works off the debt with an even bigger $5 million scam. Two crooked cops he employs are suddenly approached by another secret agent (Andy Garcia) who's conning them. When lying, cheating and manipulating finally takes on an erotic charge for Mr. Burns, he breaks his own rules and takes on a trashy female partner (Rachel Weisz) who cons him. Everyone in the movie is conning everyone else in the movie. The End. Overplotted, overcontrived, overshot and overedited, Confidence is a weak attempt to disguise a very small idea. The biggest of the many problems it faces is a deadly lack of chemistry between Ms. Weisz, who looks like a deadpan Kirstie Alley with delusions of grandeur, and Mr. Burns, a smug bus-and-truck-company version of Ben Affleck. Forget about the movie, which is awful, and consider the possibility that, like Saddam Hussein and his many stand-ins, Ed Burns and Ben Affleck may be the same person! They look alike, talk alike, act alike, flirt with the camera alike in what passes for acting, play the same roles, and look disdainfully down their pretty, sculpted noses at their material in the same way. Honestly, has anybody ever seen them in the same room at the same time?

Bad Gamble

More cinematic tedium is pumped through the anemic veins of Owning Mahowny, a gambling dud that busily conceals the talents of its excellent participants faster than a squirrel hiding pine nuts. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Minnie Driver, John Hurt and Maury Chaykin are just some of the actors who try in vain to work up some adrenaline for a film that remains steadfastly dedicated to its own inertia. Mr. Hoffman, who is making a habit of this kind of thing, plays Mahowny, a dull Toronto bank manager with such an impeccable record for excellent judgment that nobody realizes he's been draining the cash from the accounts of various investors for years, milking bank loans to pay off huge gambling debts. Ms. Driver, unrecognizable in a blond wig and horn-rimmed glasses, is his naïve girlfriend. Mr. Hurt plays the oily boss of a casino in Atlantic City who moves moon and sand to get Mahowny's bankroll transferred from Vegas. The movie cuts ever so slowly from the victims to the casino owners, who stop at no luxury to get high rollers to their gaming tables, to the cops who don't know what's going on but suspect the worst, to the corrupt bank officials who only care about one thing-making a profit on the interest of the overdrafts before Mahowny goes to jail. Which he eventually does, though only for a brief period: Mr. Mahowny is apparently considered something of an eccentric in Toronto, where these events allegedly took place, from 1980 to 1982.

Knowing all of this, the movie is still hard to believe and impossible to comprehend. None of the get-rich-quick financial details made much sense to me. They never do-which is probably why, unlike the Vanderbilts and assorted drug-addicted rap stars, I will always be on close terms with the word "mortgage." The thing to cherish here is Philip Seymour Hoffman: He works fast and cheap, takes weird roles that leading men don't want, and is fearless and versatile. From the arrogant hedonist who orchestrated his own death in The Talented Mr. Ripley, to the flaming drag queen who befriended a tough homophobic cop in Flawless, to the grief-stricken glue-sniffer who flipped out after his wife's suicide in Love, Liza … , Mr. Hoffman is always shocking, unique and memorable. Isn't it time this pie-shaped phenomenon finally shuffled his frame into a movie as indisposable as he is?

Yet what Confidence may lack in the rich emotions of After Dark, My Sweet , or in the comparative slickness of such scam classics as George Roy Hill's The Sting (1973) and Stephen Frears' The Grifters (1990), it almost makes up in its kinetic energy and tactical ingenuity. What it shares with most of its predecessors is a sterling cast, in this instance almost entirely male, and the willingness of several talented performers to play against type, with entertainingly comic effect. Dustin Hoffman plays the sleaziest and most evil mob boss ever; Luis Guzmán shows that he can play razor-sharp smart as a crooked cop here as well as he has played befuddled and bewildered characters most of the time elsewhere; and Rachel Weisz demonstrates once again that a beautiful actress in a male action picture can escape playing an out-and-out slut only by playing an accomplished pickpocket (a choice Cameron Diaz wisely made in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York ).

Among the oddities of Confidence is the casting of soft-boiled Edward Burns as Jake Vig, the head con man in a crew of scam artists that also includes inside man Gordo (Paul Giamatti) and shill Big Al (Louis Lombardi). Also on Jake's payroll are Manzano (Mr. Guzmán) and Whitworth (Donal Logue), two undercover narcotics detectives on the take. Their specialty is storming into the scam scene so as to scare off the mark-in this case, Lionel Dolby (Leland Orser), an accountant who has just been fleeced of thousands of dollars. Unfortunately for Jake, the accountant happens to be working for a fearsome mobster named King (Dustin Hoffman), who has been known to have people murdered for much less than what Jake and his crew have done in stealing money that belonged to him. Sure enough, both the hapless Dolby and Big Al, who is unwisely boastful in barrooms, are quickly dispatched with bulletholes in their skulls delivered by King's henchmen.

The surviving crew members plead with Jake to do something to get them off the hook, but Jake boldly decides instead to double his take-and also his risks of being rubbed out-by confronting King with a proposition for an even bigger scam involving the gang-connected C.E.O. of a large company. The perilous confrontation takes place while the lecherous King is "auditioning" two bright-eyed, possibly underage teenagers for his strip club. King even makes a pass at the "sweet-faced" Jake-which Jake casually deflects with a consummate skill that manages to impress King, who complains admiringly that he still can't tell whether or not Jake is lying.

With King's backing, Jake undertakes his biggest scam to date, one for which he will need a beautiful woman as a decoy. As if by divine providence, he is literally bumped into by Lily (Rachel Weisz), who smiles flirtatiously at him as they disengage. Before she disappears into a restaurant with an escort, Lily gives Jake an over-the-shoulder smile that keeps him staring at her. As he walks away, he pats his pocket and discovers that it has been picked with surgical precision. This is one way of "meeting cute" that's at least as old as Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise , but Jake is all business as he subsequently recruits Lily as the crew's decoy.

The final major player in this congested intrigue chooses this pivotal moment to make his appearance as an undercover Customs or F.B.I. agent-or perhaps even another breed of scam artist. Andy Garcia is almost unrecognizable in his character's makeup as Gunthar Butan, a badge-flashing virtuoso par excellence who succeeds in blackmailing the crooked cops on Jake's payroll into tipping him off about Jake's imminent scam. By this time, there are more than a dozen passionately greedy players involved in scams within the scams, shedding real blood and fake blood in their merrily materialistic pursuit.

This is N.Y.U. film school graduate Mr. Jung's first screenplay, and it's a promising debut, though the intricacy of its plotting and the arcane details make it a bit too cerebral for the genre.

But in the end, Confidence rises or falls on the persuasiveness of Mr. Burns in a role more suitable for John Cusack. Mr. Burns projects much of the insolence of Mr. Cusack, but little of the saving vulnerability. That there is little chemistry between Mr. Burns and Ms. Weisz is unfortunate, but not fatal for an entertainment as painlessly fast-paced as this exercise in articulate frivolity.

Charming Victor Vargas

Peter Sollett's Raising Victor Vargas , from his own screenplay, based on a story by Mr. Sollett and Eva Vives, pops up as one of the happier surprises in this woefully unending winter of discontent, both climactically and cinematically. It is warm, generous, courtly, compassionate and humanistic in the best sense. Furthermore, it avoids the coarsening clichés of most Latino and African-American hood flicks. Hence, there are no gangs, no drugs, hardly even any consensual sex.

Yet the film begins on a curiously cruel note with the teenage male protagonist, Victor Vargas, complacently removing his sweatshirt as he prepares to mount a compliant, somewhat obese neighborhood girl. Before he can enter her beseeching arms, he hears a buddy's voice from the street, yelling for him to come out, then the voice of his nosy stepsister Vicki (Krystal Rodriguez) at the window below, threatening to call pretty, slender Judy (Judy Marle)-on whom Victor has a secret crush-to tell her that Victor has gone to bed with the notorious fat girl upstairs. Victor bounds from the bed to the window to deny the taunting allegations of his buddy and his stepsister. Abandoning the still-pleading fat girl, he rushes downstairs to keep Vicky from calling Judy at any cost, which results in his throwing the telephone out the window. We never see the fat girl again, and she is never even mentioned henceforth.

I am reminded of Igor Stravinsky's comment that it is easier in music to be interesting with dissonance than with consonance. By the same token, it is easier in movies to be interesting with sourness than with sweetness. If Mr. Sollett's film had turned out to be a story primarily about the endless humiliations of an obese girl in a sexist society, and of her yearningly unattainable aspirations for a true lover who was not another girl's reject, we would have had a suitably sour film of victimization and social significance. What we have instead in Mr. Sollett's film is a light-hearted romance in which no fewer than three couplings are achieved with almost medievally chivalric codes of reverence, restraint and respect.

Hence, when Victor first approaches Judy for a date, she rebuffs him with the explanation that she already has a boyfriend. Later, we learn that her parents' divorce has left her very insecure to the point that she is unable to commit to any serious relationship. She eventually confesses to Victor that he is her first and only boyfriend, and this confidence in him on her part empowers him to take the first halting steps to manhood.

Much of the intended comic relief in the film from the endlessly breathless and deadly serious courtships is supplied by Victor's grandmother (Altagracia Guzman), particularly when she drags him to family court because she suspects that he taught his kid brother Nino (Silvestre Rasuk) how to masturbate. But I never laughed at Grandma, an old Dominican woman clinging to the repressive rites of the Catholic Church to preserve her family from the satanic clutches of sex. I marveled instead at how gently and how seriously Mr. Sollett treated this character, who would have been so easy to caricature and ridicule.

One of the most interesting aspects of this film is its accidental ethnicity. The Jewish director grew up in Bensonhurst and wrote his script originally for a mix of Jewish and Italian teenagers-but finding himself based on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with a preponderance of Hispanic applicants at casting calls, he changed the characters to fit the largely Latino neighborhood. I suspect that the distance he felt from his characters actually helped him to be more sensitive to their essential decency as human beings. Oddly, it is often easier to be kinder to the Other than to one's own people, whom one may know too well, warts and all, with the warts becoming the subject of the film.

Among the other, mostly inexperienced performers are Melonie Diaz, Kevin Rivera, Wilfree Vasquez, Donna Maldonado, Alexander Garcia, Alexandre Garcia and John Ramos. Together with the leads, they form a surprisingly cohesive ensemble despite the lack of wider ambiance forced upon the film by its low budget. Mr. Sollett is to be credited directorially for knowing when to turn up the emotional heat with climactic closeups when they count for everything. Raising Victor Vargas is a stunning rebuke to all the high-priced pabulum being dished out by the mainstream studios every week.

Fallacious Fellini

Damian Pettigrew's Fellini: I'm a Born Liar , in English and Italian with English subtitles by Mr. Pettigrew and Olivier Gal, presents a very limited and limiting view of the film artist whose massively influential achievements in the cinema gave rise to the adjective "Fellini-esque," denoting an accumulation of grotesque pictorial details, primarily of wildly grimacing facial expressions more suited to circus performers and the mentally disturbed than for the less histrionic look of "normal" existence. For some reason (perhaps pertaining to copyrights), Mr. Pettigrew suggests that Fellini's career began and virtually ended with 81 ¼ 2 (1963). There is almost nothing shown from his pre– La Dolce Vita (1960) period, which I much prefer to his post– La Dolce Vita period, just as I prefer Ingmar Bergman's work before Persona (1966) to his work after. Just call me an unreconstructed classicist and let it go at that. The interviews are mostly with Fellini himself in a manner more introspective than expansive. In short, the film is all about him and no one else, except perhaps his wife and most cherished icon, Giulietta Masina, as well as the characters in his late films and the actors who played them-most notably Donald Sutherland in Fellini's Casanova (1976) and Terence Stamp in the "Toby Dammit" episode from Histoires Extraordinaires (1967), two very marginal efforts in his overall career. There's a mordant tone to the interviews, as Fellini (1920-1993) seemed to feel himself very close to death, albeit as a world-famous celebrity who was free to indulge in mock self-deprecation to feed his overweening egocentricity.

I met Fellini once for an interview, and I was a little surprised when he praised Ronald Reagan, but then I realized that he had been in the gunsights of the influential Italian Communists ever since the 50's, when his films were denounced for betraying the socially conscious heritage of neorealism, especially in such films as Rossellini's Open City (1945) and Paisan (1946), and De Sica's Shoe Shine (1946) and The Bicycle Thief (1947). Fellini was a great talent nonetheless-and at his best, very funny.

Still, there's nothing amateurish about the cast Mr. Burns has assembled for his overextended bit of whimsy. Mr. Burns plays Tommy, a celebrity-news television producer who looks down on his lucrative employment and bad-mouths it at every opportunity. After being thrown out of the apartment he shared with his girlfriend, he moves in with Carpo (Dennis Farina), his mentor, a self-proclaimed legendary seducer of women who advises Tommy to douse his testicles with cologne when he goes out on a date. This kind of coarseness is sprinkled throughout the dialogue, as if to regale a juvenile audience with dirty, sexy talk. I don't recall Mr. Burns ever being this desperate before. The problem here is that the characters talk about sex and little else all the time, and yet the movie is not at all sensual, suspended as it is in a perpetually post-coital sourness.

Tommy eventually becomes involved with two women. First is Maria (Rosario Dawson), a divorced school teacher who has the most poignant role; Tommy's second affair, with Manhattan blueblood Annie (Heather Graham), is about to begin when the picture ends. Annie is also about to divorce her lying male-chauvinist pig of a husband, Griffin (Stanley Tucci), who's a balding dentist besides. Griffin is the closest thing I've ever seen to a hissable villain in a Burns movie, given to making sexist comments in clusters as he beds down ingénue-ish Iowan Ashley (Brittany Murphy), who waits tables while attending N.Y.U. Griffin lies to Annie about his affair with Ashley so clumsily that the audience begins to get restive over her seemingly limitless credulity. Indeed, when she finally tells Griffin to hit the road, the audience cheered with palpable relief.

When Ashley sees the light and walks out on Griffin, she accepts the attentions of Ben (David Krumholtz), a doorman pursuing a career in a rock band. Ben is closer to Ashley's age than the middle-aged Griffin, and when Ben first meets him he asks Ashley if Griffin's her father-after which the "older man" insults fly thick and fast from both Ben and Ashley, reaching some sort of climax when Ashley refers facetiously to Ben's large endowment, sending Griffin into a frenzied flight of penis envy that becomes a running joke.

The largely friendly audience at the screening I attended is a story in itself. I was told that it was a critic's screening set to begin at the AMC 42nd Street Theater at 7:30 p.m., which would enable me to attend the end of a dinner party downtown. In the theater in the stratosphere, I waited till about 8:15 for what turned out to be a benefit for a foundation concerned with the victims of 9/11. People made speeches, and Ed Burns himself got up to thank all the people who helped him bring Sidewalks of New York to the screen. Joe Torre was in the audience in the flesh, and that was nice. On this night, though, Ed Burns was the kind of celebrity his character on the screen demeans. On this night of nights, they certainly weren't going to give me a frank audience appraisal of the picture.

My own instinct tells me that Sidewalks of New York doesn't work and doesn't go anywhere, but there are a few talented performers on display, and I can't blame Mr. Burns for keeping his hand in as an outer-borough person who made good. His character even makes a prophetic speech that returns the film to its roots in the kind of people we've been honoring ever since Sept. 11.

What's in a Name?

Jacques Demy's Lola , from his own screenplay, originally came out in 1961, but it didn't enjoy the cresting popularity of the other works loosely grouped around the rubric "the Nouvelle Vague." Mr. Demy was three years away from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), which would establish his reputation in France-though not in New York, where audiences and critics howled at the intrusion of an Esso gas station into a romantic fantasy. As for Anouk Aimée, the star of Lola , she was five years away from Claude Lelouch's A Man and a Woman (1966), which would make her an international star.

Mr. Demy dedicated his film to Max Ophüls, and at the time I thought he was thinking of Martine Carol's Lola Montès in Ophüls' 1955 commercial disaster. But in later years, Mr. Demy said that he was thinking of Ophüls' Le Plaisir (1952). There are also references to Marlene Dietrich's Lola Lola in Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1930). The idea is the same: the woman who sells her body without selling her soul. The Lola of Mr. Demy and Ms. Aimée performs in a smoky Nantes cabaret, where she encounters an old sweetheart, Roland (Marc Michel), and goes to bed with an American sailor, Frankie (Alan Scott), all the while waiting seven years for the return of her child's father. There is something gentle and elusive going on here, and you should catch the movie at long last even if you've seen it before.

disposition. Since the beginning of the year, I can't remember seeing so many

catastrophes in such a short amount of time. Doesn't anybody know how to make

movies anymore?

15 Minutes , with

Robert De Niro and Ed Burns as, respectively, a celebrity cop and a New York

fire marshal who reluctantly join forces to solve a double murder, at least

tackles promising material. At a time when everybody from White House in-laws

to convicted serial killers jockey for position in prime-time Media Age sound

bites, crime, tragedy and chaos mean ratings, money and fame. It's no wonder we

live in an age of ultimate cynicism. When the good guys meet the bad guys

searching for 15 minutes of attention on the network news, you can't tell the

difference. Until it degenerates into conventional,

formulaic violence and mayhem, writer-director John Herzfeld's 15 Minutes seems smart and fearless.

Sadly, that feeling of freshness dissipates

faster than yesterday's tabloid scandal.

Robert De Niro, a fine actor with a tarnished track record

who will take on any kind of project regardless of its quality as long as the

deal is right, plays a colorful and celebrated detective who dunks his head in

a urinal of ice water before each TV appearance to sober himself up for the

cameras. He's already been on the cover of People

magazine, and he'll do whatever it takes to stay in the get-famous business.

When a couple of killers from Eastern Europe arrive in New York posing as

tourists, brutally murdering two fellow illegal immigrants and a prostitute and

burning down a tenement building, Mr. De

Niro's cop seizes the opportunity for more media hype.

In the investigation that follows, he finds himself saddled,

for some unexplainable reason, with a fireman (Mr. Burns) who tags along like a

protégé. (Since when does a New York fireman arrest muggers and race down

Madison Avenue firing handguns? Has Mayor Giuliani heard about this?) Joining

them on the spree is Kelsey Grammer as the corrupt star of a tabloid TV show

who will stop at nothing to get a scoop on the air before Dan Rather.

Meanwhile, the two killers on a rampage do some high-profile flirting with the

media themselves. One of them is a movie buff with a stolen digital-video

camcorder who registers in hotels as "Frank Capra." As the horror escalates,

the satire peters out until there is nobody left to root for. The two maniacs

videotape their crimes, the TV star shows the brutal murders on national TV to

the kind of bloodthirsty viewing public that causes riots at Hannibal screenings, and everybody hires

a spin doctor. Even the psychos, obsessed with media stardom, employ big-shot

defense lawyers who fight for movie and book rights. When one of the wackos

claims insanity-an idea he gets from a guest on Roseanne -you know an American justice system based on media madness

has gone to hell in a sound bite.

Up to a point, 15 Minutes

is gritty enough to be a viable thriller and surreal enough to be a glaring,

in-your-face sendup of today's corrosive media landscape in a cinéma vérité style. But eventually, Mr.

Herzfeld the director loses his grip to Mr. Herzfeld the writer, and the movie

jumps all over the place at cross purposes with itself. In a subplot I am

obligated to withhold, Mr. De Niro meets a fate unworthy of a Dick Tracy

comic-strip villain and the film never regains its footing. This is not a

star-driven action vehicle; it's a black comedy about the feeding frenzy

created by a hyperventilating media that is clearly out of control, in which

there are no heroes-just hacks desperate for their 15 minutes on camera, with

barrels of gut-wrenching violence thrown in for distraction.

In these circumstances, two actors I've never heard of

literally steal the picture. Karel Roden as Emil, the Czech bank robber who

would massacre a Saturday-night crowd in Times Square for a chance to be

interviewed by Cokie and Sam on Sunday morning, and Oleg Taktarov as his

movie-maven Russian sidekick, Oleg, are on the screen as often as Mr. De Niro

and Mr. Burns, which shows you how confused and fragmented the movie is. They

literally chew whatever scenery isn't nailed down, demanding-and getting-most

of the attention. Andy Warhol was right: Sooner or later, everybody will be

famous for 15 minutes. Your turn is next.

Samuel Jackson, Homeless and Hairy

The Caveman's

Valentine is another preposterous muddle masquerading as a crime thriller.

This time Samuel L. Jackson, weighted down under 40 pounds of dreadlocks, plays

Romulus, a filthy, disenfranchised former musician turned homeless bum who

lives in a cave in the middle of New York City. (Duh.) When a junkie hustler is

found frozen, hanging from a tree outside the cave, Romulus decides to solve

the case. This is more complicated than it seems, since Romulus speaks in an

incoherent language that is half mumbo-jumbo and half J. Alfred Prufrock. Worse

still, his embarrassed and estranged daughter is a New York police officer.

(Duh.)

But this is the movies, where a grotesque madman can hear

voices, see visions, blame everything on an invisible Mephistopheles called

Stuyvesant and sincerely believe Hell is located in the light on top of the

Empire State Building, and still miraculously find sponsors in a fabulous

penthouse where the society set encourages him to use the shower, the Ralph

Lauren towels and the Boesendorfer to play a classical concerto. Ah, those guys

and gals at Denise Rich's parties are such suckers for Scriabin.

Eventually, this crazy wacko invades the celebrity-studded

art world of a famous photographer (Colm Feore) suspected of torturing the

hustler to death, sleeps with the photographer's sister (Ann Magnuson) and

becomes the protégé of a bankruptcy lawyer (Anthony Michael Hall) who has a

passion for lime rickeys. Nobody raises an eyebrow. "Hey, Caveman, this

detective work-with all due respect, maybe it's not for you," says the chief

police officer investigating the case. Before The Caveman's Valentine mercifully ends, we are treated to the

sight of a naked boy strung up on a meat hook to an aria by Donizetti and

imaginary moth seraphs the size of helicopters flying around Romulus'

dreadlocks.

This ludicrous mix of neo-Gothic NYPD Blue and Grand Guignol was directed by Kasi Lemmons, whose

promising debut film, Eve's Bayou ,

also starred Mr. Jackson but fared much better. She is still unpredictable and

he is still blissfully ignorant of all limitations, but The Caveman's Valentine is dead in the water from start to finish.

The point, I guess, is "Take the time to look behind the façade of even the

most repugnant creature on the street, and you might find a sensitive,

talented, intelligent lost soul behind the dirt." Show me a cave dwelling in

Central Park and I'll volunteer hot coffee and Krispy Kremes, but I have yet to

meet a raving homeless nut on the streets of Manhattan who could play a

Scriabin piano concerto.

Spies Like Woody

Allen

Company Man , an alleged farce that has been gathering dust on a lab shelf for two

years, is beyond description. (That is not a recommendation.) The diabolical

brain child of Douglas McGrath, a former staff writer for Saturday Night Live , it's a deadly fiasco about a wimpy grammar

teacher and driver's-ed instructor from Greenwich, Conn., named Quimp

(shamelessly played by Mr. McGrath) who pretends to be a secret agent with the

C.I.A. to impress his shrewish, social-climbing wife (Sigourney Weaver). When a

Russian ballet dancer (Ryan Phillippe) defects in his student-driver vehicle,

the C.I.A., to avoid embarrassment, puts Quimp on the payroll. (Duh.)

Sparing you the labored and contrived details, we cut to the

chase: This dope ends up in a revolution just as a swishy, flamboyant Batista

(Alan Cumming) is being overthrown by a strutting, numbskull Castro (Anthony

LaPaglia) in an unnamed Third World banana republic. (Duh.) Within a mere 81

minutes that seem more like 81 days, the imbecilic Quimp catches a spy (Denis

Leary) who confesses just to stop him from diagramming his sentences, and

fights the Communists with the aid of a mad guerrilla (John Turturro) while Ms.

Weaver writes the whole thing down for a trashy first-person best seller. Woody

Allen drops in from time to time in a Pepe le Moko Casbah beret as a nutty

government agent who lost his book of secret codes in a Russian brothel,

resulting in the hanging of 45 C.I.A. operatives. The moronic cast members end

up impersonating a rock band during the Bay of Pigs, and Marilyn Monroe and

President John F. Kennedy are among the period celebs disgraced before it all

grinds to a welcome halt.

It's a rare opportunity to see so many accomplished people

coerced into making such donkeys of themselves, and Mr. McGrath is the bottom

feeder. As the writer-director of the Jane Austen movie Emma with Gwyneth Paltrow, he won deserving praise, but as the star

and co-director (with Peter Askin) of this abomination, he displays no talent

whatsoever. He hasn't a shred of screen charisma and demonstrates zero

knowledge of such basic requirements as how to deliver a punch line or where to

move the camera. Company Man is like

a long, painful, Percodan-deprived Saturday

Night Live skit directed by NBC ushers and is about as amusing as

testicular cancer.

Westchester Story

Suburb , a cheerful

off-Broadway musical at the York Theatre in the Citicorp Building, is aimed at

New Yorkers seeking the small-town peace of mind that comes with soda fountains

on Main Street, shady lawns, lower school taxes and an S.U.V. in every garage.

Stuart (James Ludwig) is an account manager in advertising who longs for

chlorophyll and ragweed pollen while his pregnant wife, Alison (Jacquelyn

Piro), is content with subways, panhandlers and traffic jams. Neither has a

clue what horrors lurk in suburbia. Alix Korey, the punchy comedienne with a

voice of stainless steel who plays the aggressive real estate broker with

"collagen lips and post-partum hips" hell-bent on selling them their dream

house, isn't about to tell them until the house is in escrow and her commission

is in the bank.

The songs are, predictably, about lawnmowers, do-it-yourself

home repairs ("What good is a castle / Without any hassle?"), commuter trains,

shopping malls and backyard barbecues. The score by Robert Cohen and David

Javerbaum, which recently won the Richard Rodgers Development Award, features

witty rhymes set to less-than-memorable melodies, and the eight-member cast

includes Jennie Eisenhower, the perky daughter of Julie Nixon and David

Eisenhower and the granddaughter of President Richard Nixon.

The entire ensemble works hard under the pleasant direction

of Jennifer Uphoff Gray, but the charming, handsome and thoroughly ingenuous

James Ludwig and the brassy, hilarious Ms. Korey are outstanding. They've both

been dressing up these little off-Broadway musicals too long. Isn't it

perfectly obvious they're ready for Broadway stardom?

This is not your 90's variety Steinberg clan.

In late May, as Manhattan emptied into the Hamptons and Saul and Gayfryd Steinberg held a fire sale of gilded furnishings at Sotheby's, the Steinberg family sold its share of Reliance Group Holdings, the company that had made them billionaires. With poor earnings stretching back a year or so, the extended clan has been downshifting since the beginning of the year into a new life as millionaires.

"The family's pot of gold is greatly diminished," said a source familiar with the clan.

Saul Steinberg, the former chairman of Reliance Holdings Group, and his wife, Gayfryd, hawked their prized triplex penthouse, the former home of John D. Rockefeller, in late February for $37 million, the highest price ever paid for a Manhattan co-op apartment. While living in a three-bedroom apartment at the Helmsley Carlton House, a hotel on Madison Avenue near 61st Street, they are in the market for a $10 million townhouse, brokers say.

But at that price, nothing seems to suit them. Aside from East 62nd Street, the couple has passed on a four-bedroom house at 16 East 69th Street being sold by the English Speaking Union for $9.2 million and 15 East 80th Street, a five-story, 21-foot wide, 8,400-square foot house with a $7.5 million price tag.

"They have not bought a townhouse yet," said a broker.

The sell-off has spread to Mr. Steinberg's sister and brother-in-law, Ronni and Bruce Sokoloff, who sold their five-story townhouse at 16 East 68th Street for $10.5 million on April 12. The buyer is Robert McKeon, president of New York merchant bank, Veritas Capital.

One broker told The Observer that the townhouse, which was never officially on the market, had an accepted offer in "2.5 seconds!"

"It was sort of a classic townhouse that [Mr.] Sokoloff had upgraded in terms of plumbing, wiring–everything was pretty much intact," said Leslie J. Garfield, who own a realty firm which specializes in townhouses.

Mr. Sokoloff bought the 21.6-foot-wide, 78-foot-deep townhouse in 1997 for $6 million from the estate of Mrs. William D. Bell, whose father built the house in 1922. It features two elevators, fireplaces, a library, four bedrooms and two bathrooms. The real estate taxes are $42,000.

Mr. Sokoloff, 51, remains the senior vice president of administrative services of Reliance Group, the insurance company founded by Mr. Steinberg. The Sokoloffs have moved to a rented apartment on the Upper East Side. They did not return calls for comment, nor did Mr. McKeon.

The family's financial crisis has meant riches for Kathy Steinberg, a real estate broker who works for Edward Lee Cave and the ex-wife of Saul's only brother, Robert Steinberg, she has emerged as Saul and Gayfryd's exclusive broker, despite talk that her relationship with the couple had cooled off. She is not on as good terms with the Sokoloffs, who gave their business to Ms. Steinberg's colleague Linda Stein, also a broker at Edward Lee Cave.

Robert, or Bobby, the former president of Reliance Group, was fired by his brother last November when things at Reliance began to look seriously bad. Since divorcing Kathy about seven years ago, Bobby has sold the apartment they shared at 944 Fifth Avenue to Hollywood producer Peter Guber for $7 million and another home designed by Charles Gwathney on Lily Pond Lane in East Hampton. He has been living in a house in northern New Jersey and renting a pied-à-terre at 211 East 70th Street. Kathy lives in a $2.25 million six-room penthouse at 1 East 66th Street.

TRIBECA

AT J.F.K. JR.'S LOFT, IT'S OFFICIAL, ED BURNS IS IN, HEATHER GRAHAM IS OUT For the record, filmmaker Ed Burns got the keys to the former loft of John F. Kennedy Jr. at 20 N. Moore Street on May 9, just two weeks after he was approved by the building's co-op board and about the same time he and actress Heather Graham split.

While angling for the title of Hollywood's "it" couple in April, Mr. Burns and Ms. Graham took a tour together of the 2,400-square-foot penthouse apartment with a private elevator and a wall of windows to the east. To observers, they seemed almost beautiful enough to inherit the former home of Kennedy and his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, the late Prince and Princess of Tribeca.

But then it seemed like someone yelled, "Cut!" The co-op board's president, Ruth Hardinger (a real estate broker with Douglas Elliman) had already unofficially rejected one buyer, a foreign businessman who offered to pay cash, but who only wanted the place as a pied-à-terre . The board didn't want a part-time owner, and actors, directors and writers like Mr. Burns are known to be on location.

Residents said the financial security of the building–which is partly based on having a high percentage of owners in residence–was the only issue, despite reports indicating that Mr. Burns was being summarily dismissed. "We're not thrilled to have lots of attention," said one tenant who was tormented when people mourning Kennedy and his wife made pilgrimages to the address last year. On the other hand, in February, the co-op made talk-show host David Letterman, an owner in the building for the past 10 years, grovel before them in order to buy his third apartment in the building–that of Larry Everston, owner of Tootsi Plohound shoe stores–in February, while recovering from quintuple-bypass surgery.

In the meantime, the actress and the director reportedly went their separate ways. On June 8, a resident of 20 N. Moore told The Observer that Mr. Burns, a Queens native, had already moved in–alone. He bought his new apartment, on top of the nine-story building near Varick Street, for just under the $2.4 million asking price, said brokers. Mr. Kennedy bought it for $700,000 in 1994. Stephen McRae and Debby Korb of Sotheby's International Realty sold the apartment on behalf of Mr. Kennedy's estate, and Halstead Property Company represented Mr. Burns.

Apparently, the co-op board will be flexible on one thing: They'll consider giving over the building's roof to Mr. Burns for the right price.

SOHO

THE MODELS HAVE LEFT THE POLICE BUILDING In the late 80's, when supermodels reigned, the troika of Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington and Linda Evangelista flocked to Soho's Police Building in catwalk lockstep, each forking over a couple of days' pay to gain another asset. The threesome made the building famous, despite the often unwielding layouts of most of the former police headquarters' apartments. But the models are all gone now, and the building's 15 minutes are over.

On June 2, Ms. Turlington, who bought a townhouse in the West Village several years ago, sold her sixth-floor apartment at 240 Centre Street for $850,000. The 31-year-old yoga addict had been renting out the 1,500-square-foot, two-bedroom, two-bathroom duplex co-op apartment for almost four years. She put it on the market in mid-January for $875,000. In just a few days, a "single and cute" businessman in his late 20's had signed a contract, said a broker. Ms. Turlington couldn't be reached for comment and her broker, Linda Gertler of the Corcoran Group, wouldn't comment on the deal.

Ms. Crawford got out of the Police Building in 1998, when she sold her fourth-floor apartment for $685,000; she now lives on Park Avenue. And Ms. Evangelista fled too; she has been renting out her apartment while living in France. These days, the building is only famous for the 2,500-square-foot, three bedroom apartment directly under the building's dome, which is supposed to resemble the Hotel des Invalides in Paris. It has a 25-foot-high living room with 12-foot windows and was purchased for $1.8 million in 1998 for Saturday Night Live co-producer Marci Klein, whose father, Calvin Klein, writes some of Ms. Turlington's paychecks.

GREENWICH VILLAGE

2 Fifth Avenue

3-bed, 2-bath, 1,600-square-foot co-op.

Asking: $965,000. Selling: $940,000.

Charges: $1,650; 12 percent tax deductible.

Time on the market: One week.

RAISING KIDS ON THE SET OF KIDS This may be the perfect New York City address–directly across the street from Washington Square Park, at the beginning (or the end, depending on where you sit) of Fifth Avenue–if you can wait long enough. A father of three who works on Wall Street did, first for this three-bedroom apartment on the 16th floor, and possibly for the smaller apartment next door. "A lot of people are buying up apartments to the left, to the right, above and below, to stay in this building," said Janet Weiner, a senior vice president at the Halstead Property Group, the broker for the Wall Streeter and the seller of the three-bedroom unit. The board doesn't seem to mind. "They want families in the building," she said. Then what is Ed Koch doing living here?

CARNEGIE HILL

25 East 92nd Street

Five-and-a-half-story, 6,500-square-foot brownstone.

Asking price: $5.7 million. Selling price: $4.7 million.

Time on the market: 10 days.

TEN-YEAR ITCH In 1969, real estate veteran Leslie J. Garfield sold this 20-foot-wide brownstone between Fifth and Madison avenues to a young couple for $225,000. Ten years later, when their kids were grown, the couple decided to chop the building up into five separate units, turn it into a co-op and sell off the apartments; they made more than $400,000 in the process. Now, with the rich scouring the city for ever-larger mansions, every shareholder in the co-op has agreed to sell out to a Wall Street couple who will reunite the separate floors. Around the same time and one block away, another 20-foot house, which had been carved into two duplex apartments, was purchased for $4.2 million by a couple expecting a baby; they, too, will restore their place to a single residence. The frenzy has raised the high price for townhouses on this block–despite the neighborhood uproar over the proposed construction of a high-rise on the corner of Madison Avenue and 92nd Street–to $6.6 million. It even lured Woody Allen, who purchased a five-story home one block east last year.

GRAMERCY PARK

136 East 19th Street (Gramercy Mews)

Three-bed, 2.5 bath, 2,500-square-foot condo.

Asking: $2.1 million. Selling: $1.86 million.

Charges: $1,018. Taxes: $1,605.

Time on the market: Four months.

CO-OPTING THE MAISONETTE Having cheaply imitated every other aspect of the prewar co-op down to the mail chute, today's condominiums have gone after the exalted maisonette, using the term to describe every variety of first-floor duplex apartment. The term was first associated with the vertical, townhouse-like apartments with entrances off the lobby of a 1920's or 30's co-op building (the type of residence fit for the William F. Buckleys and the Tina Browns). In 2000, "maisonette is just a glorified word for first-floor living," said one broker. "Nobody wants to say they live on the first floor." (Remember when buildings had only one penthouse apartment?) This recently completed building consists of five apartments fabricated out of two side-by-side townhouses. This "maisonette" has a library with a fireplace, a small powder room, a kitchen and a dining room that leads out to a greenhouse and then a 400-square-foot backyard on the first floor. Upstairs are a master bedroom with floor to ceiling windows, two smaller bedrooms and a tiny laundry room. The sale, which closed in June, was co-brokered by Kathy Sloane (Hillary's broker) of Brown Harris Stevens and Joan Kaplan of the Sunshine Group. The new owners are a couple of out-of-towners. The rest of the building is one other "maisonette" with a similar layout, an apartment occupying the entire third floor and two duplex penthouses (yes, two) on the fourth and fifth floors.

Curiously, Mr. Burns' scripts have followed a reversed route from Woody Allen's at comparable stages in their careers. Whereas Mr. Allen played clunky fools in his early farces, he began playing more accurate approximations of his real-life eminence in his two great movie masterpieces, Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979). Where Mr. Burns will go from here is anybody's guess; he has not stuck to the course of his career "independent filmmaker" contemporaries. He has thus far not displayed any of the absurdist tendencies of fellow Long Islander and Sundance alumnus Hal Hartley. Nor does Mr. Burns seem to be following in the footsteps of the politically passionate John Sayles and the stylistically and thematically adventurous Steven Soderbergh.

It is not that Mr. Burns has taken the easy way out, given his greater accessibility to the mainstream establishment than has been achieved by most of his Sundance contemporaries, though it has been whispered from the beginning that he is too commercial. Even when he was working on a shoestring, he revealed the kind of amiably creative flair that is often overlooked by film snobs in their unending quest for audience-unfriendly breakthroughs to punish the paying customers for their bourgeois tastes. In The Brothers McMullen , for example, he grabs the audience with an outrageously funny cemetery scene, and never lets go. He strikes a more ruefully sour note in No Looking Back by having a truck driver fling his tip into a messy breakfast plate as he leaves, and follows that in the next split-second with the ironic smile of Lauren Holly's Claudia, our bedeviled waitress-heroine for the next 96 minutes. Even though we are given to understand in the most economical way possible that Claudia clearly wants out of her position in life, she nonetheless carefully retrieves the tip, despite the contemptuous way it was given. This, in a nutshell, is the Burns formula for comic realism.

As the movie progresses, however, Mr. Burns strikes deeper chords of feeling in his characters than he has in the past. The laughs are few and far between as Claudia tries to resolve her various dilemmas in the dead of winter in a dreary seaside town reminiscent of the one in Federico Fellini's I Vitelloni . Only here the men are not Fellini's middle-class loafers, but working-class stiffs who drown their sorrows at the local bar with their girlfriends. Claudia lives with sure and steady Michael (Jon Bon Jovi), who wants to marry her more than she wants to marry him, a situation one seldom encounters in an American movie. Still, Claudia might have drifted and dwindled into marriage if a crisis had not been precipitated by the return to town of her irresponsible first love, Charlie (Mr. Burns), who had abandoned her a few years before when she was having an abortion. Michael and Charlie are old friends, but now Claudia stands between them, and it is up to her to end the impasse. It is to Mr. Burns' credit as a storyteller with believable characters that the movie generates considerable suspense about Claudia's ultimate choice.

In his previous films, the plots were constructed around male siblings with mostly absent mothers and curmudgeon fathers. No Looking Back shifts the emotional balance to female siblings, Claudia and Kelly (Connie Britton), and their mother (Blythe Danner), still grieving over their abandonment by a father and husband molded out of the same morally rotten material as Claudia's Charlie. What Claudia finally decides is both logical and deeply satisfying. And there is never a false note from beginning to end.

Ms. Holly, Ms. Danner and Ms. Britten achieve an uncanny rapport under the aegis of a male director who clearly likes and respects women without overidealizing them. Indeed, Ms. Holly's richly expressive performance comes as something of a revelation, and it is good to see the ineffable Ms. Danner in a juicy movie role for a change. Mr. Burns and Mr. Bon Jovi handle their comparatively thankless roles as different kinds of losers with as much zest and style as they would expend if they were cast as masters of the universe. Mr. Burns, as an ever developing actor himself, seems uncommonly generous to the actors around him.

Character Reference: Better Than Oscar-Worthy

Mike van Diem's Character , based on the novel of the same title by F. Bordewijk, is the Dutch nominee for this year's Foreign Film Oscar, but it is much better than Oscar-worthy. Indeed, Character is a full-bodied Dickensian delight such as we seldom get in movies anymore, taking us on a roller-coaster ride from poverty and disgrace in childhood to bittersweet success and riches in adulthood, with a procession of the most unforgettable characters you are likely to see on the screen this year.

The film begins with a confrontation and an apparent murder. In the course of the "investigation," a featurelong flashback takes us from the Rotterdam of the 1920's to the eve of World War II; it is unclear whether it is before or after, but it is certainly not during. There is a major Communist character, and a few Popular Front rallies, but Character is not about politics. It is about what its title proclaims; how one's character is formed and deformed by nature and nurture, by genes and luck, and how it is toughened by rejection and cruelty.

A lawyer named Katadreuffe (Fedja Van Huei) becomes a logical suspect in the apparent murder of the city's most monstrously uncaring bailiff, Dreverhaven (Jan Decleir), who has been found slain in his place of business. As Katadreuffe, the last man to see Dreverhaven alive, is questioned, we learn that he is Dreverhaven's child, born out of wedlock to Joba Katadreuffe (Betty Schurman), Dreverhaven's silent, stoical maid. One night when some mysteriously human impulse stirred within him, he had his way with her. She repeatedly refused his offer of marriage after moving out of his house with her child. She never married, but neither was she a conspicuously lovable mother to her son, preferring to remain silent most of the time. Katadreuffe is thus the product of two obsessively obstinate and laconic parents, one of whom mostly ignores him as if she regrets his having been born, and the other who goes out of his way to torment him and place obstacles in his path.

But nothing in this marvelous story is exactly as it seems at first glance, and as our hero perseveres, he finally achieves success at the expense of happiness and true love, a trade-off he regrets in retrospect, but he is consoled somewhat by the unlocking of the door to the central secret of his existence.

Rebel Zellweger

Boaz Yakin's A Price Above Rubies has already aroused the ire of spokesmen for the Hasidic community in New York for its treatment of the subject of one woman's rebellion against the strictures of the Torah, particularly about loving God more than one's spouse. As is to be expected, Mr. Yakin has stacked the deck on behalf of the individual against the group, in this instance, the Hasidim. Renée Zellweger is already a bit of a stretch as the Hasidic wife, Sonia, and yet it is her anguished resourcefulness as an actress that keeps the movie going at all, that and Christopher Eccleston's satanic snake in Borough Park's Garden of Eden as Sonia's brother-in-law Sender.

Sonia finds it difficult to articulate her malaise from time to time, and so a touch of magic realism has been added to the script to express her inner life: Yossi (Shelton Dane), the ghost of her dead brother, and a beggar woman (Kathleen Chalfant) who pops up at crucial moments with words of mystifying wisdom. Kim Hunter's Rebbitzn figures in a rather daring plot gambit as wife-turned-widow for one night of connubial consecration after a lifetime of living in the shadows of a jealous God. It all sounds too facile, and I suppose it is, but I enjoyed it all the same, although I am suspicious of outsiders judging a community from the inside out instead of from the outside in. Still, Ms. Zellweger, Mr. Eccleston, Julianna Margulies as Sonia's conformist sister-in-law Rachel and Glenn Fitzgerald as Sonia's eventually enlightened husband Mendel help make A Price Above Rubies at least worth the price of admission.

Everyone has their favorite picks on Oscar night, even an aging crazy man like Dennis Hopper, whom you'd think would have gotten over this kind of Hollywood industry schmaltz years ago. Flanked by his wife, Victoria Duffy, and his daughter, Ruthana, on March 23 at the Academy Awards soirée thrown by Entertainment Weekly at Elaine's, Mr. Hopper made it quite clear who he was rooting for as both of his co-stars from Easy Rider , Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson, vied for the best actor statuette. He gazed in stony silence from behind gray shades as Mr. Fonda's clips from Ulee's Gold were played, but then beamed from ear to ear when Mr. Nicholson's scenes from As Good as it Gets came on screen. When Mr. Nicholson won–for the third time in Academy history–Mr. Hopper let out an enthusiastic " Yeah! Woo! " and banged his hands on the table. As Mr. Nicholson gave the smarmiest speech of the evening, thanking the Academy and "all you people for looking so good tonight," Mr. Hopper doubled over in laughter, covering his mouth with one hand.

Mr. Hopper's Fonda freeze-out stems from a longstanding quarrel over the credit and profits for Easy Rider , the 1969 road movie in which the two actors played hippie bikers motoring across the Southwest on a kind of psychospiritual trip to New Orleans. First, in 1992, Mr. Hopper sued Mr. Fonda over who deserved credit for writing the script. That suit was settled out of court. Then Mr. Hopper filed a complaint in Superior Court in Los Angeles on Dec. 13, 1996, against Mr. Fonda's Pando production company, claiming that when the rights to Easy Rider were sold to Columbia Pictures in 1994, he received only a third of the proceeds and was in fact entitled to over 40 percent. According to the complaint, "In the years since the release of the picture, Pando Company's continuing breach of the Easy Rider agreement [promising Mr. Hopper the two-fifths share] has harmed the relations among the parties, forcing Hopper to engage in litigation and to threaten continued litigation among the parties." Lawyers for Mr. Hopper said that the matter was settled in 1997 but would not reveal any details.

Of course, Mr. Fonda has done his share of complaining, too. In Don't Tell Dad , his soon-to-be-released memoir, he writes: "Dennis Hopper is still insisting that he alone wrote the screenplay to Easy Rider , and has sued me for cheating him out of 'millions and millions of dollars' … It blows my mind." He also takes Mr. Hopper to task for almost ruining the shooting of a key campfire scene ("We never shot it his way … Give me a fucking break, Dennis") and selling a knockoff of the Captain America motorcycle Mr. Hopper rode in the film for $9,000 because "he needed money for drugs." (Mr. Hopper has denied selling the motorcycle for drugs. In a recent article in the Los Angeles Times , he said through a spokesman that he sold the motorcycle in 1976 for "an elaborate Southwestern belt.")

After all that, Mr. Fonda still claims to have a soft spot for Mr. Hopper: "One can imagine the love-hate relationship I've had with him all this time.… Of course, I didn't think twice about his vow never to speak to me again.… Of course I go to see all his work, and I call him to tell him how I liked it."

Mr. Hopper, however, sees it differently. Asked by The Transom if he and Mr. Fonda were still friends, Mr. Hopper said, "We weren't friends when we shot the movie. Jack Nicholson and I are friends." He added that As Good as It Gets was the best film of the year.

Yo, Man. Behold the Future of Hollywood

Sometimes a film premiere is like … a frat party. On March 18 at the premiere of his film, No Looking Back , actor-writer-director Ed Burns, discovered sitting alone at a barstool, had laid down his bottle of Amstel Light to talk to The Transom, but a flurry of admirers kept derailing the interview. It was not pretty.

"Yo man, what's up?" said Mr. Burns to a leather-jacket clad buddy by the bar. The director was wearing a slightly disheveled dark suit and a matching teal tie and shirt. "I'm in town for a couple of weeks," said the friend, pumping Mr. Burns' hand, "so I thought I'd swing by."

"You're looking good," replied Mr. Burns.

The Transom asked Mr. Burns whether many of his high school buddies had shown up for the premiere and its after-party, which was held at the restaurant Lemon. "Yeah, yeah," he said, "I got the whole gang here," presumably meaning friends from Chaminade and Hewlett, the two Long Island high schools he attended in the 80's. Another friend, this one a tallish guy, dropped over to greet Mr. Burns. Male bonding aside (brief hugs, many "Yo!"s), Mr. Burns got down to business. "Are we gonna do some sort of white-water rafting?" he asked. "Let's do it. I mean, I got nothin' doin'. I spoke to Diesel, he wants to do it … How about Martini?"

"He's in," said the buddy.

"Awright."

"I heard he got fuckin' married."

"You know, Vin said he faxed him this crazy thing from Vegas," said Mr. Burns. "I thought it was just, you know. Is he out of his mind?"

"Yeah, it's scary. Scary," said the buddy. "Yeah, it's this girl that he's known for a long time, but he hadn't seen her in years, he sees her, 12 days later, they're back together."

When Buddy No. 2 walked off, a heavyset older man and his wife strode over to slap Mr. Burns on the back. "I really enjoyed the movie," said the man. "For me it was a particular treat, meeting you just before and then seeing your screening. I've never had that kind of experience."

"Oh, yeah?" said Mr. Burns, nodding his head.

"And it's just incredible whatta nasty guy you can be on the screen," said the man, amid laughter. "I couldn't extrapolate that from meeting you.… I was a little confused, though, about how things went in the motel," said the man, referring to a love scene between Mr. Burns and his co-star Lauren Holly in the film.

"Well, it's hard to rekindle anything when it's really not there," said Mr. Burns, presumably alluding to the lost love of the two characters in No Looking Back .

Meanwhile, Ms. Holly was encircled by publicists at a table across the room. Far from being fuckin' married, at least to Mr. Burns, Ms. Holly has endured speculation that having dumped spouse Jim Carrey for Mr. Burns, the young director is currently uninterested in her romantically. Nevertheless, Ms. Holly spent the latter portion of the night holding hands and posing for photo ops with Mr. Burns. "The whole rumor thing about Lauren and I is totally untrue," he told The Transom. "Totally untrue. Just friends."

Bad Hair Night

Hairdressers, makeup artists, plastic surgeons, dermatologists and personal trainers were the stars at Allure 's Oscar party at the French colonial restaurant, Pondicherry, on March 23. True, there was a bit of a celebrity quotient–Ismail Merchant, partygoer Suzanne Bartsch, her inflatable gym-owning husband David Barton and CBS executive Leslie Moonves. Comedian Damon Wayans was supposed to play the role of "celebrity crasher," but didn't show.

None of this upset Allure 's editor in chief, Linda Wells, however, because that was the way she wanted it. "No actors," she said, looking around the room. "Of course, these people are celebrities in a different world. These are the people who are more important to any celebrity than a lawyer or an agent or a publicist."

"The philosophy here," Ms. Wells continued, "is that it's what you do when you're in your living room–you completely destroy the way some people look, you fall in love with the way other people look." At that moment, Allure assistants were handing out ballots for some "beauty awards." When the results were tallied later that night, the "flip-flop award for worst hair" went to Neve Campbell; the "popcorn blond hair award for too much golden topping" to Drew Barrymore ("with crazy daisies–courtesy of the Bellevue Salon?" one judge noted); and "the dress that should have gone down with the Titanic " to Kate Winslet.

On the more charitable side, the "best beauty by science" honor went to best actress nominee Julie Christie. "She looks good," one plastic surgeon was overheard telling a pal dermatologist-to-the-stars. "I did her." What about Joan Rivers, The Transom asked. "Joan Rivers looks fabulous," he said. "She either knows somebody or is taking exceptionally good care of herself." The dermatologist chuckled.

But none of the "winners" could top a past performance: Geena Davis. "[Her] publicist called, enraged," Ms. Wells said, "because we used a beautiful picture on the cover of our invitation." Ms. Wells produced one. "What's not to like?"

A lot. The notorious photo showed Ms. Davis walking up the red carpet in a tiered, fluffy white dress with a 10-foot train with an inexplicable dark blot on it. On the back side of the card was a smaller picture of the fashion tragedy, even more horrific from the front: a bunched-up tutu, the better to reveal painfully incorrect black stockings and black heels. "There she is in all her splendor," Ms. Wells added in earnest. "What's so bad about it? A dead animal on the back of her dress, but …" Ms. Wells could not suppress some laughter.

The Transom Also Hears

… Because Suzanne Bartsch and David Barton were just about the only well-known faces in the crowd at the Allure party, they got plenty of attention. That they were both dressed in sheer artificial fibers also helpful–he in platform shoes and an aqua-colored shirt with a Buddhist theme that rode up in back, she in a red top hat and a dress that looked to be inspired by the new S&M revival of Cabaret . After the buffet dinner, the two were standing against the bar, surveying the decidedly uncrowded restaurant, when a photographer approached and got off a shot of the two of them together. Sensing these people were important, a bystander decided to chat the couple up, approaching Mr. Barton with, "Where do you work out?" When Mr. Barton didn't seem to understand the question, the man repeated it. "You're kidding, right?" asked Mr. Barton. The bystander persisted. "At my gym," said Mr. Barton, who seemed a bit aghast. "The David Barton Gym." And then he detailed its various locations.

… That Elizabeth (Libbet) Johnson has backed out of her deal at 820 Fifth Avenue, where she had planned to blow $27 million on socialite Nancy Richardson's apartment and the one below it. Apparently, newly adopted work rules in the building required her to do all of the renovation during the summer; undoubtedly, the fusing of the two 7,000-square-foot apartments would have taken longer than one summer. "Maybe she just came to her senses," said one of several high-end brokers who told The Transom the apartments are back on the market.