You know you’re in trouble when the author of a book on a popular artist drags in lofty literary references to justify what he clearly regards as his own intellectual slumming. In this case, Joseph Epstein, the author of Snobbery (2002) and the former editor of The American Scholar, invokes Proust to compare Fred Astaire’s habitual pursuit of Ginger Rogers to Swann’s pursuit of Odette.

For the rest of this mediocre brief biography, Mr. Epstein sensibly cites Arlene Croce, John Mueller and Astaire’s largely unhelpful autobiography. This restraint is a good idea, because when Mr. Epstein ventures away from fires lit by people more experienced in dance and show business and ventures out on his own, he tends to get lost in the dark woods of his own labyrinthine ego.

He spends a lot of time wrestling with the source of Astaire’s undeniable charm, but charm is a function of personality, hence chemical. Far more important is the continuing ability of Astaire’s art to enchant succeeding generations.

Take Astaire’s most prominent counterpart, Gene Kelly, a younger man from a completely different dancing environment. Kelly always made sure to wear tight pants to show off his—admittedly very nice—ass, and was forever flashing his Irish grin at the audience. He wanted us to appreciate his dancing, sure, but he also wanted us to appreciate Gene Kelly.

There’s none of that rapturous self-regard in Astaire; the idea of a great performer as self-effacing sounds oxymoronic, but I think Astaire might be the exceptional example. His usual expression when dancing was of focused absorption. He communicated a sense of himself as a vehicle—his own ego seemed to fall away as he worked and what was left was dance, dance itself, at its most transparent. Not the dancer at the dance, but the dance in the dancer.

JOSEPH EPSTEIN STRIKES ME as one of those intellectuals who’s always slightly surprised when something great comes out of a broadly-based commercial art form like the movies; reading him on Astaire is like reading Alexander Woollcott on Charlie Chaplin. Mr. Epstein even uses the wretched term “flick” and comes to the ridiculous conclusion that Fred Astaire wasn’t a genius.

If he wasn’t, who was?

Mr. Epstein makes so many snarky cracks about the scripts for the Astaire/Rogers films that it becomes obvious that he doesn’t really like musicals at all, because, as musicals go, those scripts are quite good, with an airy daffiness that meshes beautifully with the creamy Deco sets and the effervescent Berlin and Kern scores. (Only a churl could resist Eric Rhodes’ hopeless gigolo in Top Hat and his attempt at a catchphrase: “Your wife is safe with Tonetti; he prefers spaghetti!”)

Likewise, Mr. Epstein casts aside the choreography for The Band Wagon, even though it contains what is arguably the finest dance in the MGM musical canon, the duet between Astaire and Cyd Charissse to “Dancing in the Dark”—all, notes Mr. Epstein, “done by a man named Michael Kidd.”

A man named Michael Kidd? The Michael Kidd who danced for Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen in It’s Always Fair Weather? The Michael Kidd who choreographed the original productions of Finian’s Rainbow, Guys and Dolls and Can-Can? The Michael Kidd who choreographed Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, as well as The Band Wagon?

That Michael Kidd was a distinguished artist with a gift for the rowdy as well as the restrained, and if in Mr. Epstein’s mind Kidd’s accomplishment doesn’t compare, say, to editing The American Scholar, he still deserves better than to be condescended to by someone who habitually strains for some pretty terrible metaphors (“The Astaire/Rogers coupling was the white donkey upon which he and RKO could ride into Jerusalem”).

THIS WOULD BE A negligible book except for one point that Mr. Epstein makes strongly, and, I think, correctly: Fred Astaire was a great singer—“less a singer’s singer … but that greater thing, a composer’s singer.” Astaire didn’t have a great voice, but he was able to utilize his musicality and extraordinary sense of rhythm, and combine it with respect for the words and the emotions behind them. In other words, he did the same thing for the songs he sang that he did for the dances he danced.

Mr. Epstein pays some attention to the recordings Astaire made for Verve, with Oscar Peterson and a small group, and they are indeed buoyant masterpieces. Appreciation for Astaire’s singing is not a terribly original point, but it draws forth some of Mr. Epstein’s best writing:

“If a comparison is needed, his voice perhaps resembles an urbane and more upper-class version of Hoagy Carmichael’s. The voices of both men have something of the character of the nonprofessional, of the nonchalant, of someone just noodling at a piano keyboard, trying out a tune, slightly off-key sometimes, no big deal, then suddenly things pick up and the song sung becomes not merely charming but in their versions of it definitive: the right, the only way the song should be sung.… [Astaire’s] clearly enunciated, strongly beat, often staccato rhythms were chiefly a dancer’s rhythms.”

This is very good, and almost gets Joseph Epstein off the hook for his overall priggishness. Almost.

Scott Eyman reviews books regularly for The Observer. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

Ever wondered about Lou Pearlman’s insider secrets to making a muscle-ripped boy band? Curious about the various reasons to despise the musical Rent? How about some tips on defeating a 500-pound sumo wrestler?

Those erudite fellas from publishing prodigy McSweeney’s will address these urgent queries and more at The World, Explained, a night of “fact-based entertainment” and “extreme PowerPoint presentations,” according to its creator, Will Reiser, a television producer who has worked on Best Week Ever and Da Ali G Show. In September 2005, Mr. Reiser and his McSweeney’s cohort Joshuah Bearman debuted the Los Angeles–based regular comedy night, where comedians and writers present slides, charts, videos and other primary aides to share hilarious stories. “We just sort of wanted to do something with a multimedia element to it that was a little bit smarter,” Mr. Reiser told The Observer.

On April 10 at Symphony Space, Daily Show regular John Oliver, This American Life contributor David Rakoff and author Joshua Davis will perform at The World, Explained’s East Coast debut. Memoirist Rodney Rothman will also be on hand to ruminate on creating a fake boy band called Fresh Step while working as head writer for The Late Show with David Letterman. Along with his Letterman crew, he recruited the real dance choreographer for the Backstreet Boys and wrote songs for the faux band like “You Gotta Be Fresh to Fresh with the Fresh Step” and “Don’t Talk to the Hand, Girl, Talk to the Heart.” But nobody seemed to get the joke. “MTV’s TRL [Total Request Live] brought [Fresh Step] out and didn’t say they were a joke. They kind of blew up, with real fans.” Screaming girls? “Yeah, for real. And, technically, they didn’t exist.”

So fresh, so mean, so funny.

—Gillian Reagan

Cocktails & Dreams

Passing the bar just got a whole lot easier. The Columbia University School of Mixology has made it possible to booze through an entire post-graduate education—at an Ivy League institution—in just 10 hours! And you can forget about the oppressive student loans and endless hours of nail-biting that come along with applications to other schools, because getting into Columbia Mix only takes a phone call and $180. (That might seem like a lot of cash, but willing students make and drink at least four libations at every session. Where else in Manhattan can $9 buy a cocktail and a bartending certificate?)

But this is an accelerated course at Columbia, so things move along at a very heady pace. There are just five two-hour classes. By the end of the first one, on Thursday, April 5, “blinded” students will have learned to feel their way around the speed rack of well drinks and the named bottles along the back bar. And on the same night, trained mixology professors will explain the oh-so-subtle differences between highball cocktails like a plain old screwdriver and the “sloe comfortable screw up against the wall”—a lethal concoction involving sloe gin, Southern Comfort and a splash of Galliano.

To be sure, alumni of the three-week course will never be able to look at a gin and tonic the same way again. “Someone who is about to graduate will be able to do frozen drinks, shaken drinks—pretty much every drink you’ve ever heard of, plus 80 more,” said Brian Jump, the manager of Columbia’s School of Mixology. “There’s a written test and then a practical, which involves making a drink of the judges’ choice while telling a joke, singing a song or telling a story. And you have to be poised in front of your clients, so we’ll pass things out in the middle of class that are thrown at them. You have to keep your head up and address the audience while dodging projectiles.”

—David Foxley

Picturing the Roaring 30’s

Fred Astaire romping through the air. Snap! WASP-y girls with bee-stung lips and swimsuits to die for, lounging in the sand. Snap! Long before Patrick McMullan began capturing the who’s who and what’s what of New York society, Martin Munkacsi was busy snapping the 1930’s glamourati. Currently, the Hungarian master’s works are featured in Martin Munkacsi: Think While You Shoot, on display at the International Center of Photography through April 29.

Munkacsi’s snaps are luxe black-and-whites featuring real lookers—Garbo-esque women and beachcombers galore. He documented the changing times and became world-famous for his fashion photography. His prints also give us a reason to live for the dog days of summer: If we could just switch on the black-and-white, wouldn’t we all look great lounging in the sand?

The exhibit shows how Munkacsi’s eye magically captured those hidden in-between moments of our lives, when the action happens so fast that we all but miss it. “What makes his photographs so energetic is his ability to capture movement in a photograph,” wrote Carol Squiers, ICP’s curator, in an e-mail to The Observer. “Munkacsi was a lifelong sportsman, so he was able to anticipate the precise moment to press the shutter or capture the most beautiful gesture of a dancer such as Fred Astaire.”

—Ana Callahan

Cherry Bomb

Finicky Mother Nature has finally given us spring, with light-sweater weather, Tasti-D Lite cravings—and, of course, the cherry blossoms have arrived! There’s something about velvety pink petals raining down on your shoulders that make all those petty city-life worries float away. So escape the concrete grind, grab a picnic blanket, and head to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden for opening day of cherry-blossom season on April 7. You can stroll under hundreds of double-flowering Kanzan cherry trees staggered between scarlet oaks in the Cherry Esplanade. Or check out the weeping Higan cherries in the Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden, the country’s first Japanese-style public garden, which was designed by Takeo Shiota in the 1920’s.

Patrick Cullina, vice president of horticulture and operations, gave The Observer a little cultural lesson to help us understand Hanami, the Eastern tradition of admiring the cherry trees. “For the Japanese, the cherry trees are a symbol of life,” Mr. Cullina said. “In the city culture of Japan, you’ll see people literally stopping what they’re doing and sit under the cherry trees to look at and appreciate them.” He explained the profound significance of the cherry-tree flowers budding, blooming, then releasing their petals. “The birth, maturity and death cycle is represented right before your eyes. It’s a hallmark to remind us that beauty is fleeting, and we need to take the time to take it in when it’s around us.”

—Gillian Reagan

Hollywood screen test gave little indication of things to come: “Can’t act. Slightly bald. Can dance a little.”

Then along came a magical sprite named Ginger Rogers, who had been typed as a shopworn blonde, out of a chorus line by way of a hosiery counter, and with more sass than class. Together, however, these two initially non-stellar personalities lit up the screen—especially when they started to dance. Fred’s seductive grace in motion with Ginger’s gracious compliance demolished all the puritanical defenses of the Production Code. The temporary release from censor-imposed inhibitions was only symbolic, of course, but it was then and is now exhilarating just the same.

This is to say that you should rush out and buy the new Warner Home Video DVD collection containing newly remastered prints of five of the classic Astaire-Rogers couplings, as well as extensive bonus features such as documentaries, featurettes and commentary by Fred Astaire’s daughter, Ava Astaire McKenzie. The especially good news is that “Volume One” implies that there will be a “Volume Two,” with more of the 10 Astaire-Rogers collaborations, from the seemingly impromptu duet in Flying Down to Rio (1933), through The Gay Divorcee in 1943, Roberta (one of my favorites) (1935), and on a declining note, Carefree (1938) and The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939).

When people talk about the high points of the Astaire-Rogers series, the two musicals most frequently cited (both in this collection), are Top Hat and Swing Time. Top Hat in 1935 represented the full flowering of the Astaire-Rogers mystique with the public; Swing Time in 1936 already reflected the decline of the team’s popularity. All musical sub-genres live on borrowed time in

Hollywood inasmuch as a surface realism is one of the constants of the industry’s illusionist contract with its audience.

From my own vantage point as a collector, connoisseur, and teacher in the genre, my favorite Astaire-Rogers movie would be a composite: the first half of Top Hat — with Irving Berlin’s “Top Hat, White Tie and Tails,” “Isn’t This a Lovely Day to Be Caught in the Rain,” “Cheek to Cheek” — and the second half of Swing Time with Jerome Kern’s “The Way You Look Tonight,” “A Fine Romance,” and “Never Gonna Dance.” This is to say that whereas Top Hat starts enchantingly and ends conventionally, Swing Time starts lethargically and ends ecstatically.

Between the peaks of Top Hat and Swing Time there was a comparatively mediocre Astaire-Rogers vehicle called Follow the Fleet (1936), an ill-fated attempt to reduce those sophisticates of cinematic song and dance to a gum-chewing, jitterbugging, and in all ways common couple. Even so, Follow the Fleet does enliven its soggy, not-so-fine romances with several lively variety numbers, including one wicked Astaire parody of MGM’s tap-dancing star Eleanor Powell and her penchant for being tossed head over heels between two rows of soldier and sailor chorus boys.

Curiously, the final number on the program is one of the most resonant of all the Astaire-Rogers flights of fancy: the ineffable “Let’s Face the Music and Dance,” to the words and music of Irving Berlin, with an evocation of elegance and glamour so lacking in the rest of the movie, and yet also with a fatalistic recognition of hard times. The gallant grace of “Let’s Face the Music” in the midst of stormy seas was reprised in the ‘80s in both Herbert Ross’s and Dennis Potter’s Pennies From Heaven (1981) and Federico Fellini’s Ginger and Fred (1983.)

Top Hat and Swing Time both have their defenders and detractors vis a vis the Astaire-Rogers oeuvre as a whole. Irving Berlin’s score in Top Hat is crisper; Jerome Kirn’s score for Swing Time is sweeter. The characters in Top Hat are ritzier; the characters in Swing Time are rowdier. Top Hat is redolent of escapist luxury; Swing Time is not entirely a stranger to poverty and unemployment. Astaire’s white tie and tails, for example, are both professional costume and upper-class adornment in Top Hat, whereas the same professional costume in Swing Time is merely a showbiz masquerade.

The difference also can be attributed in part to the differing directorial strategies of Mark Sandrich for Top Hat and George Stevens for Swing Time. Sandrich stated in interviews that he always attempted to balance the demands of the storyline with the inevitable disruptions caused by the musical numbers. Stevens, on the other hand, directed the silly plot of trivial misunderstandings with tongue firmly in cheek. The gales of laughter on screen, if not off, in the final sequences of Swing Time irritated audiences and critics at the time and have been a bone of contention for genre historians since.

One would think that Stevens would be forgiven his silliness after the sublimity of his mise-en-scene for “The Way You Look Tonight,” with its alternating close-ups of Astaire at the piano, and Rogers in her dressing room, shampoo suds on her hair, listening to the song, wistful eyes fixed on the camera and the audience. There is nothing of comparable romantic intensity in all the Sandrich-Astaire-Rogers collaborations.

Sandrich took the directorial helm again for Shall We Dance (1937), and the signs of studio desperation are everywhere. The plot is a shambles of high-brow caricature, fake accents, and tedious specialty acts, most notably by Harriet Hector and her acrobatic ballets. Back again are the excruciatingly pause-ridden comedy routines of Edward Everett Horton and Eric Blore. Jerome Cowan supplies an urbane presence as a cynical press agent, but the obtrusive narrative cuts into extraordinary George and Ira Gershwin songs such as “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” and “They All Laughed.” In this preoccupation with evasions and misunderstandings of his overly familiar story-line, Sandrich accommodated the musical number as an apparent afterthought.

Astaire and Rogers meet for the last time on the screen in 1949 at MGM (in color) with their knowing grins reflecting the Golden Age they once shared on the RKO sound stages in the black-and-white ‘30s. The movie is The Barkleys of Broadway, directed by Charles Walters, written by Betty Comden and Daolph Green, and featuring the surly pianist-savant, Oscar Levant. And as if to underline the pathos of their aging, Astaire and Rogers reprise George and Ira Gershwin’s “They Can’t Take That Away from Me.”

Astaire & Rogers Collection, Vol 1: Top Hat, Swing Time, Follow the Fleet, Shall We Dance, The Barkleys of Broadway; Warner Home Video; $59.92.

28 Days Later is a violent British film of apocalyptic cynicism, shot on digital video, about a deadly plague that wipes out Great Britain in one month and is heading for the rest of the world. At a time of hysterical overreaction to all sorts of global viruses keeping cable networks on the air past midnight, the film obviously hopes to cash in on the public fear factor. I prefer to think of it as just another horror flick-heavy on visuals, weak on logic and ultimately pointless. The director is Danny Boyle, perpetrator of the nauseating Trainspotting , a bizarre drug film that made heroin addicts in Scotland appear as surreal as glam-goth Calvin Klein underwear models, and The Beach , a dreadful Leonardo DiCaprio movie so florid and pretentious it even lulled Leo fans to sleep. Mr. Boyle is a specialist in high-energy downers.

As this one opens, a scientific lab called the Cambridge Primate Research Centre is invaded by militant animal-rights activists who are unaware that the caged chimps they set free are infected with a ghastly virus that is secreted in their blood and saliva. Transmission takes only 20 seconds after being bitten, sending every living thing that is infected into an uncontrollable murderous rage. Twenty-eight days later, London has been reduced to a ghost town where only a handful of uninfected survivors fight to stay alive. A bicycle courier named Jim (Cillian Murphy), a resourceful girl named Selena (Naomie Harris), and a father and daughter who are hiding in a flat lit by Christmas-tree lights (Brendan Gleeson and Megan Burns) forge a friendship in the eerie, empty streets, overturned buses and abandoned office buildings and supermarkets of London and band together with one goal-to live long enough to build a future. A voice on a radio promising safety declares: "Salvation is here! You must find us!" The group follows the voice to Manchester in a London taxi cab and finds a small battalion of nine soldiers holed up in one of the stately country manors of England, where they are planning the first steps in the formation of a new civilization. But can anyone be trusted? They offer brandy and hot bathwater, but to start the world over again, the soldiers need women, and the way the nine men in uniform drug Selena and Hannah, then dress them in red ball gowns in preparation for a massive rape scene, you know the virus is not the only thing futuristic females have to worry about.

In what is essentially a genre film with fancy camerawork, Mr. Boyle keeps the pulse tight and the visuals arresting, but when all those ferocious, carnivorous zombies converge from everywhere at once, spewing blood and screaming in a virulent, aggressive and psychotic rage, comparisons to cheap zombie-lust epics like Night of the Living Dead and Zombie Island Massacre are inescapable. There's too much vomiting in all of Mr. Boyle's movies, and the prose turns laughably purple, too. In the old days, a feverish programmer like 28 Days Later would end up on the bottom half of a double bill. Today, I predict it will more likely be welcomed by some reviewers as an antidote to tedium.

Press 'Delete'

On_Line is the kind of thing I dread-a movie about digital technology directed by an expert in interactive media and video games. The only reason I can think of to suffer through it is Josh Hamilton, a talented and versatile actor who has done some first-rate work on the New York stage, but whose movie career seems doomed to indie-prod purgatory. He plays John, a cybersex geek who runs a porno Web site with his roommate-business partner Moe (Harold Perrineau Jr., who played the wheelchair-bound narrator on the now-defunct HBO series Oz ). This is the kind of link where clients can choose their own fantasies from any sexual persuasion, enter a credit card and boffo!-the guy or gal of their dreams appears onscreen in full-motion video, ready to do whatever is desired over a secure, private connection. The object of these horny desires might be across the country or across the street. The point is, the world is a lot smaller than you think. I can remember when the purpose of the movies was to make the world a lot bigger than we thought. Trust me on this one: Reducing everything to the size of a computer monitor is no improvement.

In the course of this dull and exasperating little zero of a film, a group of six obnoxious and deeply pathetic losers conduct their social and sexual lives at their computers, sharing and relating their most personal secrets at a safe distance, without ever touching. Annoying split screens reflect the inability of these poor nerds to concentrate on any given image for more than 10 seconds at a clip. Showing off their personal lives for everyone with a MasterCard to watch, Moe wanders out to hook up with another cyber slut who overdoses on tranquilizers while John stays home manning the terminals and masturbating with a tube sock. Somehow, all of their empty lives woefully intersect with a suicidal gay Ohio schoolboy with fuchsia hair who wants to get spanked and an over-the-hill New York creep with a riding crop who likes to play dungeon master. Mr. Hamilton, who is severely wasted beyond redemption in the role of John, mopes his way through the movie drinking peppermint schnapps and crying over an ex-fiancée who dumped him. Since he's the lazy, arrogant lout who started the whole thing, you can't help but silently cheer when he logs into the self-destructive new fantasy bimbo he's been stalking with a Web cam and finds her in bed with-oh, no!-another woman, who turns out to be … you guessed it!

The first-time director of this chat-room catastrophe is Jed Weintrob, a self-confessed "digital junkie" obsessed with sex on computer screens conducted by isolated neurotics who rarely leave their apartments. If he has the perception or maturity to make a film about any kind of human emotion worth watching, there is no evidence of it anywhere in On_Line . His direction has no style. His story has no narrative. His nasty electronic soundtrack is as cold and ugly as it is impersonal. His dialogue, written with Andrew Osborne, would be laughed out of a creative-writing class for 7-year-olds. ("If I lived in Akron," says the old gay geek to the young gay geek, "I'd snatch you up like oceanfront property!") What I know about technology you could fill in an egg cup and have enough space left over for the egg. But I do know one thing: No computer can take the place of a warm body on a cold night in January, and there is nothing remotely erotic about a tube sock.

Settling the Score

Fortunately, there is good news-not on the screen, but on a series of new CD's that uncover sparkling gems in the dusty vaults where old movie musicals and Broadway shows go to rest. George Feltenstein, one of the good guys in Hollywood, toils in the archives where thousands of movies from MGM, Warner Brothers and what used to be United Artists are stored. He runs old movies in his head during lunch hour, and before he's through, I wager he'll make most of them available to the public in new, improved DVD and other formats. Meanwhile, he's produced six new soundtracks from movie musicals that have been out of print for decades and are now fast becoming collector's items. Every CD contains bonus material: unreleased tracks, deleted musical numbers, interviews, outtakes and orchestral arrangements. Example: Vincente Minnelli's The Pirate includes the never-released Judy Garland vocal of Cole Porter's "Voodoo" as well as dance music arranged for Gene Kelly. Good News , the ultimate 1947 college musical, adds to the already famous score by DeSylva, Brown and Henderson and Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Roger Edens a deleted outtake of "An Easier Way" performed by June Allyson and the dorm coeds of Tait College, led by flapper Patricia Marshall (now Mrs. Larry Gelbart), as well as deleted vocals by Mel Torme, an interview with June Allyson, and selected songs from the earlier, obscure 1930 version of Good News . The 1955 smash It's Always Fair Weather hides several lost treasures by Andre Previn and Comden and Green, including the Cyd Charisse–Gene Kelly dance number "Love Is Nothing But a Racket," and a first-time-ever demo record of Michael Kidd's deleted production number, "Jack and the Space Giants." I didn't know anyone was allowed to cut anything by Fred Astaire (wasn't it against the law or something?), but the Burton Lane–Alan Jay Lerner score for Royal Wedding reveals several surprises, including "We Can't Get Married", a reprise of the jaunty "Ev'ry Night at Seven" and dance arrangements for several other Astaire numbers, plus interviews with Fred and co-star Jane Powell. Another campus musical, Best Foot Forward , which has never previously been honored with a soundtrack album, unveils a number of happy surprises by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane, the great songwriting team of "The Trolley Song," featuring Gloria DeHaven, Nancy Walker, June Allyson, the Harry James band and Lucille Ball (dubbed by Gloria Grafton, since Lucy couldn't carry a tune in a shopping bag). Listen closely and you can hear Ralph Blane himself, dueting with June Allyson. (Her voice is lower than his.) The never-released Cole Porter score for the 1936 Eleanor Powell tapathon Born to Dance features a "censored" version of "Easy to Love" that is a collector's item. For making these great soundtrack CD's a reality, and for writing extensive liner notes as bright and peppy as they are informative and intelligent, George Feltenstein is a movie buff's best pal. More, please.

From Broadway, Sony Legacy and Columbia Broadway Masterworks have teamed up to release five dazzling, digitally remastered and stereo-enhanced original-cast CD's no serious collector can be without. For the first time on CD, the historic Harold Arlen–Truman Capote score from House of Flowers is more lush, luxurious and musically overwhelming than ever. In addition to all of the original recordings by Pearl Bailey, Diahann Carroll, Juanita Hall and the illustrious cast, the bonus tracks include "Mardi Gras Waltz", a calypso version of "Two Ladies in De Shade of De Banana Tree" by the great cabaret star Enid Mosier, and a recently discovered demo record of "Ottile and the Bee" performed by Truman Capote. Absolutely priceless! Angela Lansbury, Lee Remick, and sexy songs both playful and priapic by Stephen Sondheim are some of the reasons why Anyone Can Whistle has always been one of my favorite musicals. But this is the first time I have ever heard the five demo tracks from the composer's archives included here, sung and played by Sondheim himself. Also a great and rare opportunity to hear Lee Remick sing "There Won't Be Trumpets", which was deleted in Philadelphia before the New York opening. Barbara Cook singing "Glitter and Be Gay" in full stereo enhances Candide . The previously unreleased tracks on Rodgers and Hart's Pal Joey feature Vivienne Segal talking to Mike Wallace and hoofer Harold Lang recreating "I Could Write a Book" for the 1955 CBS-TV show Shower of Stars . Finally, now that Nine is back in business, it's a fine time to revisit the original 1982 cast recording starring Raul Julia, Karen Akers, Taina Elg, Liliane Montevecchi and others. Never before available, this two-CD set features many restored full-length songs by Maury Yeston, including "Not Since Chaplin," "The Germans at the Spa," "Unusual Way" and "The Grand Canal."

I don't call my passion for the superior scores of movie and Broadway musicals living in the past. I call it enhancing the present, with a smile. Sometimes a little hum-along with Judy, Gene and Fred is just the thing to ensure I endure.

It looks unassuming enough, just like any other reference book: weighty, blockish and solid as a brick. The author, too, sounds foursquare: a couple of film biographies under his belt, now occasionally writes for The New York Times ; originally British, now "lives in San Francisco with his wife and their two sons." He sounds a doughty enough citizen, this David Thomson, and could easily pass for any one of the harmless drudges who litter the world of film scholarship, lining it with their waddings of prose and papery opinions. Until you read the man, that is. Then you hit upon this kind of thing:

"He was the squat, wild-eyed spirit of ruined Europe, shyly prowling in and out of Warner Brothers shadows, muttering fiercely to himself, his disbelief forever mislaid." (That's Peter Lorre.)

Or this: "Imagine a film about Harvey Keitel, the actor so good, so persistent, yet so regularly denied at the highest table; ceaseless in his fury, his bitterness, forever hurtling forward in that cold, determined aura that is a mix of menace and resentment. What a role! And De Niro would probably get it."

Encountering David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film for the first time can be a little disorienting, like coming on a peacock in a coal mine. I can remember when I first stumbled upon it, in a bookstore in London almost 10 years ago. I sat down to find out what he thought about Fred Astaire and Stanley Kubrick. He found Astaire "clinching evidence of the medium's potential." On the other hand, all the chilly Kubrick "gives us, finally, is the chance to serve." I was hooked and haven't stopped reading the book since, but then Mr. Thomson hasn't stopped writing it either. He began it in the 70's, updated it in 1980, then again in 1994, and now-the number of entries swelled to 1,300-it stands before us again, as grand and eccentric as Samuel Johnson's dictionary, or one of the madder, more imaginary encyclopedias you'll find in the pages of Borges.

As a work of pure reference, Mr. Thomson's book is never going to be your first port of call. Some entries boast biographies, others don't; sometimes you get a filmography, sometimes not. And if it's the usual wan career overview you're after-the opinions both thinned by summation and pinched for space-think again. Mr. Thomson writes as if filling the sky. Here is Harry Dean Stanton, his face "like the road in the West." Here is Sam Peckinpah, "like Monument Valley at magic hour seen in the rearview mirror." Here, in similarly geological vein, but rather less happily, is Richard Gere, like "a wind tunnel at dawn, waiting for work, all sheen, inner curve, and poised emptiness."

A great put-down, I guess, although as with the best of Thomson, you do have to guess, for his bejeweled similes often leave you too dazzled to know for sure. What about this, of Astaire, who acts like "a philosopher at a bingo session"? Or this of Hugh Grant: "an incipient sneeze looking for a vacant nose"? The first is praise, the second a put-down, although I had to look it up again to be sure. This is as it should be, of course, for the only real trick with film criticism is to forget about the criticism and tend to your powers of description: successfully evoke, and the judgments will look after themselves. When Mr. Thomson writes that Jacques Tourneur's " Out of the Past is terrific-and not good enough: it is like a brilliant palace made of matchsticks, by a prisoner on a life sentence," you're halfway to wondering what the prison food is like before you notice what a strange world you have unwittingly entered, where a film can be "terrific" and yet still "not good enough." What slippery, silver-backed Wonderland is this?

The world according to David Thomson, of course-a fine place to be if you're Cary Grant, or Robert Mitchum, or Mae West ("intrigue an audience, and then pause, and they are yours forever"), but a harsh and exacting environment for directors, particularly of the young and brilliant variety. Lars von Trier, for instance, is found to be "brilliant in a way that gives that term a bad name." Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull is "beautiful in ways that make beauty the first thing one notices." This is Mr. Thomson's way: He leads you up the path with some obvious virtue like "beauty" or "brilliance," then cuts you loose to fend for yourself. So you think you hanker for "genius"? Mr. Thomson puts the term under house arrest and slaps it in the handcuffs of quotation marks. John Ford, Francis Ford Coppola and Frank Capra, he writes, are "storytellers capable of … well, 'genius' is the word Hollywood would use. But that genius is not enough. There is a talent in American films that makes for adolescent attitudes, veiled fascism, and a work that leads one to recognize the proximity of talent and meretricious magic …. There is something in the best of American films that is not good enough, and that is dangerous."

Cool. I haven't a clue what he means, but I get the feel of it-the rhythm of that exalted ascent up standards of truly Alpine height. For Mr. Thomson is an unabashed greatness freak, and if he guards the term "genius," he does so jealously, like a lover. He's at his most penetrating on the likes of Welles and Mr. Coppola, those great Falstaffian burnouts, scalded by the medium they touched, nursing their wounds in semi-retirement: "As if Welles knew that Kane would hang over his own future, regularly being used to denigrate his later works, the film is shot through with his vast, melancholy nostalgia for self-destructive talent."

There is a lot of Welles in Kane , and a lot of Thomson in Welles, particularly the Welles of the 70's-the Welles of the velvety voice-overs and amused self-exile. Mr. Thomson is, I think, the last of the great film writers, up there with Graham Greene and Pauline Kael-not least because he has the courage to wonder aloud whether film is greatness' proper medium, the medium where greatness can truly strut its stuff and get on with the business of being great. How ruthlessly Hollywood cut down Welles and Mr. Coppola, and how accommodating it is to more efficient talents like Alfred Hitchcock and Steven Spielberg. Hence the melancholy that envelops the book from its introduction, where Mr. Thomson is to be found wondering "whether I am heavier, or less 'passionate'-or are the movies less?" Spoken like Norma Desmond herself.

As with Desmond, the pose can't sustain itself; the melancholy wilts in the California sun. This new volume finds Mr. Thomson grinding his teeth aplenty, but also breaking into a big, bright smile at the thought of Jim Carrey, Wes Anderson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jude Law and Christina Ricci ("our Shirley Temple on leaving the asylum where Frances Farmer was ruined"). Again the snarl and rueful backwards glance at wrecked talent, but nothing can disguise the fun he had writing that. David Thomson is here to sing the multiplex blues-sitting there, at the back of the cinema, amid the torn velour and spilled Pepsi-but this book is the most beautiful of torch songs, and more than bright enough to light up the gloom.

Tom Shone is a film critic for the London Daily Telegraph.

Get out your paddles, ladies! The personal effects of the late Carrie Donovan ( New York Times fashion journalist turned Old Navy spokeswoman who was, by all accounts, just a big old hoot ) go on the block today at the scandal-free William Doyle Galleries. "As Karl Lagerfeld said, she was 100 percent fashion," said Doyle couture director Linda Donahue. "As a dynamic personality, she had personal taste which is very dynamic. Very big pearl bracelets- just colossal bracelets - big pearl necklaces, fantastically large decorative glasses." One chunky faux-pearl Chanel cuff is expected to go for $500 (with which one could buy enough Old Navy "board shorts" to outfit a small nation) …. Later, in Chelsea, more girls in pearls as Stephen Webster -the lucky fellow commissioned to design Madonna and Guy Ritchie's wedding rings ( big confidentiality agreement , but we hear hers was a simple platinum band, his has fey carving )-throws an ominous-sounding "Black Widow" party to celebrate his new Tahitian pearl collection, which costs $3,000 to $34,000 per piece. Expected are Michael Stipe (R.E.M. front man), pop star Pink (Gen Y Cyndi Lauper) and Gretchen Mol (starlet perhaps best known for appearing on the cover of Vanity Fair a couple years ago with her nipples showing). Hey, you can't brush up against super-fancy A-list celebrities every night, O.K.? But no worries if you're a bit short this month; you can just stroll the avenue and say, " Hello, sailor!" Yes-it's Fleet Week!

[Carrie Donovan auction, Doyle New York, 175 East 87th Street, 10 a.m., 427-4141, ext. 208; Black Widow party, Glass, 287 10th Avenue, 7 p.m., by invitation only, 646-497-0499.]

Thursday 23rd

Men writing about themselves in a self-conscious, self-congratulatory way seems so late-1990's , and yet the trend persists: Author Rick Moody faces down the ice storm of chilly reviews for his mental-illnessmemoir The BlackVeil:A Memoirwith Digressions , and reads and signs copiesofthe booktodayat the Union Square Barnes & Noble …. Meanwhile, atthe rival, "funkier" Barnes &

Noble in Astor Place, a nice bald guy from Seattle named David Shields - Brown grad who's done his time at Yaddo and Breadloaf and written for The New York Times Magazine , Harper's , McSweeney's , Salon , The Village Voice , Utne Reader , Vogue and Details -reads from what his publicity materials call a blend of "memoir, correspondence, dream, portraiture, literary criticism and cultural criticism" titled Enough About You . Bonus alarming dirty

excerpt from page 45: "She was on top of me, rotating her hips and

crying …. " Hop off, sister! Stay home and read MaryWellsLawrence 's sparkling memoir of her career in

advertising, A Big Life , instead.

[Rick Moody, 33 East 17th Street, 7 p.m., 253-0810; David Shields, 4 Astor Place, 7:30 p.m., 420-1322.]

Friday 24th

You thought Tribeca was the only neighborhood with problems? A kind of low-key, less-buffed version of the recent, much-ballyhooed Tribeca Film Festival begins today downtown-it's the Lower East Side Festival of the Arts, with octogenarian and stick man Tony Randall in the Robert De Niro role, and Al (Grandpa) Lewis as Martin Scorsese. Brace for wall-to-wall performance artists (Brown '90) waving sex toys and

pot-smoking experimental poets gorging on pierogi …. Meanwhile, in

the meatpacking district , there's a launch party for some mysterious and indecipherable entity called Sepp , which looks to be a magazine about football and fashion. (Where's Roland Barthes when you need him?) And out in the faraway land of Bridgehampton , the summer season opens with a big vr-room! at the Hamptons Auto Classic, which we gather is sort of a high-rent Daytona with MG's, Duesenbergs, Mercedes-Benzes, Mustangs, Jaguars and Ferraris for those of us, like Jerry Seinfeld , who enjoy such luxuries. (Mr. Seinfeld and his quiet wife Jessica are expected to roll into this thing later in the weekend for a breast-cancer benefit , along with oodles of Baldwin brothers and their ice-cream truck .) Yes, summer is almost here! By the way, does anyone remember when precisely it was that the women of New York collectively, unconsciously, decided to go naked till Labor Day ?

[Theater for the New City, First Avenue and East 10th Street, 6 p.m., 924-0496; Sepp launch party, 410 West 14th Street,

9 p.m., by invitation only, 560-7491; Hamptons Auto Classic, Sayre Park, Bridgehampton, gates open at 10 a.m., cocktail reception at 6 p.m., 631-537-1868.]

Saturday 25th

Hobgoblin of little minds? Umm … one might call it excessively quiet in Manhattan today, as the city's contingent of blow-dried blondes zip up their handkerchief-hemmed slip dresses and descend in droves on those fabled Hamptons, where they'll shop and eat in bungalow versions of the same stores and restaurants you can find in the city …. Brooklyn and Queens ain't exactly "happening" aujourd'hui , either …. No, if you really want to celebrate Ralph Waldo Emerson's birthday today , you're going to have to hop on the ferry for a free kite workshop at the Staten Island Children's Museum. Up, up and away!

[1000 Richmond Terrace, Staten Island, 1:30, 2:30, 3:30 p.m., 718-273-2060.]

Sunday 26th

Get out the Imitrex! Yesterday was National Tap Dance Day! Tonight in midtown, your old friend Savion Glover hosts a big tap-stravaganza dedicated to the late Buster Brown. Clap your hands as this nice lady, Jane Goldberg , picks up the "Flo-bert Award" for advancing the art of tap. "I wanted to dance with someone like Fred Astaire," said Ms. Goldberg, a limber 54, who used to be an antiwar activist and journalist ( hmmm ) until a fateful viewing of the movie Carefree with Mr. Astaire and Ginger Rogers. "My parents were not into my tapping, but I'm a good believer that people are closet hoofers and they always want to tap. It's good for keeping in shape, it's very aerobic-the gyms should discover it."

[Town Hall, 123 West 43rd Street, 7 p.m., 307-4100.]

Monday 27th

Memorial Day? It's weird: We thought there always was a Memorial Day parade down Fifth Avenue, and this year especially we thought there would be a parade down Fifth Avenue, but we just called the Mayor's office and were put on hold for about five years, and then the woman came back and said, "There isn't one." So if you don't have a barbecue or a sale to go to, you're left with whatever the horny-turned-suddenly-reverent sailors over at Fleet Week come up with.

[Intrepid, Pier 86, 12th Avenue and 46th Street, 11 a.m., 245-0072.]

Tuesday 28th

From Kissing Jessica Stein , let's proceed directly to Amy's Orgasm , a low-budget ($500,000) movie written, directed, produced by and starring Studio City, Calif., resident Julie Davis. It's the story of a 29-year-old self-help author who advises women to stay single and then (surprise!) finds love-and no, New York magazine sex writer Amy Sohn was not a consultant on the production. "The original title was Why Love Doesn't Work ," said Ms. Davis, 33, who got married and produced a tot named Holden during the making of the movie, "but I was talking to Sam Goldwyn and he said, 'You know, the title of it is really awful,' and then he just said the word ' orgasm '!" Yikes! What was it like to direct herself? "It was like major multi-tasking. It was kind of really hard; I definitely think some of the directing suffered because I was so insecure about my performance." Well, buck up, honey-it's your East Coast premiere tonight, and we're with you!

[Makor, 35 West 67th Street, 7:30 p.m., 601-1000.]

Wednesday 29th

Meera, Meera on the wall! Babe authoress Meera Nair celebrates her thoughtful debut short-story collection, Video , at the Half King, that pub owned by sweaty (and secretly sort of short) adventure writer Sebastian Junger …. And since it's been sort of a saucy week, why don't we close out with one final dirty excerpt: "He leaned far over her head and tried to direct his-" Slam!

[505 West 23rd Street, 7 p.m., by invitation only, 462-4300.]

We're all familiar with the timelessness of art–that art, to the extent to which it is any good, transcends its historical context. For many artists working today, however, what counts isn't a timeless art, but an art that is timely. How much an object corresponds to the moment is considered the gauge of its relevance. This has resulted in a scene hot on anticipating not the new, but the next. About all this guarantees, however, is that a lot of contemporary art will be old news by the time it's seen in the galleries. And so it was with Abstract Redux .

Mr. Jensen, on the other hand, is less concerned with contemporaneity than with continuity. His Fei Fei Drawings –paintings on paper, really–play for keeps. By tapping into tradition and transforming it from the inside out, Mr. Jensen sets out to create images that will thrive long after their making. In this endeavor, he has succeeded–and then some. The Fei Fei Drawings are in no danger of dating. They'll make perfect sense 100 years from now, just as they make perfect sense right now. Hell, they would've made sense a million years ago.

I exaggerate, but only in fact, not in spirit. Throughout his career, Mr. Jensen has tapped into a variety of inspirations–from the paintings of early American modernists like Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley to Abstract Expressionism to contemporary Chinese poetry, from which his current series of work derives its name. But the constant in his art has been nature. It's worth noting that the Fei Fei Drawings were painted in Siena, Italy, a location that surely impressed itself upon the artist. Yet these startlingly immediate pictures shouldn't be construed as transcriptions of a specific landscape. What Mr. Jensen has done is less cut-and-dried and considerably more risky. He has incarnated nature itself.

If this sounds uncanny, well, it is. Many artists have taken inspiration from the land, but few have inhabited it as thoroughly–or as fruitfully–as Mr. Jensen. Looking at the Fei Fei Drawings is to feel the pulse and purpose of the natural world. With their weathered surfaces, spectral presences and tangled calligraphy, the pieces encapsulate–sometimes brutishly, at other times with a biting elegance–the terrible beauty of the elements. Their power resides in a gruff inevitability. It's as if they've been here since Day 1.

On the occasion of his exhibition of paintings on canvas at the Mary Boone Gallery last spring, I chided Mr. Jensen for his unswerving devotion to the painter Albert Pinkham Ryder, an important, eccentric and difficult figure in the history of American art. After tracing the laboriousness of Mr. Jensen's canvases to Ryder's example, I suggested Fred Astaire, the epitome of effortlessness and grace, as a more beneficial role model. Whether Mr. Jensen has, in the intervening months, run out to Blockbuster to rent a copy of Top Hat , I have no way of knowing.

And I couldn't care less. Given the heady mix of intuition and clarity that characterizes the Danese show, I've come to the conclusion that Mr. Jensen can do without Astaire. I'm still not convinced that Mr. Jensen won't continue to worry his efforts on canvas. But if Ryder-worship results in art as indispensable as the Fei Fei Drawings , then so be it. Should Mr. Jensen continue on his amazing roll–and there's no indication that he won't–I'll dole out no more advice. I look forward to keeping my big mouth shut. Bill Jensen: Fei Fei Drawings is at Danese Gallery, 41 East 57th Street, until March 15.

Much of the film is brought to life by the extraordinary on-the-spot movie and still footage recorded by an expert Australian photographer named James Francis Hurley, who had accompanied previous Antarctic explorations. The salvaging of much of his work under the most desperate conditions was almost as remarkable a feat as the total rescue. If Shackleton and his companions had been fictional characters, they would have been worthy of Tolstoy in their journey into the depths of the soul. Instead, they've become real-life heroes to inspire us in our current time of trial.

Mr. Butler and his colleagues have fashioned a coherent narrative by combining the original footage in black-and-white with color footage from contemporary cinematographers of the same area. The narration by Mr. Neeson and voices representing Shackleton and his men fill in the rest of the gaps. There is a great deal of psychological analysis of men under the extreme stresses of endless ice, violent seas and apocalyptic storms. Their feats of improvisation, navigation and sheer endurance make most adventure stories seem picayune by comparison. In fact, I doubt that any movie, fiction or nonfiction, released this year will pack the emotional power of Endurance.

As it is, Shackleton seems to have become a posthumous influence in the business community for his extraordinary demonstration of management skills. Morgan Stanley's sponsorship of the film seems to function as a kind of seal of approval. Yet I wonder if Shackleton as a contemporary C.E.O. would lay off workers to sweeten his balance sheet in this time of crisis. Would he not instead choose to cut his own enormous salary before he threw his workers out in the street? I simply ask because I do not know. And the ending is as bitterly ironic as one would wish before or after Sept. 11.

Life Goes On

Arik Kaplun's Yana's Friends was shown about a year ago at a local Israeli film festival. At the time, I wondered aloud why in a city like New York, with such a huge Jewish population, Israeli films have had such rough sledding commercially. I never imagined that Yana's Friends would one day turn out to be so timely for all New Yorkers-and indeed, all Americans. The story takes place in Israel in 1991, at the time of the Gulf War with Iraq. Yana (Evelyn Kaplun) is a recent immigrant from Russia, who finds herself pregnant and abandoned by her husband, and forced to support herself and her coming baby while sharing an apartment with Eli (Nir Levi), an Israeli wedding photographer in his 20's with shamelessly voyeuristic proclivities and loose morals. Yana's predicament inspires Eli to use her as a subject for a documentary, but when the threat from Saddam Hussein's poison-gas missiles drive Yana and Eli into the same sealed bedroom, romantic flames engulf them despite the slightly comic encumbrance of their gas masks.

Mr. Kaplun provides a subplot involving another recent immigrant couple who display an entrepreneurial ingenuity by exploiting the wife's wheelchair-confined, catatonic grandfather to attract a steady stream of coins from pitying pedestrians. When the grandfather and a street musician start a brawl over sidewalk space, the story takes an unexpected turn. What the film tells us is that life goes madly on despite the most fearsome threats to our safety and security. It is something the Israelis can teach us.

The Last Good Romantic Comedy

Peter Chelsom's Serendipity, from a screenplay by Marc Klein, is a movie I found myself liking more than perhaps I should. Its plot bears a superficial resemblance to Nora Ephron's Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and You've Got Mail (1998) and the glorious granddaddy of them all, Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner (1940), in that it takes almost a whole movie for two people who are meant for each other to discover that they are indeed meant for each other. The mechanics differ in each instance, as does the level of exasperation. In this respect, Serendipity does not get off to a good start.

Jonathan Trager (John Cusack) and Sara Thomas (Kate Beckinsale) meet cute enough in Bloomingdale's during Christmas time, share dessert at Serendipity and end up skating around Wollman Rink together, which is about par for a Manhattan romance, even though the film was shot in Toronto. Though Jonathan and Sara are both entangled with other people, as we shall see, Jonathan seems more anxious to continue the relationship than Sara is. An imbalance is immediately created by Jonathan's increasing desperation and Sara's curious detachment in the name of fate.

Though I have always liked Ms. Beckinsale in more straightforward parts, her Sara here displays an edge of complacency as she establishes the terms of their being reunited on a series of ridiculously improbable coincidences. A few years pass, and both Jonathan and Sara are preparing to marry other people, and here the first variation on a familiar theme falls into place. Usually, the Other Man and the Other Woman are shown to be too ridiculous for words as marital options. Indeed, one sometimes wonders what attracted our hero and heroine to these second choices in the first place. Not so here. Bridget Moynahan's Halley Buchanan suffers real emotional pain when she realizes that Jonathan is about to reject her for someone else. John Corbett's Lars is somewhat stranger as Sara's potential husband, with his comically outlandish shenanigans as a New Age musician, but deep down he seems possessed of both an off-beat virility and an eccentric sense of humor. Mr. Chelton and Mr. Klein are less successful getting Lars off the stage than they are in disposing of Halley, but the point is that they don't demean either loser in the game of love.

The most important variation in the seemingly familiar theme of serendipity in Serendipity is that both Jonathan and Sara are different people when they finally defy all the odds to meet a second time; both have been deepened and ennobled by their quests. And along the way, they have enriched their friendships with their best friends, Jonathan with Jeremy Piven's Dean Kansky and Sara with Molly Shannon's Eve. Their exchanges of dialogue are crisp; their feelings for each other are unselfish. Ultimately, the carefree spirit of Serendipity carries the day, and it is sad to think that we may never see a comedy like this ever again, at least one supposedly set in New York City.

A Must-See

Double Bill

Vincente Minnelli's An American in Paris (1951) and The Bandwagon (1953) are currently gracing the Paris Theater, and you still have time to catch these two tuneful exercises in terpsichorean magic in spanking new prints. Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron do the honors to the music and lyrics of George and Ira Gershwin in the former, with Oscar Levat, Nina Foch and Georges Guétary in support. A curiously somber screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner fits in with Minnelli's own strikingly downbeat directorial temperament in a supposedly joyous genre.

In The Bandwagon, Fred Astaire supplies a lyrical accompaniment to Minnelli's malaise with the Howard Dietz–Arthur Schwarz ode to loneliness, "By Myself." Astaire and Cyd Charisse are a somewhat chemically lukewarm dancing couple next to the heat of the Kelly-Caron pairing in Paris. Astaire is more congenial in his numbers with Jack Buchanan, like "I Guess I'll Have to Change My Plans," and with the effervescent Nanette Fabray and Oscar Levant in "That's Entertainment." Fabray and Levant also double as on-screen representations of the film's sassy screenwriters, Betty Comden and Adolph Green.

To make a long review short, An American in Paris and The Bandwagon are two of the beauties of the second golden age of the American musical, in the 1940's and 1950's-the first being led by Busby Berkeley and the team of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the 30's. Astaire himself bridges the two eras in his ageless fashion.

National TV Turn-Off Week is finally over, and thank goodness! It was easily the longest week we've ever spent. It was sponsored by TV-Free America, a group that claims to be nonpartisan. A group that is against everything decent people hold dear is "nonpartisan?" Ha! Write your Congressional representative or e-mail TV-Free America at tvfa@essential.org.

Anyhoo, there's no better way to celebrate the end of that most un-American week by tuning in Party of Five . Remember, the Big Kiss between Neve Campbell (Julia) and her (female) professor is tonight, readers. But according to our moles at the show, the relationship is not as hot and heavy as it was originally scripted. (Damn you, Murdoch.) Even so, Fox is pumping up the upcoming episodes with provocative advertisements that ask, "Is Julia falling in love … with a woman?" (Would that she were! Oh, why am I such a wretch!) Whether she does or doesn't fall in love with her, one thing seems certain: The lovely lesbian will be out of the show by season's end, said our moles. [WNYW, 5, 9 P.M.]

Thursday, May 6

Those dogged reporters over at Brill's Content poked around The Howard Stern Radio Show and found that producer Gary (Ba Ba Booey) Dell'Abate pulls in a cool $150,000 per year. Is he worth it? It's hard to tell, especially since his supposed incompetence as a producer gives Howard fodder for hours of on-air discussion and debate. He also has his own spin-off character (the wicked Fa-Fa Fooey puppet). We say: Give that man a raise. [E!, 24, 11 P.M.]

Friday, May 7

Seen … in the white letters that appear on the bottom of the screen during MTV's Loveline , a show offering sex therapy to call-in listeners:

Goldie, 23, from Salt Lake City: "Runaway testicles ruin sex."

Mikey, 18, from San Francisco: "Roommate masturbates in front of him."

Randy, 21, St. Louis: "Obsessed with flashing his privates."

Chris, 19, from New York City: "Didn't know he slept with his friend's wife."

Amy, 21, from Baltimore: "Tell boyfriend about her horrible sexual past?"

Kimberly, 21, from Little Rock, Ark.: "Embarrassed by her noisy crotch."

Char, 23, San Francisco: "Can't stop crying during phone sex."

Niki, 19, University of Texas: "Boyfriend awkward with her mom after caught during sex."

What was it that Louis Armstrong sang? "What a Wonderful World." [MTV, 20, 11:30 P.M.]

Saturday, May 8

Twenty-eight-year-old Yalie Arthur Bradford's new project, How's Your News? , is a lot like other sarcastic interview shows (à la The Daily Show ) depending on offbeat examples of Americana for subject matter. But what makes this show different from anything else is that its reporters all suffer from some developmental disabilities. And what makes this even more exciting and volatile is that South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone's names are inextricably bound to the pilot. In fact, it was their encouragement (financial and otherwise) that helped get the pilot off the ground.

It all began at Camp Jabberwocky on Martha's Vineyard, a camp for adults with mental and physical disabilities where Mr. Bradford–like a lot of other socially conscious lads from "good families"–has worked, lo, these many summers. One day, Mr. Bradford introduced a video camera to his campers and the campers went nuts. "For them, the novelty was just seeing themselves on TV," Mr. Bradford said. "And it had a practical benefit of helping them speak better."

Mr. Bradford was enlisted by the camp to create a promotional tape, which ultimately made it into the hands of Mr. Stone and Mr. Parker. "They just really connected with it," Mr. Bradford said. "This was before South Park really existed. Then when South Park hit it big, they had the means to put up the money for the show."

The half-hour pilot was made by Mr. Bradford over three weeks of traveling from Maine to New York with some of his campers. How's Your News? played at the New York Underground Film Festival in February and will air on Channel 4 in Britain later this summer. If Mr. Bradford's luck continues, it may end up on HBO or the Independent Film Channel.

The two main interviewers in the pilot are Sean Costello, who has Down's syndrome, and Bobby Bird.

In one segment, Mr. Bird interviews strangers speaking in a brand of gibberish that only he can understand. "His inflections are such that you think he's saying something meaningful," Mr. Bradford said. "It's very disconcerting. He's old, too. Close to 50. So he comes up to people and says this string of nonsense, and he has a smile on his face and he seems to be asking a question and then the epiphany is–and this is the nice thing about the whole project–that if they just smile and talk to him, they can actually have a conversation with him. He understands everything other people say."

Some people might call this show, oh, I don't know, tasteless.

"That's the question that everyone always brings up," Mr. Bradford said. "It's possible that such a thing could be exploitive, but I think because of the fact that the people that worked on the show for so long, it makes it different. They're our friends. I don't have any interest in making them look foolish. And also in there's a certain amount of laughing at themselves. To call a show like this offensive is to deny that these people understand what they are doing and that they have a sense of humor about themselves."

Perhaps because of concerns about taste, Messrs. Parker and Stone (who are masters of what we used to call "sick humor") are laying low on the promotional front. But their South Park is still running on Comedy Central–just barely. [Comedy Central, 45, 10 P.M.]

Sunday, May 9

LeVar Burton starred as Kunta Kinte in the mini-series Roots . Then he played Lieutenant Geordi La Forge on Star Trek: The Next Generation , which is where he started directing. He continued his directing career on Star Trek: Voyager . His current directing project is a Disney Channel movie called Smart House , about a technologically advanced house that takes over a little kid's life. "The house becomes an overbearing 50's mom," Mr. Burton explained. The story is based on a short story by Ray Bradbury.

What was the attraction of Star Trek ? "I read a lot of science fiction but there was not a lot of representation of people of color. Watching Star Trek and seeing Nichelle Nichols play Lieutenant Uhura. It was an example of the future and it said to me, 'There is a place for you.'"

Mr. Burton also directed an unofficial Tiger Woods movie, The Tiger Woods Story . He met Mr. Woods after the film was done. "He was a little standoffish because this was the unauthorized version of his life," Mr. Burton said. "But I had a very intense conversation with his father. I talked about the fact that he had nothing to fear from our movie."

What about those glasses he wore as Lieutenant La Forge? Were they hard to see out of?

"Eighty percent of my vision was taken away. Why are you asking?"

I just thought it looked tough to see out of them.

"Well, your presumption in that regard is correct." [WWOR, 9, 7 P.M.]

Monday, May 10

Today host Matt Lauer begins the first day of his popular "Where in the World Is Matt Lauer" segments, in which Mr. Lauer disappears and no one, not even his colleagues, know where he's gone! And then he reappears on the air. This, of course,

drives the Midwestern hausfraus into a frenzy.

Would it be wrong, dear readers, to hope that, one of these mornings, they just can't find him? Like, some dude goes, "Where's Matt?" And then some other guy would be like: "We don't know. We don't freakin' know! " And no one would ever find him again.

Is that harsh? [WNBC, 4, 7 A.M.]

Tuesday, May 11

We asked Aaron Sorkin, creator and executive producer of ABC's critically acclaimed Sports Night , whether the proliferation of nightly sports round-up shows might affect his show.

"When I was creating Sports Night , I used to watch Sports Center all the time, but since I started making this show, I've stopped watching those shows altogether," Mr. Sorkin said.

Anyway, Mr. Sorkin has been developing a new show, which he's just delivered to NBC. It's an hourlong show called The West Wing , about senior members of the White House staff. Even though our Government has become a complete joke, Mr. Sorkin insisted, "It's not a satire. It was developed well before our President had his troubles. This has nothing to do with the Clinton White House."

The hourlong show, in the mold of Sports Night –you can call it a "dramedy" if you like, a word bandied about in the days of Hooperman and Slap Maxwell –will star Rob Lowe (Rob Lowe!), Moira Kelly (hummuna-hummuna-hummuna) and Richard Schiff. And best of all, Martin Sheen plays the President. We like, we like!

In two weeks, Mr. Sorkin will hear back from NBC as to whether his script will get made. Good luck, Aaron! Oh, yeah–Mr. Sorkin, one more thing while we're at it. I've got this thing , see, this sort of a script thing, I guess you could call it and, well–Mr. Sorkin? Mr. Sorkin, are you there!

Hello?

Well, gang, thanks for "tuning in" the column this week. I'll be seein' you again next week–unless that new guy gets here! [WABC, 7, 8:30 P.M.]

Peter Bogdanovich's Movie of the Week

On May 10, Fred Astaire would have been a hundred years old, and of all the many musicals he made (Turner Classic Movies is running 13 of them that day, and American Movie Classics is showing another four) the very best for my money is one of his last. He appeared in only four others afterward and it's among the most delightful, witty and charming in the genre's history, Vincente Minnelli's comic 1953 ode to show biz, The Band Wagon [Monday, May 10, Turner Classic Movies, 82, 2 A.M.; also on videocassette] . The title is a tip of the hat to one of Astaire's first successes, the 1931 Broadway show he did with his sister Adele, but only the name was borrowed since the movie is a totally new creation conceived and written by that hip and unpretentious, brilliantly inventive team of musical comedy wizards, Betty Comden and Adolph Green ( Singin' in the Rain , On the Town , etc.). The premise alone played so cleverly into Astaire's image at the time: A movie-star hoofer is washed up in pictures and thus comes to New York to give Broadway a shot at revitalizing his career. The purposely exaggerated biographical context continues by having Nanette Fabray and Oscar Levant play (with great verve) a most likable pair of musical book-writers modeled, naturally, on Ms. Comden and Mr. Green themselves.

All this gives the film a persuasive sense of reality that reverberates throughout and makes everything feel true: the snob rivalry between Hollywood star and Broadway dance diva (Cyd Charisse at her long-legged best) inevitably developing into romance through an intoxicating pas de deux in Central Park at night (yes, at night, this being nearly 50 years ago) to the lush strains of "Dancing in the Dark"; or the good-humored parody of an Orson Wellesian genius director-producer-star of drama condescending to take a portentous stab at doing a musical. This role is played by one of the most popular stars of British stage and screen musicals, Jack Buchanan, who unfortunately was little seen in American movies, with the one glorious earlier exception of Ernst Lubitsch's innovative 1930 musical comedy masterwork, Monte Carlo , co-starring Jeanette MacDonald. Since Buchanan died only four years after The Band Wagon , it serves as his memorably ingratiating swan song.

The picture gets off to a quick start (and never really flags for a moment) with two fabulous Astaire solo numbers: First, he arrives at Grand Central, where the press is waiting to welcome not him, as it turns out, but Ava Gardner (who does a cameo, looking incredible), and so Fred walks sadly along the deserted platform singing, "I'll go my way/ By myself," one of a dozen warmly familiar standards by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz; next, he's strolling through Times Square and decides to cheer himself up by getting a shoeshine, which leads to a smashing song-and-dance routine because, "When there's a shine on your shoes,/ There's a melody in your heart." If you're not hooked by then, just forget musicals.

The dances are all choreographed by the superbly boisterous Michael Kidd, with a climactic satirical "Girl Hunt" ballet that both imitates and kids the Gene Kelly musicals of the period and at the same time spoofs the then-popular raunchy Mickey Spillane detective sagas, with Fred's voice narrating in mock tough-guy style. Along the way, there are such show-stoppers as Astaire, Buchanan and Fabray dressed as terrible infants singing "Triplets;" Astaire cheering up a depressed cast party with "I Love Luisa"; and, of course, Fred, Jack, Oscar and Nanette doing the rollicking, inspired show-biz anthem, "That's Entertainment!" Minnelli keeps it all going with infectious energy and grace in what is, I think, along with An American in Paris , his best musical and therefore certainly high among the finest ever made.