Ms. Kennedy and Mr. Marshall.

E.T. phone home? Did Hollywood power couple Kathleen Kennedy (she earned her first production credit on Steven Spielberg's heartwarming alien flick) and Frank Marshall become too homesick in New York? The L.A.-based producing pair has sold their pied-a-terre at 120 Central Park South and try as we might we can't find any new purchase under their names.

Certainly the sale is not for lack of funds. In June, Ms. Kennedy left the couple's husband-and-wife production company to become co-chair of Lucasfilm Ltd. alongside George Lucas. Indeed, if you need to bring together the big bucks and the big names for a crowd-pleasing production, Ms. Kennedy is the one to do it, having worked on not only E.T., but also Raider's of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, Schindler's List and Munich.

They may not have needed the money, but Ms. Kennedy and Mr. Marshall, who paid $2.69 million for the unit in 2007, made a nice profit on the sale: $1 million dollars, according to city records. That's no blockbuster, but it's a decent boost. The couple listed the two-bedroom, 2.5-bath apartment with Corcoran brokers Nina De Rovira and Eva Marie Bozsik.

No expense was spared, we've been told. A little like the budgets for some films.

So what's behind the curtains? Something decidedly West Coast:a loft-like residence with a "magnificent renovation designed by Luis Ortega of Hollywood fame." The listing makes sure to inform us that no money was spared in the renovation. There's an open living room with a bar area (great for entertaining industry insiders) and large picture windows that "captivate the beauty of the park throughout the seasons." Great for framing the shots, although the script needs a little work. We're pretty sure whoever penned the listing meant "capture" and not "captivate."

Still, the pitch worked on buyers Richard Manuel Esteves and Donna Margaret Esteves, who paid a little over the $3.5 million ask. Like the Kennedy/Marshalls, the Esteveses are not from New York (they list their address on the deed as Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey), but the co-op board is apparently quite friendly to out-of-towners.

What project will the producing pair work on next?

kvelsey@observer.com

Luka Magnotta posing in front of the Hollywood Sign in a picture dated to 2007. (Photo: Flickr)

The Los Angeles Police Department is investigating the possibility accused Canadian killer Luka Magnotta was involved in a gruesome decapitation and killing where the victim's head and hands were placed in a wooded area by the Hollywood Sign. The Observer was first to report links between Mr. Magnotta and the Hollywood Sign killing on Monday. We previously alerted police in Montreal amd Los Angeles to the potential connection on Saturday.

"Our detectives are contacting their counterparts in Canada and to see if suspect was in Hollywood at the time," LAPD spokesman Lyle Knight told ABC News. "It's an open investigation. Our detectives are trying too see if there is a connection."

On Monday, Mr. Magnotta was arrested in Berlin after an international manhunt. He is accused of killing a man named Lin Jun in Montreal late last month, mutilating and having sex with the corpse, filming the entire crime in a gruesome video and mailing Mr. Jun's body parts to the headquarters of Canadian political parties.

Mr. Magnotta is a sometime porn actor, escort and alleged kitten killer who left a bizarre trail across the internet over the past few years. The Observer uncovered Facebook postings possibly made by Mr. Magnotta indicating he was in Los Angeles "doing massages" around the time of the Hollywood Sign killing. According to police in Canada, Mr. Magnotta maintained as many as 70 different Facebook accounts.

The severed head and hands were found by the Hollywood Sign by two women who were walking their dogs on January 17. Police later identified the victim as Hervey Medellin, 66. Medellin was openly gay and was initially reported missing by his boyfriend. The case remains unsolved. The Facebook postings, the sexuality of both victims and the methodology of the killings, which both involved dismembered body parts being placed in prominent locations are all remarkably similar.

After The Observer alerted the LAPD to the potential links between Mr. Magnotta and the Hollywood Sign killing this weekend, we were told our information was being "sent to our Robbery Homicide Division," which is investigating Medellin's murder. Montreal police said they would be getting in touch with the LAPD in response to our tip.

"I’m going to call LAPD or speak with someone there to see if there’s a link between our file and their file,” Detective Sergeant Antonio Paradiso of the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal told us on Monday.

Luka Magnotta posing as James Dean in Los Angeles. (Photo: Luka-Magnotta.Deviantart.com)

Last Chance for Animals, an organization "dedicated to eliminating animal exploitation" has taken responsibility for posting a series of YouTube pages "glorifying" accused Canadian killer Luka Magnotta and referencing the case of a severed head found by the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles earlier this year. According to an LCA press release, these videos were made by their "special investigations unit" in an attempt to "lure in the killer, or his companions, using covert tactics often reserved for law enforcement and intelligence agencies."

"SIU investigators immediately got to work and posted a video glorifying Magnotta, dubbing him 'The James Dean Killer,'" the press release said.  "A second video titled '1 Man 1 Icon' was produced to continue the façade using family photos of Magnotta that had not yet been featured in the press."

LCA was founded by a former soap opera actor named Chris DeRose in the 1980's. In addition to Mr. Magnotta's family photos, the YouTube videos posted by LCA also featured pictures of the Hollywood sign, references to the Satanic Bible and a description calling Mr. Magnotta “the sexiest serial killer ever to walk the earth.”

Mr. Magnotta was arrested in Berlin on Monday after an international manhunt after he allegedly killed and dismembered a man named Lin Jun in Montreal. Mr. Magnotta allegedly posted a gruesome video of the crime online and mailed the body parts to the headquarters of Canadian political parties. When he was caught, Mr. Magnotta was in an internet cafe reading news articles about himself. Prior to the Jun killing, Mr. Magnotta earned the ire of animal rights activists after he was linked to a series of videos that allegedly showed him killing kittens.

According to the LCA, their videos caused them to make contact "with several individuals who may have been Luka, or close associates of Luka" and "that information was turned over to Law Enforcement."

The Observer previously alerted police in Montreal and Los Angeles to the videos posted by LCA in light of other potential links between Mr. Magnotta and the Hollywood sign killing. Along with the videos, there are similarities in the methodology of the Jun killing and the Hollywood Sign murder, which both involved severed body parts placed in prominent locations, as well as Facebook postings on one of the many accounts attributed to Mr. Magnotta that indicate he was in Los Angeles less than one month after the Hollywood Sign killing.

On Monday, a police detective in Montreal told us they planned to communicate with the LAPD to discuss the possibility Mr. Magnotta was involved in that case. At the time, we noted, "it’s impossible to say for sure whether the HollywoodLoveLetters account belongs to Mr. Magnotta and whether he actually had anything to do with the Hollywood Sign killing. The only thing that’s certain is that someone out there is going to great lengths to associate him with it."

Apparently, that someone was the LCA.

We were made aware of the LCA's press release after receiving an email from an anonymous member of the organization. We asked them whether they were concerned about potentially wasting the time and energy of law enforcement officials who were looking into the videos and why they chose to reference the Hollywood sign killing in their postings.

"I'm really sorry, but I will need to clear any further comments with LCA's president," they said.

Luka Magnotta posing in front of the Hollywood Sign in a picture dated to 2007. (Photo: Flickr)

Could Canadian killer and infamous internet villain Luka Magnotta be behind a Hollywood murder mystery? After an international manhunt, German police say they have arrested Luka Magnotta in Berlin over ten days after he allegedly killed and dismembered a man named Lin Jun, posted a gruesome video of the crime online and mailed the body parts to the headquarters of Canadian political parties. However, The Observer has uncovered information that could potentially link Mr. Magnotta to an infamous case from earlier this year where the severed head and hands of a man were found on a wooded trail near the Hollywood Sign.

Update (6/8/12 8:37 A.M.): The LAPD has confirmed they are investigating the possibility Mr. Magnotta was involved in the Hollywood Sign killing.

Mr. Magnotta is a self-described male model and sometime escort who became infamous on the internet in late 2010 after online sleuths tied him to a series of videos showing a man killing kittens by drowning them and suffocating them in a vacuum bag. Over the past few years, Mr. Magnotta has used a series of online accounts and aliases to promote himself and discuss his alleged participation in the kitten killings. Immediately after the video of the Canadian murder, which includes footage of necrophilia and potential cannibalism, was posted online, Mr. Magnotta disappeared and law enforcement began an international manhunt saying they believed he fled to Europe.

Luka Magnotta posing as James Dean in Los Angeles. (Photo: Luka-Magnotta.Deviantart.com)

While Mr. Magnotta was on the lam, a series of YouTube accounts appeared commenting on the case. Experts have said at least one of the accounts, which used the user name "Beavis Butthead," "sounds exactly like" it was being operated by Mr. Magnotta himself. An online gaming account that had been used by Mr. Magnotta in the past also showed activity following his disappearance. When the German police arrested Mr. Magnotta, they found him at an internet cafe, further indicating he was accessing the web while on the run. Detective Sergeant Antonio Paradiso of the Montreal Police Service told us Mr. Magnotta "most probably" made online postings while he was on the lam, but it is very difficult to confirm for certain.

"That's very difficult to verify, we're still making verifications. There are all these sites anyone can access, it's incredible how difficult and complicated it could get," Mr. Paradiso said of the YouTube accounts potentially belonging to Mr. Magnotta.

One suspicious account that emerged while Mr. Magnotta evaded capture used the name HollywoodLoveLetters.

Update (6/6/12 3:31 A.M.): A group of activists affiliated with the organization Last Chance For Animals has taken responsibility for creating the HollywoodLoveLetters account on YouTube. They claim it was part of an "investigation" into Mr. Magnotta.

The account opened on Friday and its first action was"liking" footage of an interview with Mr. Magnotta. HollywoodLoveLetters followed that up soon afterward by posting a video entitled "The James Dean Killer - Luka Rocco Magnotta." Prior to the video's being posted, no public accounts attributed the "James Dean Killer" moniker to Mr. Magnotta, but the alleged killer himself has a documented interest in the late movie star. He once named Dean as one of his idols, has claimed to have undergone cosmetic surgery to look more like the actor and has posed for photo shoots dressed as Dean.

The "James Dean Killer" video featured a description calling Mr. Magnotta "the sexiest serial killer ever to walk the earth." Many of the online sleuths who have been following Mr. Magnotta commented on the video claiming the poster must be the alleged killer himself, but HollywoodLoveLetters never directly responded to these comments.

Purported family photos of Luka Magnotta that appeared in the YouTube video entitled "The James Dean Killer - 1 Man 1 Icon - Luka Rocco Magnotta." (Photo: YouTube)

Originally, the avatar used on the HollywoodLoveLetters profile was a mashup of the gay pride flag and the U.S. flag. Over the weekend, HollywoodLoveLetters switched the picture to a shot of the Hollywood sign. On Sunday, HollywoodLoveLetters began directly referring to the Hollywood Sign killing by "liking" a video news report on the case. That day, HollywoodLoveLetters also posted another video about Mr. Magnotta entitled "The James Dean Killer - 1 Man 1 Icon - Luka Rocco Magnotta." This second video features several purported personal photos of Mr. Magnotta including pictures described as showing his parents in the 1980's and him at five months old that do not seem to have appeared online prior to the video's release. In the purported photo of his parents, his mother is scrawled out. A distorted voice in the video also utters the words "The Nine Satanic Statements," which come from the bible of the Church of Satan. Last April, a post titled "The Nine Satanic Statements, Sins and Rules Of The Earth" appeared on one of the many blog sites that seem to have been maintained by Mr. Magnotta. The naming convention of the newest HollywoodLoveLetters video also matches the title of the gruesome video of the Canadian killing that was posted online, which was "1 Lunatic 1 Icepick." The account has shown no new activity since Mr. Magnotta's capture this morning and the user did not respond to a request for comment last night.

In addition to the YouTube activity and the obvious similarities in the methodology of the Jun killing and the Hollywood Sign murder, which both involved severed body parts placed in prominent locations, Facebook postings on one of the many accounts attributed to Mr. Magnotta indicate he was in Los Angeles less than one month after the Hollywood Sign killing. In the postings, which were dated February 19, the Facebook user who identifies themselves as Mr. Magnotta tries to arrange a meeting with a friend and informs them he is "doing massages" in Los Angeles. He lists a phone number that traces to an L.A. escort agency as the best way to contact him.

Facebook posting showing a user who identifies themselves as Luka Magnotta claiming to be in Los Angeles in February.

The severed head and hands were found by the Hollywood Sign by two women who were walking their dogs on January 17. Police later identified the victim as Hervey Medellin, 66. Mr. Medellin was reported missing by his boyfriend on January 9.

We have given this information to police in both Montreal and Los Angeles. Both agencies have told us they are reviewing our tip.

"For the moment we're still working on what we have here. We have a lot of things to do on that," Mr. Paradiso said. "Maybe tomorrow, or sometime this week, I'm going to call LAPD or speak with someone there to see if there's a link between our file and their file."

With the online information being difficult to quickly verify, Mr. Paradiso said the only confirmed links between Mr. Magnotta's case and the Hollywood Sign killing are "there's a body that's cut up, that the guy was gay and that our guy may have frequented Los Angeles."

At this stage, it's impossible to say for sure whether the HollywoodLoveLetters account belongs to Mr. Magnotta and whether he actually had anything to do with the Hollywood Sign killing. The only thing that's certain is that someone out there is going to great lengths to associate him with it.

British designer Jenny Packham dresses the Duchess of Cambridge on a regular basis, but perhaps she wants to start attracting an edgier clientele. The collection in her runway show this Fashion Week was inspired by the femmes fatales of film noir; gowns were red, black, and gunmetal, with body-hugging silhouettes with wide sharp shoulders. Burlesque performer and tightlacer Dita Von Teese may have been recruited as an attendee in honor of the theme; she sat in the front row in cat-eye sunglasses and her usual Old Hollywood curls. This year’s Oscars nominations include a powerful group of leading ladies. Which celebs should don these gowns for the occasion and channel their inner temptress?

One-Shot Liz, more widely known as Elizabeth Taylor.

Politically, economically, culturally, globally—except for the elimination of a few unlamented dictators and calling an end to the war in Iraq—2011 had little to offer, and delivered even less. Definitely time to say adios and begin again, with renewed optimism. But before we draw the curtain on the old man with the scythe and welcome the new kid in diapers with his brand-new year to grow, let’s lift a glass in a proper, permanent farewell toast to the folks who filed out through the exit doors in the year just ended. From no-nonsense First Lady Betty Ford, 93, to self-destructive goth singer Amy Winehouse, 27, death played no favorites in age or character. From Elizabeth Taylor, once the world’s most beautiful woman, to Cheetah, always the world’s most beloved chimp, 2011 ran the gamut in important departures.

Legendary Liz. She once said, “I can never remember a day when I was not famous.” And she lived up to it with responsibility, humor, artistry, a passion for life and an enviable reputation as a social activist dedicated to helping the sick, underprivileged and disenfranchised. From child stardom in National Velvet to two Oscars, 52 movies, eight marriages (twice to Richard Burton), endless near-fatal illnesses and billions in jewels, she finally succumbed, at 79, to congestive heart failure. In a rich and turbulent life, she didn’t waste a single minute and died with her boots on, ready for bear. If you can believe it, Cheetah outlived her. Although they never worked together, when Liz was making Lassie Come Home, the world’s most famous chimp was toiling away on the MGM jungle set next door. After the Tarzan movies ended, he lived with his “boss,” Johnny Weissmuller, until he retired to the Old Chimps Home, where he still made monkey business, posing for pictures and playing the piano. Ironically, he was often visited by Johnny Sheffield, who played Boy, then retired from show business to become a lobster importer and died before Cheetah, after falling off a ladder while pruning a palm tree. Who else would tell you these things?

This time last year, I no sooner turned in my annual goodbye column than on Jan. 2 my adored pal Anne Francis died of complications from pancreatic cancer, leaving me with so many personal memories of the fun times we shared and indelible impressions on screens big (Blackboard Jungle, Forbidden Planet) and small (she won an Emmy for Honey West, the first TV series about a female James Bond).

Cheetah the Chimp.

Anne was as gorgeous inside as she was in Technicolor. Then there was busty sex symbol and Howard Hughes discovery Jane Russell, more notable for her inflatable bra and voluptuous dimensions (38D-24-36) than her acting ability, although in Gentleman Prefer Blondes opposite Marilyn Monroe, she was praised for them all. No more close-ups for lovely, versatile British star Susannah York, 72, an actress of wide range and extraordinary depth who was more than just another pretty face in Tom Jones and her Oscar-nominated performance in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? But my favorite of her roles remains the young, naïve, feminine half of a lesbian team in the groundbreaking 1968 shocker The Killing of Sister George.

No more 8x10 publicity layouts for Jill Clayburgh, the excellent and underrated star of Broadway’s Pippin and the film An Unmarried Woman, or for Dana Wynter, 79, the elegant German-born film star best known as the woman who tried to stay awake long enough to survive the pea-pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). No more curtain calls for the great musical comedy star Betty Garrett, 91, who headlined in scores of MGM musicals, on Broadway, and as a regular on TV’s Laverne and Shirley and as Archie Bunker’s neighbor on All in the Family. As a founder of nonprofit theaters and musical workshops in L.A., she raised a lot of money to fight AIDS, and in her last appearance on Broadway, singing “Broadway Baby” in a starry revival of Follies that was far superior to the current one, she was still stopping the show. I already miss the friendly, handsome face of my diligent friend Cliff Robertson, who won a much-deserved Oscar as a mentally disabled janitor in Charly. He passed one day before his 88^th birthday. I’ll never forget the night we were both given honorary degrees at Brandeis University, after which he flew me back to New York in a hair-raising lightning storm in his own twin-engine plane. He kept saying, “If we crash, I wonder who will get the most publicity.” Funny guy.

Jackie Cooper, as a child, and Oscar nominee already.

Other stars who turned in their SAG cards forever included Jackie Cooper, 88, Our Gang alumnus who, at age 8, became the youngest actor nominated for an Oscar (The Champ, with Wallace Beery). He attended the Oscar ceremonies but fell asleep in Marie Dressler’s lap. He was washed up at 14, but became a race-car driver, a drummer with Claude Thornhill’s orchestra, a Broadway star in the 1950s, a major television executive in the 1960s, and an Emmy-winning producer-director in the 1970s. He came out of retirement to gain late-life popularity as Perry White, Clark Kent’s editor at the Daily Planet in the Superman blockbusters. There’s more: Peter Falk, a popular staple in John Cassavetes films and four-time Emmy winner for playing the rumpled TV detective Columbo, wearing the same battered trademark raincoat for 25 years until it shredded and had to be replaced; and Farley Granger, the 1950s heartthrob who waited until he was 80 to write Count Me Out, a candid, tell-all memoir about how, like Rock Hudson and Richard Chamberlain, he wasted his Hollywood years as a closeted gay star whose bisexual affairs included Ava Gardner, Arthur Laurents, Shelley Winters and Leonard Bernstein. (In a busy bed, Lenny only lasted two nights.)

Where will movies be without the flesh and bones of character actors like Pete Postlethwaite, British chameleon with a face of barbed wire, Oscar-nominated in 1994 for The Name of the Father and later applauded for everything from Alien 3 to Inception; Sada Thompson, the distinguished Tony-winning Broadway stalwart with the sandpaper voice; Marian Mercer, willowy, zany blonde who won a 1969 Tony for Promises, Promises; 93-year-old Clarice Taylor, who played Bill Cosby’s mother for seven seasons on The Bill Cosby Show; Phyllis Avery, petite blonde who played Ray Milland’s wife for two years in the TV sitcom Meet Mr. McNulty; Michael Tolan, the leading lady’s journalism teacher and boyfriend on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and one of the founders of New York’s American Place Theater; Margot Stevenson, 98, who starred opposite Orson Welles as the voice of Margo Lane, girlfriend of mystery man Lamont Cranston on the radio series The Shadow; all-American blonde Patricia Smith, who played Jimmy Stewart’s wife in The Spirit of St. Louis; James Arness, 88, a living-room fixture for 20 years as permanent as the family sofa in the role of Marshal Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke, one of the longest-running horse operas in TV history. Later, he reprised the role in five feature-length Gunsmoke movies. (Everyone forgot he also played the monster in the 1951 sci-fi classic The Thing.)

Stage star Margaret Tyzack.

More familiar faces now in bluer skies: Jill Haworth, the critically panned original Sally Bowles in the Broadway musical Cabaret, who was selected by director Harold Prince over 200 competitors despite the fact that she couldn’t sing or dance, then disappeared with her career in shreds; Mary Murphy, the pretty girl who played the wholesome small-town policeman’s daughter who fell for Marlon Brando as the leader of an invading motorcycle gang in the revolutionary film The Wild One (1953); and glamorous Elaine Stewart, a showgirl whose sexy presence added oomph to MGM classics like Brigadoon and The Bad and the Beautiful. In later years she became a household name as the hostess on two hit TV game shows, Gambit and High Rollers, nothing tops the way she stole an important scene from Lana Turner in Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful with the cynical line, “There ain’t no great men, honey, there’s only men.”

I will also fondly remember celebrated British dowager Margaret Tyzack, whose co-starring role opposite Maggie Smith in the London-New York stage hit Lettice and Loveage won awards on both sides of the pond; Dulcie Gray, 95-year-old effigy of the stiff-upper-lip school of British oddballs who starred in more than 100 plays on the London stage; Diane Cilento, sultry stage and film beauty, and wife of Sean Connery; Googie Withers, who graced dozens of films in the 1930s and ’40s, including Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes; Mary Fickett, a long-running favorite of women everywhere on the soap opera All My Children; Linda Christian, ravishing ’40s sexpot discovered by Errol Flynn in her native Mexico, then married to Tyrone Power, who moved on to Lana Turner after Linda played Lana’s maid in Green Dolphin Street. Those were the days in Tinsel Town. They did it in mirrors.

The year ended sadly for Edith Fellows, former Hollywood child star whose harrowing personal life (con men, drugs, alcoholism, a scheming mother and bankruptcy) was right out of a saga by Charles Dickens, and for Anna Massey, doe-eyed daughter of Hollywood actor Raymond, and star of Hitchcock’s Frenzy, who suffered from depression, anorexia and stage fright so severe it prevented her from being an international star, though she was admired, coached and revered by some of the most important people in film and theatre (including Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Celia Johnson, and her godfather, legendary film director John Ford). No more ovations for Roberts Blossom, famous for crabby old coots in movies like Home Alone; Tom Aldredge, Broadway veteran and husband for 50 years of costume designer Theoni Aldredge, who also died in 2011; John Howard Davies, the sensitive child star who played the title role in David Lean’s classic Oliver Twist, as well as the renowned British thriller The Rocking Horse Winner; John Wood, another Tony winner; French gamine Annie Girardot; Kenneth Mars, comic actor who played the nutty Nazi playwright in Mel Brooks’s The Producers; granite-faced Michael Gough and nice but stoic John Paxton (father of actor Bill Paxton), who both played the loyal butler in Batman movies; John Dye, only 47, who played the angel Andrew for nine seasons of Touched by an Angel; William Campbell, from the original Star Trek series; saffron-haired child star Susan Gordon; Oklahoma oil tycoon G.D. Spradlin, 90, who found acting late in life in such films as Apocalypse Now; gravel-voiced Bruce Gordon, memorable as mob boss Frank Nitti on the classic TV series The Untouchables, and Paul Picerni, who played FBI hero Elliot Ness’s right-hand man on the same show as well as the romantic lead in the classic 3-D horror film House of Wax. They died eight days apart. It was a reluctant send-off for Michael Sarrazin, the once-promising Canadian who shared star billing with Jane Fonda and Paul Newman before drugs took their toll on his looks and career. During the bloom of his romance with dazzling Jacqueline Bisset, they were my next-door neighbors on the beach one summer in Malibu, and they used to drop in to eat whatever I was cooking from pots on the stove. The book also closed on a chapter of TV sitcom history with the departure of David Nelson, 74, the last surviving member of the Nelson family on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. And who could forget pint-size Alice Playten, the saucer-eyed pixie with a voice as loud as Ethel Merman’s, who rose from Baby Louise in the original Gypsy to a series of hysterical TV commercials, including the one where her marshmallow meatballs, sweet-and-sour snails and heart-shape meat loaf drove her husband to Alka-Seltzer.

In a year notable for the sheer volume of its losses, we also bid adieu to camera-ready Marie-France Pisier, goddess of the French New Wave, discovered by François Truffaut and the star of such films as Luis Buñuel’s Phantom of Liberty and André Téchiné’s The Bronte Sisters with Isabelle Huppert and Isabelle Adjani, before melting away in shallow, overblown Hollywood extravaganzas like The Other Side of Midnight. She was found floating in a swimming pool in the south of France. Foreign films lost Lena Nyman, a gifted Swedish actress whose acclaimed work as Liv Ullmann’s mentally damaged sister in Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata was unfortunately overshadowed by her frank sex scenes in the controversial 1969 bore I Am Curious Yellow, which turned it into an undeserving box office bonanza. And speaking of censorship ire, it was au revoir to Maria Schneider, the French actress whose explicit nude sex scenes with Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris introduced new ways to use butter. We signed off on Joanne Siegel, 93, the model for illustrator Joe Shuster’s first Lois Lane in the Superman comic books, who later married the strip’s cocreator, Jerry Siegel. No more Len Lesser (annoying Uncle Leo on Seinfeld and his spinoff, on Everybody Loves Raymond); Peggy Rea (the cousin on The Waltons); Phyllis Love, intense 1950s ingenue in Broadway plays (Bus Stop, The Rose Tattoo) and later, in movies (Gary Cooper’s Quaker daughter in Friendly Persuasion); Jane White, daughter of Walter White, civil rights leader and national secretary of the NAACP for 25 years, and in her own right, a theater icon who played the (hilariously) evil queen in Once Upon a Mattress. No more magazine covers will be graced by model-actress Doe Avedon, wife of illustrious fashion photographer Richard Avedon. Their love story, from 1944 to 1951, was the basis of the historic 1957 Fred Astaire-Audrey Hepburn musical, Funny Face. No more comforting portrayals by seasoned veteran Harry Morgan in what seems like 1,000 movies from High Noon to Madame Bovary, playing everything from Colonel Potter on M.A.S.H. to the harassed fathers of teenagers, to General Grant in How the West Was Won, negotiating the vicissitudes of war with John Wayne. Who can replace these unique originals? Who will direct them, after the passing of world-class directors like Peter Yates (Breaking Away), Michael Cacoyannis (Zorba the Greek), the eccentric Ken Russell (Women in Love), and especially the prolific Sidney Lumet, a meticulous craftsman with impeccable taste who proved movies don’t have to be vulgar, derivative and stupid to appeal to wide audiences and win critical praise. Eschewing mindless action epics, animated comic books and pretentious bores, he concentrated instead on turning out timeless classics like Network, 12 Angry Men, The Group, Stage Struck, Serpico and Long Day’s Journey Into Night, to name just a few of my personal favorites. Sidney made intelligent, elegant, solid, emotionally involving films that told stories without depending on computer-generated gimmicks and special effects. He was a genuine Derby winner in a stable of tired old Hollywood also-rans.

Who will make me us laugh as much as Madelyn Pugh, who with her partner Bob Carroll Jr. wrote the I Love Lucy shows but, amazingly, never won an Emmy? Who will pen words of distinction after the final “The End” from playwrights Pam Gems (Piaf), Lanford Wilson (Talley’s Folly), Michael Hastings (Tom and Viv), Sidney Michaels (Tchin-Tchin) and Shelagh Delaney (A Taste of Honey), radio dramatist Norman Corwin, Southern novelist Reynolds Price, French resistance fighter Jorge Semprun, who wrote scripts for Costa-Gavras (Z) and Alain Resnais (Stavisky), screenwriter David Zelag Goodman (Straw Dogs) and the great Arthur Laurents, whose works for stage and screen include Gypsy, West Side Story, Rope, The Snake Pit, The Way We Were, Anastasia and The Turning Point, despite being both gay in the days of homophobic Hollywood and blacklisted during the height of the McCarthy witch hunts. Nobody will look as splendiferous without the costume designs of Theadora Van Runkle, whose berets, calf-length skirts and sweaters for Bonnie and Clyde started a fashion trend called “gangster chic,” and Ray Aghayan, who created spangled spectacles for Cher, Ann-Margret and Diana Ross made of ostrich feathers, rhinestones and 10,000 sequins. One gown for Carol Channing had 80 pounds of crystal beading and a scarf so heavy that when she flung it over her shoulder she damaged the scenery. And just in case there is still a future for show business, who will tomorrow’s bold-face headliners be lucky enough to hire, now that the legendary Sue Mengers has collected her last 10 percent? When she controlled the careers of Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen, Bob Fosse, Ryan O’Neal and Michael Caine, she was as famous as her clients. Wickedly dispensing caustic, quotable one-liners, she was as fearless as she was powerful. I was in her office one day when Steve McQueen threatened to sue her for some now-forgotten contractual sin. “I’m an Irish mick and I don’t forget,” he barked. Without batting a mink eyelash, Sue retorted: “I’m a Jewish princess and I don’t give a fuck!”

Music hit a few sour notes in 2011. No more tasty recordings of classic songs from the Great American Songbook now that the incomparable Margaret Whiting has folded her sheet music, unplugged her mike and joined her songwriter father, Richard Whiting, and her surrogate father, mentor and best friend Johnny Mercer, in that soundproof recording studio in the sky. When he founded Capitol Records in 1942, she was the first artist he signed to a record contract. She was 18 years old. Her career spanned seven decades. Among the younger generation of sophisticated song stylists who inherited the polish and style of Ms. Whiting’s artistry, it was eight bars and out for Mary Cleere Haran, crushed under the wheels of a car in a small beach town in Florida while riding her bike without a helmet. Among the most accomplished and critically acclaimed interpreters of Kern, Rodgers and Hart, Porter, Gershwin and Berlin, Mary was a darling of the cabaret world, in a class by herself, and the loss is devastating. No more swinging chords from jazz pianist George Shearing. Although sightless, he turned 88 keys into the sound of an entire orchestra, revolutionizing jazz for almost 91 years. Whenever anyone asked if he’d been blind all his life, he always said: “Not yet.”

In jazz, both Bob Flanigan and Ross Barbour, the last living co-founding members of the Four Freshmen, a vocal group who grew from warbling undergraduates in malt shops to millionaire recording stars groomed by mentor Stan Kenton, sang their final four-part harmonies. Pete Rugolo, the hip Kenton big band arranger-conductor who wrote some of the Four Freshmen’s best albums, joined them in the jam session in the sky, along with fellow jazz arranger-composer Russ Garcia, trombonist Bob Brookmeyer, Dave Brubeck’s drummer Joe Morello, trumpeter Snooky Young and sax wizard Frank Foster, who shaped the sound of the Count Basie orchestra. On the other side of Tin Pan Alley, Bruce Springsteen’s jovial sideman Clarence Clemens played his last soulful riff, country singer Ferlin Husky left the Grand Ole Opry one last time, and there will be no more hit tunes by Jerry Leiber, who with his writing partner Mike Stoller, penned durable pop songs like Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?” and Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog.” We won’t get any more brilliant songs by hip lyricist Fran Landesman, whose poetry in rhythm are passions for singers as diverse as Bette Midler, Barbra Streisand and the late June Christy—all of whom recorded “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most.” I’m really dating myself now, but I’m downright nostalgic about Georgia Carroll, the stunning supermodel from Texas who sang with Kay Kyser, later marrying the bandleader and starring in many of his zany films in the 1940s. After her retirement she retired to North Carolina, where she became active in the restoration of Chapel Hill, and Kyser became president of the Christian Science Church. That girl could sing.

Film scores won’t be the same without five-time Oscar winner John Barry, and colorful movie songs have lost their zip with the sad passing of Hugh Martin, the last of the great songwriters from the golden age of musicals. Meet Me in St. Louis alone contained “The Trolley Song,” “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and “The Boy Next Door,” all standards for 70 years. No more concerts by Kay Armen, lusty singer of Armenian descent whose rich contralto brightened many TV shows and record albums and whose rousing “Hallelujah!” was a highlight in the all-star MGM musical Hit the Deck. It was one final stanza by singers Phoebe Snow and Barbara Lea, whose dedication to esoteric songs by Alec Wilder and other classy composers made her a favorite of New York’s midnight cabaret crowd. No more arias by tenor Giorgio Tozzi, whose voice traveled successfully from the Metropolitan Opera to movies (he dubbed for Rosanno Brazzi in South Pacific) and theater (starring in a Broadway revival of The Most Happy Fella). On the opposite side of the scale, Amy Winehouse, a punk-rock singer who looked like a biker moll on Halloween, got more unfair publicity for her drug addiction and crazy antics than for her odd but transfixing voice. As a result, few people ever discovered her real talents, and her jazz-inflected songs went largely underappreciated by serious music lovers. But the year’s most bizarre music-related scandal involved Oscar-winning songwriter Joseph Brooks, who won for the tune “You Light Up My Life” and ended up facing 25 years in prison after being charged in 2009 with drugging and raping 13 women after luring them to Manhattan with the promise of phony auditions. The case was awaiting trial when Mr. Brooks committed suicide at age 73, leaving his son, Nicholas, to face his own charges of allegedly murdering his girlfriend last December.

So many goodbyes, so little space, but don’t overlook ballet’s flamboyant French choreographer Roland Petit, 87, credited with revolutionizing dance on stage and film, especially in splashy numbers for his wife, legendary prima ballerina Zizi Jeanmaire, who survives him. After the tasteless idiocy of this year’s disgraced producer Brett Ratner, I miss the polish of the deceased Gil Cates, whose reliable taste guided 14 telecasts to glory in 18 years without a hitch. Those were the days when the Oscar shows were worth staying up for. Still playing the fame game, I will not miss A.C. Nielsen, 92, the market researcher who invented the highly dubious TV rating system that turned the tube into incomprehensible hash. But I do miss Dolores Hope, Bob’s widow, who died at 102 wearing the biggest string of emeralds I have ever seen. No more fabulous meals from New York celebrity restaurant owners Armando Orsini, the “Playboy Prince of Pasta,” whose fabled Orsini’s was a West 56^th Street watering hole for everybody who was anybody in the 1960s, and Hungarian cookbook author and food maven George Lang, whose romantic Café des Artistes was a destination for anyone in love near Lincoln Center. If nothing else, he coined one of the best titles ever published for his memoir, called Nobody Knows the Truffles I’ve Seen. I will also miss fitness guru Jack LaLanne, who lived to be 96. There there were Daily News cartoonist Bill Gallo and show-biz caricaturist Sam Norkin, often unfairly called “the poor man’s Al Hirschfeld,” whose drawings filled the arts pages of the same newspaper for 26 years. It was the end of visionary inventors Elliot Handler (Ken and Barbie dolls), Murray Handwerker (his family invented Nathan’s hot dogs), Harry Wesley Coover (Super Glue), Arch West (the humble Doritos corn chips, with total sales of nearly $5 billion annually) and Hubert Schlafly, who helped generations of politicians remember their lines by inventing the dependable cheating device called the teleprompter.

Some of those town criers who died in 2011 were likeable congresswoman and vice presidential hopeful Geraldine Ferraro, former Democratic New York governor Hugh Carey and Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Warren Christopher. But my favorite was still Betty Ford—one of the most inspiring women who ever lived in the White House. She was courageous, outspoken, humane and a strong believer in sharing the truth with the people she served. After Gerald Ford became president by default, she stuck by him through thick and thin, and inevitably found her own share of the spotlight when she frankly discussed her own personal problems with the millions who adored her for her—struggles with alcohol, pain pills and breast cancer—without a trace of self-pity. She always said she came to Washington “through an accident in history.” She stayed 28 years.

No more family reunions for Judy Lewis (illegitimate daughter of Clark Gable and Loretta Young, who pretended her child was “adopted” for 31 years), Dorothy Rodham (mother and mentor of Hillary Clinton), Lucian Freud (grandson of psychiatrist Sigmund Freud and famous for painting nudes), composer Peter Lieberson (son of Columbia Records mogul Goddard Lieberson and ballet star Vera Zorina) and Svetlana Stalin (daughter of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin), who spent her last years wandering homeless and in poverty.

Journalism, which has one foot in the grave already, lost Tom Wicker, the New York Times White House correspondent, Washington bureau chief for 25 years and the only Times reporter in John F. Kennedy’s motorcade that fateful day in 1963 in Dallas that altered the course of U.S. history. Plus liberal talk-radio host Lynn Samuels, a sane alternative to the lunatic fringe of conservative hate-mongers who crowd the airwaves. Plus heavy-drinking, chain-smoking, self-professed bisexual slob journalist and professional provocateur Christopher Hitchens, and crotchety 60 Minutes commentator Andy Rooney, who kvetched charmingly about everything from the junk in his closet to the annoyances of computer technology for 33 years. I don’t know where to put computer whiz and Apple founder Steve Jobs or Jack Kevorkian, who made himself a household name by advocating euthanasia and even did eight years of jail time for what many believed to be a noble cause. He admitted to at least 130 “assisted suicides” and even invented a machine that taught people suffering from terminal illnesses how to do it themselves. To some, he was “Dr. Death.” To others, he was a saint. I could go on, but I’m feeling terminal myself.

Last but not least, did I forget to mention Karl Stover, 93, and one of the last surviving Munchkins from The Wizard of Oz? He was important too. So goodbye, 2011, you were a lousy year. And good riddance, if you ask me.

rreed@observer.com

Clooney.

When fall begins, so does the new movie season, and it all happens at the 36th Toronto International Film Festival, a.k.a. TIFF. This is the biggest, friendliest, most organized film fete in the world and a launching pad for both Hollywood Oscar contenders and small low-budget independents, which in the downturn of today’s economic meltdown amounts to the same thing. The crowds seem larger than ever this year as 300,000 people beg, fight and grovel for tickets to see in seven days 336 movies made by everyone from Madonna to Francis Ford Coppola. Politely, of course. This is Canada, not Cannes. For one whole week, you say goodbye to sleep and nutrition and learn to live on pizza and Dove bars. The Scotiabank Theatre, where most of the press screenings grind out from 8 a.m. to midnight, has even installed a Burger King. Nobody says you come to TIFF to get healthy.

Since the circus moved from plush Yorkville, with its Fifth Avenue shops and four-star hotels, all the way across the city to the seedy downtown entertainment gridlock of trattorias, discos, nightclubs and discount marts, a nonstop chorus of bitching and moaning about the “good old days” now competes with the noise of traffic gridlock. Screenings are held all over this vast city, with no fewer than 20 films per hour in every venue, forging an overcrowded schedule of events that often leaves you only a few minutes between movies. If you catch W.E., the roundly panned new film about the Duke and Duchess of Windsor amateurishly directed by Madonna (my advice is “Don’t!”), you miss the red-carpet arrival of Rob Lowe on an elephant. If, shortly after dawn, you wander with bloodshot eyes that might serve for target practice into an early-morning screening of a controversial Austrian film called Michael, you miss the Robert DeNiro press conference. Michael, a demented shocker about a mousy insurance salesman whose quiet, lonely existence without a friend, wife or significant other evokes sympathy until the neighbors discover he’s actually a child molester who keeps a 10-year-old boy locked in the cellar, outraged viewers for treating a pedophile with normal compassion (his mother loves him and his sister worries that he will spend Christmas alone). A lot of curiosity seekers on the scent of a festival scandal headed for this one but mistakenly ended up in another film from India, also called Michael, about a police officer destroyed by guilt after he kills an innocent child in a crowd of protestors who ends up illegally selling pirated Bollywood films. It’s not a comedy.

Michael.

Confusion reigns, but you grab your survival kit of eye drops, noiseless candy with no plastic wrappers and (if you’re lucky) a friend to talk to while you stand in line, and head for the movies. President Obama’s job recovery package and eyewitness memories of 9/11 compete for crawl space sandwiched between headlines chronicling rock concerts and the arrival of Madonna. You give up trying to see everything faster than you can say “It looks like the entire Russian Army spent the summer in Keira Knightley’s hair,” but since no Canadian taxi meter ever registers less than $20 a fare, if you try to see even three films a day, you can spend a month’s rent before you get out of Toronto without maxing out your credit card. That doesn’t stop anyone from trying. The city is famous for its rabid film buffs, camping out in the streets before dawn waiting for the box offices to open. And the stars themselves are as much drawn to the chaos as the fans. Kathleen Turner, Jane Fonda, Ewan McGregor, Glenn Close, Albert Brooks, Allison Janney, Nicolas Cage, Antonio Banderas, Catherine Deneuve, Charlotte Rampling, Gina Gershon, Clive Owen, Woody Harrelson, single-at-last Robin Wright (she finally dropped the Penn), Ralph Fiennes, bizarre Tilda Swinton, they’re all here, and new celebrity faces arrive on every plane. At a party celebrating the 20th anniversary of Sony Pictures Classics, I accidentally knocked a glass of merlot out of the hands of a comely dish who turned out to be Bryce Dallas Howard.

George Clooney is here, as both an actor and director, competing with Brad Pitt to prove who was the most bored and miserable at their press conferences. Mr. Pitt premiered his new baseball film and continued his campaign to disfigure his good looks as much as possible. With days of whiskers and long greasy hair resembling a rat’s nest, and looking like a Bowery bum in a homeless shelter, he was terrific as the fast-talking, quick-thinking, risk-taking Oakland Athletics manager Billy Beane in Moneyball, but a real mess in person. It was hard to tell who was more uncomfortable—Mr. Clooney, Mr. Pitt or Angelina Jolie, who trailed six feet behind her husband, acting shy, her purse attached to her tattooed arms with a gold chain, refusing to talk to reporters or pose for photos, and giving an unconvincing performance as an “I just came along for moral support” trophy wife. At Mr. Clooney’s press confab, he said nothing of any importance and seemed annoyed with any reporter who expected more. Ironic, isn’t it? Mr. Clooney lives the fantasy life of a 13-year-old boy in public, yet gets testy if anyone brings up his personal life. Color him one of the luckiest actors alive. Of his two current acting jobs, Alexander Payne’s The Descendants, a clumsy soap opera about a wealthy family in Hawaii, was a mixed blessing. Playing a man who has built an empire out of real estate law and neglects his wife and two daughters until they hardly know him, he experiences a reversal of conscience when his wife suffers brain damage in a boating accident and ends up in a coma. Playing remorse, guilt, the responsibility of a late-blooming parent and rage when he discovers the wife was cheating on him and planning a divorce at the time of her hospitalization, the role requires more depth and emotional range than Mr. Clooney is able to convey with much realism, but he looks good in a colorful wardrobe of gaudy Hawaiian shirts and beach shorts. Although he works hard to master a complex role for which he is basically miscast, The Descendants succeeds unevenly and disappoints hugely.

More satisfyingly, he has directed a very fine political film, The Ides of March, a tough, realistic and cynical morality tale about a popular liberal governor running for president whose political future is jeopardized by the dark, hidden weaknesses in his personal life. In a role as relevant as election-year headlines, Mr. Clooney gives a believable, chilling performance of slick duplicity and deceit, and his direction smoothes out the details with riveting relish. The role is a composite of all the camera-ready politicians who have done us wrong in recent years, and with easy smiles, self-deprecating humor and a tongue sugar-coated with crowd-pleasing liberal rhetoric, Mr. Clooney falls into the role without much labor, doing what he does easily. He isn’t required to do much more than dazzle with charm. It is really Ryan Gosling who steals the film as the Democratic candidate’s ambitious and ruthless press secretary who will stop at nothing to climb the ladder and take over as his boss’s chief campaign manager. This is a star in the making who is showing unimpeachable signs of his own rise to power in two films causing a sensation at TIFF. He is also Canadian, so this is something of a victorious homecoming.

Crashing in a wave of tumultuous applause from Cannes, Mr. Gosling is positively electrifying in Drive, the kind of steamy, understated, pulp-fiction film noir they used to turn out in Humphrey Bogart’s day. It’s about a lonely Hollywood stunt man with nerves of steel who smashes cars in action thrillers during the day and plows through the dark purple streets of L.A. driving getaway cars by night, listening to ball games and police reports. The first 20 minutes are nonstop, speed-and-guts action guaranteed to keep even the most jaded action-genre enthusiast wide awake, and the tempo never wanes. Unexpectedly, the unnamed man mysteriously referred to only as Driver develops confused feelings of compassion for a friendly neighbor in his apartment building (another superb character essay by Carey Mulligan) whose husband is in prison. When he has served his time returned to his wife and young son, and gets beaten half to death by the thugs he owes protection money, Driver gets involved against his better judgment and drives for the ex-con while he robs a pawn shop of enough money to pay off his debt. The scheme backfires, the ex-con gets gunned down, and Mr. Gosling ends up with the money and a cold-blooded gun moll with a heart of pure poison (Christina Hendricks, the redhead office manager from Mad Men). Pursued by an underworld gang led by a former Hollywood producer-turned mobster (Albert Brooks in a curdling surprise turn as a razor-wielding maniac) and trapped on a one-way street to the bottom of the river with no detour, Driver sweats bullets to survive long enough to turn the stolen money over to the dead man’s widow before the mob gets there first. They’re the apex of evil, but he’s a better driver. The girl has softened his heart but hardened his resolve. The tension is palpable, the suspense as unbearable as the final steps to the hangman’s noose.

Nothing turns out as planned. The crack dialogue is minimal but crisp and dead-on. The meter set by off beat Danish-born director Nicolas Winding Refn is lean and unsparing. And the pace is enhanced by the most engaging antihero behind the wheel since Steve McQueen. This is the kind of role nobody writes anymore, and even if they did, there are no actors who can play it. Ryan Gosling has an enigmatic fury and exclusive eyes the color of a hard blue sky, never giving the camera too much of himself, always leaving the audience room for speculation and anxiety. He has always been exhilarating to watch, but Drive is the movie that will skyrocket him to major stardom.

Drive.

After a movie as fresh, original and daring as Drive, you learn to ignore the insanity, the P.R. poop and the screaming throngs who bring their own folding chairs and stand on top of garbage cans to get a glimpse of a nonentity like Seth Rogen, and finally concentrate on what a film festival is really about—the films. TIFF 2011 churns out the usual doom and gloom about death, torture and the human race behaving badly, but in addition to incest, rape and dysfunctional family epics, an unusual number of films reflect a creeping paranoia infusing society with fear. Land of Oblivion, from Poland and the Ukraine, channels the radioactive destruction of a pastoral village in the aftermath of black rain radiation from a Chernobyl-like power-plant disaster. Lars von Trier’s pretentious bore Melancholia is a 135-minute chronicle of the end of the world witnessed by the guests at a garden party as a wayward planet plunges toward Earth. It is an experience I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.

Home invasions are big this year. In Trespass, masked intruders arrive at an isolated Louisiana plantation to beat, slash and otherwise drive Nicole Kidman and Nicolas Cage to the edge of murder and madness. From Canada, a more unusual thriller gaining attention is the harrowing 388 Arletta Avenue, about an affluent Toronto couple (Nick Stahl and Mia Kirshner) who are being watched and filmed 24 hours a day by a crazed stalker in a hooded black jumpsuit. Their cat’s severed head falls out of the icebox. Clock radios come on at ungodly hours. Downloaded songs blast through the computer. Then the wife disappears without a trace and the husband’s sister-in-law suspects him of murder. The distraught husband calls in the police, but nobody believes his strange story and while the cops are in the house, the voyeur is filming them, too. As the terror builds, I found myself writing the next scene in my head, imagining what horror would happen next. Strongly influenced by Hitchcock’s Rear Window but seen entirely through the lens of hand-held surveillance cameras, from the stalker’s point of view, this hair-raiser makes Randall Cole a director to keep an eye on.

Another, more welcome trend: movies about the desperate search for love in an age of apps—when today’s one-night stands are tomorrow’s Twitter. Veteran director Lasse Hallström (The Cider House Rules) has a real winner in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, an offbeat romance that teams Emily Blunt, as a marketing expert with a rich sheikh for a client who devises a project to ship 10,000 salmon to the parched riverbeds of the Middle East to introduce fishing as a sport and establish hatcheries as a new industry, with overexposed Ewan McGregor, wisely returning to his Scottish roots as a dull, humorless academic and didactic fishing expert who gets recruited against his will by the British government to supervise the project. Kristin Scott Thomas is hilarious as a self-serving public relations expert for the British prime minister, and dashing Egyptian newcomer Amr Waked is an intelligent Arab sheikh who faces political ruin and attacks by warring tribal opponents to finance the project. The premise is absurd, but as you wait on the edge of your seat to see if the salmon will follow their natural instincts and swim upstream in a blistering desert, the movie grows on you like a lichen. This is one of this year’s most popular audience favorites.

Another is The Artist, an almost totally silent film, shot in Hollywood in black and white by a French crew headed by the imaginative director Michel Hazanavicius, about the advent of talking pictures in the 1920s. The slim but unflaggingly resonant plot of this nostalgic valentine to a lost era of magic centers on George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), a matinee idol and genial ham at the zenith of stardom when sound turned everything upside down, and an ambitious little flapper named Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo) who literally falls into his arms by accident at a red carpet premiere and years later, after achieving stardom as the biggest musical star on the silver screen, pays him back for his kindness by rescuing him from obscurity and reviving his career. For 100 delicious minutes, The Artist is a cross between the Gene Kelly-Debbie Reynolds romance in Singin’ in the Rain and the Norman Maine-Esther Blodgett story in A Star Is Born—a very French parfait, with John Goodman, Penelope Ann Miller and James Cromwell added to the frosting to lend American authenticity. A smash hit at TIFF, it features a major discovery in the tap-dancing Mr. Dujardin, who has the Gallic charm and insouciant charisma of a young Maurice Chevalier.

When all else fails in the new films, which it often does, there is always the thrill of discovering great new performances. Oscar rumors spin around Glenn Close in Albert Nobbs, stiff as a boned corset in the astonishing role of a Victorian Irishwoman who disguises herself as a man to work as a butler and gets away with the deception for 20 years. Rachel Weisz is marvelous in the old Vivien Leigh role in a new movie version of Terence Rattigan’s brilliant play The Deep Blue Sea, and a slim, sylphlike Jennifer Hudson, of all the Dreamgirls divas, carves a new career in the title role of Winnie, wife of legendary South African leader Nelson Mandela. Finally, trembling with vulnerability, the sensitive and versatile Lauren Ambrose (Six Feet Under and soon-to-be Fanny Brice in the forthcoming Broadway revival of Funny Girl) is positively devastating in Think of Me, playing a jobless, poverty-stricken single mother struggling to survive in the phony swirl of Las Vegas. As one of the continuing body blows the working disenfranchised suffer daily in an economic downturn, this is a numbing portrait of a woman at the end of her rope, suddenly faced with an offer to sell her only daughter for $20,000 to an affluent adoptive couple who can give the child a better life. The decision is wrenching, and failure is assured either way. The acting by both mother and child is powerful and emotionally intense, but the centrifugal force of Ms. Ambrose left me reeling. She is heartbreaking without a shred of self-pity, and Think Of Me is a sad, wrenching but admirably unsentimental film about the bravery of the human condition that truly deserves a bigger audience.

As I reach the midway point, there is still more to come: a documentary about noisy, ubiquitous Sarah Palin; the latest work by Australia’s distinguished Bruce Beresford called Peace, Love and Misunderstanding, with Jane Fonda as a hippie grandmother from the Woodstock generation; a new Wuthering Heights with a black Heathcliff; and a modern take on Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, directed by Ralph Fiennes, replete with cable news, cell phones and Uzies. Of course it wouldn’t be a film festival without sex, masturbation and full-frontal nudity, and Irish hunk Michael Fassbender delivers all three as a pornography-obsessed New York sex addict in the ferociously graphic Shame. So far, the lines for that one have been so long that I couldn’t get in, but I’m still trying.

Just when you think you’ve seen it all at TIFF, there’s always more.

rreed@observer.com

Unknown is a bad movie that starts out as a good movie, then plunges steadily downhill in a pile of head-scratching mush.  In the warp-speed world of contrived thrillers, this one moves along satisfactorily for close to an hour, sucking us into an alternate-reality case of mistaken identity, until it chokes on its own red herrings. In the second hour, there are so many holes in the script it looks like a New York street after a snowplow. Mr. Neeson plays a noted scientist from New Hampshire named Dr. Martin Harris who arrives in snowy Berlin with his lovely wife, Liz (January Jones from TV's Mad Men), to address a global summit on bio-technology. While they are getting into a taxi at the airport, the briefcase containing Dr. Harris' speech is left on the curb. While Liz is checking them into the posh Kempinski Hotel, he remembers the missing bag and without telling his wife simply grabs another taxi to the airport that plunges from a bridge into an icy river. When he awakens in the hospital after a four-day coma without any memory or identification, a sympathetic nurse tries to help. Arriving at the hotel, he finds Liz with another man (Aidan Quinn) who has claimed his identity. "Liz, I'm sorry, I was in an accident, they didn't know who I was," he pants, to which his wife coldly replies, "Excuse me ... do I know you?" Returning to the hospital, his kind nurse recommends a friend who specializes in finding missing persons, and is then murdered by the mysterious figure who has been stalking him in the subway.       

Now Martin is not only a man without a passport, but a hunted murder suspect in a strange country. (He doesn't know his name, but he knows the foreign dialing codes, always has the correct change and never runs out of money in either American dollars or German marks.) To prove his identity, he turns to the person whose address is scrawled on a piece of paper in his coat--a former member of the East German secret police--and the Bosnian cab driver (Diane Kruger, from Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds) who pulled him from the river and is now hiding from the police as an illegal immigrant. Enter Dr. Harris' best friend from New Hampshire (Frank Langella), who brutally murders the retired Communist agent (huh?), as well as a gang of villains straight out of an old Nazi picture starring the Bowery Boys. It's amazing how everyone in Berlin suddenly speaks fluent English. When the terrorists (who knock off half of Berlin for unexplained reasons) burst into Ms. Kruger's apartment, where Mr. Neeson is hiding out, he's in the shower naked, but by the time they burst into the bathroom, he's climbing over the roof in the snow, apparently wet and barefoot, but unfazed. By now, Unknown has turned inadvertently into a comedy. Careening through the traffic in a city he's never been in, but knowing exactly where he's going, the doctor discovers there is no such person as Dr. Martin Harris, his enigmatic wife and the man who has stolen his identity are both imposters and even the confused doctor himself is ... never mind. Just rest assured that each time you think you've got it all figured out, there's always another preposterous plot twist on the way.

I can fully understand why gorgeous January Jones would want to parlay her success on Mad Men into a big-screen career, but Unknown is not the movie that is going to do it. Lamely directed by Spain's Jaume Collet-Serra from a script by Hollywood hacks Oliver Butcher and Stephen Cornwell that borders on dementia, this scrambled  chaos has not one two-minute segment that holds up under even the most basic scrutiny. No movie stops making sense in postproduction--jabberwocky begins with the screenplay. Unknown makes no sense at all, so you not only worry about Liam Neeson's judgment in movies, but you begin to wonder if he's forgotten how to read. 

rreed@observer.com   

UNKNOWN

Running time 106 minutes

Written by Oliver Butcher and Stephen Cornwell

Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

Starring Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger, January Jones

1/4

He also mentioned that he's absolutely taken with Faulkner, particularly the As I Lay Dying and "The Bear," a short story. No surprise there; he's getting his Ph.D in lit at Yale, after all. But perhaps we underestimated the extent of his devotion: Franco announced today that he will be directing an adaptation of As I Lay Dying -- from his own screenplay! -- according to a report from Showbiz 411. 

And if its not enough to direct a work so solidly canonical, Franco is in talks with megaproducer Scott Rudin to direct an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, a book that many have suggested is laughably unfilmable. Harold Bloom, that New Haven-based lion of criticism, has called it the "ultimate dramatization of violence."

This could be, up to this point, the most ambitious of all the projects Franco has taken on. We've been baffled by his ability to juggle wildly disparate and abstract projects, but nothing may ever top following an appearance on a daytime soap opera with an adaptation of a novel about scalping Native Americans.

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

"If you've been to a rock concert you know that pot sort of makes these big billowy white clouds and it didn't do that so I wasn't sure if it was real or not … I asked Zach afterwards he said it was 'THC-free' marijuana," Hoover said on the show.

Galifianakis fired up what appeared to be a doobie during the Oct. 29 episode of "Real Time." He was on a panel of guests who were discussing Proposition 19, which would have legalized marijuana for recreational use in California. Proposition 19 was defeated by a 54%-46% margin in Tuesday's election. During the Maher appearance, Galifianakis passed the joint to Hoover who smelled it before offering it to her fellow panelists.

"It's real," Hoover said after taking a sniff.

"Real Time" films at the CBS Television City compound in Los Angeles where medical marijuana is legal for people with prescriptions from a doctor.

Both Maher and Galifianakis later denied that the joint was real. In an interview with Wolf Blitzer, Maher said:

"If it was a real joint, Wolf, I would have smoked it ... I think it was cloves or something … Zach's crazy, he's not that crazy."

"It was definitely not cloves," Hoover said on "The O'Reilly Factor."

Galifianakis suggested the stunt was "smoke and mirrors" during an appearance on "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon." The comedian is currently promoting his movie "Due Date."

Hoover has not responded to a request for comment from The Observer.

Full Disclosure: Hunter Walker made a donation of $20 to the "Yes on 19" campaign.