Dustin Lance Black (Getty Images)

Milk’s Oscar-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black told The Observer that he was opposed to President Obama’s recent declaration of support for same-sex marriage. “Well, because I think marriage is between a man and a woman, I was incredibly upset,” Mr. Black said, biting a nail. He was joking, though in a quiet, grave tone--the premiere for his directorial debut, Virginia (starring Jennifer Connelly and out this Friday) had been the night before, and he was the worse for wear.

Mr. Black, whose career has included biopics of two of the most prominent queer politicians in history (the openly gay Harvey Milk, the closeted psychosexual morass of J. Edgar Hoover), said that he’d long believed Mr. Obama would come out in favor of gay marriage. In fact, the screenwriter had tried to force the issue. “I had two weeks earlier put a piece in the Hollywood Reporter saying that gay people might consider not supporting the president in the re-election campaign if he didn’t come out in favor. And I hit Romney hard in a way he deserved to be hit hard for his horrific stances on LGBT issues. And I said ‘we can’t be taken for granted anymore, we can’t vote for a less bad candidate.’

“And I took a lot of heat and I got beaten up for that, and I said, ‘It’s a hypothetical! I’m saying ‘If, then! If he doesn’t, then we might consider...’ You gotta ask for what you want in this world. And they were like, ‘He’ll never do it, it’s not a hypothetical.’ But he might do it!”

Mr. Black is now at work on a film adaptation of 8, about the legal struggle over Proposition 8 in California. The film’s to be directed by Rob Reiner. “It’s that Mormon thing,” said Mr. Black, who was raised in the Church of Latter-Day Saints and whose new film deals with life among Southern Mormons. “I’m industrious. Ambitious. I’m like the gay Mitt Romney... That’s a terrible thing to say.”

We mentioned that Virginia was less overtly political than Milk or J. Edgar, and asked if Mr. Black agreed with Godard’s belief that all film is political. “I agree with Godard and I agree with Oprah Winfrey. People are always asking ‘would you run for public office?’ And she says ‘I have so much more influence here.’ We get to tell human stories that have to do with human issues. At our best, we’re telling stories that have to do with problems in our country right now.”

Besides, he joked, we might have missed the point of the film altogether. ““Virginia is a real politician, she’s a gay man dressed as a woman. I thought of this as a sequel to Milk!”

daddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Kim Basinger dreamed of Oscar... and then she woke up.

What's the perfect corrective to the now-in-the-Farmers'-Almanac Oscar Season? How about This Had Oscar Buzz, a blog compiling all those movies that the punditocracy--or the publicistarati, or just Harvey Weinstein--told you were guaranteed Oscars? It'll make the mere fact that any The King's Speech gets to the Oscars seem miraculous once you consider how many I Dreamed of Africas had to stumble.

Jennifer Connelly and Paul Bettany

After their Park Slope adventure, Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly decided to head back to Manhattan, investing in a $6.9 million Tribeca penthouse. Apparently Tribeca didn't suit them either, however, as they have just put the place on the market, Curbed reports.

They're hoping to turn a profit on the penthouse at 288 West Street, as well, listing it for $8.495 million. Those Beautiful Mind royalties not paying off like they used to? The three-bedroom place may be feeling a little cramped, as Ms. Connelly just gave birth to her third child last May.

For a family of slightly smaller size (or one willing to have kids bunking), however, the 4,096-square-foot home is comfortable. According to a listing from Douglas Elliman brokers Raphael De Niro, James Flowers and Niro Pipher, the co-op features a skylight, a library/media room with maple shelves (currently stocked with classics like A Knight's Tale and Labyrinth) and a wood burning stove, a laundry room and "espresso stained floors," (Starbucks, we trust). Curbed has a walk through worth checking out.

eknutsen@observer.com

Journalist (Getty Images)

2003: How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days: Kate Hudson plays a beautiful reporter for a lightly fictionalized Cosmopolitan called Composure.

2004: 13 Going on 30: Jennifer Garner plays a beautiful editor at a lightly fictionized, let's say Elle, called Poise.

2006: The Devil Wears Prada: Meryl Streep plays the imperious editor of a lightly fictionalized Vogue called Runway.

2006: Blood Diamond: Jennifer Connelly plays a beautiful, adventurous reporter for Vanity Fair.

2010: Letters to Juliet: Amanda Seyfried plays a beautiful, adventurous fact-checker for the New Yorker.

2011 (forthcoming): Friends With Benefits: Justin Timberlake plays a beautiful art director for GQ.

2011 (f0rthcoming): Our Idiot Brother: Elizabeth Banks plays a beautiful, imperious reporter for Vanity Fair.

On the wobbly heels of the disastrous atheist film The Ledge comes another hopeless flop about the hypocrisy and homicidal passions of evil born-again Christians, called Salvation Boulevard. I’m not taking sides. I’m just telling you it’s a stupid farrago of aborted ideas, misguided actors, lame direction, submental writing and follow-the-dots plotting that never comes anywhere within a 10-mile radius of what I used to call coherent filmmaking. I guess it’s supposed to be a spoof of religious hysteria and the war between the blind inspiration of organized religion and the dark forces of Satan, but it isn’t funny or provocative enough to hold interest long enough to finish a bag of popcorn. It knocks itself unconscious trying to be something more substantial, but fails on every level. I call it cinema at hard labor.

Stoned dork Carl Vandermeer (Greg Kinnear) sleeps in his van overnight trying to get a ticket to a Grateful Dead concert, and when he wakes up the next  morning, he finds himself in front of an ugly architectural house of worship called the Church of the Third Millennium, run by slick TV evangelist Pastor Dan Day (Pierce Brosnan). The gullible Carl, who never seems to be cooking on all four burners, and his wife, Gwen (Jennifer Connelly), become instant converts, giving up sex, drugs and rock and roll to be saved. They also dedicate themselves to helping Pastor Dan defeat his chief opponent, Professor Paul Blaylock (Ed Harris), an atheist who writes best-sellers like The World Needs Religion Like I Need a Hole in My Head.

Seeing as their televised debates on such topics as the existence of God draw hefty ratings and enthusiastic audiences, the professor (who is as greedy and amoral as the preacher) summons the zealot to his office to propose a no-brainer collaboration on a book of conversations about their opposing world views, covering such trigger points as the Virgin Birth and the definition of religion as fear of the supernatural, that will be bigger than vampire rom-coms and bingo put together. During the meeting, Pastor Dan takes out a gun, blows a hole through the head of his nemesis, and blames the whole thing on the naïve Carl. (The sleazy fundamentalist makes a profitable cause out of what he passes off as the professor’s suicide attempt, setting up Carl as the guilty party who drove him to it.) Confused and secretly longing for his old days as a carefree, wacked-out stoner, Carl turns to an oversexed security guard named Honey (Marisa Tomei), a fellow Grateful Dead groupie with a tattoo of a teddy bear on her left breast. They call them Deadheads. (These are the facts you’ve always wanted that will broaden your education in Salvation Boulevard.) The freaked-out Honey encourages prison (“No sex, no drugs—just like church!”)

In the exaggerated spiritual crisis that follows, as Professor Blaylock lies in a coma and the cops search for Carl, Pastor Dan dispatches his cameraman Jerry (Jim Gaffigan), blubbering some distorted parallel to the story of Abraham and Isaac, to kill Carl in the desert and make it look like a second suicide. But Carl hits his assassin with a rock in self-defense, sinking deeper into a vortex of religious-fueled frenzy. There is no sign of a director anywhere and it’s a good example of an otherwise stellar cast left to its own intuition. This is both odd and disappointing, since director George Ratliff, who co-wrote the moronic screenplay with Douglas Stone, ill-advisedly based on a dreadful book by Larry Beinhart, once made a plausible domestic thriller called Joshua, about a homicidal child whose sibling jealousy of a new baby turns him into the worst pint-size monster since the legendary Rhoda Penmark in The Bad Seed. Here, he seems to be directing by telegram.

The victims of all the violence come out of their near-death experiences—not to clear Carl but to make the contrived plot manipulations even sillier—but I didn’t throw in the towel until Carl was kidnapped by Pastor Dan’s religious enemy in Mexico, who wants to beat him to the construction of his own planned Christian community on a prime chunk of real estate, and the demented preacher mistook Carl as an angel. It’s a cobbled attempt to reunite Mr. Kinnear and Mr. Brosnan, who made a fine team in a much better 2006 movie called The Matador. This time, they’re sleepwalking, but in all fairness, I confess I cracked a wan smile when Mr. Brosnan rubbed his nose trying to look pious, singing hymns at the top of his lungs, and warding off annoying calls from the devil on his cell phone. The rest of Salvation Boulevard is heavenly hash.

rreed@observer.com

SALVATION BOULEVARD

Running time 95 minutes

Written by Douglas Stone and George Ratliff

Directed by George Ratliff

Starring Greg Kinnear, Jennifer Connelly, Pierce Brosnan

1/4

reation is a sluggish tome on the life of Charles Darwin and his long and painful creation of The Origin of Species, the controversial work of revolutionary thinking about evolution advancing the theory that man was descended not from Adam and Eve, but from monkeys. It caused a sensation throughout the world when it was published in 1859, and changed the history of scientific thinking. This long and wearying movie is about how hard it was to write and publish, and survive the wrath of organized religion that followed. It arrives on the 150th anniversary of the book, and the baroque direction by Jon Amiel is determined that we should live every single minute of it.

Charles Darwin and his wife Emma, played by real-life husband-wife team Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly, were first cousins in an uptight Victorian milieu who forged a marriage based on love that surmounted all obstacles, including religious differences and the early death of their 10-year-old daughter Annie, which caused Darwin to lose his faith in God. The film focuses on a short period in Darwin’s life in the mid-19th century, between Annie’s death and the book’s publication, when he spends long, tedious days studying earthworms and barnacles in a microscope. Busy selecting breeds of birds to determine which species nature had selected for survival, Darwin becomes an object of curiosity and suspicion for scholars and neighbors alike, his face grimacing, his shoulders hunched and his brow wet with nervous perspiration. With no time to play husband and father to a growing household, his work is so demanding and repetitive that it drives him into feverish illnesses that take a toll on his mental and physical health. It never is clear what’s wrong with him. I chalked it up to overwork. Constantly throwing up, his eyes red-rimmed and glued to his test tubes, he may be a brilliant scientist in the research lab, but what a miserable sod in the parlor.

The film makes a stab at tracing his theory of evolution from a question as simple as “Where do babies come from?” to an obsession with an orangutan at the London Zoo named Jenny, an obsession that convinces him she’s an ancestor of every human being. He splits with the family minister (Jeremy Northam) to the horror of his wife, who suggests he’s at war with God—“a battle you cannot win.” His love of science is shared only by his worshipful daughter Annie, who sides with her father’s belief that “God’s plan” cannot explain 900 species of wasp caterpillars who can turn into butterflies. After Annie dies, Emma takes further refuge in religion, and Charles in the science lab. The movie is not so much about the masterpiece that results from so much tribulation, but about the agony Darwin endures while writing it. As he retreats from society and almost every human contact, the film has an alienating effect. For a movie dedicated to one of the most exciting, groundbreaking books ever written, Creation is disappointingly dull.

The movie is confusingly nonlinear in structure, with the action taking place out of sequence and leapfrogging all over the place, cutting between the naturalism of Darwin’s love for Annie and his anguish over her premature death (he rarely even speaks to his other four children) and the stylized dream sequences where he talks to Annie’s ghost. Despite the efforts of director Amiel and screenwriter John Collee to humanize the domestic side of Darwin’s struggle between faith and reason, too many surreal images and pretentious camera angles disrupt the flow of concentration, and the viewer loses grip. Every time Charles and Emma draw swords, he skips off for a closer look at a rock formation. Creation would have been more interesting if it concentrated more on the marital conflicts between Emma, a devout Christian, and Charles, who thinks the Bible is divinely inspired hogwash.

Despite my misgivings with the film itself, the acting is first rate. Tall, gangly, sandy-haired and bony, with a deeply receding hairline that shows the veins throbbing through his scalp, Paul Bettany is never remotely handsome, but according to the drawings I’ve seen of the real Darwin, he’s remarkably authentic-looking. And Ms. Connelly, who won her Oscar as the wife of another tortured genius, played by Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind (2001)—the film where she met Bettany—is familiar with the risks faced by wives of great men. Their reactions to each other and the untrained actors who play their children are full of trust and intimacy, even if her grating British accent is less convincing. The story doesn’t entirely work for me, though Darwin did live through his debilitating illnesses to become a national hero, his marriage eventually produced 10 children and Emma stuck by him until his death, at 73. He is buried in Westminster Abbey.

I guess you’re pretty much on your own here. Creation is respectable and worthy of attention, but its future seems doubtful in a divisive country where, according to a Gallup poll conducted in February 2009, only 39 percent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution.

rreed@observer.com

Ms. Weissglass’ whimsical artwork, previously purchased by actress Susan Sarandon and designer Catherine Malandrino, have long been on display at her husband’s office, currently on Warren Street.

“Definitely some people have bought work from me through that venue,” Ms. Weissglass, 47, told the Transom. 

Perhaps that is because Mr. Cohen’s visitors are a loyal community of mommies and daddies (including actress Jennifer Connelly, photographer Annie Leibovitz and actor Michael Imperioli’s wife, Victoria Chlebowski) devoted to Dr. Cohen’s laissez faire–style medical practice.  

“He isn’t your conventional doctor,” said Ms. Celle, 50, who was relieved to find a pediatrician from the South of France. (Ms. Celle, the former owner of the Calypso boutique chain, is from Cannes; Mr. Cohen is from Nice.) “He was like, ‘Oh, no, the kid doesn’t need any medicine and you can just go home.’ Sometimes he just prescribes Tylenol!”

After becoming one of Mr. Cohen’s patient-parents, Ms. Celle learned that many people she knew socially, like Ms. Malandrino and Tina Lipman, wife of Lipman advertising chairman David Lipman, were also loyal Cohenites. “I got to meet a lot of mothers in the neighborhood,” she said.

The high-profile clientele is expected to come browse Ms. Weissglass’ works, which will be on display till mid-July, this week. “She sent tons of invitations, but she’s very modest. She never gave me any names,” said Ms. Celle. “I know there are people already reserving some art, and the show hasn’t even opened.”

A little girl gets shoved by a boy at the playground and told she smells like dog poo. Weeping little girl runs to her mother, who wipes her face and explains that the little boy did that because, in fact, he likes her. Little girl wrinkles adorable nose and looks skyward while a voice-over from Ms. Goodwin dramatically intones, “That’s the beginning of our problem. We’re all programmed to believe that if a guy acts like a total jerk, that means he likes you.”

And—ha!—that’s kind of funny because it’s kind of true, right? (For those wondering, the answer is yes and no and it depends.) Sure, it’s well-traversed ground—and I don’t even mean to conjure memories of Sex and the City, which first coined the quip “he’s just not that into you” (instant Occam’s Razor philosophy for the lovelorn) and inspired a best-selling book before giving birth to this film. Think of the countless romantic comedies before it that had hard-and-fast rules along these same lines: the man whom the woman has been sniping with throughout acts one and two becomes the man she can’t live without by act three. The platonic friend you never once considered a romantic prospect is, in fact, your soul mate. The most boorish of cads will become downright princely if you can just hang on for 90 minutes. Do these things tend to happen in real life? No! But you know what? Who cares? Because, after all, they’re just movies and, besides, it’s February. And often these films make you happy. (Two Weeks Notice, we’re looking at you.)

So, with that being said, how can I explain the feeling of rage that had me white-knuckling my armrest by the end of He’s Just Not That Into You? Unlike the best of romantic comedies—the ones that send you swooning home with thoughts of first kisses and your own private montage of slo-mo paint fights in your first shared apartment, chasing lobsters or dragging a Christmas tree down a West Village cobblestoned street (somebody cue up “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”!)—this movie honestly made me never want to date again. It kind of made me not want to be a woman! Wait, scratch that. It kind of made me not want to be a member of the entire human race.

A GROSS OVERREACTION? A byproduct of mounting zeitgeistian anxiety and recent singlehood? Perhaps. But let’s break it down anyway, because unlike a straight-up bad movie à la The Love Guru, this film is not easy to dismiss.

He’s Just Not That Into You is something much more sneaky and nefarious than your garden-variety romantic comedy, because it almost gets at something true and dark about people: how even the best of us can behave really badly. After the playground scene, as we’re getting to know the interwoven cast of couples and singletons, a woman goes on a first date with a guy, and walks away thinking it has gone great, while said man goes home and calls the girl he’s really interested in. That particular girl is gunning for a married man, but when her ego needs stroking, she rings up the fallback guy, who is still ignoring the girl he went on the date with. All that sort of sucks, but then again, so do people. I wondered, could He’s Just Not That Into You be a sort of scary-realist film dressed in funny clothing à la The Break-Up?

Alas, the answer is no, for at every opportunity to show the dirty underbelly of all of our collective romantic foibles, the film spooks itself and scampers away to safer and sunnier ground. (Do not finish reading this paragraph if you don’t want to know some of the happy endings of this film!) Take, for instance, the story of Beth and Neil, who at the beginning of the movie have been happily dating for seven years. They’re committed and in love, but when Beth’s sister gets married, she spazzes out about their lack of wedded-ness, though Neil is one of those guys who is highly principled on the topic of why he doesn’t believe in marriage. It’s realistic! Seriously. So is her freakout, which of course inspires her to break up with him. Later on, he shows up when she needs him most and she (aha!) realizes that she doesn’t need to be married to be happy and tells him that, in fact, he’s been more of a husband to her than most husbands she knows.

A tiny part of my heart cheered—this is a woman being smart, rational and sensitive to her partner’s desires!—but then Neil inexplicably proposes anyway at the end and they get married after all.

I would have forgiven this movie for everything else that’s wrong with it (the weird gay stuff, the lack of ethnic color in Baltimore, Justin Long in general) if these two characters had been allowed to be true to themselves—not to be happily married ever after, but just happily ever after. Jennifer Aniston and Ben Affleck as Beth and Neil were good enough that it seemed real—they were strong the way they were, principled. So why did the filmmakers not trust us, the audience, to accept that too?

BUT THAT WAS just the most glaring of the backtracking done in this film. The cast of this movie—no matter what anyone ends up saying about it—is fantastic, which makes it all the more difficult  to make sense of what you’re actually watching. How come Ben Affleck and Jennifer Aniston haven’t done anything onscreen together before this, when they’re so great together? Jennifer Connelly gives her anal retentive character many shades of gray; Kevin Connolly successfully made us forget about Entourage’s E; Scarlett Johansson is perfectly flighty and sexpotty; Bradley Cooper is believably maybe-shady; and Ginnifer Goodwin is refreshingly charming, even though she plays Gigi, the most pathetically desperate character to come around in some time. Forget the fact that Ms. Goodwin is gorgeous, so it’s hard to believe she’d have trouble getting men to ask her out a second time (even if this does take place in a fantastical loft-and-yacht-filled land called “Baltimore”). It’s hard to imagine any woman who would go to the cyber-stalking and obsessive lengths that Gigi does doesn’t have at least one friend who would take her aside and tell her to dial it down a thousand or, at the very least, not shriek when Gigi thinks some guy really likes her.

She’s like a Cathy cartoon times a thousand, but somehow even more cringe-worthy.

We know there are crazy ladies out there, reading The Rules or hanging out in produce aisles to meet dudes, but did they have to make poor Ginnifer Goodwin this nuts? Why, when the world has lovable, smart and endearingly nutty single lady characters out there like Liz Lemon—why do we need such a depiction? Furthermore, if the filmmakers were going to make Gigi this unhinged, how can they possibly make us believe she’d become sane enough by the end of the film to snag the guy who shunned commitment and live life happily ever after, playing charades in some other couple’s living room?

If “he’s just not that into you” is the mantra that the film preaches—that it’s not that some guy is intimidated by your emotional maturity or happy childhood or successful job or whatever, it’s that he actually just doesn’t want to date you—why oh why did the film take so much time laying out how there are no exceptions to the “no exceptions” rule and then make so many exceptions? I’ve long believed that people can be divided into two camps: those who do and those who do not enjoy Love, Actually. I’m firmly in the enjoy camp: It was nonsensical and unrealistic, sure, but in a good way—it strayed so far from real life (Hugh Grant was the prime minister! And danced around 10 Downing Street!) that one could enjoy it for what it was, a fantasy starring stammering, unbelievably handsome Englishmen and plenty of feel-good happy endings. The problem with He’s Just Not That Into You is that it wants to be that kind of fun plus something more Neil LaBute–ian. It’s like the bizarro version of Your Friends and Neighbors, but unwilling to fully commit to the dark and lonely sadness of it all, so it ties everything together with a big sparkly bow that only undermines the entire message of its first half.

It’s possible that if the cast of this film hadn’t done such a good job—if I hadn’t been able to squint my eyes and see what could have been—I’d have simply waited for its week or two in the news to go away. But as it is, I’m mad, and more than a little depressed. He’s Just Not That Into You? Thanks for telling me it’s even worse out there than I thought.

svilkomerson@observer.com

Up to the eyeballs in dumb movies about zit-faced teenagers trying to get laid, we now have to suffer through a disturbing trend toward Gen Xers trying to get laid. The boring clods in the wasted all-star cast of the dismal He’s Just Not That Into You swim with sharks through the infested waters of dating hell into the cesspools of marriage; it has all the depth of a television sitcom parody. In the end, it’s hard to tell who is more miserable—the losers on the screen or the victims in the audience.

This doggie doo was adapted from the stupid self-help book of the same title by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo, two of the writers on Sex and the City, and the derivative influence wincingly shows. In fact, the title is an old line from the show. The book asked probing questions like: Why don’t men call back? And why doesn’t he want to sleep with you anymore? Or what do you do if you find lipstick on his Calvins? As with paste jobs based on other gimmicky beach-bag totes, like Sex and the Single Girl and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, screenwriters Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein were forced to tackle first things first—like a plot. They threw in the beach towel early. Result: no plot at all. Just a lot of aimless people wandering around downtown Baltimore trying to connect the dots, finding loss and rupture everywhere except where it really counts, and blaming everyone else for their misery. In this chick flick, the one-dimensional men are like afterthoughts, and the stereotypical women have all been treated like dog poo since childhood. Divided into chapter heads like “If he’s not sleeping with you …”, the movie applies Band-Aids as it plunges into endless brick walls, with a gridlock of characters and plot twists that left me with a pounding migraine. It’s like a soap opera that never ends, with one-liners.

Let me see if I got this right. Scarlett Johansson is Anna, a hippie yoga instructor and wannabe pop singer who meets and falls for a talent agent named Ben (Bradley Cooper) in the supermarket, but Ben is married to Janine (Jennifer Connelly), who wants to dump him because he lies about smoking hidden cigarettes; Ben confides in his dedicated bachelor buddy Neil (Ben Affleck), a photographer who breaks up with his longtime girlfriend Beth (Jennifer Aniston), who works in the same ad agency with Janine’s neurotic sister Gigi (Ginnifer Goodwin), who is madly smitten with Conor (Kevin Connolly), a realtor who is also hooked on sexpot Anna, so Gigi turns to Conor’s best friend Alex (Justin Long), a bar manager and terminal babe-abuser who mysteriously falls for the pathetic Gigi, who gives up on Conor, who finds a new squeeze named Mary (Drew Barrymore), who makes the fatal mistake of seeking advice from gay boys, and … oh, the hell with it. Although some of these people know each other only tangentially, the threads all connect in ways that are greatly contrived, but less than riveting. The fact that the women in this movie are all neglected, betrayed, used and hurt by a succession of men who are all arrogant, selfish jerks is not entirely credible because the girls are too ridiculously beautiful to be so desperate. (Excuse me, but are they asking us to believe no man will return a phone message left by Jennifer Aniston?) Sorting out the stars like dirty laundry, Ginnifer Goodwin steals the movie. Already a weekly favorite of mine as Bill Paxton’s youngest sister-wife on the HBO series Big Love, she’s convincingly bubbly and heartbreaking at the same time.

He’s Just Not That Into You may appeal to the same people who managed to sit through Sex and the City. It gags on the same slick, pointless, forgettable jokes that make you chuckle softly and then induce instant amnesia. Director Ken Kwapis has made a sappy movie that does everything to win your love except lick you in the face. But there’s more to filmmaking than listing the reasons why dating hell leads to canceled MySpace accounts.

rreed@observer.com

In which Regis Philbin is said to be mean to coat-check attendants and people who look at him. [P6]

Jennifer Connelly and her kids walk to Central Park to get dirty drinking water because that is how many mothers in Africa do things. Of course she does. [Radar]

If Barbara Corcoran were to lie down and be the carpet under Joan Rivers' feet, what color carpet would she be? That's what Ms. Rivers wanted to know as the two engaged in an altercation over refusing to share a dressing room on the Today show yesterday. [P6]

Eliot Spitzer allegedly told friends that his wife, Silda, knew all along about his liaisons with hookers, but looked the other way. [P6]

Despite telling Vanity Fair recently that New York is so over, Madonna is buying a third apartment in her Central Park West building after settling her longtime dispute with the building's co-op board. [NY Daily News]

Ashley Simpson is engaged to Fall Out Boy's bassist Pete Wentz. Second round of MTV's Newlyweds: The Second Daughter will begin filming shortly. Kidding! For now anyway. [NY Daily News]

Tina Brown, Joan Didion, Sean Penn and Charlie Rose gathered at Carnegie Hall for a farewell to Norman Mailer yesterday. [NY Social Diary]

Before hopping over to do a fund-raiser for Hillary last night, Elton John performed at the annual Pink Party for the Breast Cancer Research Foundation Tuesday night attended by Liz Hurley and Gwyneth Paltrow. [NY Daily News]