Still breathing during this mysterious calamity is a desperate group gathered inside an old saloon powered by an emergency gas generator: the paranoid projectionist, a vain and pompous TV personality (Hayden Christensen, who has matured nicely since his brush with Star Wars) forced to live by his wits for the first time without an audience, a distraught doctor (Thandie Newton) whose child is missing and a shotgun-toting black kid (Jacob Latimore) waiting for his mother to return. To stay alive, they must join forces to find alternate sources of light and a way out of the city, while avoiding being touched by the menacing, moving shadow that destroys everything in its path. Alien abduction? A black hole in the universe? Divine punishment for man's earthly sins? The action in Anthony Jaswinski's mordant script involves darting from one light source to the next and the direction consists mainly of movements lit by matches, cigarette lighters, torches, a truck's dying headlights and a flashlight with a dying battery. Under the circumstances, you find yourself rubbing your eyes a lot in need of an opthamologist and blinking like you have a nervous disorder. Mr. Anderson has evidently watched a lot of old Twilight Zone reruns. So much of the film's dense, murky palette evokes menace without mayhem, but the wrap-up at the end by Rod Serling is sadly missed. The actors work hard to convey terror--especially Mr. Christensen, who proved he could act when he played disgraced journalist Stephen Glass in the marvelous, underrated Shattered Glass--but the panic that overtakes the characters never quite grips the audience. Ultimately it weakly questions the reason for existence, but Vanishing on 7th Street doesn't make much of a point. On the screen, the night never ends, but luckily, the anxiety is over in 85 minutes, and outside the cinema, daylight awaits.

rreed@observer.com

VANISHING ON 7TH STREET

Running time 85 minutes

Written by Anthony Jawinski

Directed by Brad Anderson

Starring Hayden Christensen, John Leguizamo, Thandie Newton

2/4

The Late Show with David Letterman (CBS, 11:30pm): Actor Samuel L. Jackson, chef Emeril Lagasse, musical guest the BPA with Iggy Pop.

The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien (NBC, 11:35pm): Cameron Diaz, Johnny Strange, Pete Yorn.

Jimmy Kimmel Live (ABC, weeknights 12:05am): Actor Thomas Haden Church, actor Ed Helms, Scripps National Spelling Bee Champion Kvya Shivashankar, musical guest 311.

Late Night with Jimmy Fallon (NBC, 12:35am): John Leguizamo, Nick Cannon, Sonic Youth.

Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson (CBS, 12:35 am): Marion Cotillard, Michael Musto.

Last Call with Carson Daly (NBC, 1:35am): Tim Roth, Miranda Kerr, Black Kids.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (Comedy Central, 11:00pm ): Bill Russell

The Colbert Report (Comedy Central, 11:30pm): Simon Schama.

Chelsea Lately (E!, 11:00pm): Derek Fisher, comedians Sarah Colonna, Randy and Jason Sklar.

Indeed, as Cipriani 42nd Street filled with ornate gowns and the buzz of Spanish chitchat on Wednesday, May 20, Governor David Paterson, whose 55th birthday happened to fall on the same day, arrived with his wife, Michelle Paterson.

"I asked Michelle for a suggestion as to what we should do for my birthday and she said whatever we do, we have to come to the reception for El Museo del Barrio," Mr. Paterson told the Daily Transom. "So I said, 'O.K., that sounds like a good idea!'"

The governor said he happened to represent the museum during his last four years in the State Senate. "I think I stopped at the gala my first year, when I was reapportioned into East Harlem in 2003. So it's actually my second time here, but they seem to recognize me quicker this time."

Will the governor be doing some dancing?

"It's possible," he replied. "But we actually have another event to go to afterwards so we may not be around for the dancing."

At last year's gala, the women were asked to wear tiaras, white gowns and elbow-length gloves to fit the quinceañera theme—a Latin version of the sweet sixteen, but more formal. This year, attention was drawn to portraits of Latino New Yorkers like Carolina Herrera, Narciso Rodriguez and John Leguizamo that the gala's co-chair, illustrator Ruben Toledo, completed with the help of the children at the museum. Also on sale were cigar boxes, again illustrated by Mr. Toledo.

Gala chair Yaz Hernandez said she would purchase a box for her husband, Citibank exec Valentin Hernandez. Ms. Hernandez, wearing a mermaid-cut white Angel Sanchez dress with black detailing, said she does not smoke cigars, but enjoys the smell.

"I love it. Love the smell," she gushed in her lovely Spanish accent. "I grew up with it. I find it sexy and fabulous and so delicious and so mun-ly! I love it."

Mr. Toledo and wife Isabel Toledo arrived arm in arm, he in a snug suit and black tie, she in a beautifully-tailored floral dress. Despite designing the cigar boxes, Mr. Toledo said he does not actually smoke cigars.

"I don't even smoke cigarettes. I'm a bore," he said. "I don't smoke and I don't drink."

And all this time we thought that pencil-thin mustache was a sign of mischief!

"Nah, I'm a devil, but not in a typical way," he replied. In fact, Mr. Toledo said we might catch some of his devilish ways on the dance floor later. "All Latinos dance, you have to dance! See, for Spanish people—and I'm generalizing here—body language is like an intelligence, you gotta know how to use your body."

In the background, the mariachi band began to sing "Happy Birthday," or rather the Spanish version, "Feliz Cumpleaños," to Governor Paterson. The governor did not dance but seemed to enjoy the sentiment. And after Ms. Hernandez presented him with a large white cake that read "El Museo Saluda al Gov. Paterson" in red frosting, it was time for the governor to move on to his next birthday engagement.

"Happy Birthday!" exclaimed Mr. Toledo. "You must meet my wife. Oh, do you really have to go now?"

"Yes, we really must go," replied the governor.

But signs that the play might lay an egg were already in evidence last Friday afternoon at Café Une Deux Trois, where a press lunch with the cast had been scheduled. Instead of excited actors ready to begin the new Broadway run of a perfectly timed critique of inflated valuation, a near empty restaurant, and a sheepish hostess greeted the Daily Transom. "Yes, they were supposed to be here, but the event was cancelled," the hostess said with a shrug. "The actors are tired."

An invitation to the premiere's after party in Chelsea on Monday night met with similar frustration. After the Daily Transom responded positively to a publicist's request for coverage, we were met with the following reply via email: "I'm so sorry, but I was just informed that this party is closed to the press."

The reason for the change of plans, this time, revealed a production in disarray. "Well, it was a smaller party than we expected," the publicist said. After being pressed for what exactly that meant, she passed us on to another publicist, "who is in charge of events." That publicist said, "I'll let Richard Kornberg know about your inquiry. He represents the entire show. We only represent one of the producers, Stuart Lane."  

Okay then!

Mr. Kornberg was not thrilled to hear from us; "I don't even know what you're talking about," he huffed when we got him on the phone. After a review of the situation he admitted that one of the events had been canceled. But where, he asked, did the Daily Transom get the idea that the after-party was closed to the press? After being told about the email he barked, "I've got five people holding, let me call you back."

A few minutes later, he did.

"This is fucking moronic on their part! They don't have the right to ban anyone. I would have invited you. It wasn't closed because Michael Musto was there," Mr. Kornberg said, referring to the Village Voice gossip columnist. "Would you please forward me that email right away, so I can show it to a producer that is holding on the other line. I can't wait to show these people!"

The luncheon was an entirely different story, Mr. Kornberg said. Making it clear that it wasn't his idea, Mr. Kornberg explained, "The producers weren't nervous. It was a bad idea in the first place to schedule the lunch." Calming down a bit, he added, "The director wanted the three stars to be able to save their voice, so it was just postponed."  

Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna, from a screenplay by James McBride (in English, Italian, German and Spanish, with English subtitles), is based on Mr. McBride’s heavily researched novel. Before launching into my very mixed review of Mr. Lee’s 20th feature film in an over-20-year largely self-promoted career in the industry, I must note that Mr. Lee once insulted me on an ABC Nightline panel after I had expressed my reservations about what I perceived as the excessive artiness of some of his projects. I don’t remember the exact year, but it was about the time that Mr. Lee was successfully campaigning for the job of directing Malcolm X after a white director had already been announced for the project. Mr. Lee agitatingly insisted that only an African-American could do justice to the story of Malcolm X, and since he was doing all the agitating, why not him? Actually, at the time I tended to agree with him, and said so on the telecast, much to the discomfiture of the white moderator, who had set out to build up a case of reverse discrimination against Mr. Lee.

Anyway, The Miracle at St. Anna runs far too long at two hours and 40 minutes, even for the many interlocking stories Mr. Lee and Mr. McBride are trying to tell, beginning with a mysterious murder in a New York City Post Office many years after the end of World War II. An elderly U.S. Postal employee pulls out a gun from behind his counter, and shoots an equally elderly white customer. Detective Antonio “Tony” Ricci (John Turturro) is called in to investigate the case, but it is cub reporter Tim Boyle (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who eventually gets the story from the perp’s own lips. This requires a feature-length flashback to the history of the 92nd Infantry Division of African-American draftees, dubbed “Buffalo Soldiers” from way back to the Mexican War. The term appears also in John Ford’s Sergeant Rutledge (1960), with Woody Strode playing a particularly heroic Buffalo Soldier, who is falsely accused of raping and murdering a white woman. He is acquitted, of course, after the real white rapist-murderer is exposed on the witness stand.

The bulk of Mr. Lee’s narrative is concerned with the experiences of four Buffalo Soldiers, the sole survivors of a virtually annihilated battalion of the 92nd Infantry Division, stationed in Tuscany, Italy, in 1944. The division has been decimated by the artillery crossfire between the entrenched German forces on one side of a river and, on the other, the ill-timed American artillery response ordered by a misguided white American officer, who couldn’t believe that black soldiers had been the first to cross the river

The four surviving Buffalo Soldiers are 2nd Staff Sgt. Aubrey Stamps (Derek Luke), Sgt. Bishop Cummings (Michael Ealy), Cpl. Hector Negron (Laz Alonso) and Pfc. Sam Train (Omar Benson Miller). The main point of the devastating battle scenes, which are well handled by Mr. Lee and his technical crew, seems to be that the African-American soldiers are much braver than the bigoted white American officers, who are far behind the lines, can bring themselves to believe. Indeed, a white officer in one scene actually refers to the Buffalo Soldiers as Eleanor Roosevelt’s personal contributions to the war effort, adding even more of a partisan slant to the undeniable racism of the period. A particularly vicious manifestation of this racism occurs in a flashback within a flashback, when a Southern restaurant manager flashes a gun to tell the African-American soldiers that they are not wanted in his establishment. This even as he is allowing white Army military policemen to serve lunch to a booth full of Nazi prisoners of war. The now-armed Buffalo Soldiers return to get served by the same manager, but the incident leaves them with a bitter taste in their mouths.

When the four surviving black soldiers reach a small village in Tuscany, the Italian inhabitants—who have never seen black people before—warmly greet their presumed liberators from the German occupiers. The inference is drawn that there is less racial bigotry here than in the States. The same comparison is made in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), and the interracial sexuality in that film is even more prolonged and graphically explicit than it is here.

But the heart and soul of The Miracle of St. Anna begins to take shape when Private Train, the most provincial and least educated of the four surviving Buffalo Soldiers, befriends a traumatized boy (Matteo Sciabordi). It is in this impromptu relationship that the first intimations of the religious and the miraculous appear. This otherworldly theme is continued in the reenacted real-life massacre of 450 townspeople, men, women and children, for their not turning over the leader of the local anti-Fascist, anti-Nazi partisans.

There is also a very messy subplot about blood feuds within the partisan movement itself. And there are even moments of mercy and compassion from within the ranks of the Germans. Again, I must commend Mr. Lee for his ease with the languages with which he has to deal. I suppose he is to be praised also for getting this immense project off the ground with brio and panache. But too much is too much in any language, much less four. Consequently, Mr. Lee has stretched his material in so many different directions that one is left with unacceptable levels of religiosity and sentimentality in the overall context of the naked brutality we have witnessed. Actually the film never “solves” the mystery of the murder in any satisfying fashion. Instead, he seems to be saying that war is hell, but that there is love and fraternal feeling to be found on the bloodiest battlefield.

Kerry Washington’s pro-bono attorney for the accused murderer stays on the screen long enough to give a whispered tongue-lashing to the presiding judge, leading me to wonder how many courtroom series Mr. Lee has been watching on television.

It remains to be said that Mr. Lee has been less portentous and overloaded in the past. But opinions may differ on his ultimate place in film history, and my mixed verdict on this occasion may be questioned by all and sundry, Mr. Lee himself included.

asarris@observer.com

But in today's Times piece about the high school, we learned that Ms. Bell's little project happens to be backed by some important names including her boss, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, president of the New School Bob Kerrey and his wife, television and film writer Sara Paley, actor John Leguizamo, and President of Scholastic Richard Robinson.

The Daily Transom asked Mr. Carter at his book party on Monday night about his involvement in the school; he said he was serving "only as a friend." But friendships with Graydon Carter usually come with benefits, as patrons of the Wavery Inn know.

Benefactors certainly have been kind. The school's board of 18 members has already donated $3 million for start-up costs and plans to raise $12 to $17 million more over the next five years. (We expect to be scratching the Greenwich Village High School Spring gala into our calendars any day now.)

Ms. Bell reportedly "dreamed" up the school over breakfast at Balthazar with her West 11th Street neighbor, Sara Goodman, great-granddaughter of Bergdorf Goodman founder Edwin Goodman. Ms. Goodman attended The Dalton School, but told the Times that she wanted her two daughters, Georgia, 9, and Lily, 6, to be part of a "downtown community."

The ladies expect the school to grow to 360 students by 2013 with tuition set on a sliding scale from $1,000 to $34,729 (what!). Somehow, Ms. Goodman believes that the $1,000 dollar kids won't be sorted out from the $30,000 kids after first bell.

Wise Village parents who put themselves on the low end of the sliding scale may want to get their rent-controlled butts in gear: All applications are due in January at which point 45 9th graders that will be selected to enroll in the fall of 2009. And Ms. Bell has already received applications from families across Manhattan, Hoboken and Jersey City.

Playbill reports:

There’s a moment in the boring, brain-dead new M. Night Shyamalan film The Happening when Mark Wahlberg turns to the camera, trying to suppress a grin, and asks, “Can this really be happening?” I ask the same question every week, but it just gets worse.

It’s not a good sign when a director casts Mr. Wahlberg, a ruddy rapper-turned-actor who looks like a choirboy selling crack in the apse, as a science teacher pondering the mystery of why honeybees are disappearing from coast to coast. To be a good scientist, you must have a healthy respect for the laws of nature, he tells his class. I am paraphrasing Professor Wahlberg, of course. Nothing of real significance is worth quoting directly from any film written by M. Night Shyamalan. And you could stuff the entire plot of The Happening into a walnut shell. But thanks to the excellent cinematographer Tak Fujimoto, there are layers of atmosphere worth noting. Two women are sitting on a bench in Central Park when a curious breeze rustles the leaves. One of them reaches for a darning needle and rams it through her jugular vein. Cut to a nearby construction site where the same breeze reaches the hard hats, who leap from a tower scaffold above the city and crash to their deaths below. No, it’s not fallout from the fleshpots of terrorism. According to CNN, that breeze carries airborne, brain-altering chemical toxins that are driving New Yorkers to mass suicide. The infected area is restricted to the Northeast, but it’s spreading. (Nothing seems to be happening in Los Angeles, but how would they know?) When New York is evacuated, Professor Wahlberg and his wife (Zooey Deschanel) are invited to join fellow faculty member John Leguizamo to hide out at his mother’s house in Philadelphia. On the way, the train comes to a grinding halt and the passengers are discharged in the forests of Pennsylvania. From this point on, a movie with so much potential for suspense just plods along, cataloging a chain reaction of violent copycat suicides as people blow their brains out and throw themselves into the lions den at the zoo. Taking refuge in an abandoned farmhouse, they run into a screechy, hysterical old crone (Betty Buckley) who smashes her head through 29 glass windows, but mercifully does not sing anything from Cats. In the end, the plague seems to have reached the Champs Elysées in Paris, threatening a sequel with subtitles.

What is going on here? The explanation may make you reach for a gun yourself. According to Mr. Shyamalan, it’s simple: an extension of Al Gore’s environmental warning that if we don’t stop destroying our planet, then our planet will get even. For a movie with the potential for so much global-warming electricity, it’s disappointingly low on voltage. How is it possible for one writer-producer-director hyphenate to raise financing for six films, when each one is worse than the one before? His premises are equally predictable and always the same: Unexplained psychic phenomena can happen to perfectly ordinary people. Trouble is, in a Shyamalan flick, an exasperating absence of requisite cinematic creepiness is always guaranteed. They don’t make sense, and they are as empty in the center as a chocolate-covered cherry in which the assembly line left out the maraschino. They’re so kindergarten-level scary that I always figure everything out early. Even The Sixth Sense, his only critical and box office success, was too obvious to rate even one surprise. Minutes after it began, when Bruce Willis entered the party and nobody spoke to or even looked at him, I said, “He’s dead; they don’t see him because he’s a ghost.” Some people are no fun at the movies.

rreed@observer.com

The movies have never known how to mine the diversity of multitalented John Leguizamo, but he’s currently shining brightly in two roles as different as chipotle and cherry pie. In Brad Furman’s The Take, he plays a tough Latino armored-truck driver in gang-infested East L.A. who survives a close-range gun blast that leaves him fractured for life. In first-time director David Ross’s The Babysitters, he plays a preppy suburban Dad in cashmere sweaters and Bass Weejuns, so lonely and neglected by his boring soccer mom wife (Cynthia Nixon) that he succumbs to the seductive charms of their babysitter, an honors student named Shirley (Katherine Waterston), who responds to her nice employer’s generosity with a generous “perk” of her own. She’s so proud of her new sexual power that it inspires her to enlist her high-school girlfriends. Pretty soon she’s talked a network of sexy classmates into a profitable business that can send them all to college. Printing business cards, doing bookkeeping on their laptops, juggling appointments with all the upstanding husbands and fathers in the neighborhood, the girls are soon up to their ponytails in clients. But a good thing can only last so long. Things begin to backfire and profits plunge when one girl’s greedy sister gets in on the act and goes into business for herself. They call it earning tuition money. The law calls it statutory rape.

It’s only a matter of time before the police find out—or, even worse, every wife on the block. Until the risks turn deadly, what first appears to be a lurid romance between a responsible family man and a neighbor’s 16-year-old daughter ends up being a deliciously dark comedy about a prostitution ring of neighborhood babysitters who introduce a whole new meaning to the term “parental nightmare.” Mr. Leguizamo is too good for dirty-old-man jokes; he turns his character’s yearning for the old freewheeling bachelor days before he was tied down by family responsibilities into a justification for lust that leaves the viewer with a queasy moral discomfort. You can’t approve of his secret sex life with underage vixens in bobby socks, but you understand him—and like him anyway. It’s refreshing to see him play Everyman, with no ethnic chains at all.

The Babysitters is about more than a respectable man’s double life. When his married buddies get wind of what’s happening in all those lighted bedroom windows, they want to cut themselves in on some babysitter action, too, and with her little black book, Shirley becomes a pint-size Polly Adler. The film shows the easy sexual mores that can result from too much capitalism; the rigid Darwinian social structure of suburban high schools that ignores the students’ hormonal progress; and the tortured guilt suffered by grown-ups when it’s time to pay the piper. Pitched somewhere between dark comedy and melodrama, The Babysitters breaks rules. Like television’s Six Feet Under and the recent film Juno, it’s the perfect antidote to the dopey, butter-cream-frosted teen flicks of John Hughes—Pretty in Pink with poison sauce.

“The [project] that I love is The Happening,” he told The Daily Transom, although he kept mum about the nitty-gritty. “You know how M. Knight is,” he said, “you’re given the coded scripts with your name on it; you can’t get any changes unless you hand in the other changes.” Mr. Leguizamo did assure us, however, that the discreet director is “amazing to work with,” he said, later citing cast-and-crew perks like a group trip to Fiji.

Besides listening to his favorite “hot” new album this season, Alicia Key’s As I Am,” he is also working on writing new material, although he immediately added that he will not challenge the writer’s strike.

Grumbling a little, Mr. Leguizamo went on, “I’m writing for myself, not to sell. I’m not crossing any lines, I’m not a scab or a rat. I don’t want that rat in front of my apartment building!... I’m stuck with all this stuff.”