Lydia Hearst (Photo: Grayson Dantzic).

Commemorating its 30th anniversary and more than 200,000 free surgeries performed worldwide on children born with cleft lips and palates and other life-threatening facial deformities, Operation Smile is celebrating with a live auction, a private dinner and special performances. Expect guests like model Lydia Hearst and her new boyfriend Kevin Connolly, best known for playing E on Entourage but also for cheering on Ms. Hearst at last week’s Observer Philanthropy party.

Cipriani Wall Street, 55 Wall Street, (212) 699-4096, 6:30pm, dinner $1,000, dessert and after-party $250

Still, the cast is worth watching, and it’s clear that Mr. Gutierrez loves the genre. A lonely loser named Eugene who installs shower doors and paints portraits of pet animals checks into the hotel, sets up a typewriter and starts to write a crime story. This would be Danny DeVito. Stand him on his bald head, hold him by his stubby ankles, push his beer belly forward and walk him across the floor, and you’d mistake him for a rickshaw. The cantilevered story he makes up may or may not be happening in actual time (the whole thing takes place on one dark, rainy night in 1958) and involves a labyrinthine cast of characters: a tired, washed-up British detective named Felix (Rufus Sewell) with a dark and sinister secret motive for being in the hotel (think Robert Mitchum); a nightclub singer named Hanna Click (Carla Gugino) who writhes around on top of a piano singing only one tune per night (think Lizabeth Scott); a gangster’s moll named Swedish Mary (Malin Akerman) who is really an Italian with a terrible accent (make that two terrible accents); the hotel chambermaid (Rosario Dawson) who spends the night trying on sexy lingerie; a cheap crook who plays jazz guitar named Vance (Kevin Connolly); a lesbian tennis champion named Maureen (Cameron Richardson) who seduces Hanna Click into some obligatory girl-girl action, and is who the wife of a magician who performs an act with a coffin; and Felix’s square American partner Jim (Robert Forster). As they waft through the rooms of the Biltmore, they take turns narrating their stories in clumsy voice-overs that drag on forever, with no beginning, middle or end in sight. (Think Terrence Malick remaking The Big Sleep.)

The action (I thought you’d never ask) involves some gangsters who are planning to rob a steel factory payroll, stash the money away and claim it the next morning when the coast is clear. “All I had to do,” says the dick, “was wait—and walk out rich.” Everyone wants the money, including the characters you least expect. Nobody is who they pretend to be, including Felix’s straight-shooting family-man partner who discovers betrayal and likes it. “Plans do what they always do,” goes the narration. “They go wrong.” The point, as the saying goes, is “it’s all fun and games until someone pokes an eye out.” I’d like to say I wouldn’t want to ruin the fun of finding out whose eyes get poked, except that there isn’t much fun. If you wait until the end you’ll finally find out what Danny DeVito is writing and how so many disparate characters connect. Opinions will vary as to whether it’s worth the effort. As hard as they try, the actors look like they cannot camouflage the fact that they’re working for car fare.

Some of them work into the film noir conceit better than others, saying campy one-liners like “I need you to ravage me—even if I don’t look like I’m enjoying myself” and “Maybe it was the heat—or the ceviche that went to my head—but somehow I had 19 orgasms.” Best of all is Carla Gugino, whose diverse talents are as ample as her measurements (she transitions from B movies to prestigious stage productions by Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller with the greatest ease, most recently on Broadway opposite Rosemary Harris in an Athol Fugard play, proving her range). Nobody can say a line like “I never go to church—kneeling bags my nylons” like Carla Gugino. The film’s weakest link is Rufus Sewell’s rumpled gumshoe, inarticulate and mumbling to the point of madness. Barely audible, he seems to have been plunged into a state of narcolepsy. What really works is the use of ’50s jazz combo music (think Johnny Mandel’s neurotic jazz tempo throughout I Want to Live! and the swinging drive of Elmer Bernstein’s intense score in Alexander Mackendrick’s iconic Sweet Smell of Success)and the wonderful black-and-white camera work that provides plenty of opportunities for sinister overhead lighting effects. Hotel Noir looks and sounds right, but Mildred Pierce it’s not.

rreed@observer.com

HOTEL NOIR

Running Time 97 minutes

Directed by Sebastian Gutierrez

Starring Malin Akerman, Aaron Behr and Kevin Connolly

2/4

“I didn’t realize it was live! I thought they just tape it,” Mr. Grenier told the Transom, who had arrived there in true Vincent Chase (read: fashionably late) form.

The casual cocktail hour and screening was for a small group of HBO friends, employees and a few cast members. (Mr. Grenier and Kevin Connolly, who plays Vince's best friend and manager, were present, but Kevin "Johnny Drama" Dillion and Jerry "Turtle" Ferrara were missing from the entourage.)

Mr. Grenier and Mr. Connolly were dressed so similarly to their characters that the Transom had to wonder just how much these guys are like their characters.

Mr. Grenier was wearing, for example, a very Vince-esque white crew-neck T-shirt, a gray zip-up sweater, gray dress pants and dark sneakers. Mr. Connolly wore a white button up shirt and an unbuttoned blue suit, sans tie.

But, aside from their clothes, not much else about these guys seemed like the ones they play on TV.

For instance! On Entourage, Vince just got his license, even though he's a terrible driver. But Mr. Grenier has been driving since he was 15.

“My mother taught me how to drive in the Ithaca hills on a stick!” Mr. Grenier said. Impressive!

And while Vince, in the time between last season and the current one, has wrapped the Martin Scorsese remake of The Great Gatsby (oh if only this were real life!) and moved back to Hollywood, Mr. Grenier, a born and bred New Yorker, vowed to the Transom that he would never leave New York.

Mr. Connolly, who is less devoted to the East Coast, traded in his subway pass for a car to cruise along Santa Monica Boulevard a long time ago.

“I have a decent car,” he said,  “but I can’t top the ones on the show. There aren’t any nicer cars than those.” (Now that Mr. Grenier's Vince is playing Enzo Ferrari in a bio pic, everyone in the gang is driving a sports car of his own, including Turtle!)

Last night, the boys seemed to roll on a much lower profile. Mr. Grenier went to the bar to get his own drink and was not afraid to be seen standing solo in the room. Mr. Connolly had a very scruffy red beard, which he told the Transom he never gets to grow because the first thing he gets on set every day is a shave.

When the night ended, Mr. Grenier (with a rugged navy backpack thrown over his shoulder) exited the building and headed down Fifth Avenue, on foot.

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

Mr. Grenier's character Vince ended last season about to deal with the fallout from the film Medellin, which bombed at Cannes on the show. In real life, Mr. Grenier's career has stalled somewhat; his role as Anne Hathaway's boyfriend in 2005's The Devil Wears Prada has been his only breakthrough part. But last evening, by the time the afterparty at Mansion, on far, far West 28th Street, rolled around, Mr. Grenier was in full-on star mode. He was at all times surrounded by a bevy of young (and not-so-young; we spotted a white-haired lady we assumed to be his grandmother) women practically tripping over themselves to have their photos taken with him, or whisper in his ear. (By this point, Mr. Grenier's tie was rakishly loose.)

The Daily Transom spotted Constance Zimmer, who plays studio executive Dana Gordon (whom Ari Gold never fails to remind about their past dalliances), talking animatedly with Carla Gugino; Ms. Gugino, who was wearing a very Mad Men-esque green dress, plays Amanda, the agent for whom Vince leaves Ari, then abandons after they sleep together. We wondered what it was like to be women on such a male-dominated show.

"That's so funny, we were just talking about that!" said Ms. Gugino. "We play characters who are sexy, but also powerful and funny." Ms. Gugino paused. (Teensy-tiny spoiler alert!) "Though I wasn't so funny in this episode."

"We're happy to represent," said Ms. Zimmer. "There are so many hot women on the show. But we're powerful—we're not hoochie mamas!"

From the comments section:

And according to "Amy," the blogger at Filming in Brooklyn, who originally tipped us off to the sighting, the original shoot took place in Woodside, specifically at 58-45 41st Drive.

Run, don't walk.

The Queens location makes sense; the show's lead, Vincent Chase, played by the curly-haired Adrian Grenier, and his buddy, Eric (Kevin Connolly), move to Los Angeles from their childhood neighborhood of Queens, New York at the beginning of the series.

The shoot, which coincidentally took place not too far from a bus stop with a promo poster for the upcoming season, was on a quiet residential block that was heavily guarded by production assistants. But the Filming in Brooklyn blogger was able to sneak her way midway down the block and observe from behind the bushes. (There is even a video! Although due to the rather obstructed view, we see far more of the bushes than the actual actors.)

The scene, which was not particularly eventful, reportedly began with Mr. Grenier storming out of one of the houses and Mr. Connolly following closely behind. Mr. Grenier was dressed down in a black dress shirt, jeans, and Converse sneakers. Mr. Connolly was also in jeans and a plain blue T-shirt.

But just as it was about to get interesting, the crew broke for lunch.

Mr. Grenier walked down the block and happily greeted his fans and signed autographs while dodging the paparazzi lurking at the end of street, and then departed for lunch with Mr. Connolly.

Anyone have more details?

[Via Gothamist]