"Hey girl."

Hey ladies. You know, on this very special Valentine's Day, you're not looking for a dozen roses or a bear holding a box of chocolate. You're not looking for hearts, or balloons, or even a book of homemade coupons offering "I O U = One (1) Free Massage During a Screening of Crazy, Stupid Love on Our DVD Player (Your Choice, Non-Transferable)."

No girl, what really gets your motor running (pun intended) is to have artist/actor/Grand Marshal for the Daytona 500 James Franco show you the collection for his latest installation exhibit in Berlin, "Gay Town."


"This one is based on how much I hate people only recognizing me for my work in Spider-Man."

"This one is about how mad I am that Kristen Stewart cheated on R-Patz whilst filming Snow White and the Huntsman."

According to the press release, Mr. Franco's work touches on "a variety of themes that are central to Franco's artistic practice, mainly issues related to adolescence, public and private persona, stereotypes and other societal concerns such as society's preoccupation with celebrity," and that they were conceived "in hotel rooms, makeshift studios and other temporary locations whilst completing other projects, mainly motion pictures." So basically, he's doodled a bit while in between his other projects, and now these doodles get to be considered their own project--as some sort of commentary on the "metacelebrity" moment that Franco finds so compelling as it relates to himself, and apparently "K-Stew."

Mr. Riley (Photo: Emily Anne Epstein)

Filming didn’t get off to a great start for On the Road star Sam Riley, who plays narrator Sal Paradise in the adaptation of the Jack Kerouac classic. As the movie opens, Paradise’s father has just died, and fellow Brit Tom Sturridge, playing Carlo Marx analogue Allen Ginsberg, comes up and whispers a Hebrew dirge in his ear, an attempt at comfort.

There they were, two English guys still relatively early in their careers, excited to be kicking off the making of a movie that took decades to realize. And things went well for a few hours—until suddenly the clouds rolled in, the sky went black and the rain started pelting them like marbles. They took refuge from the thunderstorm in their trailer, wondering whether they might simply be sent home.

“We were laughing that it was Kerouac and Ginsberg pissing on us because they didn’t want two English guys playing them,” Mr. Riley told The Observer, sitting across a coffee table at the Regency Hotel.

Mr. Riley’s long, rangy figure looms, whereas Kerouac was compact, but in his sweatshirt and Levi’s he could almost pass for a dressed-down postwar college boy. “To be able to play Jack Kerouac or Sal Paradise,” Mr. Riley muses in his thick Leeds accent, “it’s mad to me.”

No discussion about American literature is complete without Kerouac’s 1957 ode to the West and its promise of freedom. And yet for all its quintessential Americaness, and its place of pride within the U.S. 20th-century literary canon, it took an international lot to finally pull off an adaptation of this supposedly unfilmable novel. Two of Mr. Riley’s highest-profile co-stars—Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriarty and Kristen Stewart as Moriarty’s first wife Marylou—are American, but director Walter Salles is Brazilian and screenwriter José Rivera is from Puerto Rico.

Mr. Riley was born and raised in the north of England, and these days he resides in Berlin. Best known for his 2007 turn in the cult hit Control as Joy Division front man Ian Curtis, he said he occasionally draws double takes but doesn’t have the tabs following him around just yet. “I’m in a position where I can say what I say no to, but I can’t call Marty up and say, ‘Are you sick of Leo yet?’”

Before hitting the road to shoot On the Road, he’d never seen much of America outside of New York and Los Angeles. And frankly, at this point in his life, the 32-year-old would just as soon stay at home with his wife, German actress Alexandra Maria Lara. (A major part of his motive for moving to Berlin, Ms. Lara is more often recognized on the street than he is.)

“I’m quite settled now. I’ve no interest in going on a road trip,” her husband admitted. “If I want to go on holiday, I want to sit on a beach, swim, drink cocktails and read a book.”

So who does this guy think he is, playing the thinly disguised avatar of Kerouac?

“Well, don’t think I didn’t ask myself the same question,” Mr. Riley told The Observer, levering himself off the couch to grab a pack of Gauloises. He offered one, pointing out the German labels: “If you can’t understand the warning, it doesn’t affect you in the same way,” he noted.

Mr. Riley, in character.

Even if Kerouac had never written another word, the runaway popularity of On the Road would have anointed him as the prince of the Beats (though he was reluctant to wear the mantle). More important, it turned him into a kind of Saint Christopher for adolescent males, blessing their itchy feet and boldest backpacking schemes even as the country grew ever more claustrophobically suburban.

“One of the biggest parts for me was knowing that everyone would say, ‘Well, why the fuck did they hire an English guy to play Jack Kerouac?’” he admitted. Much time was invested honing his American accent, which he figured was the least he could do.

Beside the technical challenge was the sheer burden of expectation. Early in the project, he saw an interview with Johnny Depp (often cited by fans as a decent choice for the role) in which the star expressed relief that he didn’t play Sal Paradise in the film, owing to the pressure that came with it. “I remember thinking, ‘I don’t want to know, I don’t want to know about that,’” Mr. Riley said.

When Mr. Riley initially auditioned, it was 2008. Mr. Hedlund had already been cast as Dean Moriarty, but the project promptly collapsed, a victim of the financial crisis. Mr. Riley had entirely written the project off when, two years later, he got the call that the movie was on and he had the gig. “I wasn’t asked; I was just sort of told I was doing it.”

Despite their obvious differences, Mr. Riley found several ways into the character, from their common industrial upbringings to his own work as a lyricist—“not wanting to sound in any way in the same league of writing,” he was quick to disclaim.

Kerouac hadn’t exactly seen much of the country until he set out with Neal Cassady, either. “He grew up in a very sheltered environment with his mother and a father who was very dominant, and had had no experience of the great wide plains of America until he got into the road and in the car and on his own.”

“In that sense, I didn’t need to have seen it before I had to play it.”

This version of On the Road reads between the lines and reanimates the faint ghost of homosexual tension that haunts the novel. Since he’d never read the book, Mr. Riley’s first encounter with the story was Kerouac’s first draft, written in scroll form, which is more explicit. But the overt direction it takes in the movie may catch a few viewers off guard.

“I don’t think they drove around America having sex with each other, Jack and Neal, but it did happen, from what I understand,” Mr. Riley said. “In a lot of ways, they were very liberal and forward-thinking in a very conservative time and country.”

And yet the main thing most people want to ask him about is the prospect of stripping down with Ms. Stewart, the starlet who made her name in the Twilight franchise. “I’m doing interviews with Elle magazine about sex scenes with Kristen Stewart, which is all they really want to know about,” he said. Here they are adapting a counter-cultural literary classic, but the biggest point of interest is the sex scenes. “The irony isn’t lost on me,” he said.

During filming, he was also keenly aware of their 10-year age difference and their significant others. “There are nicer ways to spend an afternoon,” said the happily married star, quickly adding that he meant no offense to his co-star.

The footage in the rain was ultimately more memorable, he said. Though the scene didn’t make it into the American cut, it set the tone for the whole project: “Nothing was really going to go quite according to plan,” he said. “But there’d be lots of happy accidents that would capture the spontaneity of the prose."

You go, Paul Ryan. (TIME Magazine)

– Just in time for the vice presidential debates, here's Paul Ryan looking like Zach Morris's stand-in during a TIME Magazine photo shoot that teased him by saying it was considering naming him its man of the year. Yeah, right!

– The reason Lindsay Lohan was fighting with her mom on Tuesday? Apparently it had something to do with a $40,000 loan Ms. Lohan gave to her mother to keep her Long Island home from being foreclosed on.

– Last night was the New York premiere of Seven Psychopaths. Watch Christopher Walken, Sam Rockwell and Colin Farrell reenact a scene from Here Comes Honey Boo Boo last night.
http://youtu.be/NzIsz3fU9xQ

– Here's how you know you've been hanging around brooding British vampires too much ... you start referring to yourself as a "miserable c**t." In Marie Claire of all places. Oh, K-Stew!

Jennifer Garner in 'Butter'

The Master

Paul Thomas Anderson

Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams

September 14

This long-deferred movie actually couldn’t have been better timed. An apparent allegory for the creation of Scientology, The Master comes along just as public interest in the (alleged!) money-grubbing cult is at an all-time high, post-Tom/Katie divorce. In this telling, Philip Seymour Hoffman is the L. Ron Hubbard-like figure who snares untold numbers of believers into his thrall. Plot details, per Paul Thomas Anderson’s standard, are hazy, but the trailer reveals simply that Mr. Anderson has kept up his keen attention to aesthetic compostion--and that Amy Adams, playing a devoted cult wife, may be this film’s MVP. Can we arrange for Katie Holmes to present her the Oscar?

Killing Them Softly

Andrew Dominik

Brad Pitt, James Gandolfini, Sam Rockwell

September 21

Andrew Dominik’s follow-up to the much-loved, little-seen Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford jumps forward in time--it’s a modern-day store of mobland America, based on a pulp crime novel. The movie was a hit at Cannes, and may be yet another feather in the cap of good-looking weirdo character actor Brad Pitt, who plays a hitman’s assistant, or “point man.” The whole thing promises to be a real boys’ club, with costars like Richard Jenkins, James Gandolfini, and Ray Liotta, who knows a thing or two (actually, just one thing) about mob movies.

Butter

Jim Field Smith

Yara Shahidi, Jennifer Garner, Ty Burrell

October 5

Little is really known about this long-delayed satirical film. How long-delayed was it, you ask? The early buzz was that Jennifer Garner’s character, a housewife and competitive butter-sculptor, was based on Presidential front-runner Michele Bachmann. Director Jim Field Smith hails from the U.K. but takes on heartland rituals in this look at the dairy-art circuit, whose protagonist is an adopted orphan daring to take on the longtime champions (Ms. Garner and Mr. Burrell). Somehow, Hugh Jackman, Olivia Wilde, and Alicia Silverstone fit into this puzzle--no word on what Ms. Silverstone, noted vegan, did around the enormous blocks of milk product.

Argo

Ben Affleck

Ben Affleck, Bryan Cranston, Alan Arkin

October 12

Ben Affleck, flamed-out Hollywood star, has had a successful second career as the director of Boston heist pictures, but his third directorial effort, Argo, finally takes him outside of the old neigborhood. Mr. Affleck stars as a CIA officer who comes up with a cunning plan to rescue escapees during the Iran hostage crisis--he fakes the production of a sci-fi movie (Iran makes a lovely moonscape, after all) and attempts to airlift out the Americans, pretending they’re crew members. Sounds fairly tidy, but we’re sure complications will ensue--and we haven’t even read the Wired article on which the whole thing’s based!

Cloud Atlas

Tom Twkyer, Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski

Tom Hanks, Hugo Weaving, Halle Berry

October 26

Everyone believed that the mammoth David Mitchell novel, encompassing millennia of human experience, was unfilmable. And maybe everyone was right! All we know right now is that the Wachowskis (of the Matrix films) and Tom Twkyer (of Run Lola Run) have turned all of their creative over-enthusiasm towards putting together the most rollicking movie ever to contain both a Martin Amis-style comedy of manners and a post-apocalyptic agrarian community on Hawaii. Somehow, major stars like Tom Hanks and Halle Berry fit into the equation. As you read this description, you’re already significantly behind; you’d better start reading Cloud Atlas this minute if you hope to have it finished and marginally comprehended by October!

Keira Knightley in 'Anna Karenina'

Skyfall

Sam Mendes

Daniel Craig, Judi Dench, Ralph Fiennes

November 9

The next, and long-delayed, installment in the James Bond story comes with a schmancy pedigree--director Sam Mendes has experienced diminishing returns since the 1990s, but he still, you know, has an Oscar. So too does Javier Bardem, who promises to be the most menacing villain since Dr. No. Un-bedecked by golden trophies are new Bond girls Naomie Harris and Bérénice Marlohe, but that’s hardly the point, is it? About the plot, little is known, but for the promise of spy-queen M’s past coming back to haunt her. All the better: it’s about time Judi Dench got to stretch her acting muscles in the Bond movies.

Anna Karenina

Joe Wright

Keira Knightley, Jude Law, Aaron Taylor-Johnson

November 9

Joe Wright just can’t resist the charms of Keira Knightley--and he’s hardly alone! Mr. Wright made it cool to think Ms. Knightley was a good actress by directing her in well-received roles in Pride & Prejudice and Atonement--without his attentions, she’s languished a bit. But Ms. Knightley is back doing what she does best (aristocratic hauteur, wearing elaborate garments, telling off gentlemen), and this time, she’s got a complement of men to choose from. Though all of us English majors know how it ends, let’s form factions rooting for Jude Law’s Karenin or Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Vronsky--or, at least, let’s decide after the fact who had the most convincing Russian accent.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn--Part 2

Bill Condon

Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner

November 16

The series that launched a million magazine covers has finally ended (though the saga of its stars’ offscreen love will surely inflate the bottom line at many a media company for years to come). It’s the final installment of the Twilight series--or “Saga,” as the producers would Germanically have it--and if you waited a week to see any of the fine independent films released last week, get in line early for popcorn. Every tween and teen and regressing thirtysomething within a five-mile radius cannot wait to see just how the Bella-Edward vampire-mortal union ends--even though the book came out years ago! No matter. Fandom, like vampirism, is eternal.

Life of Pi

Ang Lee

Irrfan Khan, Gérard Depardieu

November 21, 2012

Another unfilmable novel adapted to the screen? It must be fall! Ang Lee attempts something of a comeback with his adaptation of Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winning novel, wherein a boy and a tiger are trapped on a raft floating in uncharted waters. Mr. Lee has a lot to prove, having released a couple of films consecutively that couldn’t quite match Brokeback Mountain in terms of popular acclaim. Perhaps the transfer to a wholly new environment, with the challenge both of a dense, allusive text and of a, you know, tiger, will move him to new heights! If not, it’ll at least be the season’s most compelling misfire.

Les Misérables

Tom Hooper

Russell Crowe, Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway

December 14

Anne Hathaway has subjected you to her songs through lo these many Oscar ceremonies--and now she finally has the opportunity to belt it out on film! The world’s most energetic entertainer shifts down a gear to play doomed prostitute Fantine in the adaptation of the world-rattling Broadway show; her costars include Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe playing, respectively, the unfairly convicted Valjean and the doggedly devoted Javert. Other cast members in director Tom Hooper’s first post-Oscar flick include Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter as the garrulous-to-a-fault Thénardiers, but it’s Ms. Hathaway who’s likely dreaming a dream... of Oscar!

Illustration: Mark Hammermeister

“I guess I’m not as cynical as you are,” Neil Barofsky, former watchdog for the Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program and presently the busiest cynic caught up in the government’s entanglement with the banking business, told The Observer.

In a time when everyone seems to be cheating—and most everyone getting away with it—we’d put it to Mr. Barofsky that there doesn’t seem to be much percentage in honest behavior. If Wall Street executives, tween idols and journalistic heavyweights are shirking the rules to get ahead, doesn’t it make sense for the commoners to do the same?

It was the third week in July, and Mr. Barofsky was promoting the publication of Bailout, his insider account of Washington’s response to the financial crisis. Three days prior, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York had revealed that in April 2008, a Barclays employee called the regulator and explained that the bank was fudging its Libor submissions. “You’d think someone would pick up the phone to the Department of Justice and say, ‘We believe there’s a global conspiracy to fix interest rates,’” Mr. Barofsky said. “Clearly no one did that.”

Of course, the Fed’s admission wasn’t a total surprise. In June, Barclays had paid some $450 million to settle charges that it had rigged Libor submissions for the short-term gains of proprietary traders, and at the behest of senior executives to halt a flagging share price.

News that the world’s most powerful regulator stood by as one of the world’s most powerful banks broke the law landed like a punch in the stomach. It wasn’t just Barclays. All summer long, the headlines bled with tales of financial perfidy. At least 10 other banks were under investigation for rigging interbank lending rates, and several had fired employees amid investigations. The founder of an Iowa-based futures broker had “lost track of” $200 million in client funds over the course of 20 years. HSBC had spent the better part of a decade banking to terrorists, drug kingpins and sanctioned nations such as Iran and Cuba.

It wasn’t just banking, either. Seventy Stuyvesant High School students caught text-messaging test answers to each other were allowed to retake the test. Journalistic wunderkind Jonah Lehrer had to be caught cheating twice before he lost his gig at The New Yorker.

The Olympics hadn’t even started yet, and everywhere we looked, people and institutions were breaking the rules and getting away with it. At some point, an honest man might get stuck on the notion that there wasn’t any point to good behavior. If everyone else is cheating, don’t people owe it to themselves, and their shareholders, to do the same? Is it possible that playing by the rules means doing a substandard job?

“It’s never that hopeless,” Mr. Barofsky argued. But we weren’t so sure.

“THE UNETHICAL TENDENCY is a human universal,” said Paul Piff, a post-doctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. But not everyone bends and breaks the rules equally.

Mr. Piff’s research shows that the rich are more likely to cut off other drivers, or cheat in games of chance, and subjects who identified greed as a positive value were more likely to cheat. But greed isn’t the only factor. Creative people are more likely to cheat, he told us, as are the highly educated.

Unethical behavior seems to be driven by rank—the more status you have, the less dependent you’re likely to be on social relationships—and self-focus. Meanwhile, watching other people cheat changes our understanding of what’s socially acceptable. Successful people are more likely to cheat, increasing the chances that they’ll become still more successful. And, we suppose, increasing the chances that they’ll be surrounded by successful people who are more likely to cheat themselves.

“It’s something called social proof, and it’s one of the strongest forces in society,” said Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University and the author of The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, a book-length work on the motivations for cheating.

Which might explain why it’s so rare to find a lone lawbreaker. If one Libor submitter was rigging rates for traders, it’s only natural that the others would feel entitled to a little bit of Bollinger. If UBS was dabbling in rigging bids on municipal bond investment contracts, as federal prosecutors allege, it’s not hard to imagine (as prosecutors also allege) JPMorgan or Bank of America or GE Capital dipping their toe in the same pool.

Or as Noel Biderman, founder of Ashley Madison, which describes itself as “the most successful website for finding an affair and cheating partners,” told The Observer, “When Kristen Stewart behaves this way, I think it gives greater license to regular people.”

Oh, Kristen. When we heard she was giving up a leading role in the romantic drama Cali after her affair with director Rupert Sanders was exposed by paparazzi, we thought Ms. Stewart was the last soul in Hollywood with the capacity for shame. Then we heard rumblings Ms. Stewart’s ex Robert Pattinson has had several affairs himself. Was she really contrite, or simply laying in wait for the shoe to drop on her former beau? And in that case, was she moving on from cheating in love to cheating in public relations?

Perhaps not quite, but it called to mind Philip Hindes, the British cyclist who told reporters that he crashed intentionally in the team sprint event, to take advantage of a rule that allowed his team to restart the race. It may have been poor sportsmanship, but Mr. Hindes’ intentional crash fell within the rules, and the Brits eventually claimed Olympic gold. It’s not hard to argue that the cyclist had a duty to teammates and nation to take the dive—even if a widespread adoption of Hindesian behavior would ruin the sport for everybody.

The four women’s badminton teams that tanked their way through preliminary matches in hopes of gaining a clearer path to the podium were less successful in their attempt to skirt the spirit of the competition. But Algerian distance runner Taoufik Makhloufi managed a bit of rule-skirting that the British cyclist might applaud: He was disqualified for the London Games for walking off the track in the middle of an 800 meters heat, in a suspected ploy to conserve energy for another event. Two days later, Mr. Makhloufi was a gold medalist in the 1500 meters.

“What we’ve seen is clear gray areas and big rewards,” David Callahan, co-founder of the think tank Demos and the author of The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead, told The Observer. A few hundredths of a second can be the difference between first and second, but “there’s an enormous difference between gold and silver when it comes to endorsements,” Mr. Callahan said.

What’s true in sports is true in school or finance. In a study published by the whistleblower practice at law firm Labaton Sucharow last month, 30 percent of 500 financial services pros surveyed said that bonus considerations increased the pressure to behave unethically. The Stuyvesant High School students who had to take a state Regents exam a second time after they were implicated in a scheme to share answers by text message were competing for places at the nation’s top colleges.

“Some people feel that if they don’t cheat they put themselves at a competitive disadvantage.” Danny Solomon, who graduated from Stuyvesant this year, said in an email. “For some, integrity be damned, drastic action is justified.”

CHEATING, OF COURSE, IS NOT all upside. Fareed Zakaria, for instance, was caught borrowing heavily from a New Yorker story on gun control, and was suspended from Time and CNN.

“The first thing is, if we are getting caught, this is bad for us,” said Mr. Ariely. “The second is that we are creating a tremendous downside for society, and this can come back to haunt us. Think about living in a world where you can’t trust anybody.”

“If other people are cheating, it may serve me well to do the same,” said Mr. Piff. “That may be in the short term.” However, he was quick to add, “When groups start to upset the status quo by violating the norms, people become more and more alienated, cooperation decreases and the group disintegrates.”

To Eliot Spitzer, it’s a matter of making the penalties uncomfortable enough to prevent further lapses.

“What I struggle with now is that we have no effective remedies,” he told us. “You want to do something big and dramatic, but the draconian penalty is rarely seen as appropriate.”

In the absence of political will to take harsh actions against institutions or senior executives, he said, a broken-windows approach might work, policing the small-time infractions in hopes of beginning a systemic change. “Maybe it’s the guy on the trading floor who puts in an order for his favorite client because the guy took him to a Yankees game last night. Maybe it starts there.”

Jordan Thomas, head of Labaton Sucharow’s whistleblower practice, thought new whistleblower rules could help. “If people aren’t fearful, they stop thinking with their ethical self,” Mr. Thomas said. “Those people have more to fear, because of the whistleblowers and whistleblower lawsuits that are likely to come.”

“It’s never that hopeless,” Mr. Barofsky told us. “The people can speak up and compel politicians to break up the banks and break up the regulatory structure. “It may not happen until the next financial crisis hits,” he added. “By the way, I think the next one will be more devastating, because of some of the things we did the first time around.”

For his part, Mr. Barofsky has eschewed cheating. In the first chapter of Bailout, Mr. Barofsky goes to drinks with Herb Allison, a former chief operating officer of Merrill Lynch, at the time an advisor to the U.S. Treasury. The story goes that Mr. Allison warned Mr. Barofsky that trash-talking the administration over TARP was a sure way to ruin a career. It didn’t have to be that way: “Well, is it an appointment you might be looking for?” Mr. Barofsky says Mr. Allison asked. “Something else in government? A judgeship?”

Mr. Barofsky didn’t bite, and has settled for the less prestigious career path of law professor and book author. Not long ago, we noticed that Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine had popped up as No. 13 on the The New York Times bestseller list for the week of Aug. 12, though the work had been discredited. That burned, but there was a solace: Bailout was No. 9. So maybe there is hope for the honest man.

Then again, regulators announced last week that they were ending investigations into whether Goldman Sachs misled investors in a $1.3 billion mortgage deal without filing charges. Maybe Mr. Barofsky should have taken that judgeship.

pclark@observer.com

Douglas.

Is there anything more beautiful than feeling the cool air of fall start to kick back up? Then again, is there anything more depressing than coming to realize in the very same moment that summer has nearly passed? Sure, we’ve spent these waning days of late July and early August complaining about the heat, but who ever wants to contemplate seasonal change? What did we really do with our summer, after all?

Well, for starters, we were introduced to a few new people making a name for themselves in London. The Games of the XXX Olympiad, as they are officially known, brought us, among others, Gabby Douglas, that high-flying 16-year-old who managed to defy gravity and, perhaps more impressively, take our minds off the swimmers for a moment. She won’t be going anywhere soon—as long as we’re eating our Corn Flakes. But it does appear that Bob Costas needed a time-out. Why else would NBC leave him locked all alone in a room, while
everyone else on the NBC team was out on the town?

There was plenty happening stateside as well. It seems that when certain people say “I’ll be back,” they mean it—like the Terminator himself, who has reinvented his career once more. The former governor is now Professor Arnold Schwarzenegger, of the University of Southern California. There he’ll sit on the board of advisors at the Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy. He’ll also be the Governor Downey Professor of State and Global Policy at his shiny new think tank. Things are looking on the up for the body-builder-turned-actor-turned-politico-turned-tabloid-fodder. He might have been able to resurrect his career, but let’s face it, Total Recall is past saving after Colin Farrell’s clunker of a remake left us in desperate search for our own memory-alteration apparatus.

Speaking of Hollywoodland, there was a whole lotta hubbub when Twilight stars Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart—long rumored to be a couple—were officially deemed an item through news of their very publicized breakup, after Ms. Stewart was caught lip-locking with her married Snow White and the Huntsman director, Rupert Sanders. Though the “trampire”—as she was dubbed by Will Ferrell—seems to be on her way out of the public’s fair graces, we still have Natalie Portman, whose “official” wedding to Benjamin Millepied, with whom she is raising a son, Aleph, was perfect. The ceremony was Jewish and vegan, which takes care of all those pesky kosher issues.

On the smaller screen, Mariah Carey will be joining American Idol to replace Steven Tyler—and there is a slight possibility that Nick Jonas may join the panel as well. Sharon Osbourne is leaving America’s Got Talent, while her son, Jack Osbourne, was dropped from the Dick Wolf reality show contest about being in the military, Stars Earn Stripes. And finally, we were reminded that a Housewife by any other name is still a Housewife, after the big season shake-up left us with a bunch of new women and a bunch of the same drama. Ramona Singer versus Heather Thompson? Déjà vu, anyone?

But what did we learn this summer? That we haven’t learned anything at all.

Hello Nast-e, How You Been? In the "great" tradition of The Devil Wears Prada, Erik Maza reports on yet another bit of roman à clef that has emerged from the former innards of Conde Nast. Okay, so: Karl Taro Greenfeld's forthcoming (and very hyped!)  Triburbia isn't exactly mass-market paperback fodder, but there is a bit about a Conde Nast magazine that "didn’t survive very long in the digital age." The context provided and Maza's guesswork lead him (and us) to believe it's based on one Joanne Lipman of long-deceased Portfolio where Greenfield once worked. Portfolio famously blew a bunch of cash and its failure was like a really highbrow and way more expensive version of any one of Radar's three failures with far less drug use and more Michael Lewis and Felix Salmon. Also, Jeff Bercovici will probably never work at Conde Nast again for the wonderful media reporting he did (on Conde Nast; attaboy!) when he was there. Anyway, Maza hysterically called up Joanne Lipman who didn't comment on the book because she hasn't read it, but more importantly, we now know that Lipman is writing a book about her childhood music teacher instead of a Conde Nast tell-all. [Memo Pad / WWD]

Ghostface Dillah! IAC chairman Barry Diller was on the company's earnings call today when Peter Kafka heard him talking crazy-talk: A print-less Newsweek? Never! But: Not entirely unlikely! [All Things D] 

Nahoo: Welcome back to the media headlines for a day, Jamie Mottram, who previously oversaw Yahoo's whole blog experiment thing, who is now going to USA Today's Sports Media Group. Onward and lateral-ward! [Fishbowl NY]

On The Upside, You Get Marion Berry As Your Mayor: Have you thought about leaving New York City for higher ground lately? Tired of the Gotham grind? Well, D.C. news/gossip/scuttlebutt sheet The Hill has released their 50 Most Beautiful People list for this year, and it's as good a argument against it as anything else, especially if you've vaguely considered moving to D.C. (and let's face it: if you in fact have vaguely considered moving there, you deserve whatever fate awaits you). Also, tawdry mid-summer feature experts that we are, could you pick a worse way to shamelessly paginate, as a deterrent to reading through the entire thing? In D.C., no, because everyone there buys into things like this, as opposed to only a fraction of bored New Yorkers when we do them. [The Hill]

Someone Only She Knows: Remember what Maureen Dowd was like when she was an entirely respectable and hard-nosed reporter, before she pioneered the art of the hard-sell headline (long before The Internet—and TimesSelect—was ever a thing)? Of course you don't, because none of us were alive and if we were we didn't know who Maureen Dowd was yet because she was still an entirely respectable and hard-nosed reporter. Well, now you can relive those glory days. The Awl has a feature on it. [The Awl]

Outliars: Did Malcom Gladwell cause the recession? No, but it's fun to imagine him doing so because he once lectured at Lehman Brothers. Also: Wouldn't he just love  that? In even asking the question, Andrew Sullivan gives Malcolm Gladwell way, way, way too much credit today, while Felix Salmon gives him way too much space to defend himself of this accusation. All of which goes without saying: We all know Jim Cramer caused the recession, anyway. [Andrew Sullivan, Felix Salmon]

And The Pulitzer for Pattinson Service Goes To: The most groundbreaking thing happening in journalism today has to do with Kristen Stewart cheating on Robert Pattinson. This is like Watergate (for our angsty teenage cousin). It's literally inescapable on any social media platform right now. Congratulations, US Weekly, you've officially pushed VICE out of the "obligatory esoteric ASME nomination" position for next year's awards. [US Weekly]

Please remember to send your tips, legal threats, pencil sketches of funny dog breeds, and pro-bono accounting advice right here.

Happy Wednesday.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

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We're not sure why, but the shy and retiring double Oscar-winner Jodie Foster showed up at last night's MTV Movie Awards, where she presented the Movie of the Year Award to the fourth Twilight film, Breaking Dawn: Part 1. (How many of the kids in the audience do you think have watched The Accused?) At least Ms. Foster got to catch up with her old Panic Room costar Kristen Stewart, all grown up!

Kristen Stewart.

The idea underpinning Snow White and the Huntsman is a charming one. Epic summer movies use the language of fairy tale and myth to tell stories about contemporary heroes (who are The Avengers but a bunch of Olympians?); why not cut out the middleman and make a movie about a story everyone already knows?

Unfortunately, Snow White and the Huntsman expands strangely on the story every child knows before even hearing of Iron Man or Batman, making it a melange of fairy-tale and dull contemporary romance. Snow White, here, is not the sweetie who lives with seven hapless dwarfs—but, with little in the way of characterization, she’s a cipher.

Played by the vague and disassociated Kristen Stewart, Snow White spends the movie evading capture by the evil Queen’s army, but her most prominent character trait is her apparent beauty. At one point, a pursuing troll decides not to kill her simply because he gets a good look at her. Snow White, in the fairy tale and the Disney animated film, is not a dynamic character, and this film is true to form, placing at its center a young woman whose fairness has obviated the need for a personality.

As is so often the case, the film’s most intriguing character is the villain, Charlize Theron’s Ravenna. She is obsessed with her beauty and with consolidating power over Snow White’s unnamed kingdom, a land that she took over after killing Snow White’s father. Ms. Theron, chewing just the right amount of scenery, builds out the Queen into a character one misses whenever she’s not onscreen. She’s aided by the truly remarkable costume design and CGI work and hindered by the screenplay; far more thought was put into a bodice adorned with tiny bird skulls than into the specific rules governing Ravenna’s magical powers. Sometimes she gets power from sucking the beauty out of women, sometimes she does so by killing men. Ravenna can only be killed by the one person more beautiful than she—Snow White. While it’s unsporting to rank actresses according to their pulchritude, this movie’s conflation of beauty with virtue (in the case of Snow White) and power (in the case of both female leads) makes it an unfortunate necessity. Leave it at this: Kristen Stewart is more beautiful than the world’s most beautiful actress because the movie tells us so.

Given the general lack of elaboration as to Ravenna’s powers and Snow White’s character, the middle scenes of the movie are airless. In scene after scene, Snow White evades capture by the Queen’s henchmen simply by running out of the way; as an action caper, Snow White and the Huntsman lacks narrative ingenuity. Returning to Ravenna’s castle yields diminishing returns as well. Crafty though she is as an actress, Ms. Theron can shout "Bring me Snow White!" or a variation only so many times. If we miss her when she’s offscreen, we yearn for her appearances to have real heft.

Both Snow White’s adventures in the forest and the Queen’s ramblings in the castle may be doomed by director Rupert Sanders’s visual imagination. The movie is truly splendid to look at, and the vast tools at Mr. Sanders’s disposal stand in for any real narrative development. Snow White undergoes surrealist hallucinations, then goes to a fairy-ruled domain that Jean Cocteau might have directed if he had the budget for CGI. The Queen’s mirror drips onto the floor and re-forms in the shape of a man. With tricks like this, why wouldn’t a director keep using them again and again in place of scenes where Snow White reveals a motivation beyond survival?

The film’s greatest and most misused visual effect is Chris Hemsworth, who has overcome the burden of remarkable good looks to become one of the most charismatic young actors in Hollywood. Smeared in dirt, Mr. Hemsworth affects the movie’s sole convincing accent (the American, South African and Australian leads of this movie all play crypto-British) and plays the most interesting character. His huntsman, contracted to kill Snow White, is mourning the death of his wife and is unmoved by Snow White’s dubious charms. The movie, though, constructs a love triangle with Snow White’s childhood friend as the third wheel; this feels de rigueur, as though the screenwriters knew Kristen Stewart choosing between two men is more appealing at the box office than Kristen Stewart independent and fighting for survival.

It hardly seems coincidental that the film’s most interesting character is the one freighted with the least baggage; Snow White and the Queen are already well-known characters despite the fact that neither of them are interesting in their particulars. The attempts to push back against the commonly held awareness of who they are end up making Snow White inert rather than nice—she just isn’t convincing as the warrior princess she becomes at film’s end—and the Queen monomaniacal in a repetitive fashion. If one is adapting a well-known public-domain story to the screen, that story should have the adaptability to bear imagination. Snow White is not an interesting character, but she is a character to whom interesting things happen. Altering those events to a repeated series of narrow escapes (the dwarfs, here, are foot soldiers for Snow White, which is as bizarre as it sounds) and casting a notably uncharismatic actress as the woman who keeps making those escapes does the tale no service.

How, then, should fairy tales be adapted? (An adult version of Hansel and Gretel is said to be in the offing.) While the creativity behind Snow White and the Huntsman is to be lauded, that same creativity results in an alteration of the Snow White character to the degree that she’s both unrecognizable—and recognizable as a typical Kristen Stewart heroine, dazed and dependent upon male intervention. Had the film been more faithful to the narrative of its source material, it would have been better; that faithfulness would not have been for its own sake, but rather an acknowledgment that archetypal stories get passed along for a reason.

Snow White and the Huntsman

Running Time 127 minutes

Written by Evan Daugherty, John Lee Hancock and Hossein Amini

Directed by Rupert Sanders

Starring Kristen Stewart, Chris Hemsworth and Charlize Theron

On the Road

Nicole Kidman pisses on Zac Ephron’s face! Eva Mendes cradles a Parisian sewer troll! A nude Kristen Stewart jerks off Sam Riley and Garrett Hedlund—at the same time! Kanye West unveils the future of cinema inside an enormous white pyramid! Film festivals usually mete out their lunacy with more deliberation. This year, though, after a subdued week of world-class cinema, Cannes got weird fast.

Best to start with the worst. The Paperboy, Lee Daniels’ follow-up to maudlin-but-moving Oscar-winner Precious, is a hot mess of a picture, with whiplash plot twists and colorful characters acting brassy and trashy while racial tensions sputter and boil over in every direction. Based on the book by Pete Dexter and featuring an admirably game cast including Nicole Kidman, Matthew McConaughey, Zac Ephron, John Cusack, and Macy Gray, the film ostensibly revolves around a man accused of murdering a small-town sheriff. But it doesn’t take long for this story to sputter, spark, and go right off the rails. Let’s just say that Ms. Kidman and Mr. Cusack have psychic sex, Mr. Ephron suffers a near-fatal jellyfish attack, swamp people gut alligators before eating a tub of ice cream, and Mr. McConaughy ends up naked, bloody, hog-tied, and wearing an eye patch. It’s unfair to call this nut-bar melodrama unwatchable if only because it’s impossible to look away.

Far more successful but no less loopy was Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, a philosophical fantasia about the interplay of identity, cinema, art, and life, and revels in seemingly random episodes that feature a punk accordion band rocking out inside a cathedral, hyper-sexed computer-generated succubi, a Kylie Minogue torch song, and a suburban monkey family. International critics, thrilled to see such a high-wire act of cinéfolie, lapped it up. The film’s success is due in no small part to French actor Denis Levant, who rides around Paris in a limo and plays no less than 11 roles, including street gypsy, motion-capture stuntman, assassin, dying patriarch, and one-eyed underground dweller. It’s in this last role that Eva Mendes pops up for a brief appearance, as a lullaby-crooning fashion model whom Mr. Levant kidnaps from an outdoor cemetery shoot. “What was that scene about?” a journalist asked the director at the film’s press conference. “How would I know?” deadpanned Mr. Carax.

If only director Walter Salles had been more blithely instinctive with his over-reverent period piece On the Road, a handsomely packaged but painfully respectful adaptation of the 1957 Beat Generation classic by Jack Kerouac. Rarely does a film so full of sex (gay and straight, twosomes and threesomes) and drugs (Benzedrine, pot, booze and heroin) actually make vice seem banal. Hot young things Kristen Stewart, Garrett Hedlund, Tom Sturridge and Sam Riley go full monty with their horndoggery, while older thespians like Viggo Mortensen (nailing a  spot-on William S. Burroughs) and Steve Buscemi pop up to add a touch of classy decrepitude. But there’s nothing truly dangerous, raw or even poetic about the shenanigans of these twentysomething drifters, ping-ponging throughout the country with as much spontaneity as a layout in an Abercrombie and Fitch catalogue.

You want cinematic ambition? Just ask Kanye West. Last night, in a small private audience that included Jay-Z and Kim Kardashian, he unveiled plans to reinvent the way movies are experienced, with the seven-screen immersion of “Cruel Summer,” a 30-minute film shot in Qatar and made in association with the Doha Film Institute, the "cultural and creative advisors" to the film [Editor's note: We broke the story on Kanye's film in February.]. Really just a video installation set to a barrage of non-stop music, and housed inside a white pyramid tent that was a 30-minute walk from Cannes’ main venues, the screens—three in front, two on the sides, and one each overhead and on the floor—created the kind of visual overload more typical of a theme-park ride than an IMAX feature. And the film itself, though ostensibly about a wealthy blind women who uses a vast network of gold strings as a guide through her family’s palace, is really more a lush cascade of slow-motion Middle Eastern iconography, from Arabian horses and falconers to vast deserts and ultramodern cities. Rappers Kid Cudi and Big Sean appear, as does Mr. West himself and a blink-or-you’ll-miss-him Aziz Ansari.

“I’m not the best director in the world or anything like that,” Mr. West said afterwards. “But I had an idea that I thought would be amazing to inspire people so that one day this is the way people watch movies: Tarantino doing a movie like this, a horror movie like this, animation, 3D.” He also has plans to tour the film and keep working on it (especially since they were filming less than a month ago and rushed to make it to Cannes). “You guys are seeing the rough draft of this concept,” he said. “We’re going to show this in New York, we’re going to bring this out to Qatar, we’re going to take this installation around the world, and we’re going to re-edit and improve on it.” And Mr. West has no intention of stopping at film, now that he’s entered what he describes as his “post-Grammy” career. “I want to work on cities, I want to work on amusement parks,” he said. “I want to change what entertainment experiences are like.”