“Do you come to these parties often?” asked my companion, her lips at my ear.

Jay-Z was now bouncing to “Who Gon Stop Me,” as Jake Gyllenhaal and Florence Welch rapped along, standing on a table, towering above Carey Mulligan, Tom Hardy, Jamie Foxx and other Hollywood royalty.

Perhaps I do go to a lot of parties, but I had not been invited to this one. In school at Duke, I became close with a man who had gone into film and went on to work on The Great Gatsby, Baz Luhrmann’s new adaptation of the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. And just as Fitzgerald got a lot of leverage from his Princeton chums, my friend had smuggled me into The Darby, which came after the film’s world premiere, earlier that night at Lincoln Center, and the official after-party, in the ballroom of the Plaza Hotel.

No, I don’t often come to parties like this, I told my companion.

Corks popped from the flaming bottles, champagne spilled into glasses and the glasses overflowed. I approached Leo in his little nook.

“We spoke earlier, on the red carpet,” Mr. DiCaprio said, his oceans of blue eyes twinkling at me.

“And there are more events to come,” I responded.

And what a string of events it was: a spree of cocktail functions, high-fashion fetes at fancy boutiques, exclusive screenings in secret locations, a sprawling red-carpet premiere that attracted crowds for blocks, a boozy lunch at the New York Public Library, a boozy lunch at the Fitzgerald Suite at the Plaza Hotel, a boozy dinner at the ballroom in the Plaza Hotel, a breakfast at Tiffany, a champagne supper at Brooks Brothers, a star-studded bash at Prada, a Peggy Siegal screening at MoMA followed by a giant bash at the Boom Boom Room, and a Cinema Society screening at HBO headquarters followed by a giant bash at The Lambs Club.

The parties seemingly never ended, as Warner Bros.—thanks to an unimaginable promotional budget (though representatives would not disclose an exact figure) and countless corporate tie-ins—managed to recreate a run of blowouts similar to those that took place on West Egg.

It made sense that they had spun off the movie’s party-heavy storyline into actual glamorous bashes. Mr. Luhrmann took 1920s New York City and made it his own, running the then-emerging skyline through his saturated filter and engineering a boisterous, three-dimensional, thoroughly vibrating version of our city (though the film was shot not on our streets but in Australia, the director’s native land).

With that same approach—one not too different from Jay Gatsby’s own Icarus-esque hubris—applied to the film’s promotion, he’s turned the actual metropolis into a Gatsby-themed pop-up, a traveling party that’s the best possible billboard for the film, a series of super-fancy luxury events that eclipses any movie’s promotional roll-out in recent history.

For two weeks, The Great Gatsby has overtaken NYC.

The first shindig was at Brooks Brothers, the store where two New Haven men in Fitzgerald’s novella May Day go shopping for Welsh Margotson collars. Mannequins bestrode the sloped plaster centerpieces and seemed to be sashaying to the music, which at the moment played Lana Del Rey’s “Young and Beautiful,” the love theme from The Great Gatsby.

After a few coupes of Moët champagne I spotted Mr. Luhrmann, looking dapper enough to have stepped off his own movie’s set. We chatted about my friend from college, and then I asked about this impressive run of Gatsby-esque parties.

“A little partying never killed anyone—or, well, maybe it did,” he said, referring to (spoiler alert!) Gatsby’s death at the end of the movie. “Immediately, the parties and the glamour is what’s attractive. But when we find out that Gatsby’s doing that for a different reason, it’s why the book is so enduring. You’re attracted to it, you’re seduced by it, but then you find yourself going on this human journey.”

This human’s journey took him next to a screening at Warner Bros. headquarters, one of a few screenings set up for those who could score seats. The film is massive, a sensory overload, a wildly kaleidoscopic spectacle that somehow manages to stay relatively faithful to the Great American Novel, all building to that monumental party scene, set to “Rhapsody in Blue.”

After the credits rolled, I raced downtown to the party at the Prada flagship.

The official premiere, the following night, engulfed the whole of Lincoln Center’s grand arcade. An army of photographers and journalists jockeyed for snaps and quotes. Attendees in black tie downed cocktails on the balcony overhead, laughing and waving to people who couldn’t see them, as a giant banner for Samsung, one of the movie’s (many) sponsors, hung below, visible to the masses. And finally the stars, each one positively gleaming, showed their famous faces.

Leonardo DiCaprio, Baz Luhrmann and Carey Mulligan.

I caught Mr. DiCaprio as he was about to go in and watch himself enthrall the audience.

“What I loved about Jay Gatsby was this idea of this iconic American dreamer,” Mr. DiCaprio told me, his eyes wandering up to the sky. “We all can identify with the American dreamer—the man coming from nothing and manifesting his own destiny.”

With no entrée into the party at the Plaza Hotel, I passed the time with cocktails at the Whitney Museum’s annual Art Party, sifting through crowds of young strivers who had purchased tickets and budding socialites with enough connections to land a spot on the host committee. It was the next generation of upper-crust New York grabbing cocktail after cocktail.

“Darby if you can swing it,” came the text message from my college friend, and I hopped in a cab that zoomed between the monolithic towers of Midtown and down into the West Village. The feverish party rang out for hours. I drank scotch from Mr. DiCaprio’s table. I dipped a girl low dancing to Roaring Twenties jazz.

Somehow, the cast (sans Mr. DiCaprio, who had hit 1OAK following The Darby) made it to a lunch the next morning at the New York Public Library, looking fresh as ever. Event host David Remnick was nice enough to take a break from editing The New Yorker to chat with Mr. Luhrmann about the research that he and his wife, Gatsby costume designer Catherine Martin, had done into the inner workings of Fitzgerald’s soul.

“C.M. and I, we imagined we were Scott and Zelda,” Mr. Luhrmann said to the room, where Anna Wintour sat with literary heavyweights like Jeffrey Eugenides, Maureen Dowd, Calvin Tomkins, Philip Gourevitch and Téa Obreht. “C.M. went a bit too far with the champagne exploration ...”

“Baz, you have a much bigger problem with the bottle than I do!” his wife said.

Everyone reached for his or her wine glass.

Then it was time for a panel discussion with the cast moderated by the biographer Dr. Amanda Foreman, who commenced perhaps history’s most glamorous book club with Ms. Mulligan, Joel Edgerton, Mr. Maguire and Isla Fisher.

Not long after the movie-star book club ended, I ran into Mr. Edgerton, who plays Tom Buchanan.

“You read Fitzgerald’s letters, and it’s clear he just wanted so bad to be famous,” the actor said. “He just wanted to get laid and be famous.”

I wondered, aloud, who doesn’t want to get laid and be famous?

Jay-Z.

Mr. Edgerton shrugged.

“I haven’t met anyone.”

Mr. Luhrmann then grabbed me and walked me through the grand hallways of the New York Public Library and out the towering front entrance, where a handful of fans stood beside the two lions calling out for the director, asking for autographs.

“Wasn’t The Darby so fun last night, Nate?” Mr. Luhrmann said, walking down the massive steps. “It just felt like the Jazz Age again?”

The director bounced as if fully refreshed. He was the perfect perennial host for The Great Gatsby. On the street, a car was waiting for him. It would take him to a television interview. Before he ducked in, he went for a double-pump handshake.

“I’ll see you Sunday at the Boom Boom Room,” he said. “Another party!”

I arrived early on Sunday night only to find the space empty, devoid of famous faces. Through the Boom Boom Room’s floor-to-ceiling windows was a glittering panorama: the Empire State Building to the north, and to the south the Hudson River snaking down to lower Manhattan and the unfinished Freedom Tower.

Then things picked up. As the cast took their time to arrive from the screening at the Museum of Modern Art, Katy Perry showed up wearing a colorful outfit she claimed was inspired by Frida Kahlo. (Ms. Perry had been at the Prada event, too.)

“It’s very of Gatsby, it’s very befitting,” she told me, speaking about the run of parties.

Ms. Perry later joined Mr. DiCaprio, Ms. Mulligan, Cuba Gooding Jr. and others in a back section of the Top of the Standard, surrounded by bodyguards. I walked in and saw Baz Luhrmann, who pulled me over to his booth. The director began talking about The Great Gatsby in an intelligent way. I smiled. It was a conversation I had been searching for amid the two weeks of glad-handing, petty arguments, studio politics and celebrity publicists. Mr. Luhrmann talked with stunning earnestness about how The Great Gatsby is the American Hamlet, about how Hamlet is the Bible, about how the New Testament is the first cinematic document, and about how, in the Gospels, Jesus Christ dies at 33, much like the protagonist of his newest film.

What more could I ask of this director, after all of these events at posh places in New York City devoted to his movie, all of them masterminded on some level by Mr. Luhrmann himself, the ringleader, the puppeteer—the boy from Australia who changed his name and became famous?

It’s like you’re Gatsby yourself, I said.

“I’m not Jay Gatsby,” he said. Then he pointed to a man a booth over, a man at the center of this golden top-floor canopy above New York City, sitting with Dasha Zhukova—the partner of Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich—the actress Kristen Wiig and No Doubt singer Gwen Stefani. He was pointing at Leonardo DiCaprio.

“I’m not Jay Gatsby,” Mr. Luhrmann said. “He is.”

As the new Gatsby, Leonardo DiCaprio is hopeless, a little boy in his first After Six tuxedo.

Let’s face it. The Great Gatsby never has been—and probably won’t ever be—successfully turned into a great motion picture. Many have tried (four flop movies, not to mention various small-screen attempts, including a truncated but memorable Playhouse 90 with Robert Ryan and Jeanne Crain in the golden days when TV still knew what quality programming was). Robert Redford was a perfect Gatsby in the pretty but boring 1974 version by Jack Clayton, but the movie was dead on arrival. The best I’ve seen is still Elliott Nugent’s black-and-white 1949 version, with Alan Ladd at the top of his form as the screen’s most glamorous Gatsby to date, heading a cast that included Betty Field, Macdonald Carey, Ruth Hussey and Shelley Winters. Mired in mysterious litigation for six decades, it has never been released on home video, is never shown on any cable or network channel, and cannot be appreciated by the legions of F. Scott Fitzgerald fans who have never seen his work properly adapted to the screen. And so his literary masterwork remains nothing more—an elegant but elusive triumph of words over images, best savored on the written page.

You don’t realize just how much misguided damage can be done to a great novel until it is vaporized by a pretentious hack like boneheaded Australian director Baz Luhrmann. Some critics, through the years, have put forth the unpopular theory that Fitzgerald specialized in style over substance, but as any college English major knows, he was famous for pruning away the clutter. With the cinematic meat cleaver that Mr. Luhrmann wields in one bloated misfire after another (I still haven’t recovered from the nausea-inducing Moulin Rouge), style is all there is left, and in The Great Gatsby it looks alarmingly like clutter. Budgeted between 105 and 127 million dollars, depending on which Hollywood trade journal you read, with every inflated expense aimed at your eyeballs in awkward, totally unnecessary and stomach-churning 3-D, this is one of the most maddening examples of wasted money ever dumped on the screen. Jay Gatsby is an enigmatic figure in the excessive Roaring Twenties who came from poverty and devoted his life to becoming a self-made millionaire to win over a superficial girl named Daisy, buying an ostentatious mansion on Long Island across the lake from her rich husband Tom and infiltrating high society with lavish, loud and impossibly overproduced parties masquerading as social events. Racking up his 3-D budget to the credit-card limit, Mr. Luhrmann turns these dinner dances into drunken confetti-drenched orgies. The sumptuous, vulgar Gatsby estate, overflowing with gangsters, movie stars, flappers, wisecracking alcoholics, voluptuous tap dancers, people falling from trapezes, clowns, acrobats and an orchestra in the middle of a swimming pool full of inflatable rubber zebras, looks like a high-school costume party on prom night invaded by Cirque du Soleil.

Is it any wonder, in all the slobber and confusion, that the acting is so bad? With the phoniest set of performances this side of an Ed Wood flick, you might as well be watching Plan 9 From Outer Space. As the new Gatsby, Leonardo DiCaprio is hopeless, a little boy in his first After Six tuxedo. Worse still, he is no longer the centerpiece of the story, a task that falls into the incapable hands of the incompetent, miscast Tobey Maguire as Jay Gatsby’s friend, neighbor and all-seeing matchmaker and Daisy’s cousin, Nick Carraway. He might suffice as a callow Spider-Man, but as the film’s narrator, saying campy things like “They were careless, Tom and Daisy ... they smash people and then retreat back into their vast world of money and carelessness ...” Even with these masterful lines from the book, he just sounds like he’s reading from a college yearbook. Mr. Maguire is supposed to be the camera through which the tragedy unfolds, but he is light years away from possessing the range, craftsmanship and experience required to play a Fitzgerald hero. Mr. DiCaprio has the experience, and we know he can act, but he’s not beyond the need for a director’s keen guidance. Without proficient direction, he comes off like he has no stamina to give the role of Gatsby the stature it demands. That kind of direction would imply the kind of wisdom and insight Baz Luhrmann lacks. He’s too busy directing the confetti.

Carey Mulligan is another artist who knows how to pop the cork on bottled emotion, but her Daisy Buchanan is so trite and myopic you wonder what Gatsby ever saw in her in the first place. Only the terrific Australian actor Joel Edgerton has the proper grip on the material as her handsome, shallow, two-timing husband Tom. It’s supposed to be a story about fate and irony, but the jealous garage mechanic Wilson and his sluttish wife Myrtle (so soundly and wrenchingly played by Shelley Winters in the 1949 version), who gets mowed down by Gatsby’s Duesenberg, have been all but relegated to bit players. This dilutes the dramatic impact that builds to the story’s feverish climax, rendering the big finale impotent. This version of The Great Gatsby has the narrative strength of tap water.

Like Orson Welles, Mr. Luhrmann chooses interesting material to shape into movies, but then his colossal ego does ridiculous things to doom it. This catastrophe has actors who roll their eyes and raise their eyebrows in perpetual uncertainty about what kind of literature they are supposed to be interpreting—a trashed-up revision of the original with the narrator now echoing the inner voice of Fitzgerald from an asylum where he is writing a book called ... The Great Gatsby? The jazz and big band swing of the ’20s has been replaced by hip-hop music supervised by Jay-Z and songs by Beyoncé and Fergie with the historical significance of a tuning fork, and there are so many close-ups that it sometimes looks like a movie about ears. I love the publicity quotes by Baz Luhrmann stating that his intention was to make an epic romantic vision that is enormous. Also: overwrought, asinine, exaggerated and boring. But in the end, about as romantic as a pet rock.

rreed@observer.com

THE GREAT GATSBY

Written by Baz Lurhmann and Craig Pearce

Directed by Baz Luhrmann

Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Joel Edgerton and Tobey Maguire

Running Time: 145 mins.

Rating: 1/4 Stars

A model apartment.

It's been one lucky break after another for Erin Bubley, aka Erin Heatherton, the girl from Skokie, Ill., who moved to New York to become a model and caught the eye of Leonardo DiCaprio—all while strutting around in bedazzled lingerie for Victoria's Secret.

Now the underwear angel is flitting into a loft-like two-bedroom condo at 1 Morton Square, which she purchased for $1.76 million, according to city records. All at the age of 23!  We bet Ms. Bubley is really glad that she decided to spend the summer before her senior year modeling in New York rather than going to camp.

"So I had to make a decision," Ms. Bubley told The Chicago Tribune of her choice to pursue modeling at 17. "Should I take this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity or go to basketball camp?"

1 Morton Square.

Ms. Bubley bought the condo from Damien Miller, who made little profit on the sale after buying the apartment for $1.7 million in 2006. He tried to sell it for $1.9 million in 2008, then dropped the price to $1.89 million in 2009, before taking it off the market and recently re-listing it at $1.76 million.

The home comes with soaring ceilings, oversized windows and exceptional southern light, the Prudential Douglas Elliman listing, held by Daniel Kunen boasts. After all, a young model needn't lurk in the shadows. There's also a gourmet kitchen with an eat-at counter, a Viking Professional stove and Subzero fridge.

We doubt Ms. Bubley will be making much use of those.

kvelsey@observer.com

Leonardo DiCaprio (Gatsby), Vanity Fair, December 2012

Headline: "YES, LEO'S BACK! Hollywood's Ultimate Bad Boy Goes Back to the Roaring Twenties--and Aims At Oscar"

Editorial Concept: Leo plays with a baby tiger cub, smokes a cigar by a pool, walks through a hedge maze.

Carey Mulligan (Daisy), Vogue, November 2012

Headline: "SECRETS OF EAST EGG: Carey Mulligan as the Woman Who Stole Gatsby's Heart"

Editorial Concept: Done entirely in character, with special attention to the scene with all Gatsby's shirts on the floor.

Tobey Maguire (Nick Carraway), Esquire, November 2012

Headline: "THE TAO OF TOBEY: Hollywood's Hottest Recluse on Fitzgerald, Film, Finding Contentment--and What He's Learned Along the Way"

Editorial Concept: Looking stern on a golf course.

Joel Edgerton (Tom Buchanan), GQ, October 2012

Headline: "TIE ONE ON! The 12 Neckties You Need Now"

Editorial Concept: Mr. Edgerton models a bunch of ties.

Isla Fisher (Myrtle Wilson), Allure, January 2013

Headline: "IT'S ISLA! Mrs. Borat (That's Right!) On Her Big New Role"

Editorial Concept: Best mascaras for your hair color.

Christoph Waltz and Jamie Foxx in 'Djago Unchained'

Quentin Tarantino loves a good revenge fantasy. Besides Kill Bill, his last Academy Award-winning film, Inglorious Basterds, reimagined the death of Hitler and the Nazi regime at the hands of the Jews.

Five years later, we have Django Unchained: the highly-anticipated ode to the spaghetti western in which Southern slave Jamie Foxx and German bounty hunter  Christoph Waltz are on a mission to make Southern plantation owners suffer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=rC8VJ9aeB_g#!

The tagline of this film is "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of vengeance," which pretty much tells you where the auteur's head is at. Much like Inglorious Basterds, your reaction to this film will probably have less to do with its style (which is awesome) or its performances (lets just give the Oscar to Leonardo DiCaprio for Best Supporting Actor and forget about holding the Academy Awards this year), and more with how you feel about the director's take on bloody revisionist history.

Just for an example: how do we feel about the protagonist's salvation coming from a  German bounty hunter/dentist? Anyone else having flashbacks to Marathon Man? (Though Mr. Tarantino is far too keen on film references for that to be an accident; we're sure the phrase "Is it safe???" will be uttered at a crucial juncture in the film.)

A coworker pointed out another issue for viewers: while the film is ostensibly a Western, it also has elements of a Blaxsploitation movie. This is not new territory for Tarantino, but might rankle those who feel that the director consistently appropriates black  culture in an effort to ramp up his quotability quotient.

'Battleship' star Rihanna (Getty Images)

The Hunger Games (Gary Ross) March 23

Your children have been refreshing Fandango daily to see if tickets are available yet for the movie based on Suzanne Collins’ kiddie novels—think of them as Twilight, except with actual murder instead of benign vampirism. Games promises a chaste love triangle and lots of angst for the tween set, but what’s in it for adults? Potentially, some solid acting. Jennifer Lawrence, last widely seen in her Oscar-nominated Winter’s Bone role, hopefully turns in another subtle and edgy performance as a young woman fighting to survive, and she’s accompanied by some tried-and-true character actors, like Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks, and Donald Sutherland.

The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies) March 30

The long-absent Terence Davies returns with an adaptation of a play by another Terence—the late Rattigan, who wrote about the subtle emotionality of the British upper crust. This work is no exception, featuring as it does Rachel Weisz (and where has she been?) as the wife of a judge who is engaging in a dangerous liaison with a pilot. The cast also includes Tom Hiddleston, who was in just about every movie last year, of brows high and low (War Horse, Midnight in Paris, and Thor), but we’re more excited about the return of Mr. Davies, whose last narrative film, the moody The House of Mirth, came out way back in 2000.

Titanic 3D (James Cameron) April 4

To paraphrase Céline Dion, “It’s here—there’s nothing we fear.” Just in time for the centenary anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic comes the rerelease of the multiple Oscar winner. It’s been converted into 3D, too—so it’ll feel like Kate Winslet is throwing her diamond necklace right at you! Surely director James Cameron hopes he’ll break his own record by getting this film back to the #1 all-time box-office spot, but we suspect that, nearly 15 years after Titanic’s release, we’ll be among the rather limited number of Kate-and-Jack die-hards who simply can’t ever let go.

Damsels in Distress (Whit Stillman) April 6

Whit Stillman, who was hiding out with Terence Davies, is back too, with a drama that proves he’s still interested in what the kids are up to. The director who blew the lid off deb parties and disco dancing now examines a suicide-prevention mission undertaken by a WASPy queen bee whose idea of “It Gets Better” is introducing her classmates to tap dance. Sure, the notion of frolicsome young beauties put in “distress” by the men in their lives seems a bit fainting-couch-y, but, given that his previous films were all more or less period pieces, one exactly doesn’t go to Mr. Stillman for insights on the way we live now.

Darling Companion (Lawrence Kasdan) April 20

Every one of our favorites unites in a project that might be the Avengers of 1980s Oscar-ceremony attendees. Diane Keaton tries on a new Chico’s scarf-and-blazer combo as a woman who loves her dog a bit too much, and Kevin Kline is the husband who misplaces that dog. Throw Dianne Wiest and Sam Shepard into the mix, and you have a winner. We’re not sure why there’s so much hue and cry—it’s not like the dog is played by Uggie—but if there was ever an actress who seems like she’d be a little too into animals, it’d be Annie Hall herself!

The Five-Year Engagement (Nicholas Stoller) April 27

Jason Segel, tired of speaking to Muppets, has returned to romantic comedies about human beings. His Forgetting Sarah Marshall follow-up  costars Emily Blunt as a fiancée who has taken her sweet time making it to the altar—hey, it’s hard to plan a wedding! Between choosing a venue and bridesmaids’ dresses … Also featured are NBC Thursday-night comedians Chris Pratt, Alison Brie, the inescapable Mindy Kaling, and, for some reason, Oscar-nominated Aussie spitfire Jacki Weaver. We’re not sure why Mr. Segel keeps getting cast as a romantic lead—perhaps because he writes the parts for himself? (Aspiring actors who don’t resemble Channing Tatum, take note.)

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (John Madden) May 4

An all-star cast of Britain’s actors most likely to cluck “Well, I never!” trade their manor houses and cozy flats for India in this tale of white people encountering brown people. Characters played by Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy, and Maggie Smith, among others, decide to retire to the subcontinent before realizing that “exotic” is an unalloyed positive only when applied to the term “dancer.” It is likely, though, that they will all learn, like, three lessons before dying—perhaps some of them taught by Slumdog Millionaire star Dev Patel!

The Avengers (Joss Whedon) May 4

The most anticipated film of the year among circles too young or too cool to remember Titanic unites Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man and a bunch of less popular and less charismatic superheroes in a quest to save the world from threats of an unclear nature. Scarlett Johansson is the lady who kicks and punches, Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth are the slabby studs, and moody blue Mark Ruffalo is the Incredible Hulk. (You wouldn’t like to see Mark Ruffalo when he’s angry—he brews some Kombucha to cool down then talks passionately about hydrofracking!). Unlike this summer’s noirish Dark Knight reprise, this promises to be big and bright and dopey—just what we want as rainy winter changes to overheated spring.

The Dictator (Larry Charles) May 11

Sacha Baron Cohen is back in character; apparently Bruno didn’t sate his appetite for foisting upon audiences a goulash of an accent and nightmarishly draggy scenes of his imposing himself upon unsuspecting people. The Dictator has him playing the Qaddafi-esque ruler of the fictitious nation Wadiya, one who gets to do fun things like shoot his subjects onscreen and seduce Megan Fox. We’re pretty sure that for all the Americans who were unaware of the Arab Spring, this will be a bit too insider-y, but who knows—everyone loves to laugh at Mr. Cohen when he impersonates an ethnic.

Battleship (Peter Berg) May 18

Rihanna makes her acting debut in a film about robotic aliens sent to destroy Earth—and despite her singing voice, she plays one of the humans defending us! This adaptation of the numbered-grid board game promises to be anything but B-9, with a cast that also includes the ever-more-grizzled Liam Neeson, Friday Night Lights star Taylor Kitsch, and Brooklyn Decker, who just finished playing Ophelia at the Old Vic (just kidding, she’s a bikini model!). We hope this one is successful—not due to partisanship for any of its stars, but because the deadline headlines about “sunken Battleship” are just too predictable.

Evelyn Lauder.

The sad passing of Evelyn Lauder this week has us wearing our pink ribbons proudly (and also buying up half of Estée Lauder’s cosmetic counter at Bloomingdale’s). The cancer survivor, advocate and entrepreneur was one hell of a lady. You’d have to be to have Estée Lauder as a mother-in-law (we imagine her as the perfume magnate version of Anna Wintour’s surrogate in The Devil Wears Prada). But even a real Mommy Dearest couldn’t hold a candle this week to Patti Labelle. Page Six painted the Lady Marmalade crooner as a terror-inducing psychopath, who scared her 18-month-old so badly that young Genevieve Monk suffered “personality changes.” While we don’t doubt the righteous ire of Ms. Labelle, we also wonder how anyone can tell when a toddler has a mood shift. Does that involve more crying and rending of garments, or less?

Speaking of scary mommies, Piper Laurie—well-known for, among other things, playing the religious lunatic who pushed Sissy Spacek’s wide-eyed Carrie into murdering her entire high school with her mind—has a new memoir out. It’s called Learning to Live Out Loud, which in Ms. Laurie’s case means dishing about losing her virginity to Ronald Reagan at 18. Even creepier, it was on the set of Louisa, where the  future president played the role of her daddy. (We’re just going to go thumb through our tattered copy of Freud ... )

Of course, kids today don’t have to pull a Carrie at the prom to sufficiently alienate their parents and the rest of society; they can simply snag a spot on one of our million reality TV shows. (That said, it’d probably make for better viewing if a Snooki or Kendra Wilkinson-type developed telekinesis—think of the ratings!) And for the aspiring dead-eyed starlets and socialites among you, American Media Inc. is developing a brand new magazine catering to your fantasies of sub-prime time stardom. Reality Weekly will feature a dating column from Victoria Gotti—which we assume will tackle everyday relationship dilemmas (i.e., What to Do When Your Father Puts a Hit Out on Your Boyfriend)—as well as tips and cheat sheets for devotees of America’s guiltiest pleasure.

Which is only a bit guiltier than our other great American guilty pleasure: developing wishy washy conspiracy theories and floating them to see who’ll bite. Which is what The New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof did Tuesday when he theorized that Mayor Michael Bloomberg was secretly pro Occupy Wall Street. After all, Mr. Kristof argued, why else would he raid Zuccotti Park in the middle of the night unless he wanted more public sympathy and attention drawn to the OWS movement? We’re pretty sure he had a cheek full of tongue at the time, but one thing’s for certain: if Rudy Giuliani were still mayor, he would have been at the park on day one with the batons out, ready to bend some protesters over his knee for a personal spanking. Next to his predecessor, Mayor Bloomberg’s reticent behavior toward the seemingly unending Occupation is more June Cleaver than Father Knows Best.

But if your eyes glaze over and you start feeling feverish every time you read about protests (which may be a sign you’re getting Zuccotti Lung, the super-flu going around the tent city, so please see your doctor), the antidote could be found Friday night at Avenue in the meatpacking district, when Leonardo DiCaprio’s 37th birthday bash raised $1.3 million for his disaster relief and wildlife preservation charities. (As Estée Lauder once said, “If I believe in something I sell it, and sell it hard.”) Robert De Niro, Naomi Campbell, Bradley Cooper and Edward Norton celebrated with the J. Edgar actor, and an auctioned 15-liter bottle of Veuve Clicquot painted by artist Peter Tunney went for $50,000. We can’t help but think it would have been a little more exciting with a few Patti Labelle-inflicted “personality changes” or Carrie-at-the-prom moments—but then we’ve probably been watching too much reality TV.

DiCaprio as Hoover.

In spite of a fusillade of P.R. overkill about what a brave, risk-taking actor he is, and how he spent five hours a day in a makeup chair squirming, Leonardo DiCaprio’s portrait of a balding, sweaty, gristle-chewing, half-mad J. Edgar Hoover is gimmicky play acting. J. Edgar, Clint Eastwood’s exhausting chronicle of power obsession about the enigmatic, self-serving egomaniac who, as director of the F.B.I., kept America trembling with terror for half a century under the phony guise of patriotism, is a long, tedious and hollow disappointment.

Mr. Eastwood is too old to tackle a personality so complex; he knows nothing about what it takes to turn the character flaws of a cross-dressing mama’s boy into an attention-craving closet queen like Hoover. And how many prosthetics do we have to endure to watch Leonardo DiCaprio fake his way through roles like Howard Hughes and the forthcoming Frank Sinatra and Jay Gatsby—roles for which he is totally unsuited and therefore miscast. For now, we have another miscalculation in a bloodless film about a monster more pathetic than dangerous, with an odd, rambling screenplay by Oscar-winning writer Dustin Lance Black (Milk) that meanders all over the place unable to tell a story with any kind of narrative coherence. It’s not that J. Edgar is such a bad movie. (It’s not Melancholia.) But it is boring and ineffectual. There’s no passion behind it.

From his early days in the Justice Department to his death in 1972 at age 77, the movie leans heavily on the Max Factor jar to show boyish, cherubic Mr. DiCaprio in every phase of a controversial life. Some of the facts are a matter of public record. Named by Calvin Coolidge as the sixth director of what was then called the Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar rose to glory and in 1935 was appointed by U. S. Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone (Ken Howard) as the first director of the newly organized F.B.I.—a position he assumed was “for life.” For the next 36 years he made all the rules, sodomized the Constitution, declared war on everything he disliked from “Bolshevik radicals” to Martin Luther King, set back the progress of the civil rights movement, used force to root out every suspected communist, and arrested 4,000 people by the time he was only 24 years old. Yes, he initiated a lot of crime-fighting technology, including fingerprints, wire-tapping and forensics labs. But he also used the F.B.I. to intimidate celebrities and public figures, harass political activists, and illegally collect secret files of alleged evidence and hearsay against everyone from mob bosses to Marilyn Monroe. Insanely jealous, he fired staff members with poor educations and cheap wardrobes and ruined the careers of special law-enforcement agents who became heroes in the tabloids, such as Chicago’s Melvin Purvis, the man who actually tracked down and killed John Dillinger while Hoover took all the credit and drove him to suicide in 1960. Soft-soaping his corruption, the movie barely touches on these facts and refuses to take a stand on the many ways he proved himself a major hypocrite. While ranting homophobic prejudices against gays, he was a closet homosexual who carried on a private love affair with assistant deputy F.B.I. director Clyde Tolson (played softly by Armie Hammer, who appeared as Mark Zuckerberg’s handsome twin adversaries in The Social Network). Inseparable, the two men are shown kissing only one time in their 40-year relationship, following a fist fight on the floor when Hoover announced he was going to marry Dorothy Lamour. Despite documented eyewitness accounts of Hoover’s secret passion for cross-dressing, fueled by his strong, dominating mother (Judi Dench, flawless again), he is revealed posing with his mother’s necklace and silk dress against his chest only once, following her death. (F.B.I. employees behind his back called him “J. Edna Hoover”.)

Unable or unwilling to expose the elements that made him really interesting (Mr. Eastwood has ill-advisedly declared Hoover’s private life “none of my business”), the film plods along timidly without the courage of its own convictions. Remaining annoyingly passive about a diabolically conflicted despot while retaining an air of ambivalence is one of the major flaws in a film that compiles a lot of research with no dramatic payoff. Without a clear narrative arc, the script and direction lead us astray in a series of endless distractions. In the form of notes dictated for a memoir that was never published, the different periods in Hoover’s reign are framed in episodes connected with an unwieldy and less-than-unifying precision, giving Mr. DiCaprio myriad chances for double facials, young and old. His beginnings are illustrated by his deportation of liberal Jewish political dissident Emma Goldman (Jessica Hecht). Under the guise of protecting apple pie and the “American way,” his motto was “Knowledge is power,” but after the Depression, when the world changed, he didn’t change with it. Instead, he started spying on his enemies without benefit of search warrants, collecting harmful personal information on people of fame and influence, including Eleanor Roosevelt for being a lesbian, and going so far as to eventually threaten and intimidate Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy with rumors of his brother Jack’s Hollywood sexcapades. As early as 1932, before the official organization of the F.B.I., he feasted on personal publicity from the kidnapping of the baby of Charles Lindbergh (Josh Lucas), although he had no jurisdiction over the case, posing for photos kissing Shirley Temple, schmoozing with Ginger Rogers at the Stork Club, and creating a feeding frenzy in the press that led to the execution of immigrant Bruno Hauptmann (whom he falsely claimed to have captured bare-handed) without concrete proof of his guilt. His phony bravura did, to be truthful, result in the eventual passing of the “Lindbergh law,” making kidnapping a federal offense punishable by death. This is one of the persistent contradictions in the life of J. Edgar—every transgression was followed by a triumph. Unfortunately, all of these facts are crudely assembled with the rudimentary casualness of a school play. It is fascinating to learn that Hoover never personally made a single arrest, perjuring himself in Congress by taking credit for all of them. Hooked on amphetamine injections, he ended his career a graying, miserable wreck, still craving the affection of the American people, who instead have now all but forgotten him. Was he ever happy? Even in the end, as two sick, doddering old men, Hoover and Tolson were never able to admit their love. When J. Edgar died, newly inaugurated president Richard Nixon went apoplectic. “Seal off his office, change the locks, do what you have to do—I want those fucking files!” he ordered. But they were gone. The only two people who saw through him were his secret lover Clyde, who inherited his home, job and everything he owned, and his longtime private secretary, Helen Gandy (a wasted Naomi Watts), who stood by him through every trumped-up triumph and every embellished claim to achievement, and is last seen after his death shredding all of his files before Nixon could get to them, thus averting a bigger scandal than Watergate.

As a colorful chapter in American infamy, it’s a story worth telling in a better, more suspenseful film, but J. Edgar does not hang together. Mr. DiCaprio’s King of the G-Men is no new-age, old-school rough guy like Elliot Ness. He’s something of a sawed-off pipsqueak with a mean-spirited and ruthless pursuit of personal glory at everyone else’s expense. I expected more from a movie about the most feared man in America for half a century. Whatever else you think about him, in retrospect, he had balls of brass—an essential quality replaced in J. Edgar by dull indifference.

rreed@observer.com

J. EDGAR

Running Time 137 minutes

Written by Dustin Lance Black

Directed by Clint Eastwood

Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Armie Hammer and Naomi Watts

2/4

Ms. Lively is strong, she smiles through grief.

Oh! You pretty things, why can't you stay together? After a blink-and-you'll-miss-it five-month courtship, great American leading man Leonardo DiCaprio and cable television actress Blake Lively have called it quits. Yes, it's for real this time -- reps for both parties have confirmed the split. US Weekly broke the story, but I say, don't let's kill the messenger. Let's be cordial. It's the pair themselves that have let us down. Here, we have extra tissues.

The consequences of this are multitudinous. If you're in Monte Carlo looking at yachts, you will now have a very slim chance of seeing Leonardo DiCaprio snuggling with Blake Lively; before, the chances were fairly high. What else? Well, Leo won't be cast as Chuck Bass' nefarious cousin on Gossip Girl anytime soon. Yeah, and Mr. DiCaprio's in Australia filming some movie about a rich guy stealing another rich guy's wife, but when he's back, his old cap-clad self will no doubt prowl this town until late at night.

We wish the best for both of them.