cannes 2013

Michael Douglas and Matt Damon star in Steven Soderbergh's swan song, Behind the Candelabra. (Getty Images)

Cannes: Liberace, Damon, Gosling—With Less Than a Week Remaining, Transgressions Await

CANNES, France — Liberace fluttered into the Cannes Film Festival this morning and graced the masses with the heartfelt Behind the Candelabra, Steven Soderbergh’s directorial swan song and a touching May-December love story between Mr. Showmanship (Michael Douglas) and Scott Thorson (Matt Damon), his longtime arm-candy companion. (American audiences with a good cable package Read More

The Eight-Day Week

sarah jessica parker

To Do Tuesday: Snow Time Like the Present

It’s time for one of the season’s most glittering charitable celebrations. UNICEF is throwing its snow-ball—the annual Snowflake Ball at Cipriani 42nd Street. Tonight’s honorees include Harry Belafonte, the calypso singer-turned-humanitarian, and U.S. Fund for UNICEF board member Dolores Rice Gahan; they’ll be serenaded by Tony Bennett and the Wynton Marsalis Quartet. The star power Read More

It is unclear whether Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones kept their legs uncrossed...

Uncross Your Legs, They Cried Out at Michael Kors

“Please return to your seats!”

The typical orders were barked from the front row at Michael Kors on Wednesday, September 12 at 10 a.m. Too much too early. Due to some recent Team Kors PR shifts and rifts, we couldn’t locate the familiar faces that would help The Observer with its conquest. Where were Savannah Read More

Money Never Sleeps: Wall Street, Stoned

“Are you a bee? Do you like to sting people?” a handsome banking executive in a merlot-colored suit growls to his protégé. It is early afternoon in the third-floor offices of a midtown skyscraper, the News Corporation headquarters, and select middle-aged men are watching an advanced screening of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, the Oliver Read More

The Last Critic

I Scorn iPorn! My Secret Garden: Organic Soil

When I was a boy, “dirty” was the epithet of choice for the hated other. It wasn’t enough to call someone any of the slurs for being Jewish or black or Latino. You had to put “dirty” before it.

The genealogy of the insult was firmly established in the history of the world. Your tribe-your Read More

Study (Mine) Reveals Key to Celebrity: Icy Unavailability

I finally figured out what my problem is. After all these years, I now see what I have been doing wrong. Caution: It’s pretty tragic. Simply put, I am just too folksy and available. Yes: folksy and available!

My epiphany came last week while reading A Time to Be Born, the late Dawn Powell’s searing Read More