They claim the star, also of the controversial, lawsuit-inducing home renovation, brought a bedbug infestation to the neighborhood when she moved in her furniture. Never mind that about a million people in this city (to be not-so-exact) with no proximity to indie divas have exactly the same problem.

As revenge, one neighbor hid Ms. Jones' newest release behind the mugs at Starbucks. That should really smart for the 31-year-old, whose first album alone sold 20 million copies.

Let's also keep in mind, these are the same sane neighbors who said they'd rather have gonorrhea than bedbugs and also believe the insects are responsible for their lackluster love lives.

Of course, this shouldn't be entirely new territory for the singer, who once bemoaned her first miserable apartment in New York just because there were bars on the windows. Just because she paid $4.9 million for a fancy Brooklyn brownstone does not mean she is immune to the scourge of New York.

lkusisto@observer.com

Another undeserving new critical favorite is Chinese director Wong Kar Wai, whose films Happy Together and In the Mood for Love were like IV drips administered by an anesthesiologist. Now someone has unwisely talked him into making his first one in English. Big mistake. It all seems twice as boring, pointless and narcotic when you can understand the words. I like the title, My Blueberry Nights, which is every bit as meaningless as the rest of the movie. But in the first sentence you hear, the narration of Jude Law says, “I don’t know how to begin, ’cause this story’s been told before.” Again and again.

Without a plot or any kind of connective tissue to hold the vignettes together, nothing about My Blueberry Nights makes any kind of coherent sense as it follows Norah Jones, the recording artist, around in her acting debut. She can’t act, and I’ve got news—she’s no jazz singer, either, even though she’s managed to forge a bogus reputation as one. Still, here she is, in practically every scene, lovely to look at but so insecure and uncertain about how to speak a simple declarative sentence that she seems to be hiding in the corner of each frame. What can I tell you? Jude Law works in a New York diner as a waiter, bartender, short-order cook, or combination of all three. It’s hard to tell, since you rarely ever get a glimpse of a customer, and practically nobody ever eats there. They just waft in to leave their apartment keys in a large fishbowl. On day one (the days are all numbered, but the movie seems to go on for years, so you soon stop counting), Ms. Jones drops in and orders blueberry pie, which thrills Mr. Law because absolutely everybody hates the blueberry pie. Their eyes meet. Nothing happens. On day nine, he gives her the whole blueberry pie because nobody else wants it. After this movie, neither do I.

So she shifts around for a year with the days popping up in no particular order, which is a good thing because it saves us from being forced to live through every minute of it. Cut to Memphis, Tenn., and a waitress gig in a late-night bar, where she befriends an alcoholic, self-destructive cop (David Strathairn) and his trashy estranged wife (Rachel Weisz), who mostly just yells a lot, driving him to a suicidal car wreck. Ms. Jones occupies her time by writing hundreds of postcards to the delicatessen back in New York where Mr. Law, who has no return address, just waits, staring at the uneaten blueberries. In Las Vegas, she teams up with a bottle-blond poker player (Natalie Portman), who cons her out of her life savings and gives the best performance in the film, although she does nothing significant and says nothing worth remembering. The whole thing ends up back in the New York diner. The keys have all been returned to their original owners, but there’s still plenty of blueberry pie, which, as you might imagine, looks stale as an old Reebok by now.

What to make of all this? It runs only 90 minutes but feels like nine days. The keys are symbols of loss and the blueberries are symbols of failure, and who cares? Every scene is composed of fragments of words and camera angles that never come together. The trajectory consists of more pregnant pauses than any film should be allowed. My guess is that it’s about people who feel but never articulate, who love but never connect emotionally. Actors will do anything, but with nothing to play, they all appear to be marking time before the lunch break. Worst of all, the movie is plagued with annoying inserts showing close-ups of cream running down the sides of dishes heaped with blueberry pie. If nothing else, it should do wonders for Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers.

Coming along so shortly after we all grew delirious with tabloid joy over the “$4,300 Misunderstanding” featuring power brokers with unsatisfactory sex lives who need women in spike heels to step on their privates as a release from being control freaks themselves, the cardboard stick figures in My Blueberry Nights could use a little sex to spark up their empty lives—as well as the film. Since it began shooting in June 2006, it’s been on the shelf ever since, and you’ll instantly know why. It’s like watching ice melt.

Wong Kar Wai’s My Blueberry Nights, from a screenplay by Wong and Lawrence Block, from a story by Wong, marks Wong’s first English-language feature in a 20-year, eight-feature and two-segment career that has won him critical plaudits and festival prizes around the world. Fortunately, Mr. Wong has made the perilous journey into a new language without sacrificing his artistic soul and very personal visual style. Hence, My Blueberry Nights strikes me as beguiling enough and bewitching enough even at this early date to make my list of the 10 best English-language films of 2008.

Indeed, My Blueberry Nights fully succeeds in achieving the objectives that its auteur hoped to reach, as he explained in a statement: “Sometimes the tangible distance between two persons can be quite small but the emotional distance can be miles. My Blueberry Nights is a look at those distances from various angles. I wanted to explore these expanses both figuratively and literally, and the lengths it takes to overcome them.”

Wong is aided in no small measure in this simultaneously intimate and expansive endeavor by his co-writer, Mr. Block, a veteran crime novelist with the necessary good ear for dialogue demanded by the mystery genre. The film is also well served by a free-spirited cast headed by a newcomer to the screen, pop music sensation Norah Jones as Elizabeth, who begins the film with a broken heart, and travels across America trying to mend it. Her character, however, is a waitress, not a singer, except on the soundtrack; there she joins with many others in a succession of torchy ballads reinforcing the movie’s main theme of an endless yearning for that one true love that seldom seems to materialize right away.

Elizabeth explodes with anger and tears in a cafe one night when she sees her boyfriend (Chad Davis) with another woman (Katya Blumenberg). The cafe’s whimsical owner, Jeremy (Jude Law), tries to console her, but she keeps returning to the street corner that looks up to her boyfriend’s apartment, where he is now entertaining her successor.

As she gets to know Jeremy better, he shows her a large jar full of keys left by spurned lovers, hoping that the owners will come back to retrieve them, but they never do, Jeremy tells Elizabeth. Jeremy himself has a set of keys in the jar, but he has just about given up hope that his former beloved will return to break the dismal spell of the jar. In the course of one of their conversations, Jeremy reveals that nobody ever orders the blueberry pie because all his customers are hooked on other pastries. Elizabeth then experimentally orders a serving of blueberry pie, and we watch her eat every bite with a mixture of pleasure and surprise. By this time, the director of In the Mood for Love (2000) and 2046 (2004), has shown his stylistic hand in shifts of focus and angle as Elizabeth blithely devours the blueberry pie. She then falls into a deep sleep on the counter, and Jeremy delicately caresses the hair straying over her forehead.

But we are only in the first third of the movie, and Elizabeth has a long way to go as an observer and a participant in two other life stories, one in Memphis and the other in Nevada, before she can return to Jeremy in New York as an emotionally confident woman. Wong believes literally in the long distances his characters must travel, and for his first American movie, why not avail himself of virtually the entire American continent?

In a Memphis bar diner where Elizabeth has been hired as a waitress by the stern but strangely compassionate manager (John Malloy), she comes into contact with Arnie (David Strathairn), an off-duty cop trying to drink his way out of his despair over his separation from his wife, Sue Lynne (Rachel Weisz). Elizabeth watches helplessly as a hopeless situation ends worse for Arnie than for the more emotionally resilient Sue Lynne.

This episode in the movie plays out in a dangerously maudlin manner, and if Elizabeth’s next adventure, in Nevada, was in the same key, the entire movie would slide downhill. Instead, a beautiful and perky poker player named Leslie (Natalie Portman) single-handedly lifts up the whole movie with her sassy, swaggering manner, and her amusingly shameless attempts to manipulate Elizabeth into surrendering her life’s savings for the promise of a car, so that Leslie can reenter a poker game in which she has previously gambled and lost everything in one winner-take-all hand.

In the meantime, Elizabeth has kept in touch with Jeremy, via postcards and cell-phone conversations. The stage is set for a final reunion, and another large serving of blueberry pie. The point is that the blueberry pie is palpably much more than a metaphor. Mr. Wong treats it as the tasty stuff of life and memory in a compellingly elongated torch-carrying love story.

One can say that Wong has only one story to tell, but whether it takes place in Hong Kong and Singapore, or in New York, Memphis and Nevada, it is ultimately the most important story the cinema can tell, and Wong does it beautifully and passionately.

Do you crazies feel like the New York Times isn't paying attention to you? Well you're right--they've eliminated the 'kook fax' machine (2nd item). How will the nutjobs make contact now?

How do you become one of the select few uber-galleries in Manhattan? Well, first you've got to have more than just one gallery, of course--but you've also got to bankroll the hell out of your artists. Great rivers of cash money flow down 10th Avenue! Hoy hoy!

In The Transom; The master Zen rock garden builder comes to New York for his first mission--downstairs from Norah Jones in the Carl Fischer building; a party for U2 goes hideously wrong; and Chelsea's best and brightest galleries clamor for better spaces.

What will Mayor Bloomberg leave behind? Maybe nothing at all.

In the cultcha pages, Suzy Hansen rips would-be slut Elizabeth Hayt a new one, and Ron Rosenbaum is really totally over Larry David.

And then, of course, there's this: The Great Gay Outdoors, which seems like something the staff of the Socialist Party News might write as an editorial for Latin Inches after an eight-hour Sex and the City marathon. Only in New York, kids, etc., etc.

Ridgway:

Murky Holiday

For the generation that came

of age with MTV, the name Stan Ridgway is sure to remind people of one image:

Mr. Ridgway's face pushing its way out of a giant vat of baked beans in the

video for Wall of Voodoo's "Mexican Radio." I know people who can't help but

shiver when they hear the words, "I feel a hot wind on my shoulder …. "

It's apt that Mr. Ridgway's music is so closely associated with

such a memorable visual. He's always paid heavy homage to the movies, especially

the silents and film noir; many critics have compared Mr. Ridgway's sad-sack

sketches to Raymond Chandler stories, and the singer's first solo effort was

titled The Big Heat .

His latest album, Holiday in Dirt (New West Records),

continues to mine this vein, although it's more reminiscent of the twisted,

paranoid fantasies of Jim Thompson than the sleek, hard-boiled work of Mr.

Chandler.

Mr. Ridgway's voice has mellowed a bit, but retains its ranting,

metallic edge. "Operator, Help Me," set to a minimalist mellotron and ominously

persistent piano chords, feels as if it could be the soundtrack to a serial

killer's internal monologue: "Operator, help me / There's a sound out in the

street and it just keeps getting louder as we speak …. Operator, help me / I

can hear them by the door / And they're laughing at me, stuck in here / I can't

hold out anymore."

Not all of Holiday in Dirt is as evocative as

this. The album is a collection of B-sides and previously unreleased songs, and

when the singer strays from the knife-edged pop he's best at, he tends to

flounder. But there are enough small morsels here to make the whole meal worth

trying. "Garage Band '69" sounds like They Might Be Giants, and both versions

of "Silent Movie Star"-there are Billy Wilder and C.B. DeMille mixes-display a

genuine affection for the type of actress portrayed in Sunset Boulevard . Holiday in

Dirt is not a great album; Mr. Ridgway probably doesn't have one of those

in him at this point. But it is the latest worthwhile chapter in a consistently

eccentric, engaging career.

Norah

Jones:

Baby Billie

There's a small number of singers whose voices evoke a certain

delicious weariness-an ever-gnawing realization that life is hard and painful.

Billie Holiday had such a voice.SodidJohnny Hartman.

NorahJones may someday be countedamongthisgroup. Thoughshe

doesn't have the vocal authorityofHoliday, she'sagorgeous singer, and it's easy

togetlostinher

performances.

Twenty-two years old and too infusedwith aching to be precious,

Ms. Jones has been one of the mosthypedjazz artists to come along in the last

decade. Blue Note Records has been pushing her for months, even though her

debut album, Come Away with Me , won't

be out until late February.

Last month, Ms. Jones' label unveiled her at two press showcases

at the Bottom Line. And at the Nov. 26 concert, it was clear that the singer

has a ways to go before she fulfills the expectations that have been placed in

her. Although her voice was as languorous and beautiful as it is on her

upcoming disc, she did not always seem in charge of her performance, and there

were moments when she seemed downright listless.

The same is sometimes true on

Come Away with Me . The CD is being

positioned as a pop album, but it's rather subtle-too Joan Armatrading, not

enough J. Lo-for that playing field. It should, however, succeed as a

remarkably sophisticated album by a gifted cabaret singer. "Don't Know Why,"

the album's opener, sets the tone perfectly, as Ms. Jones wades into the song

with a disarming innocence while purring through lines like "I don't know why I

didn't come." "Shoot the Moon," with its unrushed accompaniment and

behind-the-beat phrasing, is just waiting to be reborn as a tearjerker of a car

commercial. And though Ms. Jones' reach exceeds her grasp on "The Nearness of

You," she leaves no doubt that we'll be paying attention to her in the near

future.

Royal Tenenbaums :

Mothersbaugh, humbug!

Great soundtracks are a lot harder to pull off than great films;

they must remind the listener of the film towhich they're attached as well as

stand on their own. There needs to be both a narrativearcand a musical payoff. TheBig Chill wasa greatsoundtrack.Sowas Pulp Fiction .

Many people think that the

soundtrack to Wes Anderson's last film,

Rushmore , was a great soundtrack. They're wrong. Though I'd love to bestow

plaudits on anything that highlights the Kinks and the Faces, the Rushmore soundtrack, like the movie

itself, was too precious. There were too many Mark Mothersbaugh interludes and

one too many Cat Stevens songs. But Mr. Anderson, who compiled the soundtrack

in addition to directing the film, left the distinct impression that he had a

great soundtrack in him, not to mention a great film.

Now I'm beginning to wonder. The soundtrack to The Royal Tenenbaums has its moments,

prime among them being Nico's ice-cold cover of Jackson Browne's heart-stopping

"These Days." "I don't do that much talking these days," Nico sings in that

singular voice that makes you wonder if she has any idea what she's talking

about. "Don't confront me with my failures / I had not forgotten them." It's

the type of song that makes you want to get in an old car with a shitty heater

and cue it up again and again as you drive home through the icy December night

to your dysfunctional family. It's beautiful.

But that song, the first on the disc, is the high point. A little

of Nico goes a long way, but Mr. Anderson includes another of her  tunes, the far inferior "The Fairest of the

Seasons." He also goes way overboard with Mr. Mothersbaugh's work again,

including nine of the former Devo member's compositions. (Separated from the

movie, these tracks sound like nothing so much as the music to over-caffeinated

toy commercials.) At the same time, the Rolling Stones' woefully obscure "She

Smiles Brightly," which functions as a real showstopper in the film, isn't

included. The Velvet Underground's "Stephanie Says" and Nick Drake's "Fly" are,

which makes for a noxiously wistful and winsome affair.  Enough already.

Borah

Bergman:

Rolling on The River

It's fashionable to wonder where avant-garde jazz has to go these

days. And indeed, the didactic, tendentious "experiments" that are often passed

off for music leaves the non-academic listener wondering if he needs an

advanced degree to enjoy what's being made to the left of the Lincoln Center

Jazz Orchestra.

Then there are discs like

Borah Bergman's new trio recording, The

River of Sounds (Boxholder Records). Here, Mr. Bergman-the John Coltrane of

the piano, according to Down Beat

magazine-teams up with the phenomenal German trombonist Conny Bauer and

Brooklyn-based violinist Mat Maneri. I know, I know: A bass-less, drum-less

trio recording sounds dicey. But Mr. Bergman is a visceral musician, and Mr.

Bauer can produce such ribald delights that fans of the trombone would be well

served by buying everything he plays on.

"Jim," the album's first track, opens with lots of room, with

single piano notes spaced out over a dirge-like cry from the trombone while Mr.

Maneri's violin evokes shtetl weepers

rather than Grappelli arpeggios. When the trio does pick up the pace, Mr.

Bergman's outpouring of notes-with pounded declamations and frenetic

chordings-lead what sounds like a marching band from an insane asylum.

Some of the songs on The

River of Sounds do sound like soundtracks to experimental art-house movies,

but for the most part, Mr. Bergman and his band infuse their songs with an

emotionality and tenderness that's still too rare in the avant garde.