- Rob Lowe, Stephen Colbert, and the cast of Modern Family will be filling in for Robin Roberts on Good Morning America this week while the ABC host undergoes a bone marrow transplant. Hey, we'd take a soggy piece of bread over last week's substitute, Jessica Simpson.

- Would you like to go bowling with Paul Rudd, Rashida Jones, Denis O'Hare, John Oliver, and not one but two stars of a Law&Order franchise? Of course you do. We don't even need to mention that the whole thing's for charity. You were already sold.

- Candace Bushnell keeps having to resettle the same old lawsuit with former manager (and alleged Stanford inspiration) Clifford Streit. She keeps giving him money for his part in helping her get Sex and the City on HBO, and he keeps telling her its not enough. She should just stop and ask herself, WWCBD?

-Alec Baldwin's dream Portlandia role: "A meat salesman with all kinds of charts and graphs of the loins and the sections of the pig and the cow and the organs." Just no pig, please...we're keeping kosher this week.

Jones and Samberg

It’s easy to be down on “alternative” —or independent—romantic comedies. Lower-budget boy-meets-girl movies seem even more moribund than more conventional entries in the genre these days, with offerings like Lola Versus and (500) Days of Summer aping Hollywood conventions, adding little to the well-oiled machine but a vague sense of quirk. The notion that they’re telling a new or different sort of story is belied by the same familiar beats and characters and tropes audiences have become familiar with through your run-of-the-mill blockbuster.

Celeste and Jesse Forever, however, announces itself as a genuine alternative to the mainstream romantic comedy and for once doesn’t play the part in name only. It’ll restore your faith that there’s something new to say about love on screen—or, at least, a new way to say it.

The film’s opening sequence introduces the audience to a couple (Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg, playing Celeste and Jesse) who have fallen in and out of romantic love. They are still together but clearly disillusioned, separated and preparing for divorce—but still sharing a platonic affection.

Celeste is a high-powered author and trend-spotting PR agent of sorts (what it is she does all day remains vague throughout the movie, and is a failure of the film, but more on this later), while Jesse is a layabout illustrator who prefers watching old VHS tapes of the Olympics to making money. Their divergent ambitions have pulled the couple apart; it’s possible to have known someone for a very long time and yet still have rushed into marriage. They’re rushing into divorce, too—Jesse hasn’t even moved out as he prepares to sign the paperwork.

What makes Celeste and Jesse Forever bold is its view of what happens after the end of a romance. Romantic comedies often view long-term relationships as the end goal—comedies since Shakespeare have ended with a marriage, but contemporary heroines have pursued it so aggressively and single-mindedly that the head spins. In other words, the long-term relationship is so obviously wrong that it is an obstacle to be cleared so that true love, with the female half’s cute neighbor or the friend she’s always ignored, may reign.

Celeste and Jesse’s relationship, as seen through a montage of still photographs, was neither perfect nor horrid. Like a real relationship, it had component parts that were very positive and very negative, drawn out over the course of the film through the pair’s completely natural interactions with one another. Ms. Jones and Mr. Samberg have an enviable chemistry that threatens at any time to burst into a screaming fight or into a rekindling of affection. And their relationship, like any real relationship, proves remarkably difficult to end definitively.

Nothing about the interactions between Celeste and Jesse seems schematic, a credit to a script that puts them through a number of twists that might seem contrived. But Celeste’s reactions in particular are unpredictable in the way that people are unpredictable (co-writer Rashida Jones gave herself, after years of being improperly utilized on NBC sitcoms, a great character); nothing in this film seems as though it came from a screenwriting handbook.

It is difficult in the age of spoilers to discuss this film without going into vagaries of the sort indulged above; that’s because the standout element of the film, the relationship as written, relies on the shock of the real, the consistent depiction of the option that Celeste or Jesse, fully realized characters, might choose against the best interest of themselves or of a tidy narrative. It’s so unlike other movies of its ilk that to specifically delineate the hows and whys is to spoil its effect.

Other elements of the film are less effective: the script falters in its attempt to parody contemporary culture through Celeste’s job and through a Britney-circa-1999-ish starlet she promotes, or mentors, or something. Lee Toland Krieger’s direction is at times naturalistic to a fault; scenes can be poorly lit. Certain characters—Ari Graynor’s well-drawn confidante or Elijah Wood’s against-type boss—fall through the cracks in ways that feel true to Celeste and Jesse’s narcissistic pursuit of happiness but don’t give the characters enough to do. Were they not able to make such good use of their limited screen time, they’d be the traditional boring best friends and confessors every romantic comedy is stocked with.

And Celeste and Jesse are narcissistic and self-involved; but that’s the point. Rather than bravely soldiering on to the next great love, as any hero or heroine who dumps the wrong partner at the start of a movie ought to do, they both end up in entanglements. Their respective greatest loves are not one another but the idea of “Celeste and Jesse”—they clearly don’t fit together, and we aren’t rooting for them to make it. Celeste and Jesse Forever, then, is ultimately a film that flies in the face of the notion underpinning most of modern cinema, that conventionally perfect love is possible.

Love, in this film, is conditional, compromised, the end result of a series of often wrongheaded decisions. What becomes of Celeste and Jesse, as a pair, is ultimately less interesting than the changes wrought in each of them as individuals after they separate. It helps that Ms. Jones and Mr. Samberg so compellingly sell post-breakup lives every bit as individually interesting as their chemistry together.

And, for all its power to subsume the self into a unit, love is hardly anything to celebrate; the true achievement, for Celeste and Jesse, is becoming oneself again in the face of a culture that prizes the sacrifice of the individual to an ideal. A film that starts with a breakup and moves toward, well, no resolution that’s traditionally satisfying, is a film that truly understands the sublime and painful comedy of having been in love.

CELESTE AND JESSE FOREVER

Running Time 89 minutes

Written by Rashida Jones, Will McCormack

Directed by Lee Toland Krieger

Starring Rashida Jones, Andy Samberg, Elijah Wood

Ira Glass and Mike Birbiglia pose at The Bing Bar

It's winding down, celebs are fleeing, the open bars are starting to dry up, and The Observer's 4 day long hangover is starting to catch up with us—enough of the sob story, we're going back in for more.

First stop: Surprise surprise—The Bing Bar for a dinner and after party with the cast and crew from Sleepwalk With Me

• NPR's Ira Glass stormed the red carpet (read: stood there graciously speaking to lesser media mortals) and gave us a few pointers on the birds and the bees as we asked him how he got here: "Well, when a mommy meets a daddy, and they reaaaaly really love each other..."
• Bourbon in hand, we borrow the ear of the star himself, comedian Mike Birbiglia who through "years and years of debilitating and honest failure" arrived right where he is today. This guy's put his 10,000 hours in.
• Occupy Sundance marched around a bit outside our window, seemingly unaware that their audience was already deeply sympathetic (right?)

A quick drive-by drinking at Grey Goose and we're headed back to the basement at Bing to catch Theophilus London and Asher Roth on stage

Theophilus London commands the stage at Bing

• "I wonder if anyone thinks I'm famous..." overheard The Observer from a partygoer as we checked in with the omnipresent Hannah Bronfman, fresh from a short stint in Vegas for the Chanel event the night prior.
• Quick to remind everyone that he's probably much cooler than you, an insufferable Mr. Roth muddled about the red carpet un-ironically bouncing a tennis ball. Cool, dude.
• You kind of have to give it to Mr. London, who cites preparation, concentration and "an obsession with experimenting as much as possible with the latest tech" in getting him to where he is today. For a 24 year old from Brooklyn, he's got the stage presence of a seasoned vet.

Alright fine, twist my arm, let's go to Tao

• We found fameball DJ Samantha Ronson belting out a passable set, eventually putting the entire party on hold at microphone point to pay homage to Noah Tepperberg "Everybody shut the fuck up, there's somebody here that we have to thank, and I think you know who that is..." A crass, yet sweet gesture that didn't not remind us of the holdup scene from Pulp Fiction.
• They're out of bourbon. This is a problem.
• Sundance make out team Kirsten Dunst and Garret Hedlund realized they were sick of dancing with the plebeians and decided it was time to break it down on stage where Ronson and Rashida Jones were all too happy to oblige.
• Even Rashida Jones's name is hot.

The Observer was disappointed to learn that our red-eye flight would be cutting off our opportunity to catch LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy attack the turntables at Bing tonight, but we suppose there's always next time.

Wiz Khalifa at Bing Bar.

Walking down the main drag in Park City, The Observer remembered one thing: This place is tiny. We’re talking NoLita tiny. Nestled between Park City and Deer Valley Ski Resorts, the diminutive town transforms itself once a year, at the crack of Robert Redford’s whip, into the epicenter of the Sundance Film Festival. It’s 10:30 p.m. on the first night (sort of), and this frigid hamlet is slammed.

First stop: Microsoft's eyebrow-raising bottomless pit of bourbon - The Bing Bar.

• The Observer overhears a partygoer's astute observation: "Can you smell that pot? Wiz Khalifa is totally here, I think he's in that tiny VIP area"
• Wiz was, in fact, totally there, presiding over a petite velvet roped section of the seductively grungy basement of The Bing Bar.
• Mr. Khalifa took the stage, belted out his seminal track Black And Yellow and the crowd promptly lost it.
• After being asked how they got there, New York's own nightlife impresario Mark Birnbaum revealed to The Observer he came by plane to Sundance after learning his lesson from last year's 23 hour, 400 mile (really?) car ride that nearly ended him.

Next stop: The Celeste and Jesse Forever Premiere Afterparty at Grey Goose's Blue Door.

• Two words: Elijah Wood. The Observer borrowed the cameo star and had the chance to ask him how he got here, to which he replied, beaming, "I owe it all to my mom, man. She got me here - no question."
• Rashida Jones is hot.
• Both Chris Kattan and James Marsden revealed surprisingly that it was not hard work and determination, but "an airplane" that got them to where they were last night. They both declined to mention if they flew commercial.
• Aziz Ansari had perpetual s'mores in his mouth.
• Grey Goose knows how to make a mean cocktail.

Last Stop: Tao, yeah that Tao, you know the one.

• Successfully recreating everything you love and hate about it's megaclub big brother, Tao Sundance is something to behold. An infinity watt speaker system made conversation a bit of a stretch, leaving The Observer feeling as though we were in a bizarrely captivating celebrity petting zoo.
• The ever dimpled Mario Lopez doesn't know how to not smile.
• Harvey Weinstein held court at his table while a semi-unitarded Paris Hilton channeling Snooki and beaux Afrojack took to dancing on anything that wasn't the floor. The Observer noted the suspiciously high quality of Hilton's earmuffs.
• Fire code shmire code.

Later that evening, after hopping around the packed Soho streets for Fashion's Night Out, we found ourselves in an even more aggressive mob scene: the line of people desperate to join us at the Pop magazine party at Don Hill's. Dubbed the party of the week before it even happened, the bash at the new venture from nightlife barons Nur Khan and Paul Sevigny attracted the evening's biggest names. As Iggy Pop rocked on the stage, Gwen Stefani sat perched on a ledge cradled by husband Gavin Rossdale; Mary-Kate Olsen stood on a bench to make up for her height; and Nicky Hilton chatted to the woman of the hour, Pop editor in chief Dasha Zhukova, girlfriend of one of the world's richest men, Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich.

Of course, Chloë Sevigny wouldn't miss out. She had on a T-shirt and jean skirt befitting the gritty Don Hill's feel, and told The Observer that her brother's place would be the city's new hot spot. "It's what it was like at the Beatrice, and it's probably been missing since the Beatrice," she said. (What she didn't say, of course, was that the Beatrice Inn was closed in 2008 for overcrowding and "inadequate means of egress"--problems that hopefully will not plague Don Hills.)

On Saturday night, at the after-party for Charlotte Ronson's spring collection, Ms. Ronson, wearing a fitted, frilly blue dress, told us she was feeling good after her show, and said the rest of her week will be filled with "meetings--hopefully positive ones!" Her twin sister, Samantha, explained the personal significance of her final musical selection from the show, Lisa Loeb's "Stay": "That was an ode to one of my sister's and my best friends from when we were kids. She died a few years ago, and that was like our song together." Rashida Jones, on the other hand, wasn't feeling chatty, but she was clearly thirsty, as we witnessed her pour a hefty amount of vodka straight from the bottle into a empty coconut-water carton.

More action at Alexander Wang's party. The young designer topped his gas station soiree from last year's Fashion Week with a full carnival, built from scratch in a parking lot at 18th Street and 10th Avenue. Dree Hemingway, Terry Richardson and Agyness Deyn all turned up for the pulled pork sandwiches and skee ball.

The wildly enthusiastic Mr. Wang talked to us for a few moments, but didn't have time to stay put. "Will you walk with me to the bar?" he said as we dodged the cameras and flashbulbs. "We need alcohol! We need alcohol! Sorry!"

We asked Mr. Wang, who had on a black T-shirt, black shorts and black sneakers, about the theme for his over-the-top party. "The carnival is the new performance. Everyone can be a performer now."

We asked him to elaborate. "I just want people to have fun," he said. "Just get drunk, have fun, have a good time."

Our fashion crawl came to a close on Sunday night at the Tommy Hilfiger 25th Anniversary after-party, where we got a little literary with Mad Men's Christina Hendricks. "I just finished The Way the Crow Flies, which I absolutely loved," she said. Next on her night stand is One Hundred Years of Solitude, which she's started three times but never made it past the first chapter. "I know it's going to be worth it if I just go for it. ... I know the payoff will be there," Ms. Hendricks said. We also ran into Kelly Osbourne, who told us she was looking forward to hearing the evening's musical performers, the Strokes, play for the first time in New York since 2006. "Before there was the Strokes, I really liked *NSYNC and, like, really big pop music. And then the Strokes came out and they are what made me change my taste, I guess you could say. In my generation, I think that happened with a lot of people."

Asked what his favorite moment of the party was, Mr. Hilfiger said, "Having all of my friends there, including Jennifer Lopez, Bradley Cooper, Rebecca Romijn, Jason Lewis, Lenny Kravitz, to celebrate with me, and the Strokes' performance. It was one of the best nights of my life."

editorial@observer.com

"Well, for Fashion Week—it's only once a year," said the guest standing next to The Observer. (What, fashion people aren't the churchgoing type?)

Indeed, The Stage at Lincoln Center was packed, regardless of the hour and day. Rashida Jones, in the front row, had on Clubmasters and bright red lipstick. Leighton Meester, last seen at the Chanel opening talking about how boring she is because she loves staying in on her couch, sat across the runway. Vogue editrix Anna Wintour was also present and, for some reason, she was braving the show with denuded eyes — she had removed her sunglasses from her face. 

Thank god, she put them back on upon the start of the show, when a flush of white light burst into the space. And with the lights came the music: Debussy's "Clair de Lune," which — despite the title's invocation of moonlight — seemed so appropriate for this Sunday morning. As soon as the first lilting piano notes hit, the crowd let out a collective ah. 

Unfortunately, the intoxicating combination of the sumptuous Derek Lam collection and the French composer's best-known piece disappeared after we stepped outside to find the weather drizzly and gray. Oh, well — that's what Paris is like in the fall, right? 

We’ve been hip to Ms. Caplan’s charms for quite a while. Her role in Mean Girls as Janis Ian (not the singer but a Lebanese alterna-chick with a biting tongue) is one of our favorite teen movie supporting characters from the last decade. It takes a clear talent to steal a movie away from the likes of Tina Fey, Lindsay Lohan (back when she was actually good) and Rachel McAdams, but Ms. Caplan managed to do so with aplomb—we’ll forever love her triumphant line reading of “suck on that!” After Mean Girls though, she sort of disappeared, only showing up occasionally on mostly bad television (The Class, Related) and in thankless movie roles—for instance, her head exploded in Cloverfield and she had the unfortunate opportunity to co-star in My Best Friend’s Girl with Dane Cook and Kate Hudson. There was also a supporting turn on True Blood, which gained Ms. Kaplan notoriety on the Internets, since screencaps of her many topless scenes from the show were plastered all over the Web.

Yet it all came together on Party Down, as Ms. Kaplan gives a truly Emmy-worthy supporting performance. If the Starz series—about a bunch of broken dreamers working in a catering company in Los Angeles—is like The Office but with an extra helping of pathos, then consider Ms. Caplan like Pam, but actually interesting. In fact, if anything, Ms. Caplan’s character on Party Down reminds us of the wonderful work Rashida Jones did during season three of The Office.

We know Ms. Jones is working on a script about a divorcing couple that tries to remain friends—the thought was that she’d also be the female lead—but that sounds like an ideal role for Ms. Caplan. Someone needs to give this girl an Apatowian-like romantic comedy pronto! No offense to flavor-of-the-moment Ms. Jones, but it’s time for another actress to get a turn.

Rashida Jones is kinda having a moment. The beautiful daughter of Quincy Jones and actress Peggy Lipton is a proud part of the No. 1 comedy in America, I Love You, Man; she’s a co-star on the highly anticipated Parks and Recreation, which debuts on April 9—poor test screening results be damned! And just this week, she sold her first screenplay, the snappily titled Celeste and Jesse Forever, which she co-wrote with actor Will McCormack (Brothers and Sisters). Fox Atomic picked up the rights to the script, which finds a young married couple going through a divorce whilst trying to remain good friends -- Ms. Jones is also set to star. 

While on face value, the premise of her first screenplay sounds simultaneously hackneyed and played—some variation of this “make the best of it!” comedy has littered cinemas in the last few years, from The Break-Up to What Happens in Vegas—we’re more than willing to give Ms. Jones the benefit of the doubt. She’s proven to be a highly intelligent comedienne, and that’s not just because she graduated from Harvard; time and again in her screen roles, Ms. Jones has shown herself to be an adept manipulator of prior expectations. On The Office, she turned Karen from “the other woman” into a wonderful, funny and sympathetic person—we still think Jim should have chosen her instead of Pam. Meanwhile, in I Love You, Man, she takes what is ostensibly “the girlfriend” and imbibes her with believability and empathy, when the character could have easily veered off to become nagging and irrational. For reference to the latter, see Katherine Heigl in Knocked Up.

Granted, being an excellent actress doesn’t mean that Ms. Jones will also be an excellent screenwriter, but we have faith that the choices she’s made for her screen work will translate well onto the page. Not surprisingly, she seems to understand female characters in a way that most male comedy writers clearly do not. We don’t know if she’ll ever be allowed into “The Fempire” alongside Diablo Cody, Dana Fox, Lorene Scafaria and Liz Meriwether (here’s hoping she isn’t), but in our minds, the more females there are writing comedies, the better. In the meantime, we’ll be crushing on Ms. Jones, the actress, when Parks and Recreations premieres in two weeks.

For pure nausea, there’s a rudimentary horror masquerading as a gross-out comedy marketed for morons called I Love You, Man. Another brain-dead freak show about speed-dialing California twitters, it stars the talented Paul Rudd, who is making a career out of trashing both his talent and reputation in one rotting mackerel after another and laughing all the way to the bank. He is Peter, a real estate agent who realizes, on the verge of his wedding to Zooey ( Rashida Jones), that he has never achieved enough maturity in life to have a best friend, much less a best man. Peter has a filthy-mouthed father who says things like “He’s got a bush like a porcupine and wears a Speedo full of Brillo.” His office mate spends all of his time watching women having orgasms on the office computers. And his gay brother gives him the kind of advice you only get from old reruns of Queer as Folk: mandates literally translated to mean man dates. So Peter auditions prospective best men for his wedding, settling on a meathead named Sydney Fife (Jason Segel). Sydney has a mangy dog called Anwar Sadat that litters the sidewalks (lots of close-ups of people interfacing with dog poop in more ways than one) and lives in a condemned dump on the beach filled with junk bought on e-Bay. While his fiancé is understandably weirded out by this repulsive fruitcake, Peter gets so caught up in the life style of electric guitars and 6-foot subs that he falls in love with Sydney instead. The movie was written and directed by John Hamburg, the hack who created Meet the Fockers, and its dialogue consists almost exclusively of gibberish slang that exists only in the minds of trolls: “We’re just chillaxing”; “Totes Mcgoats”; “No lags between the vags.” The guys call each other “McGeetch” and “Dude von Dudenstein.” A big date is piling on the sofa watching a box of season-two Lost DVDs. Mr. Segel, the star of such timeless classics as Forgetting Sarah Marshall and the TV show Freaks and Geeks, specializes in playing obnoxious slackers with lips caked in dried oatmeal who litter while they twitter. But Mr. Rudd as an obsessive-compulsive git with attention-deficit disorder in a movie this bad is a waste of double the talent. The Peter Pan syndrome is overdone, but never with this much pointless vulgarity. These gits remind me of those ’60s fools who drove Camaros, smoked pot and ate at Dolores’ Drive-In. If they exist today, they must live in cardboard boxes under the Santa Monica Freeway.

rreed@observer.com

So! Consider us incredibly excited by the news that Ms. Jones is finally/officially/set-in-stone returning to television in NBC's The Office spin-off-that-really-isn't-a-spin-off, starring Amy Poehler. Ms. Jones' name had been circling the Greg Daniels produced project since it was announced last year and it's good to see that she's finally signed on. The former Office star will be taking on the role of Ann Logan in the untitled show, a character described as "a nurse whose boyfriend has a strange injury". That injury leads Ann into the world populated by Ms. Poehler and comedian Aziz Ansari, who had also been previously announced as a cast member. Confused yet? While all this sounds incredibly vague and bizarre, it qualifies as the most information we've heard yet regarding the sit-com that, we repeat, isn't an Office spin-off. Ms. Jones said she'll most likely be filming starting in early 2009 and the series is expected to either debut in the Spring (a la the first season of The Office) or next Fall.

Whenever it debuts, the new show will already be on our must-watch list. In fact, the only way it could sound better was if Tina Fey came onboard as Ms. Poehler's sassy best friend. Is it possible NBC is finally doing something right?