Underneath all the layers of synthetic beading, there was some serious talent on show, and the high kicking Rockettes’ collective prowess is impressive. An expertly choreographed section where the ladies took on the roles of toy soldiers helped to showcase some of that skill, and revisiting the group’s wardrobe highlights of the past few decades was a nice touch. It is the show’s 85th year, after all, and there is something to be said for their pulling power and ability to still create a buzz almost a century after their debut.

There is also, however, something to be said for not getting too carried away, and it seemed a little like director, choreographer and conceptualist Linda Haberman had forgotten this during the final scene. In a freakish concluding parade, where a donkey, the Rockettes, children, live sheep, little people (err elves) and two live camels lined the stage, it was hard to decide what to be most offended by. The show did bring a lot of (premature) Christmas cheer to New York, and that almost made us feel warm and fuzzy inside. But one last look at those poor withered camels onstage, and the fake blizzard ensuing outside the venue on our departure, and those near fuzzy feelings all but vanished into the faux snowy ether.

• "Unsurprisingly, the finished product plays like a pumped-up recruitment commercial deemed fit for feature length and multiplex viewing." --Jeannette Catsoulis, The New York Times
• "As a no-holds-barred recruiting video, Act of Valor kicks all sorts of ass. As an actual movie, however, it barely coheres." --Bilge Ebiri, New York
• "A mechanically efficient yet soulless dramatization of the U.S. Navy SEALs in action, "Act of Valor" ultimately misses its target: The hearts and minds of American audiences." --Robert Koehler, Variety
• "In Act of Valor, a recruitment poster loosely disguised as a movie, the story is fictional but the leading men are not." --Rick Groen, The Globe and Mail
• "Considering Act of Valor is, at its heart, a multi-million-dollar U.S. military recruitment video, it’s fitting that the film opens with a commercial message from directors Mike 'Mouse' McCoy and Scott Waugh." --Linda Barnard, Toronto Star
• "A Navy recruitment poster riding a wave of well-deserved Navy SEAL enthusiasm, “Act of Valor” arrives disguised as a feature." --James Verniere, Boston Herald
• "The U.S. Navy should slash its recruiting budget and just schedule screenings of Act of Valor. Hollywood meets propaganda in this rah-rah action film about an elite group of Navy Seals who circle the globe battling terrorism." --Leah Rozen, The Wrap
• "The question: What is it? Is it a documentary? A docudrama? A rescue mission re-enactment? A lengthy commercial from the Navy's PR department? No, yes, sort of and yes." --Clint O'Connor, Cleveland Plain Dealer
• "Having a real Navy SEAL team as the stars of a fictional action adventure film adds a frightening realism to the traditional shoot-em-up Act of Valor. Michael Bay has some serious competition now that Act of Valor co-directors Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh have upped the ante on military action films." --Justin Craig, Fox News

THR: One critic said you brought dignity to that character with restraint. Do you agree?

Davis: (Smiles painfully.) I love and hate the word "dignity." I feel it's overused for black actresses, as with "sassy" and "soulful." I can go on. The same adjectives are pulled out of a magic box. That's who she is in the book. My job was to create her. So yes, she is a quiet character. People always migrate toward the flashy character. They say what they mean, they're out there, you can see it in their behavior. The character that doesn't speak a lot is usually in the background. One of my favorite roles I ever played was a serial killer, which didn't get a good response, either. It was for television, Law & Order. I appreciated killing a whole family with a baseball bat. You know, sometimes one person's junk is another person's treasure.

There's more good stuff in there, including the name of the female fine arts photographer that helped Carey Mulligan get over her nudity anxiety.

Akers.

Learning to sing the complicated songs of Stephen Sondheim fluently, remain rue to your own style, and examine fresh interpretations at the same time is a challenge few singers have managed to master. Karen Akers is the rare exception. In her ravishing new show at the Algonquin’s fabled Oak Room (through Oct. 29) she looks at the brilliant composer’s erratic tempos and captivating lyrics through a magnifying glass, finding new meanings under, behind and on the edges of lyrics less courageous performers inevitably pass over. The result is adventurous and thrilling.

With the elegance of a Bolshoi ballerina, she also manages to evoke a friendly accessibility that is inviting. One can imagine her picking apples in an orchard, wearing a sable coat. With her dark purple baritone, the result is nothing like Barbara Cook’s trilling soprano or Elaine Stritch’s critic-proof croak as she “talks” the songs. Ms. Akers is an equally adept actress, but I get the feeling I am hearing Sondheim for the first time. You can count on her as sure as a palette of orange in autumn to illuminate the underappreciated and reveal surprises. This is not the hackneyed, overexposed Sondheim other cabaret divas give you. So anyone expecting a vocal caress by a title like “What More Do I Need” might be fooled. From the score of Saturday Night, Sondheim’s earliest show, this song is simultaneously giddy, infectious and cynical in its belief that even a dismal New York winter can seem beautiful if you’re lucky enough to be two instead of one:

A subway train thunders through the Bronx,

A taxi horn on the corner honks,

But I adore every roar.

And what more do I need?

I hear a crane making street repairs

A two-ton child running wild upstairs

Steam pipes bang, sirens clang,

With your love, what more do I need?

Divided into three sections labeled Live, Laugh and Love, she examines both sides of the coins. “Live Alone and Like It,” from the film Dick Tracy, and “Here We Go Again,” an obscure song from Do I Hear a Waltz with music by Richard Rodgers, are about single people who find happiness in the core of their own comfort zone. The selections in the “Laugh” portion are not fall down funny (Sondheim doesn’t write many of those), but she finds new things to do with the strippers’ “You Gotta Get a Gimmick” from Gypsy, and she does it without the props. She introduces American audiences to “But Underneath,” a brilliant song written especially for Diana Rigg in the London production of Follies. It is beautiful and wrenching. On “Would I Leave You,” from the same score, she turns that final “guess” into more of a threat than a multiple-choice question. After so many difficult, complicated and wordy songs with daunting harmonies and patterns of semantics that break down the complexities of the joy and heartbreak in relationships, I guess it’s only natural that she includes the threadbare “Losing My Mind” and “Send in the Clowns,” but I’m tired of them both. Audiences still expect the familiar, and she finds a newborn approach that I found miraculous.

There’s so much more, but get to the Oak Room and make the journey yourself as Karen Akers teaches you something while she entertains you royally. Don’t look for all this Sondheim in Oshkosh. It’s too esoteric for some audiences and too smart for the Average Joe, but just the kind of urbane, sophisticated evening you get only in New York.

rreed@observer.com

Except it kind of is.

From its opening moments, it's clear that Skins is trying too hard. The credits, set to the song "Lina Magic" by 3D Friends, flash footage of the cast making out, smoking joints, wiping tears and walking in angsty American Apparel formation. The first frames of the premiere episode, which aired Jan. 17, feature a raccoon-eyed waif doing the walk of shame shoeless in the snow. She tries to catch her brother's attention so that he can distract their parents while she sneaks into her room, but he's busy watching the exhibitionist MILF across the street disrobe through her picture window. The second episode, which aired Monday, opens with a hot lesbian cheerleader (is there any other kind?) popping a pill, going to a club and bringing home a conquest. Before each episode, MTV sternly reminds us that what we are about to watch is rated TV-MA, which stands for "mature." The show, ironically, is anything but.

Skins is an ensemble, but judging from the first episodes, its main character is Tony Snyder (James Newman), the aforementioned voyeuristic big brother, a diminutive cross between Emile Hirsch and Fred Savage who lives life like a lascivious Ferris Bueller, getting away with everything from taunting faculty to driving a stolen car into a lake. His cocksure swagger and smarmy charm make him the most popular guy in school--as well as the puppet master of his group of friends, who round out the principal cast. There's Stan (Daniel Flaherty), a mop-topped slacker virgin (the first episode centers around Tony trying to get Stan laid, to no avail); Michelle (Rachel Thevenard), Tony's equally horny girlfriend and the oblivious object of Stan's affections; Chris (Jesse Carere), a loudmouth party animal; Tea (Sofia Black D'Elia), the gorgeous gay cheerleader who nonetheless has sex with Tony in episode two; Cadie (Britne Oldford), a pill-popping weirdo with a knife fetish who lets everyone believe she deflowered Stan; Eura (Eleanor Zichy), Tony's near-mute little sister; and Daisy (Camille Cresencia-Mills) and Abbud (Ron Mustafaa), who I'm sure have sparkling and unique personalities but who, for the first two episodes at least, serve mainly as token minority hangers-on.

The kids in Skins seem initially divided into two groups--the smart-phone-equipped, cherry-lipped beautiful people and their slightly less attractive sidekicks--and the adults are ludicrous caricatures: hysterical mob-soldier fathers, emotionally unstable teachers, tracksuit-wearing drug kingpins. And while the dialogue is almost exclusively sexual, it's not edgy in the slightest. ("Tonight we present Mr. Happy with the keys to the furry city," Tony crows to Stan--and he's not talking about Petland.) It's desperate to be shocking, along the lines of Larry Clark's 1995 NC-17-rated Kids, but it errs more on the side of its supposed antithesis, Gossip Girl (a character even makes a dismissive, derogatory remark about the CW show in the pilot)--Skins is polished to a high sheen, too concerned with keeping up appearances to get really dirty. Expletives are bleeped out, and the kids play with their phones more often than with their genitals. How anyone is arguing that Skins may violate child pornography laws is beyond me; Kathie Lee and Hoda are more risqué (in fairness, they are also probably more drunk).

This week's installment, which centered on Tea, was, at least, an improvement over the cocky pilot, but Skins' message is still muddy. Is it an irreverent, over-the-top, ratings-baiting lark, or a show with an actual message? Right now, it seems like the former--after all, it's hard to follow Glee's fan-favorite, long-suffering gay character, Kurt (who's been all but canonized by the media), with a young woman who coos, "I screw girls. So what?" while swigging vodka with a boy she's about to bang. A post-masturbation heart-to-heart with her Holocaust survivor grandmother (yes, really) doesn't do much to make her more sympathetic; like the rest of her friends, Tea is too anesthetized and navel-gazing to summon anything resembling real emotion. "You really don't give a [bleep], do you?" Tony asks Tea in episode two. "No, I really don't," she replies.

Then why should we?

ulamarche@observer.com

A: We get sentences like this!

Take your girl down and get some vodka on. Your boys as well.

Well then! Lavo is the newly opened, big-plattered, glitz-heavy sister eatery to Tao. "You know Tao, Buddhaman," reads a real sentence in this story. "It’s where Kim Kardashian had her 30th birthday party." So Lavo is that kind of place — the kind of place where power-suits bring done-up petite girls to gawk at the opulent, McNally-on-steroids space. How, then, do you review such a spectacle?

The whole brouhaha inspired Sifton to get epistolary with his Times piece. He framed the review by opening with a concerned question from a 6'3", 220-pound bro who just wants to take his smoking-hot girl — and his six boys, of course — to dinner. Is that too much to ask? 

"We’ve been to something like 10 restaurants now, and I think her favorite foods are truffle fries and ketchup," the composite bro confessed to Sifton. "But she drinks Champagne. So maybe bottle service?"

It turns out this guy is in luck! Lavo, Sifton replied to the bro, is that Shangri-La that beefy hedge-funders heretofore only imagined — the place where they take their girls in the sports-addled, Kobe-craving annals of their minds.

But on the off-chance the date's a dud? There's a club below the restaurant where he can knock back Jager with his boys. Naturally, this club is also called Lavo.

nfreeman at observer.com |@nfreeman1234

Sifton's main target appears to be Huang himself, who gets a starring role in the zero-stars review, having had the misfortune to dine in the restaurant—rather than cooking—one night when Sifton visited: "He had strutted into the restaurant with a crew of friends and taken a table in the middle of the room," the critic recounts, "then pulled out his mobile device and started to text." 

Though Sifton has some kind words for Huang's Rivington Street sandwich shop, Baohaus, praises Xiao Ye's "top-drawer" dumplings and calls the "General Tso-style" prawns "something approaching a new paradigm," he pointedly declines to print the names of the dishes (Poontang Potstickers and General Poke-Her Face Prawns, actually). Then he goes in for the kill, calling the cabbage "a school lunch nightmare" and describing the beef rib as something that "might have been made by your college roommate in a borrowed Crock-Pot."

It's on! Or so you'd think. After all, Huang seems to relish a fight as much as anyone. Last week, when Time Out gave the restaurant a less harsh but still dismissive review, he took to his blog, "Fresh Off the Boat," to dis the mag as "The Magazine for Murray Hill Tourists" and slag critic Jay Cheshes as "another dude who can't tell zha jiang from dan dan." 

But foodies who rushed to the web spoiling for a fight when the Sifton review went online were disappointed. Huang's last blog post was an embed of Banksy's Simpson couch gag. He sounded downright chastened on Twitter:

And later, he took to his blog, noting "i feel kinda blueballed with the goose egg," before declaring, "I've been around and done a lot so this doesn't faze me. But am I going to change this time? Yes. I can't just wing it anymore. People are paying good money for this. It's not a game... This is as apologetic as I'll ever get, but I'm sorry. Man gotta admit his mistakes." 

It takes a big man to admit when he's wrong! This guy might turn out to be a chef after all.

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Jonathan Franzen's new novel, "Freedom," like his previous one, "The Corrections," is a masterpiece of American fiction. The two books have much in common. Once again Franzen has fashioned a capacious but intricately ordered narrative that in its majestic sweep seems to gather up every fresh datum of our shared millennial life.

You heard the man: every fresh datum. Now we are going to spoil the end of the review:

Walter, groping toward deliverance, mourns "a fatal defect in his own makeup, the defect of pitying even the beings he most hated." But of course it is no defect at all. It is the highest, most humanizing grace. And it cares nothing about power. Like all great novels, "Freedom" does not just tell an engrossing story. It illuminates, through the steady radiance of its author's profound moral intelligence, the world we thought we knew.

Jodi Picoult will be delighted to read this, we're sure.

First, the hard news out of Mr. Lane's book:

The juiced ex-Mets baseball player-turned-stock-picker Lenny Dykstra supposedly traded access to Jim Cramer, CNBC's screaming "Mad Money" man, for $250,000 in penny stock; the psychedelic-art hack Peter Max is a wily operator; and Wall Street sharks made even more money and behaved even worse than you imagined as the markets careened toward disaster in the first decade—the Zeroes—of the new century.

But Mr. Lane also writes about the magazine publishing group, Doubledown Media, that he started to target the new class of working rich spawned by the bubble.

Doubledown published titles like Trader Monthly, Dealmaker, Private Air, Corporate Leader and Cigar Report—totaling some 500,000 free copies in circulation. How does a company like that make money? Free vodka and girls.

At one point, the company was valued at $25 million, and later at $17 million. (For reference, Perez Hliton's blog was valued by one potential buyer at $20 million in May, but that was before it's brush with child pornography. It's worth less now?)

Mr. Kosner writes:

Such healthy valuations were strange because as "The Zeroes" goes along it becomes obvious that, while Mr. Lane's company is churning out a half-million free copies a month, it is really in the business of staging parties. Advertisers and potential advertisers pay Doubledown for the privilege of pouring the latest designer vodka down the gullets of Wall Street's new aristocracy, peddling $10,000 watches on the wrists of arm-candy models and enticing rich marks into $300,000 Maybach luxury sedans and time-share condos in Las Vegas.

The parties continued right up until the end. Less than 24 hours after Lehman Brothers failed, Dealmaker threw a party for over 1,000 bankers. In the end, Doubledown went bankrupt and a newsletter publisher picks up some of their property for $50,000.

One final note about Lenny Dykstra, from Mr. Kosner's review: "He likes to stay up for four or five days at a stretch before crashing. He freely admits to Mr. Lane that he used steroids while playing ball. Despite everything, Mr. Lane goes into business with him; it all ends in tears and surreal litigation."

Nails on rails!

"Sarah Jessica Parker looks better after her face mole was surgically removed," Mr. Reed added. "So why does her hair look like 20 pounds of mattress stuffing?"

(Mr. Reed called for the removal of Ms. Parker's mole in his review of the first Sex and the City film in 2008, writing, "There’s nothing wrong with Sarah Jessica Parker that couldn’t be cured by wart-removal surgery.")

Mr. Reed was not the only critic to bash the new film.

The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw called the sequel "misjudged and quite incredibly boring" while comparing it to an old Star Trek film. 

Perhaps, with Sex and the City 4, we will be treated to a heart-rending Death of Spock-type scene, in which Samantha is fired out of a Manhattan penthouse window in a sparkly coffin, having first transferred her "katra" to a demure assistant.

Variety's Brian Lowry wrote that at least the film is long.

Without giving away too much regarding the story, one theme explores the boundaries of forgiveness -- a touch ironic for a romantic comedy that commits the near-irredeemable sin of stretching to nearly 2 ½ hours.

Los Angeles Times film critic Betsy Sharkey wrote that franchise seemed to have aged way faster than the film's actresses.

Still, the women are not anywhere as desperate as the movie itself, which fails its stars and its many obsessive fans, unless everyone was waiting for the AARP version ... This being a treatise on marriage, "Sex and the City"-style, the action starts stateside with a gay wedding extravaganza coupling Carrie's GBF (Gay Best Friend, duh) Stanford (Willie Garson) to Charlotte's GBF, Anthony (Mario Cantone) until death, or a state that doesn't recognize gay marriage, do them part. When the question is posed, "Could this wedding get any gayer?" the filmmakers' answer is "yes, Yes, YES!" with a Liza Minnelli capper that, like the rest of the film, sadly shows its age more than its irony

Then Liza Minnelli shows up to perform a gay marriage. Heralded (and hooted at) as the embodiment of camp unreality, she looks more human—nervous but happy to belong somewhere—than the four leads.