Two years after paying $2.68 million for the airy downtown duplex, Ms. Perry seemed ready for a fresh start following her split with the raunchy British comic. She put the condo on the market in February, listing it for $2.75 million with Prudential Douglas Elliman broker John Prince. City records show that Ms. Perry has now sold the condo for $2.62 million.

Mr. Prince would not confirm that Ms. Perry was the seller of the wood-beamed abode (although Ms. Perry was widely reported as the buyer at the time of purchase, she bought the pad through the 65 North Moore Street Trust). However, he did say that the apartment had attracted a lot of interest from buyers.

"It had a spectacular terrace with a great southern view," said Mr. Prince. "It had a very warm feeling, it made you feel that you wanted to live there." Just like one of Ms. Perry's videos!

Listing photos, while they do not catch any flecks of stray glitter or Hello Kitty paraphernalia, show a cherrywood staircase connecting the sunny living room and master bedroom. There's also a generously sized terrace and "good closet space" (perfect for one's whirling, twirling show bras or candy-colored wigs). Maybe someday Ms. Perry will look back on 65 North Moore as the one that got away?

Although Ms. Perry did not make a profit on this sale (not that she needs to, with her songs raking in the cash), at least she appears to have sold to a kindred soul. Buyer Alexandra Suppes, an academic, seems to be the author of a much-shared, favorable Amazon.com review of the book Hello Kitty Everywhere.

kvelsey@observer.com

Baldwin and Crusie in Rock of Ages. (David James)

As rock musicals go, Rock of Ages can’t go fast enough. This sloppy freak show is two minutes shy of two solid hours of screaming swill, without a shred of freshness, insight, cleverness or coherence to be detected within a two-mile radius. It’s based on a noisy Broadway jukebox joke that was never much to write home about in the first place, but it still had a soupçon of humor and banal charm, both of which are bewilderingly missing on the screen. The fact that the show is still running testifies to the confounding disregard for taste and intelligence rampant among today’s mass-market audiences. I haven’t seen a movie this bad since Battlefield Earth and Howard the Duck.

There is no plot, but you can write the outline for the one that’s missing on your fingernail. Stupid girl from Oklahoma boards a Greyhound bus for drug-addicted, sex-crazed Hollywood to become a rock star and meets a janitor who also wants to be a rock star. She ends up stripping, he ends up in a boy band, and the story ends up in the hopper with the rest of the clichés. The two-minute story threatens to drag on for years, populated by amplified wack jobs shrieking lyrics that cannot be translated and spitting dialogue so filthy it can’t be repeated. The director is a fraud named Adam Shankman (Hairspray) who is so inept he has a hard time figuring out if there’s any film in the camera. Hollywood blackmail comes in all sizes, but I shudder to think what it took to trap otherwise respectable people like Alec Baldwin, Tom Cruise, Paul Giamatti and Catherine Zeta-Jones into this kind of unsalvageable garbage.

Hate sets in early. Sherrie from Tulsa (rock singer Julianne Hough) boards the Greyhound and all of the other passengers burst into song, including the children. Arriving in the middle of a parody of the Sunset Strip in the 1980s, her suitcase full of Twisted Sister albums is immediately stolen, but the prancing drug dealers and prostitutes are as cheerful and friendly as extras on The Donna Reed Show. In minutes, a janitor and wannabe rock icon (singer Diego Boneta, eons away from star status) lands Sherrie a job in the Bourbon Room, a cross between the old Whiskey a Go-Go and the noxious Viper Room where River Phoenix took the cab. It’s a hellhole, run by a fat, greasy cretin in a long Cher wig (Alec Baldwin) and threatened with police raids and foreclosure warnings by the new mayor’s wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who dedicates herself to cleaning up the crime and vice that has taken Los Angeles captive. She organizes church groups to shut down the Bourbon and destroy the career of Stacie Jaxx, an alcoholic, terminally stoned, oversexed dope fiend played by a half-nude, tattooed Tom Cruise with extended nipples, black fingernail polish, a pet baboon who mixes his drinks and a lot of hair below his belly button that would, back in the day, have caused a riot at the Hays Office. It’s supposed to be a “brave” example of a fearless actor doing a stretch, but he looks more like an androgynous addict at the New Orleans Mardi Gras who has been spending entirely too much time in the wrong kind of massage parlors.

Between a barrage of unspeakable assaults on the eardrums by groups called Arsenal and Concrete Balls, the mayor’s wife, who reveals she once spent the night with Stacie Jaxx unconscious from drugs and multiple orgasms and never got over it, sings “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” while the mayor is getting spanked by his S&M secretary. “Listen up,” says Mr. Baldwin, preparing his teenybopper clientele for Stacie Jaxx to turn the Bourbon Room into a Xanadu of “sweat, ear-shattering music and puke—so let’s get going!” Ms. Zeta-Jones remembers the night he made her “feel like a woman”, covered with Cool Whip and Wild Turkey. Ms. Hough tells the rock superstar, “When my hamster died, your music really, really helped me through.” The audience at the screening I attended was laughing so hard I missed a lot of the sub-mental dialogue, but who could miss Alec Baldwin, in the lowest point and most embarrassing mistake of his career, bellowing “I just vomited—in my pants. It came out of my ass.” The filthy, disgusting script is by three people who should remain nameless, but I can hardly believe one of them is Justin Theroux, a good actor who would do the world a favor if he dropped his laptop off the top of the Chrysler Building. Mary J. Blige drops by to offer sage advice (“It’s not fame and fortune you came to L.A. looking for—it’s love. And love left this place a long time ago!”) Tom Cruise gets a reporter from Rolling Stone pregnant and ends up on the toilet floor covered in condoms. It’s about as entertaining as an iron lung.

I can understand the perverse temptation to make money by appealing to the base instincts of an ever-increasing audience of fools, but this assault on the IQ is where people with self-respect should draw the line. Rock of Ages is so bad it makes Burlesque look like an underappreciated masterpiece.

rreed@observer.com

ROCK OF AGES

Running Time 123 minutes

Written by Justin Theroux, Chris D’Arienzo, Allan Loeb and Chris D’Arienzo (musical book)

Directed by Adam Shankman

Starring Julianne Hough, Diego Boneta and Tom Cruise

0/4

The previously announced Anger Management was one of a very few new shows FX was promoting (others included late night shows backed by the talent of Chris Rock and Russell Brand, and The Americans, a spy drama starring Keri Russell). The evening was more a celebration of a successful year than a presentation of new programming, as FX promoted its vast library of popular films--including the yet-to-be-released Battleship, Prometheus, Men in Black 3, and The Avengers--and the critical and commercial success of shows like Louie, American Horror Story, and Sons of Anarchy. "I want to take a bit of a victory lap," said Lou Latorre, the president of ad sales, noting that it had been their top year for business ever.

One piece of news they didn't announce: the curmudgeonly comedian Louis C.K. is bringing his web comedy special Live at the Beacon Theater to FX at an undisclosed time in the future. "What am I going to do, put it on Showtime?" he asked us. "I feel loyalty to FX. And they're going to air it as a commercial, sort of, for the site [where fans can buy the special].

"FX will give me the leeway--you can say 'shit' and 'asshole,' and you can't say that on Comedy Central. You just can't say 'fuck,' and there aren't that many 'fucks' in this." He was interrupted by the actress Aisha Tyler, who thanked him for self-producing his special and selling it himself: "Everyone's going to copy you now!" Indeed, Mr. C.K.'s success on the web had been seen as an epochal moment for comedians who wanted or needed to work outside the TV box.

John Landgraf, president of FX, confirmed the future airing of what had been a web-only special, noting, "It doesn't qualify for an Emmy unless it airs." As for the big media story of the cable scene--TBS's success with reruns of The Big Bang Theory, Mr. Landgraf noted, "We tried to buy Big Bang, we tried to buy Modern Family [which was bought by USA]. We would have bought them for the right price."

Mr. Brochstein was less sanguine. "Big Bang, they're going to burn it out. If you don't like Big Bang, you're not watching TBS. It's a frequency play." As for a network that prides itself on premium movie content losing the rights for The Hunger Games to ABC Family, the ad sales chief told us: "It was stupid money they spent."

Finally we asked: was Charlie Sheen, who'd missed the introduction of all the network's stars ("I'm sure he's en route," said Mr. Landgraf at the time, and indeed he walked the red carpet last), ready to return to TV? "He's ready like nobody's business."

Here's a look at some looks from last night.

One wonders whether Brown's current resurgence ("Yeah 3x" has peaked at #15 on Billboard -- not great, but better than one might have assumed Brown would ever do again) is worth potentially alienating Rihanna. Rihanna has gamely participated in the "Shy Ronnie" sketches; can Brown, even despite his apparent image rehabilitation, really be funny?

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Normally, we discount any raging film fan who rails against the Hollywood machine and their uncontrollable urge to remake something old, but there is something truly depressing about this news. The problem is, the movies being remade are actually still good. It isn’t like Total Recall has stopped being completely ridiculous and over-the-top; Clue is surprising funny (bless you, the dearly departed Madeline Kahn) and paced as if Goodfellas-era Thelma Schoonmaker had a hand in the editing room; Romancing the Stone still delivers the romance and adventure in bushels; Arthur received loads of Oscar nominations; and The Karate Kid is as much of a classic now as it was 20 years ago. There are plenty of reasons to remake a film, but with these flicks, it just seems like nothing more than a desperate attempt to cash in on already established and popular brand names.

We are well aware that the movie executives and captains of industry who run Hollywood studios are smarter than us, and they probably looked at the economy and figured that they aren’t going to get people to spend $12 dollars on a ticket by giving them some intelligent and thought-provoking film (see every Oscar nominee that wasn’t named Slumdog Millionaire or didn’t star Brad Pitt). So then the only way to get people into the theater is to give them something they’re familiar with. But when Tyler Perry can open a film to over $40 million in box office receipts, and Paul Blart: Mall Cop can become a smash hit, it becomes fairly clear that the current moviegoer (us included!) isn’t very discerning. Instead of remaking classics, why not just give audiences movies like them?

If you think this idea is crazytown, take a peak at box office titan Gran Torino. Underneath it all, that movie was nothing more than an updated version of both Dirty Harry and The Karate Kid and audiences were sold on those well-worn themes. We’ll see anything, Hollywood! Just leave our childhood memories and DVD collections alone.

As of now, the Romancing the Stone remake is still in its infancy, with only Eagle Eye screenwriter Daniel McDermott on board (do with that information what you will). Meanwhile, Warner Brothers is looking at the new Arthur as a vehicle for British comedian Russell Brand. We're not really fans of either of the original movies, so the idea that they are getting remade doesn't make us clench our fists into balls of anger. In fact, we barely remember Arthur at all. (Do you realize that the original Arthur got four Oscar nominations when it was released in 1981?! Us neither! Ahh, the crazy 80s!) What bothers us is that the ideas presented in Arthur aren't even that original to begin with. It seems like it could have been just as easy to write a whole new (and original) story about a rascally drunken buffoon trying to win love and his family's inheritance without calling it a remake. Is the 27-year-old Arthur brand name that important to the audience Warner Brothers will market the Russell Brand version to? The same can be said for Romancing the Stone, a charming and kinda violent diversion that works in its own fish-out-of-water way. However since Romancing the Stone is a pastiche of Indiana Jones, The African Queen and Howard Hawks' comedies, why not just come up with another variation on that theme? This is Hollywood after all; it's not like every single idea hasn't been done fifty times over already.

We guess what makes us most upset is just the sheer laziness that gets exhibited time and time again by major studios. And now that they are cannibalizing their old library for ideas as generic as Canadian prescription drugs, it might be time for an industry wide intervention. Now if you'll excuse us, we're going to Christopher Cross' theme from Arthur...

According to Larry Rudolph, whom AP described as Spears' "manager at Jive Records," "She's in the middle of recording her next album, which is going amazingly well, and her focus remains on the studio."

Last year, Ms. Spears made an ill-fated comeback appearance at the event (the first moments of her performance were an obvious homage to Elvis Presley's 1968 Comeback Special) that was notable for her lethargic dancing and obvious lip-syncing.

Thankfully, the Jonas Brothers—whom you are forgiven for not knowing if you're over 11-years-old or don't read Details or Rolling Stone—are still scheduled to appear at the September 7th Los Angeles Event.

Because Mr. Brand is a much bigger star in England than he is anywhere else, the UK unit is covering the lion’s share of that massive advance, our source said. Stateside, the book will be published through HC’s Collins division and overseen by editor Gillian Blake.

Mr. Brand, who is currently working on a second movie with Mr. Apatow and recently wrapped one with Adam Sandler, published a raucous memoir last year about his addiction to drugs and sex that was a huge bestseller in the UK. That book, entitled My Booky Wook, originally involved a ghostwriter, but Mr. Brand didn’t like what he saw of a first draft and decided to write it himself—in Tuscany!—over the course of about a month.

Literary agent Richard Abate of the Endeavor Agency sold Collins U.S. rights to that book for $250,000, according to our source, and then came back to them, by way of HC UK CEO Victoria Barnsley, with the new one.