Twins and a new condo.

Atoosa Rubenstein, everyone's favorite cat lady, is moving her growing brood into bigger digs.

Ms. Rubenstein and commodities-trader husband Ari have purchased a palatial 4,300-square foot spread at 535 West End Avenue, city records show.

Ms. Rubenstein, the former whiz-kid editor of Seventeen and CosmoGIRL!, left the industry six years ago to start Big Momma Productions, a consultancy of sorts that appears to have done little other than maintain a vestigial web presence. Now she has three children, a rich husband and brand new condo on the Upper West Side.

It's like a football field.

Ms. Rubenstein may have left the hyper-competitive realm of tween magazines, but who says you can't be just as ambitious when it comes to home buying/making?

These days Ms. Rubenstein passes time keeping busy with the kids, doing lots of different types of yoga and, as she told Fashion Weekly Daily last September, "I'm fornicating!"

Good thing her new Extell condo has five bedrooms. There are also five baths and a 40-foot long corner living room, according to the listing, held by Brown Harris Stevens brokers Lisa Lippman and Scott Moore. It's a big upgrade from the Rubensteins' 3,000-square foot loft at West 18th Street, which sold last spring for $4 million.

This new place (also Extell) cost the Rubensteins a lot of catnip—a whopping $8.8 million. But there comes a time in every young woman's life when she realizes that it's time to leave the Flatiron loft and move into the Upper West Side prewar.

Best of all, Ms. Rubenstein's new place is way fancier than the $1.92 million apartment that Elle editor Roberta Myers bought in December, also on West End Avenue.

The Rubensteins' apartment will be a nice place for the growing family to stretch out, just like a cat in a patch of sun. Best of all, the Rubensteins managed to talk the developer down considerably from the $9.4 million ask. Thatta girl power guru!

kvelsey@observer.com

Elizabeth and Colin Callender with friend (right). (Patrick McMullan)

As president of HBO films between 1999 and 2008, Colin Callender was responsible for helping to erase, or at least lessen, the grimace caused by the words "made for TV."

Maybe he and wife Elizabeth Callender can help do the same thing for the somewhat staid environs of Upper East Side? The pair just bought a four-bedroom, four-bath floor-through at 3 East 84th Street.

The producer, who left HBO to start his own company—Playground Entertainment—is obviously making a decent go of things beyond the boob tube behemoth. City records show that the couple paid $4.7 million to take possession of a co-op boasting a double living with French door windows opening to a Juliette balcony, a large formal dining room and an "warm and inviting library." Where guests can retire after the meal with brandy and cigars?

The price was a bump above the $4.49 million that the apartment was asking when it was listed on October 12 with Brown Harris Stevens brokers Lisa Lippman and Scott Moore. But apartments going over ask is not entirely unheard of in estate sales, especially in situations where relatives are eager to sell and price accordingly. In less than a month, the co-op, belonging to the Estate of Rita Gorman was in contract.

The fact that this listing is "in perfectly pristine condition"—which is not the case with many estate sales—might have helped it go especially fast. And we're sure that the four bedrooms—a master, two other generously proportioned bedrooms and a double staff/laundry room appealed to the Callenders, who have three children between them.

The double living room.

The design of the place may not be as chic as the two-bedroom at 120 Central Park South that producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall just vacated, but then, the magnificently sleek decor failed to convince the power couple stay put. Of course, producers are always looking for the next big thing.

kvelsey@observer.com

Going to the suburbs.

We all knew this moment would come—after all, what was conservative View co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck doing on the Upper West Side in the first place? Now she and ex-NFL-er husband Tim Hasselbeck have finally offloaded their four-bedroom condo at Ariel West, Gary Barnett's glassy tower at 245 West 99th Street.

Sure, the couple took a loss on the place. They paid $3.3 million for the condo in 2008 and only got $3.1 million in this sale, city records show. But at least they got out! The couple is moving to Greenwich, Conn. with their three children, where they can count on a backyard, a three-story house and at least a few neighbors who have similar political leanings.

The living room. Nice, but it's no mansion in Greenwich.

And it looks like the Hasselbecks were really desperate to go. They only asked $3.3 million for the 2,300-square-foot condo, listed with Brown Harris Stevens brokers Lisa Lippman and Scott Moore, and rather than holding out for the ask, they sold after only three months.

The couple will be moving into a sprawling suburban mansion that they bought for $4 million, according to The Daily Mail. When the apartment hit the market in February a rep for the Hasselbecks told TMZ "It's time for a backyard! Tim and Elisabeth have decided to trade in city living for the suburbs."

The new owner, who is listed on the deed as Mdbn Owner LLC, will enjoy a nice view from the 16th-floor pad, a formal foyer with a powder room and full bath, 10-foot ceilings and tony building amenities like a 52-foot indoor pool and a billiards table with a grand piano.

kvelsey@observer.com

The native New Yorker, on whom the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer is based, may have traveled the world, but he knows there's no place like home when it comes to real estate investments. And the Greenwich Village pad is not so far from Washington Square Park, where Mr. Waitzkin first learned the game by playing blitz chess with hustlers.

Never one to be bested by his opponent, Mr. Waitzkin, now a martial arts champion and author, cleverly waited until the pieces were in place to scoop up the loft-style apartment for $1.8 million from Bruce and Mee Soo Jin, according to city records.

Considering that the apartment was most recently listed for $1.9 million with Brown Harris Stevens brokers Lisa Lippman and Scott Moore, a $100,000 savings may not seem like much of coup, but the place has been bouncing around the market with different brokers since it was listed in 2009 for $2.5 million. Checkmate!

Spanning two-floors, the corner duplex is huge and airy, with ten-foot ceilings, an open kitchen and a big, light-filled living room. Sounds like the perfect place to practice martial arts if you ask us!

The co-op even permits adding skylights to the space for extra light, according to the listing. And who knows what Mr. Waitzkin might do? While he is an international master in a game that rewards patience and planning, he can also be unpredictable.

As the biography on his website notes, "Initially Josh had no intention of competing in the martial arts, but there was no stopping the inevitable." We wonder if he felt the same way at 200 East Houston?

kvelsey@observer.com

Bateman and Reynolds.

The charm, versatility and charisma of Jason Bateman and the camera-ready good looks of Ryan Reynolds should add up to more than a piece of crummy, amateurish junk called The Change-Up. But what else can a discerning filmgoer (I naively presume, perhaps foolishly, there are a few of those left) count on from bogus director David Dobkin (Wedding Crashers) and sub-mental screenwriters Jon Lucas and Scott Moore (The Hangover)? Expect an overwhelming surfeit of incompetence and filth.

In this one-joke frat house masturbatory fantasy about two guys who exchange bodies for no reason except to keep a DOA movie going for almost two hours, even the title makes no sense. There is no such thing as a “change-up.” I could understand “change-over” or “trade-off,” but the invasion of one person’s persona into another person’s frame is not a “change-up.” Never mind. Nothing else jells in this farrago of idiocy, either. Mr. Bateman is Dave, a battered but responsible lawyer, husband and father of three, including a pair of twins, who hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in months. Mr. Reynolds, his best friend since the third grade, is Mitch, a pot-smoking, womanizing, free-spirited bachelor-model-actor (a nice 21^st century way of saying “irresponsible, unemployed jerk”). He is a symbol of a former life Dave would like to re-live. Dave hasn’t had time to have sex with his own wife, while Mitch says things to trashy women like “I’d like to strap you to my face and say the alphabet.” One night, after a ball game and a few joints, they pee in a fountain and wish they could trade places. Miraculously, they wake up the next morning in each other’s bodies. Now it is gentle, responsible family man Dave who is talking like a drunken Marine and hangover king Mitch who is forced to attend law firm briefings and burp babies, covered with vomit and diapers filled with what looks like chocolate pudding but isn’t.

The conceit is they look like themselves but talk and act like each other. Dave arrives on a movie set looking like Mitch but to his conservative, button-down horror, it turns out to be a porno film with another man’s finger up his orifices. When the kinky Mitch’s sexy new squeeze shows up for wild, uninhibited sex with Dave, who looks like Mitch, she is nude and nine months pregnant. Meanwhile Mitch, in Dave’s body, tries to keep from sleeping with his best friend’s wife Jamie, played by Leslie Mann, wife of no-talent Judd Apatow and one of the worst actresses in B-movies. Remember her opposite pardon-the-expression Adam Sandler in the abominable Funny People? I couldn’t understand a word she said in that fiasco, and she hasn’t learned a thing since. She sounds like she’s got a mouth full of cotton swabs, stuffed in sideways.

The Change-Up drags on endlessly, held together with scatology, flatulence and masturbation. Everybody gets a chance on the toilet, with all the noise and disgust that graphic bathroom scenes entail. When Mitch tries to teach Dave how to be Mitch by shaving everything off below his Speedo line, and Dave feeds Mitch’s ego with more penis-envy jokes than a bunch of sailors in a locker room, the contrivances pile up like a tower of dominoes. Here is a minor idea with minimal possibilities for mistaken identity routines, plummeting into mind-numbing confusion.  Sooner than you can search the second hand on your watch to see how much more of this you can take, you forget if you are watching Dave in Mitch’s body, or vice versa. It’s worth a chuckle or two to see Mr. Bateman get a chance to be crazy and gregarious, but when will somebody give him a role with some stature? In this sorry waste of time, his energy gets all mixed up with Mr. Reynolds’ pecs and who cares? I finally threw in the towel when Dave, in the body of Mitch, and Sabrina, the sexy law intern in Dave’s office (played by Flavor of the Month Olivia Wilde), who thinks she’s on a date with Mitch, both get their genitals tattooed.

Your move.

rreed@observer.com

THE CHANGE-UP

Running time 112 minutes

Written by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore

Directed by David Dobkin

Starring Jason Bateman, Ryan Reynolds, Leslie Mann

1/4