New York fashion week has finally come to a close. Amen! For those less-fortunate editors and fashion authorities (or perhaps we are the lucky ones) that have not jetted off to London or Milan, we finally get a moment to recover.

In retrospect, we relished the young talents of Prabal Gurung and Jason Wu. The Observer will never forget the spectacle and grandeur of Alexander Wang—or the impeccable quality of Simon Spurr’s suiting. With such a busy social schedule and so many shows, it’s hard to remember all the garments we evaluated with a careful eye.

We’re still a smidgen bitter about a few mishaps with Oscar de la Renta and PR Consulting… but we forgive easily… Oscar might possibly have been the best women’s collection in town! Best of luck obtaining the financial means to swing the $15,000 price tag...

One thing we do recall in our hazy fatigue, is the undeniable fact that fur is back. Yes, yes it never really left! But honestly!

"It's so glamorous and luxe!" proclaimed Joan Rivers about fur, backstage at Dennis Basso.

Perhaps Ms. Rivers is in the right. Has there ever been so much mink, chinchilla, fox, raccoon, coyote, goat, rabbit, astrakhan, Mongolian lamb, ermine and sable shown in New York? Probably… but let’s peruse The Oberserver’s favorites— shall we?

Images: GETTY and Patrick McMullan.

Avatar

What's the story: It's so nice that James Cameron, the ostensible King of the World, decided to tackle something small for his follow-up to Titanic. Ha! If you haven't heard of Avatar by now, we can only assume you've just arrived to earth from Pandora. After years of hype and speculation, the 3-D spectacle hits theaters today and—surprise!—apparently delivers on all the hype and speculation. (And, really, when was the last time something like that happened?) The reviews, even from the most hardened critics have been glowing, filled with terms like "awesome" and "beautiful," and it's even drawn comparisons to The Jazz Singer because of its game-changing ability. Here at the Observer, our Sara Vilkomerson sums up Mr. Cameron's latest thusly: "Staggering outside after two hours and 40 minutes of this thing, I felt like I had to lie down and take a nap." Someone get us a pair of 3-D glasses and a blanket, stat!

Who should see it: Watchmen's Dr. Manhattan (he's blue like the Na'vi aliens!)

Nine

What's the story: Nope, this is not "The Tiger Woods Story." Nine, based on the Broadway musical adaptation of Fellini's 8 1/2, comes from Chicago director Rob Marshall and features a cavalcade of female stars ranging from Oscar contenders like the lovely Marion Cotillard and Penelope Cruz to old war horses like Sophia Loren and Dame Judi Dench and everyone in between (Kate Hudson, Fergie, Nicole Kidman). And! As the man these ladies spend the movie orbiting around, the milkshake drinking Daniel Day-Lewis. The reviews for Nine have been mixed, but if you think we're going to pass on the opportunity to see Daniel Plainview sing and dance, you clearly don't know us very well.

Who should see it: Tiger Woods.

Have You Heard About The Morgans?

What's the story: To answer the question posed by the title: unfortunately, yes. This latest bit of romantic comedy pabulum—the type of film we're sure New York Times film critic Manhola Dargis would have an expletive ready for—stars the nominally charming Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker as a warring Manhattan couple banished to Middle America by the Witness Protection Program. (Don't ask.) And, wouldn't you know it: they fight! And have culture clashes with the locals! And, uh, you might as well just rent The Ugly Truth or The Proposal instead.

Who should see it: Those unlucky enough to get shutout of Avatar showings.

Also opening this weekend: Jeff Bridges gets his Oscar-hype on in the country western drama Crazy Heart; and all hail Emily Blunt as the Queen in The Young Victoria.

To the already overcrowded list of year-end disappointments bringing 2009 to a sorry close, you can add Nine. With a legendary Broadway score; director Rob Marshall (Chicago) hoping to repeat his musical Midas touch; and an all-star cast that redefines that overused word “fabulous,” a lot of Christmas bonbons were expected from the anticipated movie version of the 1982 Broadway classic. Alas, the movie delivers thistles instead.

The original musical, based on Fellini’s largely autobiographical film 8½ and directed by Tommy Tune, was pure genius. The movie is boring, pretentious, empty, heartless, interminable, cold and as richly flavored as a hard-boiled egg. The basic premise remains the same: A stressed-out director without a single word on paper for his next film retreats to a spa for a rest cure. One by one, the female muses in his life appear among the white tiles to inspire him, dressed elegantly in black. Let the razzle-dazzle begin. But in the movie, Guido, a director with a phony accent (a hopelessly miscast Daniel Day-Lewis, about as decadently Italian as Mickey Rooney), pushes a cast of thousands all over the place: press conferences, the sound stages of Cinecittà, the Appian Way, the Fountain of Trevi, the Amalfi Coast and every historic monument in Rome. When he sings, he’s climbing scaffolds like James Bond doing chin-ups. Songs have been dropped and characters added, to no avail. There’s his long-suffering wife (Marion Cotillard); his suicidal mistress (a scantily clad Penélope Cruz); his butch costume designer (Dame Judi Dench in a wig with Buster Brown bangs the color of doggie-doo); his dead mother (a matronly and badly photographed Sophia Loren, of all people); a neurotic movie star (Nicole Kidman) in a strapless gown wading through fountains; a fat prostitute on the beach (pop diva Fergie), who tried to seduce Guido when he was 9; and enough noisy chorus lines to make you reach for a Valium.

They all sing … and sing … and sing! Covered with bling, and not always in tune. Ms. Cruz does an erotically charged number inspired by Jack Cole’s choreography for Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The musical numbers all look alike, but Dame Judi belts out “Folies Bergere” better than the others, trailing a mile of red feathers. In a senseless role added to the film for no valid reason, a clueless Kate Hudson plays a trashy journalist from Vogue dancing on a runway that looks like a rock video set. Busty, porcine Fergie, beating a tambourine, leads a stage full of sluts on a stage full of sand. Sophia Loren should sue. Doesn’t Mr. Marshall know you don’t shoot a woman nearing 80 from under her chin? Because Guido is reaching back inside his brain to pull out memories, real and imagined, the movie plays leapfrog with time frames, switching from color to black and white without purpose. Onstage, there was so much glamour I couldn’t decide whom to concentrate on. In the movie, they’re so obnoxious I just wanted them to shut up and go home. The movie is busy, but in their failed homage to Fellini, they’ve lost his mystery and humor.

The fragmented script, expanded to include an army of men, now features jealous husbands, nervous producers, doctors with stomach pumps and hypocritical, autograph-collecting Catholic cardinals from the Vatican who ban Guido’s movies but secretly adore the sex scenes. The writers (including director Anthony Minghella, who died before it was finished, which might explain some of the holes) never find the words to deliver Guido from his midlife crisis and describe the detritus of his messy life. The women who swirl through his dreams would make better studies if they added up to a form of therapy, but the deadly script uses them as nothing more than props. Regrettably, none of the fury and passion that made them so memorable onstage has made its way into this loud but lifeless film spectacle. Without the necessary insight into these flamboyant women that a coherent script would provide, you end up caring about none of them. The characters strut and screech and shake their butts in a sexual faux frenzy, but remain as one-dimensional as cardboard. They knock themselves out cold, but it’s like a greatest-hits assembly of pop tunes and dirty dancing from floor shows in Atlantic City, inserted to make you forget that nothing else is going on. Nine is giddy, empty-headed and loud, but it never manages to prevent the audience from snoring. It’s a musical train wreck.

rreed@observer.com

According to Variety, The Weinstein Company is negotiating with Penelope Cruz, Catherine Zeta Jones, Sophia Loren, Javier Bardem and newcomer Marion Cotillard (who recently played Edith Piaf in the highly-praised biopic, La Vie En Rose) to appear in the adaptation.

Bardem follows Raul Julia in the role--Julia played director Guido Contini, who, in the musical inspired by Fellini's 8 1/2, must juggle his many lovers and his career; Antonio Banderas played the role in the revival.

Loren would play Contini's mother, who appears in the musical as a ghost.

Michael Tolkin is writing the screenplay; Rob Marshall will choreograph; and Arthur Kopit and Maury Yeston, who did the original book and music and lyrics respectively, are executive producers.

• Variety

The book is based on a true story. On April 30, 1975, in the small Czech town of Dvür Králové, 49 giraffes (23 of them pregnant) were gunned down and dismembered on government orders. Mr. Ledgard—for the past 11 years a foreign correspondent for The Economist—has fashioned from this bizarre, still unexplained incident a political parable that verges on the Kafkaesque. Stunned and ethereal, Giraffe begins like a dream but ends like a nightmare. Not for nothing is one of its narrators a sleepwalker.

But before we meet the sleepwalker, we meet Snêhurka: “I kick now in the darkness and see a coming light, molten, veined through the membrane and fluids of the sac, which contains me. I am squeezed towards the light. Let it be said: I enter this world without volition.” Not so the reader, who presses greedily on into this new-seen world, especially when the being doing the seeing turns out not to be human: “The first thing I see is my own form, my hoofs impossibly far away, slicked with fluid, and my mazed hide, bloodied, flickering in the haze, burning, as though I am not passing from my mother to the ground, but from the constellation Cameleopardalis into the earth’s atmosphere.”

From here the book gets into what one feels obliged to call its lengthy stride, with Snêhurka and the rest of her tower captured and taken from the scorch of the African Savannah to the gray chill of an Eastern European zoo. Also along for the ride is Emil, a specialist in hemodynamics whose day job is designing space suits for astronauts and whose knowledge of the blood flow of tall creatures has been deemed useful for the transportation. In the company of his charges, though, Emil’s clear-sighted rationalism is soon replaced by a light-headed worship. He can’t get enough of these wondrous beasts “and their rising blood.” “They are impossible,” he tells himself, “there is no such animal.”

Equally impossible, Emil keeps telling us, is life under communist rule, a system whose “youthful symbol is a book of knowledge set alight” and which results in metaphysical stasis—a freeze-frame in which there is “no now and it is possible to live without remembering the year, and to have no sense of time passing.” Hence Emil’s habit of mentally photographing what he sees as images of contentment. “This is what I do when I see beauty. I take a picture, I shutter it with a blink, keep it in my mind, and turn it this way and that until the Communist moment recedes and beauty is in the ascendant.”

Lucky him. As Emil sees it, the rest of the populace is condemned to wandering aimlessly through state-organized chaos—rather like those poor captive giraffes in his charge. Rather, but not quite. In fact, Mr. Ledgard’s book suggests, the Czechs have more in common with the okapi, the giraffe’s smaller cousins. They’ve never had to reach up for their food and have not, therefore, had the giraffe’s grace thrust upon them.

Beauty is the by-product of struggle, of the evolutionary command to adapt or die. But communism seeks to end history by the creation of utopia—literally, a non-place. Non-places call for non-people, of course—hence, Giraffe argues, the air of living death that hung about postwar Eastern Europe. It’s always best, in other words, to stick your neck out.

As a reporter for The Economist, Mr. Ledgard perhaps by definition writes from the right, but novelists need to come at a story from more than one direction if they’re to get anywhere near its truth. Giraffe is as laden down with agitprop as anything by Brecht. Pretty much everyone who talks in it says the same thing—that communism is even less than it’s cracked up to be. Worse, they say it in the same slow, numinous, image-heavy voice. Read aloud at random from the book and you will have no idea who’s talking. This would be a fault in any novel, but in a novel whose specific intent is to make clear the Identikit restrictions of a political system, it spells double trouble.

The good news is that, as the novel builds towards its bloody climax, Mr. Ledgard’s pulse quickens, and his prose grows more supple and muscular. The reason is simple: a new narrator, Jirí, who’s given not to abstract portentousness but to the concrete and tactile. The reluctant gunman hired by the state to kill the giraffes, Jirí takes us through the procedure with precision-detail disgust.

Mr. Ledgard really does serve up a vision of hell here, with Jirí atop a fence ordering a helper to shine a flashlight below the giraffes’ ears, the better for his bullets to penetrate the most vulnerable area of their craniums. Emil, meanwhile, is down on the ground, wading through blood and guts as the beasts are buckled and broken, the better to be thrown onto the trucks that will take them away. As a vision of death in life, it makes the novel’s droopily metaphoric moments look more pallid than ever. Like the communists he despises, Mr. Ledgard should leave the comforts of his ideas and beliefs behind and get to grips with the resistant world.

Christopher Bray, a biographer and journalist, is film critic of The First Post. He lives in London.

The book is based on a true story. On April 30, 1975, in the small Czech town of Dvür Králové, 49 giraffes (23 of them pregnant) were gunned down and dismembered on government orders. Mr. Ledgard—for the past 11 years a foreign correspondent for The Economist—has fashioned from this bizarre, still unexplained incident a political parable that verges on the Kafkaesque. Stunned and ethereal, Giraffe begins like a dream but ends like a nightmare. Not for nothing is one of its narrators a sleepwalker.

But before we meet the sleepwalker, we meet Snêhurka: “I kick now in the darkness and see a coming light, molten, veined through the membrane and fluids of the sac, which contains me. I am squeezed towards the light. Let it be said: I enter this world without volition.” Not so the reader, who presses greedily on into this new-seen world, especially when the being doing the seeing turns out not to be human: “The first thing I see is my own form, my hoofs impossibly far away, slicked with fluid, and my mazed hide, bloodied, flickering in the haze, burning, as though I am not passing from my mother to the ground, but from the constellation Cameleopardalis into the earth’s atmosphere.”

From here the book gets into what one feels obliged to call its lengthy stride, with Snêhurka and the rest of her tower captured and taken from the scorch of the African Savannah to the gray chill of an Eastern European zoo. Also along for the ride is Emil, a specialist in hemodynamics whose day job is designing space suits for astronauts and whose knowledge of the blood flow of tall creatures has been deemed useful for the transportation. In the company of his charges, though, Emil’s clear-sighted rationalism is soon replaced by a light-headed worship. He can’t get enough of these wondrous beasts “and their rising blood.” “ They are impossible,” he tells himself, “ there is no such animal.”

Equally impossible, Emil keeps telling us, is life under communist rule, a system whose “youthful symbol is a book of knowledge set alight” and which results in metaphysical stasis—a freeze-frame in which there is “no now and it is possible to live without remembering the year, and to have no sense of time passing.” Hence Emil’s habit of mentally photographing what he sees as images of contentment. “This is what I do when I see beauty. I take a picture, I shutter it with a blink, keep it in my mind, and turn it this way and that until the Communist moment recedes and beauty is in the ascendant.”

Lucky him. As Emil sees it, the rest of the populace is condemned to wandering aimlessly through state-organized chaos—rather like those poor captive giraffes in his charge. Rather, but not quite. In fact, Mr. Ledgard’s book suggests, the Czechs have more in common with the okapi, the giraffe’s smaller cousins. They’ve never had to reach up for their food and have not, therefore, had the giraffe’s grace thrust upon them.

Beauty is the by-product of struggle, of the evolutionary command to adapt or die. But communism seeks to end history by the creation of utopia—literally, a non-place. Non-places call for non-people, of course—hence, Giraffe argues, the air of living death that hung about postwar Eastern Europe. It’s always best, in other words, to stick your neck out.

As a reporter for The Economist, Mr. Ledgard perhaps by definition writes from the right, but novelists need to come at a story from more than one direction if they’re to get anywhere near its truth. Giraffe is as laden down with agitprop as anything by Brecht. Pretty much everyone who talks in it says the same thing—that communism is even less than it’s cracked up to be. Worse, they say it in the same slow, numinous, image-heavy voice. Read aloud at random from the book and you will have no idea who’s talking. This would be a fault in any novel, but in a novel whose specific intent is to make clear the Identikit restrictions of a political system, it spells double trouble.

The good news is that, as the novel builds towards its bloody climax, Mr. Ledgard’s pulse quickens, and his prose grows more supple and muscular. The reason is simple: a new narrator, Jirí, who’s given not to abstract portentousness but to the concrete and tactile. The reluctant gunman hired by the state to kill the giraffes, Jirí takes us through the procedure with precision-detail disgust.

Mr. Ledgard really does serve up a vision of hell here, with Jirí atop a fence ordering a helper to shine a flashlight below the giraffes’ ears, the better for his bullets to penetrate the most vulnerable area of their craniums. Emil, meanwhile, is down on the ground, wading through blood and guts as the beasts are buckled and broken, the better to be thrown onto the trucks that will take them away. As a vision of death in life, it makes the novel’s droopily metaphoric moments look more pallid than ever. Like the communists he despises, Mr. Ledgard should leave the comforts of his ideas and beliefs behind and get to grips with the resistant world.

Christopher Bray, a biographer and journalist, is film critic of The First Post. He lives in London.

And Donald and I agree about virtually everything. In his new book, Trump: How to Get Rich (Random House, $21.95), he exhorts the dealmakers of the world to get rid of the handshake, calling it "a terrible practice."

Beginning last fall, I mounted a campaign to eliminate the handshake from my own personal repertoire of interpersonal communications. "My hands are wet, so I won't shake hands," I'd say, fanning them frantically as if post-manicure. The reason? Like The Donald, I have an aversion to The Colds and The Diseases and The E. Coli. Call us crazy, but The Donald and The Simon have no desire to touch snot-encrusted digits or to shake the clammy (or dry!) hands of those who have just emerged from the bathroom having done God knows what.

Yes, many colleagues and acquaintances have now branded me a germ-phobic freak, but it has all been totally worth it. I am proud to say that I managed to survive until mid-March without catching a cold. I succumbed after reluctantly dropping my guard and allowing an afflicted individual to cuddle and cough upon my dog.

Regarding moguls: The Martha debacle has created a whole new subspecies of the chattering class. I call them the why-aren't-I-on-Court-TV? amateur legal "experts." These ninnies pontificate about the ins and outs of the Martha case-à la Sean Penn on W.M.D.-as if they had any idea what they were talking about and were taking anything other than a prurient interest in the whole thing. Meanwhile, all they really care about is the ongoing availability of those fabulous K-Martha sheets ($40.99 for a queen, 100 percent cotton, 270 thread count).

The negative publicity has, if anything, inspired Martha to staggering new heights of product excellence. My favorite new chair is from Martha's Signature furniture catalog. It's a Windsor chair cast in iron (approximately $450; call 800-950-7130 or visit marthastewart.com). The shape is sublime, but the color is a bit dreary. For best results, respray with safety orange or lime-green car paint.

The chicest new bed on earth comes from her Martha's Turkey Hill collection. The Irvington nickel-plated bed (approximately $1,600 for a queen) is also unbelievably versatile: Once you've secured it, you can redo your bedroom in classic mod Americana, or go totally over the top with a wacky pop-Victoriana 60's look.

Expect an increase in Martha creativity over the next year or so. While in Oz, Martha is not going to waste time reading Dostoyevsky or engaging in lesbian flirtations with other inmates, no matter how attractive they may be. She is, if you'll pardon the vernacular, a raging top . After the first couple of weeks, she will have more new recipes and design concepts (and more adoring bitches) than she knows what to do with.

The reality is as follows: Martha will redeem herself, and she will do it really, really quickly. Let us not forget that Sophia Loren also spent time in the big house. The only residual effect on her career was a massive spike in eyewear sales.

Quiche this!

No small thanks to Time, the consolidation of politics and celebrity is nearly complete. Time-Warner's seating consultants must have had a blast. Should Kelly Flinn be paired with Dick Morris? Donna Rice with William Ginsburg? Evander Holyfield with Betty Friedan? Jack Kevorkian with Jerry Falwell? Flies on the wall must have been staggering with delight. Imagine the table talk if Leni Riefenstahl, the most accomplished Nazi propagandist of all time, had been paired with Louis Farrakhan! Chat about comparative million-man marches! And if the no-shows had showed, imagine the possibilities: Ariel Sharon with Fidel Castro!

If Hitler had only lived to 109, he might have been paired with Saddam Hussein, who didn't show, either, but then again, not every Time cover subject was invited. You had to have made a difference to the century-as if Saddam hasn't! According to Bruce Hallett, the president of Time, "What better way to celebrate every Time than to honor the men and women who have enlivened our pages with their valuable contributions in this century?"

And speaking of no-shows, where was erstwhile cover star O. J. Simpson? Margaret Thatcher? Yasir Arafat? Jimmy Carter? No Newt Gingrich, no George Bush, no Bob Dole, no Dan Quayle. No Oliver North, no Colin Powell. The only Republican pol in sight was Jack Kemp. Perhaps Republicans want to keep their distance from the "liberal media," or they were upset that Bruce Springsteen, Madonna and Tina Turner weren't going to be there.

The tone was gee-whiz and, for the most part, predictably self-serving. Mary Tyler Moore regaled the crowd by recalling how Lucille Ball once graced a young actress with a compliment. Surprise! The recipient of the compliment was Mary Tyler Moore. One notable exception to the self-exaltation was DNA double-helix discoverer James Watson's moving tribute to Linus Pauling, the great chemist whose rival model of DNA was too cumbersome, and whose peacenik activities earned him a salary cut from the proprietors of the California Institute of Technology. Bill Gates, fresh from the Senate Judiciary Committee clutches of Orrin Hatch and Strom Thurmond, delivered himself of a paean to Orville and Wilbur Wright, declaring that "the 20th century has been the American century in large part because of inventors like the Wright Brothers." As if the 20th century has not also been the century when millions of city-dwellers succumbed to aerial bombardment. More fatuous history has not been on display in one place since the night Newt Gingrich dined alone.

In this company, not for the first time, one has to admire Mikhail Gorbachev, given a pulpit again after years in the wilderness. First he had to put up with his seating partner, Kevin Costner, rising to make a miserable joke about the translator who sat at the table with them. ("If you think this evening is long, you should try hearing it in two different languages.") No sympathy there for the man who dissolved an empire-only to find, having just flown all the way from Berlin, that he had to lean away from Sophia Loren, seated to his right, in order to stay close to his translator on his left. Who is it? asked a young woman seated next to me as he was being introduced.

When he got his moment before the microphone, Mr. Gorbachev had the gall to address the full glitz and radiance of Radio City Music Hall and actually say something, clumsy though it was. After lumbering through a tribute to Time for lasting into "a mature middle age," he lionized Mohandas K. Gandhi. Too often, he said, the leadership of the 20th century had realized its potential through force and deception. He called V.I. Lenin "grandiose" while still honoring him (I think) for utopian labors in behalf of "social justice," and tempering the Soviet state with the market, just as Franklin D. Roosevelt would later do the opposite. To a fidgeting crowd, he declared that the world needed "leadership of a new type," fusing "politics and morality" into a "new humanism" that would "put an end forever to the geopolitics of force" and "treat all humankind with compassion."

And now, the envelopes, please. Best (or possibly the only intentional) joke of the evening: Sharon Stone, toasting Betty Friedan: "Two guys go out shopping for a brain … The male brain is $100,000, and the female brain is $25,000. Why is the female so inexpensive? It's used." Most desperate Hail Mary attempt at a metaphor: Kevin Costner, reading from notes, on Joe DiMaggio: "He is a man who speaks to us … about how to wear defeat and disappointment as if it were just a passing storm." Most effusive obsequity toward the hosts: Steven Spielberg called Time "an institution that has always strived to tell the truth." Subtlest rebuke of the hosts: Toni Morrison crooning (a bit effusively) over the "vivid and intelligent" prose style of the magazine in the 50's and 60's, but noting that back then it lacked "a hint of jaundice." Boldest rebuke of the hosts: James Watson, speaking about Linus Pauling, the great chemist who won a second Nobel Prize, this one for peace, pointed out that Time once ran this caption under Pauling's photo: "Defender of the unborn or dupe of the enemies of liberty?"