Arden Wohl

Not all art-collecting this month is going on in Miami: tonight brings the opening reception for the Young Collectors Exhibition, a diverse set of works intended for young (read: a level below Sotheby’s on desired price point) patrons. The whole show, put on by Leila Heller Gallery and WASP bible Town & Country, raises money for the Pollock-Krasner Foundation’s Hurricane Sandy relief fund, to aid those artists whose livelihoods were affected by the lower-Manhattan floodwaters ... Meanwhile, Uma Thurman, Eric Ripert and the perpetually headband-wearing Arden Wohl stop by the Tibet House benefit auction at Christie’s, for which Martin Scorsese (on a break from shooting that new Leo flick) serves as one of the honorary chairs.

Leila Heller Gallery, 568 West 25th Street, opening reception tonight at 6:30pm, exhibition remains open through January 12, information can be found at leilahellergallery.com; Tibet House benefit auction, Christie’s Auction House, 20 Rockefeller Plaza, 6:30pm, tickets can be obtained by calling 845-658-4150.

Kelly Ripa and hubby Mark Consuelos gettin' frisky!

Given that it was our second evening in a row at Cipriani's – albeit at the midtown franchise on this occasion – our usual penchant for the venue had been dampened somewhat, and the inclement weather certainly wasn’t helping. But the UNICEF Snowflake Ball managed to turn our well plucked frowns upside down in a glittering evening of philanthropic revelry, with celebrities in a multitude of fields pitching in to lend a hand. The sumptuous menu was designed by revered chefs; the entertainment led by a veritable swing legend, and the auction prizes donated by some of America’s hottest talent. It is fair to say that UNICEF, like the bartenders, got the mix just right.

Katy Perry was the evening’s surprise A-List attendee, swishing through the foyer’s revolving doors in a fishtail dress designed by another of the evening’s guests, Naeem Khan. The couturier’s wife, jewelry designer Ranjana Khan, recently ventured into reality TV land with several appearances on The Real Housewives of New York and was quick to dispel her involvement with any of the cattiness the show has become famed for.

“Being on RHONY was fun, but I didn’t get caught up in the drama,” she told The Observer on the red carpet. “My friend Carole [Radziwill] wanted me to be involved with the last season, and she’s returning for the next one, so I know she might want me to do something again.” Did Mrs. Khan just let an inside secret slip, perchance? Ms. Radziwill is yet to officially confirm her involvement with season six, but you heard it here straight from the jeweler’s mouth. The Observer 1, RHONY 0.

Indeed, spilling secrets seemed to be a trend throughout the evening, with Manhattan’s favorite crooner Tony Bennett revealing: “Lady Gaga called me last night from Peru. She wants to do an album together and we’re going to do it, just me and Gaga. It’s going to be a big swinging album with a big hot band.” Well, perhaps it wasn’t quite the juicy nugget we initially imagined, given that Mr. Bennett has been quoted as saying that the "Poker Face" singer called him the previous night from New Zealand with the idea for a collaborative record. That quote happened three months ago.

Given that Mr. Bennett is at the ripe old age of 86 and still put on a glorious show – some of which was without a microphone – we’ll forgive this little slip. But please be more careful next time, Tony, when toying with our Gaga-fueled emotions.

From genuine secrets to recycled ones, there was one couple on the red carpet who weren’t attempting to hide a thing – step forward Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos. The fruity pair didn’t miss a beat when volunteering to talk about their ahem, romantic interludes, with Ms. Ripa divulging: “We have an Indonesian holiday themed bedroom, and a bed from Bali. Which may or may not have broken once.” Quick, somebody call Poirot, we’ve got a cryptic case of too much information on our hands.

After the duo’s domino effect of smut polluted The Observer’s innocent mind, we went in search of some good clean fun at our table, where we dined with the chefs who put the menu together. Best-selling author and UNICEF ambassador of 12 years Marcus Samuelsson had drafted in help from fellow restaurateurs Michael Anthony and Marc Murphy, who co-created a meal trumped in deliciousness only by their company. As they wined and dined us with a feast of truffle lobster salad and Wagyu steak, the flavors of the food were perfectly enhanced by the Wynton Marsalis Quintet, whose jazzy tunes rose to the very top of Cipriani’s lofty ceilings.

Just edging out the edibles in terms of success was the auction, which contributed to the event's staggering $2.5m raised for the very deserving charity. A backstage pass with Selena Gomez, who was decked out in a floor length Dolce & Gabbana number for the event, scooped two high bids of $20,000 apiece, contributing to the money raised by other high bidders on lots for Lady Gaga tickets and a day on the Knicks’ court as player Tyson Chandler’s personal guest. The guests were not left wanting when it came to an eclectic mix of goods, and spunky auctioneer Courtney Booth of Sotheby’s coaxed the cash from the crowd’s pockets with ease.

There was just time to honor Harry Belafonte before the evening came to a close, and he undoubtedly made a deserving recipient of the Audrey Hepburn Humanitarian Award for his commitment to the charity over the past quarter of a decade. With the audience on their feet as he took to the stage, the emotion in the room was palpable.

It was clear that UNICEF was close to the hearts of all of the evening’s attendees, including Uma Thurman and Téa Leoni, and as we slunk out of Cipriani’s once more, the prospect of returning didn’t seem quite such an imposition.

You are looking at a photo of a man in a coffee shop. He is wearing a straw hat, frayed around the edges. His hair is white underneath, and long. His hand is grasping a coffee cup, but he is not looking at it. He is looking at someone out of frame, making a gesture with his free hand: fingers extended, palm pointed slightly diagonal and down. The universal sign for “This is the important part.” In mid-gesture, he is animated. He does not seem to know he is being photographed.

This is how Denis Piel might have posed the scene of himself being interviewed about his latest book, Moments. The photographer with the flair for the cinematic is set to release a coffee table collection later this month with Rizzoli. Moments is a series of images, mainly of models and actresses, that Mr. Piel shot on the set of various advertising and editorial campaigns during his tenure in the ’80s as of one the magazine world’s Big Names.

His more famous works can be seen on the covers of Vogue, Vanity Fair and GQ; in 1979 he was handpicked by Condé Nast’s Editorial Director Alexander Liberman, along with Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, as one of the few photographers to ever have a contract with the publishing house. Over the course of his tenure, Mr. Piel shot more than 1,000 editorial spreads in the U.S., German, Italian, French and English versions of Condé Nast titles.

Before Annie Leibovitz draped a sheet over a 15-year-old Miley Cyrus and called it a day; before Terry Richardson made it into Page Six with accusations of masturbating in front of naked models he was shooting, Mr. Piel and his contemporaries were displaying their contributions to the century-old “art-or-pornography” debate on the front pages of magazines and fashion spreads for luxury products.

But besides the transgressive nature of partial nudity in a high-end glossy, the comparisons between Mr. Piel and his contemporaries—which also included Vogue’s preferred cover fashion photog, Helmut Newton—are few and far between.
“They were very, very, very ... and I’ll add another very, different,” former Vogue editor Grace Mirabella recalled of the famous cover photographers in the ’80s. “Helmut—who was superb, had a great sense of style—was always looking for the deepest, not-best story about the women. In other words, he put them in situations that were very uncomfortable, that was this close to being excessively sexy, and almost questionable.”

Mr. Avedon, meanwhile, was “the strongest” in fashion history, according to Ms. Mirabella, with his monochromatic, soul-penetrating portraits. And Mr. Piel? “Would it be superficial of me to say that his were the most attractive?” she wondered.

“He was the best of his moment. He was able to get the allure of the model while still keeping this sense of reality that was missing from a lot of the more posed shoots.”

“He was not the usual type ... if you could consider photographers of this period a type,” Jade Hobson, the creative director of Vogue at the peak of Mr. Piel’s fame, told The Observer. “For example, he had an Australian accent.”

He also had a casualness in both dress and demeanor that put models at ease: “With Denis, he was always looking for that ‘off’ moment. So many photographers at that time were looking for the girls to be ‘on,’ but Denis wanted that awkward moment between a pose. He was looking for something more real.”

“His was the antithesis of a fashion shot,” she concluded.

In truth, Mr. Piel is more interested in models who can act (and vice versa) than ones who just blindly follow direction. He can (and will) proudly claim that he was the first photographer to have actress Uma Thurman sit for a shoot. There she is in Moments, at age 16, pouting and pulling at an oversized wifebeater that looks in danger of falling off at any second.

The photographer admits to being partial to curvier woman (as defined in the realm of modeling, that is), which also made him an outlier of fashion photography. Isabella Rossellini frequently appears in Moments, as do Rosemary McGrotha and the ill-fated Gia Carangi.

“I wasn’t round, but I wasn’t rail-thin,” former model/actress and frequent Piel collaborator Amanda Pays told The Observer. “He was interested in the female body in a more sort of natural form.”

Ms. Pays admitted that she had originally been uncomfortable with the idea of doing a nude photo for Mr. Piel for a personal collection (though she got to keep her hat in the shot, which she used as a fig leaf). “But there was not something not creepy about Denis. It wasn’t so much about being naked as it was getting to know you as a person. Doing a portrait that was just a little bit deeper than a physical picture.”

Perhaps because, like the saying goes, what he really wanted to do was direct.

“With my photos, I really want to do is tell a story. I want to set up a mise-en-scène,” Mr. Piel expounded, dropping some film vocabulary into an explanation of his famous 1983 photo “Video #4.” (The snapshot features Nastassja Kinski on a red couch, holding a phallic-seeming video camera. She is clothed only in fishnets and a black mesh bra.)

“What a picture really does is make you think about what happened right before the photo was taken, or what’s about to happen.”

Mr. Piel cites as inspiration not another photographer, but Stanley Kubrick: the director had planned to write an introduction to Mr. Piel’s book, but passed away before seeing it to fruition.

“What was great about Kubrick was that he never told the same story twice. He didn’t need to brand himself; instead of today, where people make 10 movies and you feel like you’ve just seen one.”

Mr. Piel’s cinematic flourishes define his body of work. Peter Arnell, the creative director for Donna Karan’s seminal ad campaigns in the ’80s, recalled collaborating with Mr. Piel for shoots of hyper-realistic city scenes. This series of photos evolved into a video ad, which follows Ms. Karan as she is driven around New York, trying on clothes and getting ready for a date. Ms. Karan’s inner thoughts are conveyed in a pre-Carrie Bradshaw monologue of soundbites: “I live for luxury, but the real thing ... an afternoon nap”; “Dark glasses are like being behind a waterfall ... safe and daring at the same time,” and “God, why won’t he call?”

“The video was revolutionary,” Mr. Arnell stated as a matter of fact. “That’s because the best way to engage an artist of Denis’s talent is to explore, and not go in with very tight preconceived notions, like this definitely has to be a print, or it has to be television. Denis was so excited to do film, and he was really able to capture the idea of the modern woman on the go, which is what Donna wanted.”

Ms. McGrotha, who met Denis Piel on an Elle shoot in the ’80s, became one of his most frequently photographed subjects. She remembered him as more as a Kubrick-type obsessive, sometimes having her hold poses for hours while setting up the lights for cameras with low shutter speeds.

“He was very intense, very precise. He always wanted you to live a certain role ... there was a lot of role-playing of different characters,” Ms. McGrotha sighed. “But sometimes he’d want your personality, which was a lot harder.”

Mr. Piel saw the idea of models “playing themselves” somewhat differently. “Sometimes I would go on shoots, and I’d take my own pictures first. Like the Vogue story we did on Amanda [Pays], I took her picture first, before the shoot. I like to get as raw as I can, as much of the personality in the model before they are all made up and artificial.” An odd word choice for a fashion photographer.

He explained: “When Andie MacDowell was chosen to do Sex, Lies and Videotape, the director was very clever. He cast her to not act. She was herself, she was playing herself. And that’s why she was so great in that film.”

Ms. MacDowell was a former model of Mr. Piel, posing for him in Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue in 1985.

“He shot me in my early 20s, when I had just finished wrapping St. Elmo’s Fire,” the Southern-twanged actress told The Observer over the phone. “But I wasn’t a star by any means. I was an introvert, so it was good for me to work with someone like Denis, because he worked like a director. He always came up with some kind of ideas or concepts of a character you’d be playing. He was getting people to play out these roles, and it gave them an opportunity to be bolder than a model normally would.”

Eventually Mr. Piel did become a director: In 1995, he directed his own feature, Love is Blind. The documentary chronicles the first year of marriage between two blind people. Mr. Piel refers to it as “the beginning of reality television.”

After Condé Nast, Mr. Piel found himself as something of artistic futurist. He formed several creative collectives, like the Umbershoot, a virtual “ideasbank” where independent filmmakers could share their work and cross-pollinate techniques and theories. It went belly-up in the dot-com bust. Still ... no regrets.

“Our idea was to have films distributed online; today that’s a reality,” Mr. Piel said. So he was right after all.

Of course, he is best remembered for his photographs. Hence Moments, which he hopes will re-establish him in the art world.
“I was planning to do a book for years, but never got around to it. And then I looked around, and saw that my position within my peers had been lost,” Mr. Piel lamented.

Today, Mr. Piel is excited about a new project—one that takes his latest obsession and combines it with photography—turning the 17th century chateau in the South of France where he currently resides into a “sustainable hotel environment”-slash-“utopian Eden.”

“We’re really into permaculture right now,” Mr. Piel said. “I want to take pictures of this fantasy of a tomorrow where the world has collapsed. People have to think, ‘Well, how am I going to eat? How am I going to live?’ They’ll have to figure out their relationship to the Earth.”

He plans on portraying this fantasy future with a photographic series where semi-nude women interact with nature.

And why wouldn’t they be clothed?

“Well, because we won’t need clothes,” Mr. Piel replied. Ever the pragmatist, he quickly added, “Or maybe we do. Maybe it’s just minimum clothes.”

Ms. Thurman: a tour de force performance at 1 Lexington Ave.

Uma Thurman is not Killing Bill these days, she's killing the co-op market, grabbing a one-bedroom at the Gramercy Park apartment at 1 Lexington Avenue.

Ms. Thurman scooped up the one-bedroom pad on the eighth floor for $1.55 million, according to city records. The unit was not listed publicly.

The Pulp Fiction star is returning to building where she once lived with ex-husband Ethan Hawke until their divorce in 2006. Ms. Thurman and Mr. Hawke once owned an adjoining $8.6 million duplex, but the actress sold it after the couple split up.

Marriages come and go, after all, but the love between Ms. Thurman and 1 Lexington will never die, apparently. We guess Ms. Thurman just couldn't get her beloved out of her mind.

Previous owners Randall Heck and Cynthia Swezey know their way around a real estate deal, too, having picked up the pad for $995,000 in 2009. The listing at the time boasted of a master bedroom with original french doors with an adjoining sitting room and a living room with "gorgeous museum quality built-in shelving." There's also a kitchen with a dutch door (cute!). Most importantly, though, the apartment comes with a key to Gramercy Park.

kvelsey@observer.com

Everyone who was anyone attended the fashion show, which included glitter, disco balls, leather bomber jackets, and something that was described by the Associated Press as an "animal-print-meets-tropical-sunset tank dress," which is burning our brains with Miami fever just trying to consider what that might look like.

Here's what you missed from the show, if you weren't lucky enough to snag a seat.

(Photos via Getty)

When this Canadian clambake was started back in 1976 by three eager film buffs in a Toronto saloon, they couldn't convince one Hollywood studio to send them a full-length feature. Thirty-five years later, TIFF is arguably the friendliest, most popular and best organized movie convention in the world. This year it sold 300,000 tickets to 300 films in 11 days, generated a revenue of $170 million; published a program book 448 pages long; and boasted a staff of 100 full-time employees, 19 programmers and an army of 2,000 unpaid volunteers in orange T-shirts who do everything from ushering to pouring salt on your popcorn. TIFF has come of age, and this year it has even moved into a brand-new permanent home at the Bell Lightbox, a sci-fi superdome on the site of an old parking lot owned by the father of director Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters), replete with art galleries, film libraries, five state-of-the-art screening rooms and two restaurants where the flacks and hacks gather to meet, greet and tweet. They're still $25 million short of their $196 million fund-raising campaign goal, but ready or not, they opened anyway, staging a Sunday afternoon block party with balloons, fireworks, live rock bands, celebrity arrivals and trucks of free cupcakes. One caveat: Along with smaller, glam-free flicks, the dynamic has changed geographically, too. Now that festival headquarters has shifted miles away, from the swanky neighborhood of Yorkville to the seedy downtown entertainment district near the waterfront, the annual Brangelina parties, shopping sprees at Tiffany's and posh luxury hotels are a thing of the past. With screening venues sprawled all over the city and the press agents and stars 10 miles away, it is nothing to spend $40 on a taxi ride between movies to share a cocktail with Catherine Deneuve. The red carpet premieres are on one side of town in traffic gridlock, but the boldface names have to travel to the gift lounges on the other side of town to collect their free swag bags of Hermés scarves, Gucci handbags and Canadian maple syrup.

Things were off to a rocky start. The TIFF opened in the middle of a bedbug invasion that left audiences at the early press previews complaining of bites on their thighs, backs and rear ends, and so armies equipped with pesticides invaded the combat zone in the days before the official red carpet rolled out, and sponsors and organizers have promised an "itch-free festival." So far, so good. But when all is said and done and the last projector starts rolling, the only that matters is the movies. Excelsior! This year, the richness and diversity has a higher quality than usual. From documentaries about disgraced New York governor Eliot Spitzer and the decline of American public education (starring Bill Gates), to a graphic gay porno film called L.A. Zombie that has been banned in Australia, there is something for everybody. After the opener, a campy musical about hockey with Olivia Newton-John that was generally dismissed as an embarrassment, things picked up with two of the best films I've seen in decades. Actor Ben Affleck has triumphed as both star and director of The Town, a cajones-in-your-face crime drama about the brutal crime scene in Boston's historic Charlestown neighborhood, labeled the bank robbery capital of America. Mr. Affleck is wonderful as the leader of a gang of violent, ruthless thieves who makes the mistake of falling for the pretty, blindfolded hostage who can turn them in to the Feds. Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker) is especially creepy as the most vicious thug in the group, and Jon Hamm, in one of his first major roles since Mad Men, emerges as a powerful screen force in the role of a witty, hard-boiled F.B.I. agent. Set in the Boston alleys and Irish bars familiar to Scorsese and Eastwood, and featuring a $3 million robbery during a pivotal Red Sox game in Fenway Park, it is a film with a grip as smart and unforgettable as it is fresh and surprising. The Town is the best heist movie--as well as the most intensely plotted, brilliantly written and carefully directed film about the complex members of a criminal gang--since The Asphalt Jungle. Equally memorable is Never Let Me Go, a lyrical, haunting and lushly photographed adaptation of the great book by metaphysical novelist Kazuo Ishiguro (Remains of the Day), about idyllic children growing up in a baronial English country school who love, laugh and learn about life as all children do, until we discover [ed note: Spoiler alert!] they are clones in a dystopian government project, secretly marketed for the purpose of donating their organs to society in order to save mankind. Carey Mulligan, the Oscar-nominated marvel from An Education, leads a splendid cast that includes Keira Knightley, Charlotte Rampling and Sally Hawkins, in a cautionary tale about the dangers of science vs. humanity. One of the few films I've seen lately that audiences and critics were still debating fiercely days after its premiere, Never Let Me Go is a heartbreaking, imaginative work of art that left me devastated. So did Hereafter, a touching triptych of stories related to the theme of life after death; it finds Clint Eastwood in a more muted tone than usual, with Matt Damon as a sensitive psychic.

After nine months of Hollywood drivel, TIFF is always the launching pad for works of more serious ambition. Common underlying themes in the films coming this fall include people seeking dignity in the face of overwhelming adversity and the sad desperation of terminally lonely people trying to connect in a troubled world--to someone, some place, some sense of justice and meaning, anything! As the director of Trust, actor David Schwimmer does a disturbing job of tackling the terrifying world of Internet predators. In this powerful drama, an emotionally vulnerable 14-year-old in Chicago falls for a boy she believes to be a cute California volleyball player in a popular chat room, but when he arrives in person, while her parents are out of town, he turns out to be a 35-year-old rapist who is nothing like his photos or promises. The story centers on the disastrous effects of the rape on the girl as well as her parents (Clive Owen and Catherine Keener), as they all cope with a nightmare that changes their lives forever. Tony Goldwyn's Conviction is the inspirational true-life story of Betty Anne Waters (Hilary Swank), a Massachusetts wife and mother who devotes her life to proving the innocence of her brother Kenny (Sam Rockwell) after he is sentenced to life in prison for a murder he didn't commit. Neglecting her husband and two sons while scrimping and saving to put herself through law school, she pulls every lever in the corrupt legal system with the aid of famed attorney Barry Scheck (Peter Gallagher) to reopen the case, only to discover after 16 years of work that the DNA evidence has been destroyed. The film chronicles her undying faith as she overcomes one obstacle after another;  Ms. Swank is aided by a first-rate cast (Juliette Lewis, Melissa Leo, Minnie Driver and others) and a script that plays like a detective yarn. The ending will leave you cheering. Beautiful Boy is a wrenching story about two parents in a rocky marriage (Maria Bello and Michael Sheen) who are shocked to heartrending depths of despair when their perfect 18-year-old son commits a mass shooting on his college campus before taking his own life. In the hot new "hunky alpha males in jeopardy" genre, nothing could be more harrowing than 127 Hours and Buried. The first one is writer-director Danny Boyle's first film since the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire, the true story of adventurer Aron Ralston, who fell through a crevice on a hiking trip through Utah in 2003 and lay pinned under a boulder for 127 hours until he was forced to cut off his own arm to save his life. A graphic story of courage and survival guaranteed to make you pinch yourself to keep from fainting, with James Franco giving a heroic performance, it forced several members of the audience to be carried out on stretchers during an early preview in Sundance. Not for sissies. In Buried, Ryan Reynolds is a civilian truck driver delivering kitchen supplies in Iraq who wakes up in a wooden coffin underground with no oxygen and a cigarette lighter running out of fluid. With my heart pounding and nerves jangled, I was only able to stand it until the snake showed up. But I wasn't bored.

If proof was ever required that the movie business has changed, consider Robert Redford. The once glamorous and hugely powerful commodity is here like everybody else, shlepping a new film he directed with independent money called The Conspirator, hoping to interest a distributor. It will need all the shlepping it can get. The Conspirator takes place two years after the Civil War during those dark days of April 1865, when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. John Wilkes Booth, who was gunned down before the curtain fell, is just a peripheral player in the aftermath of the shooting at Ford's Theatre. Seven men and one lone woman--all civilians--are accused of being co-conspirators in a corrupt trial that should have been tried by a jury, not a military tribunal. The war department, run by Lincoln-appointed Edwin Stanton (Kevin Kline), is so hell-bent on pacifying a country desperate to avenge the president's murder that it sacrifices the Constitutional rights of an innocent woman without a shred of evidence. The result is a shameful trial that is both immoral and illegal. Mary Surratt (Robin Wright) is guilty of nothing more than the misfortune of owning the boardinghouse where Booth sometimes visited and his followers lived, but even after the court finds her not guilty, Secretary of State Stanton changes the verdict and makes Mrs. Surratt the first woman ever sent to the gallows in the U.S. With excellent performances by Ms. Wright (she's dropped the Penn), James McAvoy, Tom Wilkinson, Evan Rachel Wood and Danny Huston, a carefully researched screenplay and the kind of period authenticity most indie-prods on a reduced budget only dream about, Mr. Redford has provided a worthy footnote to a part of American history they do not teach in classrooms. The Conspirator has "worthy" stamped all over it with a capital "W," but to me, it lacks momentum, its commercial prospects seem dim and with a running time of more than two hours, it is somber to the point of tedium.

Not bad for a first week in Toronto. And still more new films by Jean Luc Godard, John Sayles, Ken Loach, Francois Ozon, Stephen Frears, Darren Aronofsky, John Carpenter and Werner Herzog to sift through, plus Kevin Spacey as crooked politician Jack Abramoff, and Mickey Rourke as a broken-down jazz musician stranded in the desert who falls in love with the Bird Woman in a traveling circus. So many movies, so little time. Sleep, balanced meals, exercise--they're all on hold. You live on pizza, candy bars and eye drops. Then you prop your eyes open and head for another double feature.

rreed@observer.com

USER-FRIENDLINESS
Any idiot can use an iPhone—and we know, because we’ve seen it happen. BlackBerry gets a few points for most models’ physical QWERTY keyboards, which are less prone to typos than iPhone’s virtual keys; but Apple controls for this problem with text-correction software, and its completely intuitive touch-screen operation wins the category.
Advantage: iPhone

DURABILITY
iPhones crack when they’re dropped, unless you invest in bulky shells and cases; by contrast, as Wired’s GeekDad blog has pointed out, BlackBerrys still work after being run over by a full-size pickup truck.
Advantage: BlackBerry

BELLS AND WHISTLES
iPhone wins for both built-in features and apps. In addition to the 3GS’s built-in video camera, GPS, Wi-Fi, music and video player, YouTube connectivity and quick Internet browsing, the iTunes App store offers tens of thousands of applications. BlackBerry App World pales in comparison.
Advantage: iPhone

OPTIONS
BlackBerry’s online store currently offers 21 models, with a range of prices and features; iPhone buyers can pick only between 3G and 3GS. BlackBerry is also supported by 45 carriers in the U.S.—iPhone is currently only available on drop-heavy AT&T.
Advantage: BlackBerry

CELEBRITY USERS
As we know all too well, Tiger Woods’ iPhone has gotten him into trouble; but Uma Thurman, Ryan Reynolds, Nicole Kidman, Emma Watson and Michelle Williams have fared better with theirs. There doesn’t seem to be much family loyalty: Miley Cyrus is a devoted BlackBerry user, while brother Trace carries an iPhone; Jake Gyllenhaal uses an iPhone, while Maggie sports the BlackBerry; Beyoncé is a BlackBerry devotee, while sister Solange is an iPhone girl. Many celebs also prefer not to choose: Cameron Diaz, Taylor Swift, Lindsay Lohan, Adriana Lima and Vanessa Hudgens have all been spotted with both devices.
Advantage: Draw (If it seems like everyone in Hollywood, from Amanda Seyfried to Zac Efron, is glued to a BlackBerry, that’s because BlackBerrys are frequently given gratis to celebs; in the past five years, the phone has been on offer in gift bags at the Oscars, the AMAs, the Golden Globes and the Grammys. Apple’s sole spokesmodel is Justin Long.)

Tuesday: 20/20
While you were sleeping, The Blind Side became one of the biggest hits of the entire year. For those of you who haven't seen it yet (or for those of you who want to relive the story from the comfort of your own couch), ABC's 20/20 is offering "the real story" behind the film. So instead of Sandra Bullock's brassy portrayal of Leigh Ann Tuohy, the Tennessean mother who took in a homeless boy and helped turn him into an NFL superstar, you'll get the actual Leigh Ann Tuohy. But don't worry fans, Ms. Bullock and her on-screen husband, Tim McGraw, make appearances as well. Might we suggest having some Kleenex ready? [ABC, 10 p.m.]

Wednesday: Kill Bill Volume 1 & 2
Since the DVD combining both volumes of Kill Bill that Quentin Tarantino has been teasing us with since the release of the first film back in 2003 has yet to materialize, we'll have to settle for this impromptu back-to-back showing on IFC to get our kung-fu fighting fix. For the record, we prefer the crackling part one, which offers some of Mr. Tarantino's most inspired filmmaking, to the more mature and talky part two. And obvious kudos to Uma Thurman, in a performance that was wrongly ignored by Oscar voters, for mixing the vengeful bride with equal parts sass, smarts, pathos, humor and total badassary. That's not a word, but thanks to Ms. Thurman, it should be. [IFC, 8 p.m.]

Thursday: Jersey Shore
We had been reluctant to start watching the latest television lobotomy from MTV, but why fight against something so delectable? Whether or not Jersey Shore is actually real is beside the point. This show—which is quite possibly the beginning of the 2012 apocalypse—is hilarious, ridiculous and impossible to turn away from. Where else can see someone refer to himself as "The Situation" in a serious manner? No doubt as a gift to people like us (think: anti-social), MTV is airing a new episode of this living train wreck on New Year's Eve, meaning we don't have to head out to overpriced bars to encounter loads house music, fist pumping and hair gel. [MTV, 10 p.m.]

Friday: The Twilight Zone
Call us old fashioned, but New Year's Day wouldn't be New Year's Day without a trip into The Twilight Zone. From the ball drop until January 2, SyFy is airing a marathon of the classic series, which means you can dip in and out as you please. However, for those of you looking for some guidance, make sure to check out "Time Enough At Last" (airing at 10:21 p.m.), the old chestnut starring Burgess Meredith, the apocalypse and a pair of fragile reading glasses. Cue the music! [SyFy, all day]

Many films have been made about the perils of parenthood, but none with a more attractive and entertaining mom on the verge of a nervous breakdown than Uma Thurman in Motherhood. Except, of course, the frazzled and terminally adorable Diane Keaton in the unforgettable Baby Boom, but Ms. Thurman has her charms, too, as Eliza Welsh, a once-promising writer who has sacrificed her own career to raise two children, with a distracted husband (Anthony Edwards) who isn’t much help at home and doesn’t bring in much money as a minor editor who collects rare books retrieved from garbage cans. They live in the insufferable clutter of two adjoining rent-controlled walk-ups on a street in Greenwich Village so quaint that the traffic is always blocked on both sides by movie companies filming Hollywood comedies in the neighborhood. If only Eliza’s life were half as glamorous. But she’s a different anomaly than Julia Roberts. Motherhood is about one exhausting day in her life that will make any sane man or woman—married, single or gay—stock up on birth control pills and pray.

Imperfect, unsexy, bespectacled Uma is a far cry from the Kill Bills, but there is no better proof of an actor’s skill than a role that requires her to do several things at once. She’s a multitasking mother-machine, all right, and watching her painfully survive never-ending stress made me want to kill myself. Between chores—climbing three flights of stairs 20 times a day, throwing a birthday party for her 6-year-old daughter, running the vacuum, laundering piles of dirty underwear, reading myriad books by nutty child psychologists, lugging a kid in one arm and an incontinent dog in the other while trying to move her car to the opposite side of the street for alternate-street-cleaning parking, and making lists, lists, lists—she also sharpens her writing skills in a daily blog. Ms. Thurman does a nice job of building frustration and aggression simultaneously—which, in her case, means smoking and yelling. But consummate overachievers never rest, so in her spare moments (huh?) Eliza enters a magazine contest to catalog her thoughts about “What Motherhood Means to Me”—in 500 words or less! Oh, yes. The deadline is midnight.

The worst pitfall of all this responsibility is that nobody seems to care at all. They all take Eliza for granted, and she ends up so desperate for affection that when she finally gets a chance to soak in a hot tub, all she can think of is the confession by her ditzy, pregnant best friend Sheila (Minnie Driver) that she used her child’s motorized bathtub toy for a dildo. Forced to do all the shopping on her bike because the car has been towed to make room for yet another movie-location shoot, loaded with handfuls of party supplies, including a birthday cake on which the bakery has misspelled her daughter’s name, she accepts a friendly offer from a handsome delivery boy to drag the shopping bags up the stairs, and invites him in. Not for romance (although you kind of hope things will kick up a notch), but just to see if she can still dance. Sometimes you just wish Eliza could send her eccentric, disorganized husband and her two yapping, skirt-yanking kids to camp and go to bed with a copy of How to Be Your Own Best Friend.

Nothing ever happens the way you think it will. This is simply a film about how underappreciated motherhood is. Women are so challenged and overextended that they are no longer even aware of their own priorities. There are rewards, too, if you have enough strength, brain cells and muscle tone left over at the end of the day to enjoy them. But according to this movie, amusingly written and directed with savvy by Katherine Dieckmann, motherhood presents massive potential for mental and physical collapse and keeps both psychiatrists and chiropractors in business. Regardless, Motherhood is Uma Thurman’s movie all the way. She’s in every scene, and she makes each one of them count.

rreed@observer.com