Sandra is a young woman who has only one weekend to convince her colleagues they must give up their bonuses in order for her to keep her job — not an easy task in this economy.
In a desert town, sometime in the future, a repressive government regime restricts all forms of artistic expression. At night, Theo breaks the law, risking torture and death, to paint his work on public spaces. But when his lover Elia is arrested for committing the same crime, Theo allows himself to be captured hoping to somehow be reunited with her.
Aviator Marie Vallières de Beaumont goes on a journey to find her lover Bill Lancaster after his plane disappears in the Sahara. After her plane is forced down in the Ténéré she meets Lieutenant Antoine Chauvet of the French Camel Corps who joins in the hunt for Lancaster. As the two endure hardships in the desert, they begin to develop feelings for each other.
Lucie, who works as a white-hot fashion model, exhibits a dominant, often controlling, "Type A" personality, whereas identical twin Marie consistently projects a backward, reserved, laconic and unassuming attitude. When Lucie receives a covetable French recording contract, a significant problem stands in her way: the inability to sing. Marie possesses the voice of an angel, however, and quickly jets off to Paris to stand in for her sister, unannounced - little realizing the dangerous and even violent string of consequences that she is igniting.
Malik (Omar Epps) is an African-American student attending on a track scholarship; academics are not his strong suit, and he goes in thinking that his athletic abilities will earn him a free ride through college. Fudge (Ice Cube), a "professional student" who has been at Columbus for six years so far, becomes friendly with Malik and challenges his views about race and politics in America.
While celebrating their reconciliation and six years of marriage, the American actress Sally Nash and the British novelist Joe Therrian receive their close friends, some colleagues and their next door neighbors in a party. Under the effect of Ecstasy, revelations are disclosed and relationships deteriorate among the group.
Young Augusten Burroughs absorbs experiences that could make for a shocking memoir: the son of an alcoholic father and an unstable mother, he's handed off to his mother's therapist, Dr. Finch, and spends his adolescent years as a member of Finch's bizarre extended family.
His wife having recently died, Thomas Jefferson accepts the post of United States ambassador to pre-revolutionary France, though he finds it difficult to adjust to life in a country where the aristocracy subjugates an increasingly restless peasantry. In Paris, he becomes smitten with cultured artist Maria Cosway, but, when his daughter visits from Virginia accompanied by her attractive slave, Sally Hemings, Jefferson's attentions are diverted.
Some thirty years after Arlis witnesses his father murdering a family, he runs into Kay, who happens to be the family's baby who was spared. Kay and Arlis suspect nothing about each other, but when his father returns, old wounds are reopened.
Dorothy Parker remembers the heyday of the Algonquin Round Table, a circle of friends whose barbed wit, like hers, was fueled by alcohol and flirted with despair.