America isn't the only one having a birthday this week. Last night, Lindsay Lohan — everyone's favorite freckle-faced, raspy-voiced, psychologically-damaged, naked-picture-taking, gossip-column-filling, potential-half-sister-having, secretly-lesbian actress — turned 22 years old. It's truly mind boggling to imagine she's that young. Lohan's got so many miles of bad road behind her that I pegged her for at least 35. But no, 22— only one year past the legal drinking age which she's certainly never adhered to. So, how did Linds celebrate this momentous occasion? By throwing an 80's-prom-themed bash at Teddy's in the Roosevelt Hotel, of course. Check in after the jump for more party deets than you can shake a stick at.

Long time BFFs Lance Armstrong and Matthew McConaughey reunited on Wednesday afternoon for a run in MQLIGU. Armstrong lovingly gushed about his relationship with Kate Hudson for a majority of their jog. McConaughey was surprised to hear that Armstrong had already met Hudson's mother. McConaughey has yet to met Goldie Hawn after doing two films with Hudson. Armstrong asked his good buddy for some advice on how to handle things with Hudson, but McConaughey quickly changed the subject. McConaughey wanted to know if Armstrong had seen his flip flops. McConaughey has felt his entire vibe has been completely out of sync ever since he lost his favorite pair of sandals.

· P. Diddy couldn't be more excited about Hancock: the first legitimately mainstream black superhero! (Don't point out the drunken loutishness—he's happy as a motherfucker and we'd like him to stay that way.) [PaulScheer.com]
· "Angelina Jolie is way too thin to be an action hero!" says whoever ABCNews.com could find to offer a quote corroborating their Angelina Jolie-is-too-thin-to-be-an-action-hero story. [ABCNews.com]
· Take a tour of the insanely huge Brooklyn mansion Jennifer Connelly and Paul Bettany are leaving, and the insanely expensive TriBeCa loft they're moving into. [ONTD, The Real Estalker]
· Wesley Snipes can travel to London and Bangkok to shoot two movies while his Totally Insane Tax Avoidance Trial of the Century appeals are processed. [Yahoo/AP]
· Here's photo evidence of Brett Ratner holding one of his five Big Penises. [VMan]

As we approach America's 232nd birthday bonanza celebration, we here at Defamer HQ can't help but feel more than a little bit patriotic. After all, this great country of ours affords us so many rights and privileges. Like the right to bear arms! And the right to free speech! And the right to shoplift a tanktop from Express when you were but a teenag ... wait, what? We don't remember reading about that last right in our history books, so what is Molls doing waving that factoid in our faces in this evening's To Do's? Well, you'll just have to watch and see...

It didn’t take long for Katie Holmes to prove she cannot compare to Nicole Kidman when it comes to Broadway appeal. Months before she even sets foot on stage, Tom Cruise’s replacement wife is striking out at the box office, managing to sell only $1 million worth of advance tickets to her September theatrical effort in All My Sons. That may sound like a decent take in the world of steadily declining Broadway sales, but it doesn’t even come close to Kidman’s number, which was $4 million. So why the distant gap in interest between seeing Holmes hack through Arthur Miller and Kidman feign sex live? It’s not just a matter of full-frontal cartwheels...

I remember the first time I heard about Megan Fox. "Man, this chick has it all," I thought to myself. She's hot, not a terrible actress, uh... did I mention hot? In fact there was only one problem with her. Her fiancé was a douchebag. And not just any douchebag, but Brian Austin Green! The whole B.A.G. affair was such an affront to my sensibilities that it tainted Megan Fox as a whole. She couldn't be that great if she was into a dude who not only devirginized Donna on 90210 but also released a terrible rap album entitled One Stop Carnival. But now that's all changed, thanks to this little tidbit of information: Megan Fox has called off her engagement to Brian Austin Green! [cue Handel's Messiah, ring church bells, light fireworks]

Rescued from the precipice by the courageous members of NYPD's Anti 'Former Child Stars Trying To Score in a Park From Some Homeless Dude ' Vice Squad, Tatum O'Neal has finally learned what her sentence will be for trying to drown her Scottie-losing sorrows in the arms of her former lover, crack. Brace yourselves. This is not pretty:

The upcoming remake of Beverly Hills: 90210 is continuing the process of putting its out-of-work alumni back in business. Spurned by producers for just being her normal bratty self back in 1994, Shannen Doherty is reportedly in talks to join Jennie Garth and return the characters that launched each of them into the zeitgeist back in the early `90s. But despite Shannen and Jennie's overenthusiastic acknowledgment that they’ve got nothing better to do, not every cast member is so eager to pull the trigger and willingly euthanize their own careers. Which stars are only contributing to the remake in off-screen roles, and which are phoning in Hell Nos from Italy as they shoot far more important Hallmark Channel movies, after the jump.

What took Hollywood so long? Tim Russert died on June 13th and they're only just now announcing plans to make a movie about his life? On July 2nd? Come on, people, that's 19 days. Used to be a movie like that would get announced under a week after the tragedy. Summer must be making everyone lazy.

Daniel Radcliffe has got to be sick of playing Harry Potter already because he's starting to talk all kinds of crazy talk about the upcoming 6th installment (feels more like the 100th) of the series, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, to make it sound more exciting. In a recent interview with Empire Magazine, Radcliffe went so far as to say, "There's a fair amount of sexual energy and drug parallels. We have a couple of Trainspotting moments."

While most of her employment opportunities of late have come from Down Under in the capacity of a celebrity shot-girl for hire (do they swirl down your throat in the opposite direction, we wonder?), Tara Reid has apparently also been keeping busy on our own shores, gearing up for an exciting new reality show. (We see no mention of it on her IMDb page, so we'll assume the first season of Tarafied: Celebrity Foreclosure is a staight-to-web venture.) In the above TMZ segment, one of the scripted verité sequences requires the frequently botched actress to enter formerly fashionable Hollywood social establishment Hyde. One of TMZ's stanchion-shackled documentarians then helpfully offered some improvised crowd noise—which leads, for some reason, to the frustrated crew repeatedly pointing out his Asian heritage: first disparagingly, then, as a means of bridging the paparazzo/Z-list-entourage divide. Oh, let's just let TMZ's Great and Powerful Harv explain it. Roll it, Harv!

Tribune Company's Los Angeles Times is one of the most hard-pressed big-city newspapers: the parent company is over-leveraged; the local market reeling from a real estate crash; and like all papers the LAT is suffering from competition from the internet. Even so, the 150 newsroom layoffs announced today are shockingly swingeing. Together with buyouts announced at the start of the year, the latest cuts will leave the Los Angeles Times-once one of the fattest papers in the country-with 20% fewer editorial positions than last year and 42% fewer than a decade ago.

[Photo Credit: X17]

Not only is the all-American cast of I Survived A Japanese Game Show required to insert themselves weekly into a variety of life-sized pachinko machines, but the premise of the show is such that they are deprived of the familiar comforts of their homeland. That leads to all manner of East-West culture-shocks—the kinds that until now could only be adequately captured by a Sofia Coppola movie—and proverbial hilarity ensues. In the clip above, chaperone Mama San prepares a Japanese breakfast feast for her fabulous-cash-and-prizes-loving houseguests. Trussville native Justin dives into the adventurous culinary proceedings as if it were a bonus-round Velcro wall; sometimes, however, even the most open-minded and -stomached of intentions can be sidelined by the garnish byproduct of a carp's Brazilian.

Picture it: you get a fancy-schmancy director to make a film about one of America's most beloved characters; it has a huge budget, impressive effects, big name talent, and... it totally sucks. Ang Lee's The Hulk immediately comes to mind, as does Bryan Singer's Superman. They were both critical and commercial failures, plus they were boring as all hell. But this summer, the Hulk franchise got a less sucky, more successful reboot. And that got Hollywood's wheels a'spinnin'. Could the same thing be done for The Man of Steel? It's complicated. Watch as we untangle the twisted tale after the jump.

Up until the point where filming began on Planet Terror, Robert Rodriguez's career was flying. Long considered one of Hollywood's more prolific directors (11 directorial credits between 1995 and 2005), the auteur specialized in churning out FX heavy (yet, comparatively speaking, low-budget) B-films that ended up being very profitable for both himself and the studios that released his pictures. But Rodriguez's life and career began to fall apart as he began an on-set relationship with his lead actress in Planet Terror, Rose McGowan, a relationship that not only ended up costing him his marriage but also one that seriously derailed his career. Most recently, he had been pushing to get studios interested in his $70 million remake of Barbarella which, natch, would star his new soul-draining harpy love interest. However, nary a studio in the world was willing to take a risk on a movie with that budget that had Rose McGowan as a lead (nor would they touch Red Sonja or Women In Chains!, two other projects he tried to secure financing for with his flame in the lead). Now, it appears that the friction between Rodriguez's personal and professional lives landed the pair an all-expenses paid trip on the Splitsville Express. According to Page Six:

America's Got Talent judge David Hasselhoff got off to a rousing start of his second job, scaring tourists on London's South Bank. Hasseloff explained that he really isn't scaring the tourists as much as offering them a pleasant surprise and the opportunity to have their picture taken with a celebrity. Hasselhoff did admit that we were a rough patches in the beginning where he popped up from behind the embankment and there was nobody there. Hasselhoff felt a bit embarrassed, but he said that there's a learning curve with every new venture. Hasselhoff opened to have all the kinks worked out by lunch time on Thursday.

I'll admit it, I thought Hancock looked pretty cool. It's got a fun premise, a great trailer, good effects, Will Smith in full-on superstar mode, and even Jason Bateman. In short, it seemed like the perfect summer entertainment. Then, a few weeks ago that Variety review came out, and all was not well. Todd McCarthy said "this odd and perplexing aspiring tentpole will provide a real test of Smith's box office invincibility." Suddenly Hancock seemed a little shaky. If Hollywood's hometown paper didn't love it, who would? Well, opening day has finally arrived, the rest of the critics have weighed in, and it seems that Hancock is not just bad, but a big steaming pile of shit. It managed to scare up a scant 34% at Rotten Tomatoes and that's only slightly better than Drillbit Taylor! Stick around after the jump to read a collection of the prickliest critical barbs.

If you've been longing for a re-pairing of rival NASCAR champions Ricky Bobby and Jean Girard, only this time in something a little more fog-enshrouded, well, then, hold on to your pipes: It was announced today that Sacha Baron Cohen and Will Ferrell will star in the working-titled Sherlock: Elementary Deductions For Solving Puzzling Murders Throughout Queen Victoria's London in a Deerslayer Hat—an updating of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's iconic mysteries. From Variety.com:

You know what the best part about dating Kate Hudson is? Not the fun beachside lunches with a jolly Goldie Hawn and doting “unidentified males.” Not the late-night games of Pin The Tail On The Boob with 9-year old Ryder. Nor is it collecting your winnings from that bet you made with Owen Wilson about who could land the ebuillient blonde. No, the most enjoyable benefit to following Hudson around town and forcing grin after grin is the dynamite opportunity to finally get photographed dutifully wearing clothes coincidentally fashioned by your lifestyle-sustaining sponsor!