Watching Dave Letterman sucker-punch Hills axis of vapidity Spencer Pratt on The Late Show Friday night brought up one major question for us: why has it taken this long for a talking head to publicly shame the guylighted villain? Shilling, we presume, merely for the gruesome brand that is Spencer and Heidi, the numb and pathological Pratt answered a few very pointed questions regarding the MTV show's obvious scripted nature and what exactly Bromance nobody Brody Jenner does for a living. At that point, Letterman finally pulled out the big guns after Spencer boastfully claimed he "won't go to a club for less than $100,000." Dave's shock, insulting-yet-gentle series of guffaws and his no-beat-missed announcement that he wants Spencer off his set immediately sum up an interview too good to be true. See for yourself after the jump.

· Robert Downey Jr. is in talks to star in DreamWorks/Universal's Cowboys & Aliens, which is actually about cowboys and aliens, not the Bush regime's immigration policy. [THR]
· Indiana Jones and Iron Man brought Paramount Pictures International to the $1 billion box office grosses milestone six weeks earlier than last year, celebrated by Viacom Ringwraith Sumner Redstone hoopin' and hawin' over the studios in his fire-breathing skull-dragon, much to the dismay of the Star Trek cast and crew. [Variety]
· More reasons to love Eva: Eva Mendes is close to signing onto Werner "Abel Who?" Herzog's Bad Lieutenant continuationing.
· AMC is producing pilots based on Glen David Gold's 1920s magician novel Carter Beats the Devil, and Ice, about a family who works in New York's diamond district. [Variety]
·Mark an "X" on June 24th, which pits Celebrity Family Feud vs. the premiere of Wipeout vs. Kitchen Nightmares vs. America's Got Talent vs. I Survived a Japanese Game Show. (The "X" is there to remind you what day the world is ending.) [THR]

Actors love to brag about the huge, painful physical transformations they under take to get into character. Whether it's Tom Hanks starving himself for Cast Away or Renee Zellwegger making the ultimate sacrifice of eating food to star in Bridget Jones Diary, your favorite stars will do whatever it takes to impress Oscar voters. That is, except for Abigail Breslin. The iPod touch loving, anti-Fanning first showcased her laziness when she donned a fat suit to play a chubby child beauty pageant contestant in Little Miss Sunshine. Sure, she's pre-pubescent and forcing a weight gain could have done some serious damage to her still-growing body, but a serious actress wouldn't have minded. The fact that her work was Oscar-nominee worthy must be considered a fluke. Real actors alter their bodies. All Breslin did was, ahem, act.

In a scene that was eerily reminiscent of the 1982 Scott Baio film Zapped!, popular movie star Keanu Reeves finally put to use of some of the telepathic techniques he learned from the Matrix film series. Only instead of using them for quote-unquote "good", he decided to have a little fun and make this woman's top fall off instead. After all, Reeves just began his summer holiday in France and, after a few ho-hum days, he decided to kick his vacay up a notch. Reeves said, "France is fun and all, but it got pretty boring pretty fast. So I just thought really hard and KABOOMBA! That woman's top fell off, then that one and so on and so on." Reeves thought that the female beachgoers would object to the seemingly random acts of clothing removal, but the beachgoers surprised Reeves with their casual attitudes towards nudity. Reeves added, "Everybody has been real cool about it and just went with it. I mean, if I did this in America, surely TMZ would catch wind of it. And I don't have to tell you this, but NOBODY likes it when that long-haired dude rips into them. Speaking of whom, does he remind you of Bodhi at all? Not even just a little?"

If you happened to miss the two dozen or so reminders that your humble, athletically-ungifted Defamer editor would be a featured guest on Dr. Drew Pinsky's radio show this past Friday, we've collected some of the highlights for your listening pleasure. (Before you judge our performance too harshly, you must consider for a moment how nervous we were to be in the presence of the man who taught us everything we know about the relative riskiness of the fringe sexual practices that defined much of our experimental late-20s.) Drew surprised us right off the bat by opening up the floor to our own questions. We took the bait and started grilling him about his recent feud with Tom Cruise and the first word from the set of Celebrity Rehab 2.

A rep confirmed this afternoon hour that Stan Winston, whose special-effects efforts on Terminator 2, Aliens and Jurassic Park won Oscars and established benchmarks in their field, died Sunday night at his home in Los Angeles. He was 62 and had suffered from multiple myeloma for seven years, staying on the job all the while, contributing effects and make-up work to the likes of AI: Artificial Intelligence, Big Fish, Iron Man and overseeing the effects department on the currently filming Terminator 4.

The Departed's Matt Damon comforted his co-star Mark Wahlberg during the fifth game of the Los Angeles Lakers-Boston Celtics NBA finals about the poor reviews Wahlberg has been receiving for his work in The Happening. Wahlberg felt especially hurt about the negative comments about his acting. Wahlberg said, "I really tried with my performance. I did my research. I remembered my lines. But, I gotta admit, I was totally caught off-guard by the fact that we were supposed to be making a B-movie. Nobody told me that."

Hulu — the NBC-Universal/Fox owned video website that is not so different from the numerous other websites offering full episodes of television shows, is the subject of a fawning, incredulous profile in today's Los Angeles Times. While all of the major networks already offer the bulk of their primetime line-ups for free online, Hulu boldly puts a bunch of it together on one site, thereby saving precious seconds of web surfing time. In an embarrassing display of old media-ness, reporter Scott Collins rhapsodizes over Hulu's "special features."

As excited as we are for borderline troublemaker Emma Watson and her rumored new deal to become the "face of Chanel" at 18, the $6 million contract comes with a curse or two. The French cosmetics giant has been airbrushing celebrity visages in ad campaigns for years, but its most recent short-term star partnerships haven't always ended amicably, nor have they resulted in the kind of chaste and glossy reputation sources predict for Watson. Though a friend insists that "She's not going to end up like these other Hollywood train wrecks, she just isn't...No one is going to be saying, ‘I never wanted to see Hermione in that light,'" we took a look back at her quilted bag-carrying predecessors to shine a light on the kind of controversy this same wallet-fattening gig has earned its celebrity reps in the past.

If you, like us, were beside yourselves with worry when National Wiener-Biting Champ [NSFW] Olivia Munn abruptly announced she would be taking some time off from her co-hosting duties on Attack of the Show!, we can offer by way of comfort the above recent photo. We assumed correctly that she was in Europe—only where we thought she'd be found in the tiny German town of Osendorf in Land Sachsen-Anhalt, where the World Wiener-Biting Championships are held every June, she was instead spotted in a small boat on Italy's Lake Como, accompanied by boyfriend and October Road star Bryan Greenberg, trash TV veteran Tate Donovan, and a third, unidentified brunette we'll refer to as Signorina X. All, it turns out, were guests of Lake Como's most famous resident, George Clooney, who'd later invite them to dry their garments on a medieval sock-toaster and retire to Villa Oleandra's dedicated pizza room for an anchovy-and-burrata pie so transcendent, none would ever again question the existence of God.

According to one editor of a celebrity weekly, it's the "last trip to the buffet table," as Britney Spears' gurney-bound trip to the hospital signaled the end of dish. If that seems a bit ominous, it may be because there is a discernible lull in glossy-packaged brain candy. "There's nothing going on in celebrity land. There's no news, no gossip, no scandal," whined a TV producer to Liz Smith a few months back. "The Oscars showed how dull things are. People are only interested in politics." It's true. Reliable pop tarts no longer yield Google results like they once did (at left, Paris Hilton's trend chart, which shows a baseline traffic drop of about two-thirds). Here are a handful of theories about what's happened:

While this summer's blockbuster stars may yet go down as the stroppiest on record, Mike Myers has pulled a bit of an midseason upset by usurping the season's sulky, moody, bridge-burning crown from long-time "passion" front-runner Edward Norton in the new issue of Entertainment Weekly. Not that the rap on Myers today isn't that much different than it's been in the last 17 years, but with The Love Guru drawing fire from all sides and Myers' spirituality-and-humor crossbreed having apparently all but hijacked his, well, humor, now seems as good a time as any to stir up the bad blood trailing him to the screen this weekend:

Alec Baldwin may have a surprising new lover —- the deericorn. In an interview with the New York Post about his seeming mid-life crisis, 30 Rock's master thespian railed at the tabloids for focusing all their energies on his unpaid voiceover work while missing all the truly interesting stories about his life. As Baldwin told the Post:

We'd like to interrupt your regularly scheduled blog reading on this lovely Monday morning in order to make a quick introduction. We are excited to announce that, for the next two days, Sara Bibel (aka DroppedCall) will be jumping into the mix in a guest blogger capacity. For those of you who aren't already familiar with her work, Sara’s meandering journey through the dream-strewn streets of Hollywood began with a stint working for Defamer favorite Courtney “Call Me Corey” Solomon (who you'll likely remember from the great Captivity billboard scandal of Spring 2007). His screaming tirades and stapler throwing antics prepared her for her two-day stretch at Defamer H.Q. She then made it through the studio gates and into the glamorous world of television research, where she crunched Nielsen ratings numbers and sat behind the double mirror in numerous focus groups. Her next move took her into soaps – writing over a hundred hours of television you don't want to admit that you watched. Currently, she is a columnist for fancast.com.

Entourage star Kevin Dillon ran into some of New Jersey's finest at an appearance at The Pool in Atlantic City over the weekend. Not being a neophyte in the often perilous club-going-for-pay circuit, Dillon made sure that his rider contained a section which stipulated that he must be secluded from a majority of the club either behind a velvet rope or sequestered in the V.I.P. area. However, these precautions did not prove to be ironclad enough to prevent him from interacting with a few overzealous fans of the HBO series, who knocked down the red velvet rope and demanded to have their pictures taken with Dillon. One fan said, "How often is Johnny motherfucking Drama in the A.C.? Not that fucking often. No stupid rope is going to stop me and Frankie and Kari and Mary and Frankie #2 from getting our picture with him! We would've done the same thing if it was Derek Jeter or one of those Gossip Girls."

Anti-smoking watchdog groups might not be too pleased with William Hurt's turn as the stogy-chomping Gen. Thaddeus Ross in The Incredible Hulk, but the gruff, unscrupulous character was one of the film's pleasant surprises. Like Jeff Bridges as Iron Man's Obadiah Stane, the Hollywood veteran was rendered almost unrecognizable, called upon to play the villain beneath some bushy facial outcroppings and the corrugated complexion of a former pretty-boy pushing 60. Sitting down with a starstruck CNN correspondent, Hurt couldn't underscore enough just how "not fun" the creative process was:

Never saying never might be the smart play for Guillermo Del Toro, who once went off so memorably on the Lord of the Rings franchise ("I was never into heroic fantasy. At all. I don't like little guys and dragons, hairy feet, hobbits — I've never been into that at all. I don't like sword and sorcery, I hate all that stuff") only to commit to directing the godforsaken Hobbit two-fer less than two years later. Alas, he's at it again this month in an interview with Complex Magazine, apparently setting himself up for his first stab at romantic comedy after he returns from New Zealand:

Naturally we couldn't ignore a blind item involving our favorite celebrity trend of the season, lesbian chic, that appeared in yesterday's NY Daily News. Especially when the item not only involves a starlet who dabbles in Lohan/Ronson-inspired games with the same sex, but also outs her bad boy boyfriend for helping her appear as straight as possible in the public eye. As the News asks today:

Congratulations go out this morning to M. Night Shyamalan and his beleageured backers at 20th Century Fox, who weathered brutal buzz and worse reviews to nurse The Happening to an impressive $30.5 million opening. We've never been happier to underestimate a film's box-office juice — especially when Manoj's Folly needs all the support it can get before heading on the road. First stops: Mexico and Korea, where the film's marketing materials now include some of those countries' respective national landmarks among the decimated landscapes:

Entertainment Weekly's Q&A with Angelina Jolie is unremarkable-except for the remarkably unflattering photograph the magazine uses for its cover. Now it could be that EW wanted an image that matched in spirit the "candid interview" touted in the coverline. But I thought the Hollywood publicists demanded photo approval when negotiating interviews-even when they're pushing a movie such as Jolie's forthcoming Wanted (watch a chase from the movie, here). On the EW cover, the screen beauty's chin juts forward; lighting from above has left a shadow under her nose; the pores haven't been smoothed out in retouching; and there's a mole on her forehead. Well, there was one the issue itself (scan at left) under the letter "r"-in the same photo from the magazine's website (right), however, the spot isn't visible. Did EW bring out the photoshop only after the issue had gone to the printers? (After the jump, the cover and Angelina Jolie's blemishes in higher definition.)