Screw the oil market — look no further than the flagging fortunes of American icon Ed McMahon for an uncanny barometer of our nation's volatile economy. The man whose face in your mailbox once reflected decades of surging domestic wealth has reportedly suffered a financial decline mirroring our war-addled vortex of national debt: $1.5 million, to be exact, half of which is owed to American Express, with another $644,000 owing on a palatial house he can't seem to unload:

Whether it's the work of just one Manosh-targeting vandal or a number of copycat subway saboteurs, the one thing we know about The Happening adbusting is that we find it fucking hilarious. After New York public transit patrons were left wondering what twist and turns lay at the end of The Penis (spoiler alert: balls!), they now have a whole new slew of questions regarding a Friday the 13th release called, chillingly, The Crapening. [copyranter]

The Guardian runs an outrageously satisfying interview with Clint Eastwood today, in which he was asked to address comments made at Cannes by his perennially malcontented, bullhorn-wielding peer, Spike Lee. In them, Lee suggested Eastwood ignored African-Americans' contributions to the Allied cause in Flags of Our Fathers. (The exact quote: "There were many African-Americans who survived that war and who were upset at Clint for not having one [in the films]. That was his version: the negro soldier did not exist. I have a different version.") And while "a guy like him should shut his face" will undoubtedly emerge as the rant's most pull-quoted phrase—and deservedly so, being eight perfectly chosen syllables that manage to encapsulate everything we love about the shoot-first, dump-the-body-later Eastwood mystique—there's much else to savor in the permagrizzled auteur's verbal swat-down:

Welcome back to Defamer Attractions, your regular cheat sheet to what's new, noteworthy and/or doomed among the week's movie releases. Today we break down the hand-to-hand combat between a violence-prone bear and an equally vicious Israeli hairdresser, determine which also-ran will look on pitiably from the sidelines, suss an underdog for the multiplex-allergic among you, and review the best and brightest new DVD's. As always, our opinions are our own, but in keeping with the spirit of this week's Big Two, they are also reliable and brutally precise.

· Last night's Farmer Wants a Wife—which we're told actually exists and is not an elaborate 30 Rock joke—was the most! shocking! ever!, as contestant Ashley, a "catering sales manager," dropped a few f-bombs on the lonely Missouri field worker. (Who, it bears mentioning, we're almost positive we saw go-go dancing in nothing but a tuxSpeedo at last night's gay marriage rally at The Abbey). [The CW]
· We're going to go out on a limb and guess Ice-T is a breast-man. [flisted]
· Janice Dickinson's 8-week-old Chocolate Lab puppy is missing. Run, Hershey! Run! [TMZ]
· This is just a travesty: The Hockey Night in Canada theme is in jeopardy. Help us, Don Cherry. You're our only hope. [Reuters]
·Hey—Zebricorns! [greywolf]

If there was ever a doubt that Oliver Stone's land-speed record production of W would be anything but a broad political satire of our outgoing president, let it now be allayed with Lionsgate's first teaser poster for the film. Combining eye-chart aesthetics, lexicographic precision and a surplus of malapropisms and other stupid shit George W. Bush has said over the last eight years (our favorite here: "I can press where there needs to be pressed; I can hold hands when there needs to be ... hold hands"), the one-sheet suggests that Stone's lugubrious, self-serious stabs at presidential folklore from JFK to Nixon are in fact over, and his more lilting, equally self-serious Natural Born Killers vein is set to bleed once again over an election-year popular culture. We eagerly await the official one-sheet; if Lionsgate has any sense, they'll use this as inspiration. [/film]

The Reverse Cowgirl blog points us towards us a tidbit buried in a Daily Texan interview with Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk, regarding the bold marketing efforts being undertaken by Fox Searchlight to promote their screen adaptation of his novel Choke:

Held last night in New York and scheduled to air next Thursday, Bravo's A-List Awards are billed as a night celebrating "the best in Food, Fashion, Beauty, Design and Weatherman Lap-Dance Dispensation." BravoTV.com has already started building buzz by leaking highlights online, including Lauren Hutton acceptance speech for a "beauty icon" award. In it, she first admits to having been "up for 46 hours," before launching into a stream-of- sleep- deprived-consciousness which encompassed, in no particular order, her thoughts of guacamole-preparation, the ozone layer, and the promiscuity-engendering properties of testosterone. So confounding was her monologue that during the commercial break, it took the combined efforts of Tom Colicchio, Santino Rice, and Carson Kressley just to pry apart the paralyzed furrows in a deeply perplexed Tim Gunn's brow. [BravoTV.com]

[Photo Credit: X17]

Now you, too, can get in on the ground floor of a major Hollywood investment opportunity: Deposed New Line kingpins Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne are coming back! Maybe! That's where you come in, according to Nikki Finke:

We’ve been wondering for a while now when all these obsessed-over spawns of celebrities would finally grow up and start canoodling already. With all the “wombwatching” and “bump” updates screaming at us from the newsstands, all we really want to know is when Lourdes is going to start dating James Wilkie Parker Broderick (oy), or when Suri will link eyes with the matching-haircut, age-equivalent Maddox. But thank the pervy Hollywood heavens above, the wait is now over. As the NY Daily News reports today, two youngsters with very famous A-list parents are currently “dating,” and “poised to take Hollywood by storm…and they have a combined age of 18!” Well! That’s slightly disgusting but also beyond intriguing! The new hot couple on the schoolyard revealed, after the jump.

Exciting news indeed, as America's Little Career-Squandering sweetheart Lindsay Lohan has—we repeat has—secured an honest paycheck, and one that doesn't require her to climb onto a hotel diving board before a swarm of paparazzi, shouting, "Mom! Mom over here! Watch me suck some serious face with my best-friend-with-benefits, Samantha Ronson! Mooooom! You're not waaatching!!!" Fake-pregnancy comedy Labor Pains has managed to avoid the on-again, off-again fate of another Capitol Pictures-financed production, David O. Russell's Nailed, reports Variety:

While we all felt a little bit misty back on March 4th when Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax passed away, the event conjured up some repressed childhood memories for Defamer's To Do blackbelt holder, Miss Molly McAleer. Memories that she hasn't been able to deal with until now. In tonight's installment of Defamer To Do's, our little polyhedral princess confesses that she spent more than a little bit of time with the 20-sided die while growing up in the suburbs of Beantown. Enjoy!

We've already admitted that the Real World series lost us more than a few years ago. We grew especially despondent after that Las Vegas: Reunion idea, and hardly noticed when the current Hollywood-set season began. Then one recent Lazy Sunday, we found ourselves flipping through the channels and spotting a young man named Greg. You see, Greg is Puck, Irene, Trisha and Coral all meshed into one handsome package. He steals panties. He cries in the confessional. He's violent. He doesn't clean up. His heart breaks. He punches walls. And last night, the producers decided to eject Greg from the current pack, claiming he hadn't been putting enough effort into his "job." But after taking a look back at the long list of past Real World ejections, we're dumbfounded as to why MTV has made a habit of kicking off some of the most charismatic, entertaining and (warning: cliché lies ahead) "real" people on the show. A clip of the brutal send-off from last night, plus a recap of the top three most erroneous ejections pre-Greg after the jump.

· The 24th day of negotiations brings us no closer to SAG-deal closure, as the actors' union refuses to endorse the AFTRA deal signed last week. (And that despite all the sexy progress AFTRA made in negotiating "online clip consent and jurisdiction over low-budget made-for-Internet productions!") Meanwhile, time is running out for SAG to petition its 120,000 members for strike approval in time for the June 30 deadline. [Variety]
· Ben Silverman shoots, he scores! The Stanley Cup finals score NBC a second-place finish, inspiring the gimmick-happy network head to his greatest idea yet: The Biggest Loser on Ice! [Variety]
· Former House of Blues president Joseph C. Kaczorowski will partner with Grosvenor Park, a film financing company which offers pre-sale, gap, tax financing, and several other services that instantly render us glazed over with boredom. [Variety]
· It's a light-ethnic-stereotyping showdown at the box office this weekend, as Kung Fu Panda and You Don't Mess With the Zohan face off for your mindless-summer-moviegoing dollars. [THR]
· Jimmy Smits will join Season 3 of Showtime's Dexter, playing Miguel Prado, an "ambitious, charismatic assistant DA" who nevertheless suffers from the same stultifying inability as the rest of the cast to tune in to Dexter's highly damning, V.O. narration. [THR]

Among those sniveling, rodent-like, British sorts who follow the weight fluctuations of actresses who look inarguably healthy, Catherine Zeta-Jones's current "condition" is approaching near-scandal levels of alarm. For example, the Daily Mail today cites a not-harrowing new collection of photos supposedly suggesting Zeta-Jones has suffered a perilous loss of curvature and, well, stone:

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]

This just in: a Hollywood PrivacyWatch Special Edition, featuring an extremely well-observed power breakfast with your American Idol, David Cook. "I saw the American Idol winner David Cook at breakfast at Belmont on Wednesday. He was having breakfast with some record execs but he was dressed in total faux-hipster. Vest over t-shirt. Check. Pork pie hat cocked jauntily. Check. Lots of necklaces outside of his tee. Check. Three (!!) of those fight breast cancer/fight something plastic bracelets on one wrist. Check. Cowboy boots. Check. He totally looked like he was dressed by someone who hates him." [Defamer AI Coverage]

For any of you out there who still don’t “get” Kathy Griffin, we now present you with a single clip that will effectively prompt a lifelong love affair with the red-headed, fast-talking, Scientology-bashing spark plug of an entertainer that she is. On the Today Show this morning, giggly Al Roker had the pleasure of speaking with Kathy about her upcoming hosting job of Bravo’s inaugural A-List Awards and not-so-innocently asked her if there was really anything she wouldn’t do on camera, considering her reputation as a truthiness-telling comedienne who never holds back. What followed was a delicious and epic moment in television history, during which Roker was given a lap dance, off-screen staffers were overheard gasping, and images of a Roker/Matt Lauer/Halle Berry threesome in “the big bed” were thrust into our collective imagination.

As we mentioned yesterday, the cover of the current issue of People magazine bears the image of Jodie Sweetin—famous for being a former meth addict, star of Full House, and host of a waist-down exotic dancing competition, in that order—holding proof positive of a God that believes in second chances: Zoie, her 7-week-old baby daughter. (Who, contrary to an erroneous rumor floating around the internet, was not named for a two-headed pygmy rabbit who'd frequently appear after several sleepless nights on the pipe, offering Sweetin companionship and life coaching whenever it could.)