If the Founding Fathers whose lives we celebrate on this Presidents Day were still drawing breath, they'd want you to spend this entire Monday contemplating the box office numbers:
· Britney Spears dabbles a toe in dry waters, but quickly decides it ain't nearly no fun.
· All the Anna Nicole you can stomach: Sexy babies, refrigerated bodies, refrigerated shakes, flamboyant entertainment doctors, the Phantom of the Will.
· Tom Cruise wants us to laugh with him this time.
· 24 has a thing or two to learn about torture. We suggest forced Tyra viewings.
· Ralph Fiennes is now free to move about your cabin. Or is he?
· Paris Interest Scoreboard: L.A. Mayors: 1, Vienna Society: 0.
· New Line really lucked out with that 23-month-old baby left to freeze to death. Is that kismet or what?
· Fey to Sorkin: "Longer and not funny." A brilliant insult because he'd argue the same thing. But for how much longer?
· Sharon Stone scolds those naughty Berliners.
· The S in SKG isn't donning the Obama swag just yet.
· Nic cage finally calls out Entertainment Weekly for the highbrow snobs they really are.
· Who knew that taking on Carlos Mencia could have such far-reaching consequences?
· Sometimes you gotta ram your SUV into a theaterful of people watching Dreamgirls just to feel anything.
· Like the movie they are meant to promote, Little Miss Cupcakes are sweetly predictable.
· No stunt-lesbianism to see here. Please disburse.
· Now all the separates you from David Geffen's magic sand is a 10-foot buffer.
· The Austrians were totally mean to Paris! [via BWE]
· The Germans were totally mean to the J. Lo!
· Entourage's Lloyd initially thinks that the guy trolling for representation by his fictional boss might be a little unbalanced, but after figuring out he's probably just kidding, still decides not to put through his crazy-call to the Piv.
· Are movie reviewers allowed to refer to Donald Trump's genitalia as "evil"? Apparently they are!
· Our bold prediction: Wealthy famous person in legal peril still somehow avoids jail time in connection with recent DUI. We know we're really going out on a limb with that one.
The spectacle of Anna Nicole Smith's death may one day become the source material for a hit megamusical, peopled with a colorful cast of characters that includes newly materialized long-lost relatives, horny Bahamian immigration ministers, flamboyant entertainment medicine practitioners, nervous diet pill executives, and a massive chorus of potential babydaddies. Right now, however, there's nothing hummable at all about the ugly tug-of-war underway for Smith's estate, a legal nightmare that the court-ordered release of her 2001 will has done little to clarify:
Friday
· Bob Miller, disembodied play-by-play voice of our local NHL franchise, startles fans with his corporeality by signing his new book, Tales From the Los Angeles Kings, at Barnes and Noble in Glendale.
· Alternacrooner Pete Yorn melts the panties of the musically undiscerning at the Wiltern; The Autumn Defense at Spaceland; Mike Stinson at the Troubadour.
Saturday
· More music! Camera Obscura at the El Rey; the amazing Neko Case at the Henry Fonda; Sparta at the Echo.
· Things once again get shady at midnight at the UCB Theatre, where the Dirtiest Sketch in LA contest pits some of our porniest local minds against each other in a battle for filthy supremacy.
· Icelandic artist Hekla Dögg Jónsdóttir reveals a surprise installation at the Machine Project, but her previous trick of showing Angelenos what a frozen puddle looks like sounds pretty hard to top.
Sunday
· Not that any of our readers would be interested in something so lowbrow, but the WWE's No Way Out will be at the Staples Center. Didn't Donald Trump just offer to shave his junk if Vince McMahon beat him two out of three falls? We can't recall what the actual wager was, but that's probably close enough.
· Still more music: Silverchair at the El Rey; Devendra Banhart is among those spinning at the Redwood Bar & Grill; DEEP celebrates its eight year anniversary with David Morales and Quentin Harris at Vanguard.
· And fulfilling our quota of zombie-related activities for the weekend: Arnold T. Blumberg signs Zombiemania: 80 Movies to Die For at Dark Delicacies.
PrivacyWatch celebrity sightings are submitted by our readers, and are posted several times a week, so send them in as quickly as your little fingers can type them. Submit yours to tips[AT]defamer.com (please put "sighting" or "PrivacyWatch" in the subject line) and let everyone know about the time you saw Eric Clapton folding his underwear in public.
And so it goes: According to Extra—exclusively, at least until People, Us Weekly, and TMZ rush their reports online in the next five minutes—Britney Spears has finally decided to make a proactive decision about her health and check into rehab, where she and her overexposed ladyparts can reflect about the poor decisions they've made over the last few turbulent months. There's no information on what facility she's chosen, but we hope that she selects the celebrity-friendly, Lohan-approved Wonderland Center, which will provide her with a Sober Nanny who will allow Spears to quickly return to the baby-neglecting routine that will bring much-needed stability to her recovery process.
· It's a record-setting Oscar year, and not a single award has been handed out yet: Dreamgirls has the most nominations in history without receiving a Best Picture nod; not since the very first Oscars have none of the nominated Best Actor performances come from the nominated Best Pictures*; and only once before have none of the Best Picture nominees received a single cinematography nomination. Another Oscar milestone: No former men's underwear models have been nominated in any acting category since the 1937 ceremony, when popular longjohns pin-up of the day Leonard "Chug" Diamond lost Best Supporting to Walter Brennan. [Variety]
· Finally, Toho Co. chairman Isao Matsuoka will get his due, receiving the ShoWest International Lifetime Achievement Award for excellence in bringing film programming to Japan, including a guarantee to every ticket buyer that they won't be crushed by a runaway SUV while watching Hello, Dream Kittens!, the dubbed Japanese version of Dreamgirls. [THR]
· Not to be outdone by the LAT's The Envelope, the NY Times launches their own awards section, Awards Season. Lead story: How the Oscar-nominated foreign films are the category to look to this year for the Big, Message Pictures the Academy usually loves. [NY Times]
· Commercial time is sold out for the Oscars telecast, with advertisers shelling out an estimated $1.7 million per ad, courting a somewhat more sophisticated audience than the Super Bowl. In other words, expect the two accidentally gay guys making out over a shared Snickers bar to be corporate lawyers, not mechanics. [The Carpetbagger]
· Generally satisfied to produce movies that explore the lighter side of blowing shit up, Jerry Bruckheimer (and Disney) have acquired the movie rights to Mark Bowden's Atlantic Monthly terrorism article "Jihadists in Paradise," plunging Bruck into much darker explosion-related territory. [Variety]
· The team behind Batman Begins sequel The Dark Knight continues to make impeccable casting decisions: after allowing Katie Holmes to "walk away" from reprising her character from Begins, they're close to signing up Aaron Eckhart to play Two Face. [THR]
· Al Gore will attempt to reverse global warming through a single day of simultaneous, worldwide rock concerts, a solution that climatologists have already dismissed as rooted more in the former Vice President's passion for the music of John Mayer than in proven science. [Variety]
· Various Fox entities (FX, 20th Century Fox TV, Fox Broadcasting) team up to shower Nip/Tuck creator Ryan Murphy in cash for his showrunning/developing services. [Variety]
· Var thinks that Fox News Channel's right-wing Daily Show knockoff The 1/2 Hour News Hour feels like something "enterprising high-school kids with a video camera could replicate." [Variety]
Those duped Borat movie frat boys have been dealt yet another massive blow in their ongoing legal battle against the makers of the film. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Joseph Biderman—the same judge who tossed their motion to have the scene featuring their bonehead pronouncements on women, Jews, and slavery nostalgia cut from the movie's DVD release—has now rejected their case outright, THR Esq. is reporting, in a legal decision that might affect the outcome of the scores of other victim/stars hoping to make benefit of glorious lawsuit settlement:
We realize that it's never a good idea for a Hollywood couple's less successful half to abandon the security that comes with a life of being married to an A-list earner, but are things already so bad for Ryan Phillippe that he's open to taking party hosting gigs? This limited time opportunity landed in our inbox as part of personal appearance booking agency Esterman Entertainment's e-mail update on the talent they offer (among other performers featured: Webster, C.C. DeVille, Ron Jeremy) for all of your mall-opening and wet-t-shirt-contest-emceeing needs. While we'd never begrudge a guy the chance to pick up some easy money in between movies (he's even on Ellen today plugging his new film), he should enter this world knowing that seemingly innocent hosting jobs are a proven gateway to the pure celebsploitation of the Australian horse auction circuit.
With Ralph Fiennes' attempt at getting his mile-high freak on with a Qantas stewardess in the cramped quarters of an airplane lavatory making international headlines, the concerned citizens over at ABCNews.com turned to a small army of clinical sexologists and psychologists to assess whether this was merely the case of a horny movie star taking advantage of a convenient situation, or the symptom of something much darker:
Back on Wednesday, we passed along a video (still available here) of comedian and Fear Factor master-of-bovine-anus-devouring-ceremonies Joe Rogan confronting Carlos "Mind Of" Mencia about the widely held belief that Mencia helps himself to other comics' material (which, to his credit, he at least has to courtesy to transform into something completely unfunny). Since the release of comedy repo man Rogan's whistleblowing exposé, it seems the fight has been pretty lopsided in Mencia's favor, as Rogan blogs that he's been given a time out at the Comedy Store (the site of the confrontation) and lost an agent over the brawl:
Yes, it has come to this: Paris Hilton's boredom is news. Previously, the minimum level of Hilton activity meriting media coverage has been a fart, but with this story about how the Vienna Ball understimulated the heiress so thoroughly that she couldn't be bothered to squeeze out even the most grudging of flatus in exchange for her generous appearance fee, the old standard has all but been erased, and a whole new avenue of coverage involving the occasions when her trademark privileged, dead-eyed stare seems incrementally more glazed over has opened up. It shouldn't take more than a week before InTouch moves boldly into the boredom space by featuring a photo spread of an ennui-stricken Hilton blankly staring at her Sidekick, waiting for the arrival of a text message from Nicole Richie that may never come.
· And we thought that McDreamy would never find true love.
· How many letters are there in "famewhore" again? Oh, more than two? Damn.
· Comedy Central's Insider blog is ready to throw down with the sure-to-be-hilarious Fox News Daily Show knock-off.
· We really don't have the heart to tell this guy that Ari Gold is just a fictional character.
· That trick where Simon/Paula/Randy pretend to be breaking bad news to a room full of Idol hopefuls never gets old! And now you can bring the fun home with this rejection kit.
Even though we are generally inclined only to note agency assistant hires involving people throwing away promising reality TV and legal careers to pursue the sacred vocation of taking ten percent of someone else's dream, we nonetheless feel compelled to pass along a rumor from a tipster alerting us about the newest drone staffing the CAA Death Star:
Kenny Chesney is widely credited with starting the "overly-groomed country radio guy of indeterminate sexuality that no one has ever really heard of marrying A-list Hollywood actress" trend currently sweeping the industry. He recently told 60 Minutes (in an upcoming, very special, "We Have Officially Run Out of Interview Subjects" episode), that the "fraud" Renee Zellweger listed as the reason she requested an annulment after four months of marriage to him had nothing to do with any lack on his part of a healthy appetite for the ladies:
