It's time once again to break out our finest scented oils and erotically knead the tense muscles of this week's sponsors, whose support keeps us from giving $5 rubdowns in a shady Thai massage parlor on Hollywood Blvd. If you'd like to advertise on Defamer and benefit from our magic hands, see this page.
· British exhibitors yank Night at the Museum from theaters to punish Fox for violating the sacred DVD release window, further threatening to have Ben Stiller drawn and quartered should he attempt to promote the DVD on British soil. [Variety]
· With no American Idol to contend with, ABC makes Thursday night its Nielsen bitch. [THR]
· Penelope Cruz will supplant Scarlett Johansson as Woody Allen's chesty object of age-inappropriate lust in his next film, which will shoot in Barcelona this summer. [Variety]
· After failing to agree to a "workable content-sharing agreement," Viacom demands that 100,000 clips featuring its content be immediately removed from the YouTubes, a move that could make embeddable video of The Hills tragically hard to come by. [THR · Producer Dino De Laurentiis threatens that if his Hannibal Rising prequel is a success, he can take the character even younger in future installments like Hannibal Lecter: Cannibal Baby. [Variety]
Because each flagstone on the Path to Oscar™ is such an important part of the journey to Hollywood's Biggest Night that it requires its own media event, the press was invited over to the Hollywood and Highland Grand Ballroom yesterday for a preview of the Governor's Ball, the post-telecast soiree where the Academy attempts to revive Oscar VIPs utterly exhausted from the four hours of congratulatory buggering they've just endured with a free meal. Var's The Knife blog made the trip, reporting that obscure local caterer Wolfgang Puck will be handling the food, and that the gala's organizers have decided to save the industry's most conspicuous awards-season table-hopper from his worst instincts:
Having satisfactorily completed the Celebrity Centre's rigorous, ten-week "My Life Is Great And I Am As Madly In Love As The Day I Signed My Contract: Level VII Post-Betrothal Communications" course, Scientology war bride Katie Holmes is being slowly reintroduced to the public, giving her first interview as Mrs. Tom Cruise to Harper's Bazaar:
In rounding up some tales of difficult actors (and Paris Hilton) disrupting their movie sets (Chris Tucker thinks Rush Hour 3 actually has a script! Lindsay Lohan is moody now that she's sobering up! Paris Hilton has no short term memory!), today's Page Six shares this gem about the important extra-propositioning responsibilities of tail-chasing fauxteur Brett Ratner's trusty assistant:
· Without the supermarket checkout line, Michael Lohan might have no way to get in touch with his troubled daughter. Then again, he could always trying texting her.
· Looking to scare the shit out of your own city with a flashing Mooninite not-bomb? eBay will hook you up.
· Ellen Pompeo only plays (OK, played) an anorexic on TV.
· Finally, a place to put your terrifying ability to identify random celebrity body parts to productive use.
· All your favorite famous person BJ moments, collected in one handy place. [NSFW]
According to embattled publicist-to-the-troubled-stars Leslie "My Client Went to Rehab And All I Got Was An Even Bigger Fucking Headache" Sloane Zelnick, the searching and fearless moral inventory that slowly sobering-up outpatient Lindsay Lohan is compiling in between runs to the Coffee Bean requires that the actress become even more proactive about her personal health, leading her to back out of her next movie project, A Woman of No Importance. Reports People:
· Music round-up: The U.K.'s Mopemaster General, Morrissey, begins the first of three nights at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium; Midnight Movies at Spaceland; Helmet at the Troubadour (again).
· Aziz Ansari, Rob Huebel, and Paul "Best Week Ever" Scheer form comedy's Human Giant at the UCB Theatre, where they host a variety of comedians and test screen some of the video shorts they'll soon unleash on their MTV show of the same name. Laughs guaranteed under pain of an ass-kicking from Michael Clarke Duncan, the troupe's inspiration.
· The Skirball Center hosts the L.A. premiere of China Blue, a documentary that will make you feel terrible about how many Chinese workers suffered so that you can wear that $200 pair of designer jeans to Area. [flavorpill]
Because we here at Defamer like nothing more than to play marketplace matchmaker to merchants of slightly used celebrity undergarments and their devotees, we'd like to now divert your attentions to eBay Lot #280076499409, consisting of two manificent examples of the satin and lace contour bra, dating to the late 20th Century and guaranteed to have been worn by Katherine Heigl during her Foxy Extraterrestrial period:
Defamer is committed to informing its readers of exciting opportunities to be humiliated by television networks desperately trying to fill out the non-American Idol portions of their primetime schedules with similarly intellectually challenging fare. And in the service of this noble mission, we direct you to Craigslist's virtual casting office, where the drive to recruit those soon to be flummoxed by an inability to retrieve facts once readily recoverable from their ten-year-old minds is in full swing:
But if you absolutely *insist* on distracting attention from the work, she'd like you to know that she can't wait to be a mom, still hasn't totally recovered from that nanny situation (or, for that matter, from her forced participation in simian watersports), that there is "no sexual anything" between her and Diddy, and, perhaps most importantly, she absolutely did not allow her Factory Girl co-star to penetrate her while the cameras rolled, no matter how much more convincing that might have made their sex scene. In a statement to be released later today, Miller's publicist will urge the media to respect her client's privacy going forward, now that this uncomfortable period of utterly unwelcome fame is about to blow over.
When facing a media firing squad to answer questions about one's arrest for facilitating a multimedia conglomerate's crazy ideas for getting some attention for their cartoon about anthropomorphic fast food items, one might politely offer a "no comment" and be on one's way. On the other hand, if one were interested in taking a moment to spotlight the absurdity of a situation in which a few friendly, flashing aliens were briefly mistaken for a pop-culture-savvy terrorist cell's attempt to drastically reduce Boston's stoner population through the explosive co-option of a beloved icon, one might handle their post-arraignment press conference in a different way.
· Maggie Gyllenhaal and Terrence Howard are named honory co-chairs of Film Independent's Spirit Awards, as much for their pinchable cheeks and twinkly eyes as for their impressive body of independent film work. [Variety]
· Tom O'Neil is still trying to decipher the Oscar Code (thankfully, this time not from his bed), and comes to the following conclusions: Scorsese will pick up the DGA award, and Best Picture is anyone's to win. Your office pool's a lock! [The Envelope]
· One oddsmaker puts Departed ahead with 5-4 odds, and Sunshine right behind it at 5-2, but it could easily pull ahead, as Academy members looking for some uplift among a depressing field will ultimately prove unable to resist the charms of its suicidal gay uncles and heroin-snorting dead grandpas. [USA Today]
· The Genies (for the uninitiated: Canada's top film award, and no, none of your three wishes will turn it into an Oscar) gives its Claude Jutra Award for best freshman filmmaker to Vancouver's Julia Kwan for Eve and the Fire Horse, and Stephane Lapointe of Montreal for The Secret Life of Happy People. [Variety]
· The Bagger is set adrift by this year's Oscar unpredictablity. Come on, Oscar-prognosticating-monkey, prognosticate for us! [The Carpetbagger]
· Jennifer Garner seeks to emasculate husband Ben Affleck by proving that at least one person in their household can carry a holiday-themed comedy, signing on to star in the remake of the 1945 movie Christmas in Connecticut for Warner Bros. [Variety]
· Warner Bros. and Joel Silver, who have been developing a Wonder Woman movie to be written and directed by fanboy-sainted Buffy creator Joss Whedon, are "quietly" trying to buy another Wonder Woman script, possibly to cover their asses in the event its writers decide to sue because their "getting it on in the invisible jet" scene is too similar to the one in the eventual WB product. [THR]
· Unfaithful co-stars Richard Gere and Diane Lane reunite for the Nicholas Sparks adaptation Nights in Rodanthe for Warner Bros. [Ed.note—Is today Warner Bros. Day at the trades?], in which they hope to recapture the carnal chemistry they enjoyed in their previous collaboration. [Variety]
· American Idol continues to destroy everything in its path. Interestingly, its Nielsen halo effect is now even boosting its lead-ins, bringing Bones its highest ratings in a year. [THR]
· In speculating about how moving beloved, but ratings-challenged, Friday Night Lights to a better timeslot might improve the show's chances of survival, Var invokes the name of Freaks and Geeks, the standard by which all beloved-but-ratings-challenged-series- that-were-killed-off-too-quickly are judged. [Variety]
If you stopped watched American Idol after the audition rounds, you'd be forgiven if you somehow mistook the reality colossus as the search for America's greatest schizophrenic. (Symptoms: "delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, grossly disorganized behavior, dressing inappropriately, crying frequently...") Once the parade of psychotics passes by our TV sets and back into the crazy jungle, however, the cream eventually does begin to rise to the top—whether through pure talent, or with the help of a story about one's father's botched murder-suicide attempt. Jennifer Hudson definitely fell into the former camp when she stumbled onto the Idol stage in Season 3, but perhaps her current dizziness from trying on Oscar gowns has given her temporary amnesia regarding just how long-range and accurate 19 Management's sniper-fire can be:
While all the latest buzz around ill-advised marketing campaigns hysterically misconstrued as acts of terrorism is currently clustered around yesterday's freakout over some harmless, flashing, bird-flipping Aqua Teen Hunger Force devices placed around Boston, a story in today's LAT reminds us of the similar events of last April, when Paramount's planting of suspicious, wire-sprouting music-boxes inside the Times' newspaper vending machines to promote Mission: Impossible III exacerbated many L.A. residents' quiet fears that Tom Cruise is bent on world domination. The LAT reports that federal officials are mulling the idea of suing both the studio and the paper over the stunt:
In a brief preview of an article to appear in the upcoming Resurrection Issue of Radar (much more background info on that here for the curious), Ben "The Gatecrasher" Widdicombe assembles a variety of anecdotes, that when taken together, seem to add up to the shocking revelation that serial studio dumpee Jim Carrey might be somewhat difficult to work with: Tales of unbidden urination, tantrum-having, and fun-list-deletion follow:
Universal has hardly had time to refuel the Brinks trunk since it dumped out a pile of cash to acquire the rights to the inspiring story of displaced, soccer-playing kids from war-torn nations it hopes to one day reimagine as Kicking & Screaming II: The Fugees, but it's already emerged triumphant from another bidding war, beating out New Line and Warner Bros. for the script Nottingham by coughing up "seven figures" to its writers (the creators of recently canceled Showtime series Sleeper Cell) and betting another $20 million that mild-mannered character actor Russell Crowe (A Good Year) will shine when given a chance to finally be the center of attention of a big-budget project. The script's high-concept of "Robin Hood, but where the Sheriff of Nottingham is the good guy" is so "now why didn't I think of that and become a millionaire overnight?" simple that Imagine's Brian Grazer, who'll be superproducing for Universal, will be overheard at various cocktail parties over the next month telling transfixed conversation partners, "You know, I always felt in my gut that Nottingham was misunderstood and Robin Hood was kind of a dick, but I knew that if I waited long enough, someone would finally tap into my consciousness and put it all together."
