Larry Birkhead, the photographer who has had sex with Anna Nicole Smith on multiple occasions and is seemingly OK with the world knowing this, has won a major legal victory: An LA Superior Court judge has ruled in favor of subjecting mama's little miracle, baby Dannielynn, to DNA testing in order to determine who is the child's natural father. From the AP report:
With precious few hours until we kick off for our Christmas vacation, we never expected that the Celebrity DUI Gods would send down yet another drunk-driving mugshot for our amusement, but they've just delivered the gift of this Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, Gerry, the Kurt Cobain one) photo through their chosen vessels at The Smoking Gun. The Portland Mercury's Blogtown PDX fleshes out the arrest story with a police official's description of Van Sant, who was driving his Porsche SUV without his headlights on and burned some rubber at a red light: "He had glassy, watery, red eyes, slurred speech, and smelled strongly of alcohol." Unfortunately for the director, recent Drunken Famous Person Mugshot Hall of Fame inductee Rip Torn's playful jailhouse modeling session set the bar impossibly high for his peers, making Van Sant's effort seem all the more uninspired and dour. If there's one lesson Torn has taught us, it's to reclaim one's boozy dignity by having some fun with a potentially embarrassing situation.
· While idling in your car for what seemed like days in a futile attempt to escape from The Grove's parking structure, you've often suspected you were actually trapped in a multi-tiered, Alighierian Inferno. Losanjealous offers photographic proof of your fear.
· "Dick in a Box": the t-shirt is now available on the internets. A quibble: Where's the bow and gift wrapping? It almost looks like you're being directed to put your junk in that birdhouse.
You know who really hates Frosty the Fucking Snowman? This guy.
Cityrag directs you to the 50 Greatest Cartoons of All Time.
· The Miss Nevada USA pics, uncensored—except for the Splash News watermark all over them. [Very NSFW]
· The ThighMaster presents The Girls Of The Wonder Years.
PrivacyWatch celebrity sightings are submitted by our readers, so send them in often: Baby Jesus implores you! Submit yours to tips[AT]defamer.com (please put "sighting" or "PrivacyWatch" in the subject line) and share the thrill of Tom Arnold being your first celebrity sighting despite having lived in Los Angeles for several years.
· Music round-up: Sepultura at the Whiskey; Smegma at The Echo; Los Abandoned plays your "Spaceland on Ice" skating music at Pershing Square.
· At the UCB Theatre's "Motherfucker!" a handful of female comedians prove their chops by doing long-form improv without the crutches of scenes about relationship, babies, or periods. No word on whether shopping is also off limits—they're brave, not crazy.
· Why flip randomly to virtually any channel to enjoy It's A Wonderful Life when you can watch it on the big screen at the Aero, sharing in the communal experience of openly weeping at the holiday tear-jerking classic in a room full of sentimental strangers?
Alas, what we feared was all but inevitable has come to pass: the Miss Universe Organization has decided to strip Miss Nevada USA of her title following the sudden appearance of some racy™ photos, rather than take the unexpected opportunity the free-spirited, bi-curious pageanteer provided them to re-brand their buttoned-down contest as something on the cutting edge of youth culture. TMZ.com got its hands on the full set of pictures that cost our poor tiara-clad martyr her sash, should you wish to more fully inform your opinion about how badly pageant justice was miscarried today.
Iconic former gay porn star Jeff Stryker (nee Chuck Peyton) and his North Hollywood neighbor Paul Kulak, described as a "juvenile delinquent-turned-javelin champion," have found themselves embroiled in an ongoing bitter feud over "the Woodshed," which from best as we can surmise is some kind of open mic night for local, folk-music-loving weirdos. Peyton hates the noise and crowds; Kulak just wants to feel the music, dude. It's the quintessential, porn star vs. hippie L.A. story, and according to the Daily News, things have gotten ugly. Disco dancing ugly:
Sure, Viacom's had a pretty tumultuous year, with enough layoffs, tear-soaked executive shitcannings, high-profile pissing matches between superannuated overlords drunk on power and the overpaid, fading megastars who test their patience, and random on-lot conflagrations to test the morale of even the most slavishly dedicated drone. But that's precisely why a heartfelt, year-ending memo from the corporation's new CEO (you know, the person who replaced the guy who everybody loved) is so important: Without a well-spun accounting of all the things that went right within the faceless multimedia corporation (15 Golden Globe nominations! The launch of a bilingual music channel targeting bicultural Hispanics! Other stuff!) and an obligatory expression of thanks for hard work manifested mainly in stock price fluctuations, employees might be sent off to their holiday vacations thinking only about the turmoil of the past 12 months. After the jump, New Fearless Leader Phillipe Dauman's 2006-capping note to his charges (forwarded to us by someone who wants us all to feel like we're part of the corporate family), which is sure to send his little Viacommies to their brief hiatus pumping their fists and ready for the fresh challenges of the New Year.
In our ongoing effort to bring you the best of year end movie lists and awards—no critics' circle too far or too small!—another round-up:
· Chargers fans also love Clint Eastwood, as Letters From Iwo Jima is awarded best picture and Eastwood best director from the San Diego Film Critics Society. And while Helen Mirren once again gets top actress honors (her certificate, suitable for framing, is in the mail), they then proceed to throw several curveballs in the other acting categories, including Lili Taylor as best supporting actress for Factotum, Ray Winstone as best supporting actor for The Proposition, and Ken Takakura as best actor for his work in Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles. From the title alone, that sounds to have been a lot more demanding a role than Mirren's, which mainly required her to sit around in a palace, sip tea, and act bitchy. [Variety]
· The Phoenix Film Critics Society Awards gave United 93 best picture, Mirren best actress, Forest Whitaker best actor, and Little Miss Sunshine best screenplay, proving stretching out Blind Melon's "No Rain" video into 100 minutes of indie movie quirk clichés was an idea whose time had come. [OscarWatch]
· indieWIRE's first annual Critics Poll—a descendant of the Village Voice poll— asked 107 North American film critics to assess the year's best, with a special eye to movies that may have been overlooked. Number One, and far ahead of the pack, is Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. [IndieWire.com]
· The Onion A.V. Club gives their top honor to Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men, with special mentions to the underrated Brick (#4), and Half Nelson (#6), which succeeds in its inner-city high school inspirational teacher story despite a lack of a Coolio song on the soundtrack. [AV Club]
DGA ScreenerGate rages on! The Guild reverses its shocking no-screeners policy reversal by banning the DVDs for this award season, then promising there will be no awards campaigner mindfucking next year, when they'll be allowed. "The most awkward and disrespectful awards snafu of the year!" says Outraged Anonymous Exec of The Undisclosed Studio Review-Journal. [Variety]
Drumroll, please: The last Harry Potter book will be named Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Titillating rumor that we just made up: Harry and Hermione will finally get it on, as will Ron and the new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor. [THR]
Rocky Balboa picks up $6.2 million on its first day of release, prompting MGM to rush out ads touting the film as the "Number One Movie In America On Wednesday, December 20th." [Variety]
NY circuit court judges, network lawyers, and the FCC carry on a lively debate about when people can say "fuck" and "shit" on live television. [THR]
· While Americans largely ignored Clint Eastwood's English-language World War II movie, the Japanese seem to really love the one he made in their tongue. [Variety]
Michael Moore, the poster boy for anti-establishment doc makers with woeful personal grooming habits, must be feeling extremely relieved today, as the amputee war veteran who was suing over some interview footage of him shot for an NBC Nightly News segment, but which turned up in Fahrenheit 9/11, has had his case thrown out of court:
The AP brings up an angle we'd never considered regarding the Michael Richards Racist Tirade Incident: How might the public's lowered opinion of the man once universally beloved for playing Cosmo Kramer affect the sales of Seinfeld-inspired Festivus poles? Sales have been brisk so far this season, leading a representative from the $20,000-a-year unadorned metal rod industry to state that fans are understanding enough to look past the regrettable actions of an actor with rage issues to the real meaning of the fake holiday:
You've by now had some time to savor every last morsel of Donald Trump's buffet of fat jabs and stupid-lady jokes aimed squarely at Rosie O'Donnell. We can finally share with you the attack that started it all: a spirited invective in its own right from O'Donnell, in which she first performs an amazing approximation of the Manhattan land baron's otherworldy hair, then calls him out for his self-serving "pardoning" of the cokey-boozy reigning Miss USA, and concludes with heartwarming Hannukah wishes for Trump to "sit and spin, my friend."
The barrage of recent Miss USA-related scandals has made the stories completely blur together for us, making it nearly impossible to distinguish which tiaratard is off to Trump-ordered rehab, was dumped by MADD, or—and we may be misremembering this one—once sold herself into the harem of a blonde-hoarding sultan, a clear violation of pageant by-laws. In any case, the senseless media persecution of these young women for doing what comes naturally to a pageant winner set loose in the city (namely, binge-drinking themselves to temporary blindness, then publicly indulging in some light bisexuality) continues with the release of some racy™ photos of Miss Nevada USA partaking in the kind of harmless merriment that typically earns a vivacious gal a coveted cover slot on a Girls Gone Wild DVD. We hesitate to even offer a link to the allegedly controversial images, as we'd never want to be a party to anything that would have a chilling effect on future pageanteers flashing their goodies and making out with each other, but we feel it's important that each reader make up his or her mind about whether such innocent activities compromise a beauty contest title-holder's ability to wear a sash bearing her state's name while cutting a ribbon at a local car dealership.
Just five days after SNL's "Dick in a Box" (variously and coyly referred to as "A Special Box," "Special Treat in a Box," and "A Special Christmas Box") debuted on the show and on the YouTubes, the NY Times delivers the inside scoop on how a brave consortium of late-night programming executives, lawyers, and NBC's highest-ranking officers decided to release an uncensored version of the liberally bleeped clip on the internet, allowing fans to remove any lingering doubts that the male sex organs being sneakily proffered to the delighted women in the video may have, in fact, been referred to as "cock(s) in a box," best network decency practices be (cautiously) damned. Reports the Times:
Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) has cut ties with Miss Teen USA Katie Blair for her reported underage carousing with Miss Temporarily Disgraced USA Tara Conner, but it's expected that she will quickly rebound to sign on as a spokesperson for Mothers Totally In Favor Of Hot And Horny Pageant Chicks Getting Coked Up And Making Out (MTIFOHAHPCGCUAMO).
Evangeline Lilly's Hawaiian house burnt down, but as Michelle Rodriguez has been off the show for a while, fire inspectors have already ruled out the possibility that conflagration was caused by a flaming mai-tai drinking contest gone horrible awry.
Christians prepare to protest the pregnant, virgin Komodo dragon expected to give birth around Christmas, claiming the reptile is making a mockery of the sacred holiday.
· Over at HuffPo, Studio 60's Steven Weber does his best impression of 30 Rock's Alec Baldwin.
A Defamer operative who got his hands on a preview screener of FX's upcoming Dirt, Courtney Cox's attempt to launch an edgy, post-Friends TV career on basic cable by playing precisely the type of tabloid editor who torments her and her camera-shy family on a daily basis, submitted this brief review of the series's first two episodes. [Mild spoilers ahead, we suppose] As expected, there's FX's requisite naughtiness in the form of some semi-nudity and light swearing; somewhat less expected: Cox's repeated use of a vibrator and ex-Laker Rick Fox being bent over a hot tub and sodomized by a strap-on. Says our tipster:
The proliferation of lists this time of year is just a necessary December evil, like McDonald's Arch Card commercials, or carbon monoxide poisoning. In order to help you make heads or tails of all this obsessive year-end cataloging, a round-up:
· Entertainment Tonight has announced its annual "ET Hot List" in a press release, which basically tabulates which stars got the most mentions on the show that year. #1 is Tom Cruise, though his victory is somewhat soured by the fact that Anna Nicole Smith, having repeatedly sold them her own story for methadone and rent money, came in at an impressive #4. The full list is after the jump, for those of you for whom seasonal depressive disorder has not yet completely set in. [ETOnline]
· Entertainment Weekly named the cast of Grey's Anatomy as their "Entertainers of the Year," with Executive Editor Lori Majewski explaining that it's not just a show, "it's a phenomenon. Back in May when last season's final show aired, every place in New York City was empty. You could get a table at the best restaurants." We commend Majewski for going above and beyond the call of duty by canvassing every fine restaurant in Manhattan in anticipation of this not at all hyperbolic or hype-propagating quote. [Reuters]
· Cracked.com gives us a list of truly awful Christmas gifts, but we think the runner-up—an Adriane from Rocky action figure—should probably have taken top honors, if for nothing else looking like a GI Joe doll disguised as a fat Russian woman. [Cracked]
· BestWeekEver.tv is offering 10 Days of 10 Best Lists. Today's category, movie clichés, tackles an inconvenient truth that could ultimately pose a legitimate threat to our survival as a species: Eugene Levy oversaturation. [BWE]
