We knew something just didn't sit right with us when we previously noted Omar Sharif's racist beating of a Mastro's steakhouse valet. At a Beverly Hills courthouse hearing yesterday, the Lawrence of Arabia star's lawyer, legendary celebrity crusader Martin Singer, nobly cleared his absent client's name:
· Because even the tiniest fart in the hurricane of gossip-sheet flatulence represented by the Cruise-Holmes relationship cannot be ignored, we give you: Katie Buys Blue Blanket! We think!
· We have frequently referred to the sound we think we'll hear before we die, but Goldenfiddle might actually have an mp3 version of it.
· This is perhaps the best argument for a totalitarian dictatorship anyone has ever made.
· The NY Times' David Carr steps into the Oscar-blogging ring with nary a mention of the Fat Clooney Factor. Rookie mistake.
· Have some extra Rose Bowl tickets? Craigslist always provides exciting new ways to tackle the exchange of goods and services.
· And in what represents the dissolution of the most important marital relationship of our youth, Valerie Bertinelli and Eddie Van Halen are calling it quits. Love has truly died on this day.
If a major broadcast network were to undertake a miniseries about a sensitive subject like, say, the Holocaust, you would assume that if they partnered up with the son of a notorious Holocaust denier (and who also directed Passion of the Christ, a film that many considered anti-Semitic), they'd be doing so for a compelling and principled reason, right? So tell us, ABC, what was the high-minded explanation for Mel Gibson's potentially explosive involvement in such a project?
Professional ice hockey has had a time of it lately, still trying to play catch up after last season's disastrous labor strike and a steadily dwindling US audience. Forced to get creative, the NHL has pinned its hopes on the celebrity blog musings of one Elisha Cuthbert, who in her Hollywood Hockey Thoughts blog bio on NHL.com, calls herself "just an actress who loves the sport and does not play — but that doesn't mean I can't talk about it!" And no pom-pom waving arctic bunny she; this former Montrealer (we knew there was something we liked about this girl, despite the fact that she conveniently abandoned her hometown Canadiens for the LA Kings) is an insightful fan! Take for example her reasoned treatise on the art of booing turncoat players:
· Adam Sandler's heartbreaking amnesiac love story, 50 First Dates, screens twice tonight at the ArcLight. Star Drew Barrymore and producer Nancy Juvonen, apparently lacking something better to do on a Tuesday night, will stick around for Q&As after both showings.
· Music round-up: Echo and the Bunnymen at the House of Blues on Sunset; Pedro the Lion's David Bazan at the Knitting Factory; also at the KF: a showing of All Dolled Up, a documentary about the New York Dolls.
· Because there's been a jarring lack of items in this space touting the signing of "tongue-in-cheek design manifestos," Jonathan Adler presents My Prescription for Anti-Depressive Living at Book Soup.
With the end-of-year holiday quickly approaching, it's time for agencies to show their appreciation for the gatekeepers who prevent their Very Urgent Messages from disappearing into circular-file oblivion by greasing their palms with token "assistant gifts." A Defamer operative embedded on one of the big studio lots demonstrates his gratitude by offering this review of the trinkets CAA just dispatched to the call-rolling class:
Russell Crowe was not present at Sunday night's Museum of the Moving Image tribute to Ron Howard, presumably occupied with the exciting rebranding of his none-hit-wonder band, The Ordinary Fear of God (formerly Thirty Odd Foot of Grunt, saving, the $25 million per film actor recently explained, the expense of reprinting his TOFOG merchandise.) Seeing a prime opportunity in this Russelless evening to mock the self-serious superstar free of his glowering stares and the possibility of a knuckleballed dessert fork in the eye, many of the presenters had a field day at Crowe's expense:
It might be as simple as Robert Downey Jr. having misread the UNICEF Snowflake Ball invitation as "Dress Code: Strictly black eye"; then again, it could have been something much darker, perhaps involving a series of jerryrigged bunsen burners, a ball peen hammer, and a dime bag of the finest street-grade reindeer dust procurable with minimal lead time. We shall never know, because Downey Jr. made no reference to it when he presented the Danny Kaye Humanitarian Award. Not that we can blame him; get just a bit too honest about your personal foibles, next thing you know you're the poster boy for tough guy facial injuries.
• Does Jann want to sell off Wenner Media? [WWD]
• And does Time Warner no longer want to sell off part of AOL? [NYT]
• Former Regan Media flack Paul Crichton could be considering suing his old boss Judith over her characterization of his departure. Oh, the fun never stops over there. [Radar]
• Washington Post Magazine Reader Peter Carlson discovers the charms of erstwhile New York Presser and onetime Spicoli gondolier Matt Taibbi. [WP]
• ABC went with Vargas and Woodruff only after the network couldn't reach a deal with Charlie Gibson. [NYT]
• And apparently there's this cool blog revolutionizing Hollywood coverage. [LA Mag]
· Sony throws Columbia Tri-Star worldwide marketing president Geoffrey Ammer into the mouth of a volcano to atone for year that saw the disastrous releases of Stealth, XXX: State of the Union, and Bewitched. Should the slump continue next year, his predecessor will have her throat cut ceremonially in an ancient Aztec temple. [Variety]
· NBC becomes the latest network to jump into bed with Apple, offering downloads of current (The Office, L&O, Leno) and library (did someone say Knight Rider?) shows at the iTunes online store, [THR]
· We know that Var has its cute little way of playing with language, but they should really spare us the unfortunate and inevitable image of pocket-sized DreamWorks Animation mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg "tapping" anyone. [Variety]
· The Weinsteins sign home video distribution agreements with a company called Genius Products just to sound more intelligent; we make largely irrelevant joke about a company name to mask (poorly) our utter lack of originality. [THR]
· Hollywood Out of Ideas, Recycled Directors Edition: Paramount and producer Steven Spielberg bring Stephen Sommers, who was originally attached to the movie but left to do another project, back to write and direct the When Worlds Collide remake. [Variety]
For the second straight year, The Hollywood Reporter has named Anne Sweeney, co-chairman of Disney's media networks and president of the Disney-ABC Television Group (take a breath), the Most Powerful Woman in Hollywood.* (We'd do the THR one better and declare her Most Powerful Woman in the Universe, but we've long posited the existence of a planet populated entirely by a super-race of female entertainment executives, who dispatch their weaker citizens to Earth to run things until the eventual invasion.) As a reward for Sweeney's ability to keep the heel of her Manolo Blahniks firmly on the throats of power-list competition for the past 12 months, like MTV's Judy McGrath, Universal's Stacey Snider, and Sony's Amy "Can We Just Forget About 2005, Please?" Pascal, she's apparently been rewarded with a sassy new head shot on the Reporter's website (and reproduced here). Congratulations, and fingers crossed for the dynasty-solidifying threepeat!
The celestial prophetess gazing into her lunar oracle on black arts enthusiast Britney Spears' homepage is conjuring several dark omens: a cloud of pungent reefer smoke hanging over a newborn's crib; a grown man weeping at the foot of a tow truck operator; and the fast creeping despair of an abandoned and embittered mother, dancing as fast as she can:
Actor Rob Schneider, who earlier this year established himself as Hollywood's foremost practitioner of the epistolary form with his infamous open letter to LAT columnist Patrick Goldstein, takes the occasion of a reference to his role in 50 First Dates in a NY Times editorial on recently deceased Pat Morita's career ("Watch Rob Schneider play Ula, a leering Hawaiian in the Adam Sandler movie ''50 First Dates,'' with a pidgin accent by way of Cheech and Chong, and you get the sense that Hollywood still believes that there is no ethnic caricature a white actor can't improve upon.") to break out his finest stationery and ply his craft in a letter to the Times. Schneider notes his half-Filipino heritage, diffusing the "condescending white actor" argument, then discusses the genesis of his character:
· The LAT gives some front-page Calendar section love to "Peggy Archer," the pseudonymous set-dwelling. lighting-tech troublemaker behind the Totally Unauthorized blog, one of our favorites.
· "Listen here, Mr. Dreamy Eyes, I don't care if Heath didn't brush his teeth this morning. Plug your nose and kiss that cowboy like your life depends on it! I'm gonna get that Oscar nomination even if it makes your damn lips fall off."
· "'I went through some very lonely times,' the King Kong star said while promoting the movie. 'I spent a lot of time in my car crying my eyes out. One night, I drove along thinking, maybe I’ll take a left here, over the cliff, because I can’t take it any more.'” Then Naomi Watts remembered that was just a scene from Mulholland Drive, not her real life, and everything was fine again.
· Kirsten Dunst turned out for Saturday's USC-UCLA massacre.
· Leonardo DiCaprio produces a film about global warming, finally attains the coveted media honorific "actor-activist."
Film Threat's released the bottom ten of their annual Frigid 50 list, the rankings of Hollywood's coldest and least-influential players. Inexplicably, the industry's most ruthless power-moppet finds herself languishing among the Hilary Duffs, Ryan Phillippes, and Burt Reynolds of the world:
Time magazine has Steven Spielberg's only interview prior to the release of his latest film, Munich, heralded as a sure Oscar-shot for, among other things, the way it deftly entwines pangs of momentary assassin guilt into its aria of Mossad revenge killings. The eternally optimistic director (at least in his movies' last ten minutes), refers to Munich as a "prayer for peace." It's an uplifting sentiment, but it doesn't quite erase the fact that the onetime Ambassador of Childhood Wonder is now feeling more like a Debbie Downer:
