· Stephen Farber’s Reel Talk film series screens The World’s Fastest Indian (to paraphrase another movie: motorcyle, not feathers) at Landmark’s NuWilshire Theater, with a discussion to follow with director Roger Donaldson.
· Monday night music round-up: The (International) Noise Conspiracy (as always, parentheses theirs) at the Troubadour; Aqualung does two shows at the Silent Movie Theater; Cold War Kids at the Silverlake Lounge.
· At the 8th Annual Director's Cuts Film Festival at the Egyptian Theater, some of today's most cutting-edge music video directors present their short films, promising not to challenge the attention spans of their audience too severely in this different format.

The Defamer Special Correspondent on Celebrity Brunching spent part of a leisurely afternoon monitoring the food intake of one of Hollywood's biggest stars, filing this brief report on the red-hot new trend of "bring your own cuisine":

LA Observed alerts us to a joint fundraising campaign by feminist activist groups Guerrilla Girls and Movies By Women, with their goal being to mount the billboard pictured above on the Sunset Strip by Oscar season (you might remember driving by a similar one back in 2002). The keystone of their "Startling Statistics" campaign, the art direction-deficient billboard (seriously, gals, couldn't you have asked one of your art-fag friends to make pretty?) reads: "The Anatomically Correct Oscar. He's white & male, just like the guys who win!" Beneath that are the promised "startling" (and accurate; rounded to the nearest decimal, in fact!) statistics. But we predict what will really end up causing chain reaction collisions is the accompanying illustration of, from best we can make out, Harvey Weinstein taking a golfing break at a nudist colony.

You don't say? Because we thought the legendary director of such video game adaptation masterworks as House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark (featuring Tara Reid as a genius anthropologist), and BloodRayne was about to blow us all away by trying his hand at a lighthearted romantic comedy.

The Smoking Gun has obtained a letter sent to a number of publications from Jennifer Aniston's lawyers, with a subject line: "Jennifer Aniston/Invasion of Privacy," (note to her people: great title for possible Derailed follow up!). At issue is a paparazzo, a Hubble-sized telephoto lens, and some topless photographs of Jennifer sunbathing at her home:

We once again celebrate the cameraphone heroism of our readers, who risk life and limb (and in this case, stungunning by the Governor's security detail) to bring us blurry, low-resolution pictures of famous people engaged in utterly mundane activities. Our spy captured Arnold Schwarzenegger at Barney's in Beverly Hills (click the image to enlarge), and the spectacular choice of camera angle makes it look as if part of his shoe-shopping ritual includes ensuring that all footwear also fits snugly around the 'Lil Terminator. Another operative noted that Schwarzenegger spent some time in the handbag department as well, either pointing to a potential Christmas gift for Maria Shriver, or the further exhibitionistic exploration of his apparent leather goods fetish.

Madonna's return to the top of the British music charts is over, for now at least, knocked off by an Eminem best-of release called "Curtain Call The Hits," a triumph somewhat marred by the fact that a local impersonator has just been found guilty of taking his tribute act too far:

· Someone at Comedy Central finally asks, "Hey, what happened to the stuff we paid for before Dave Chappelle ran out on us?" and now plans to air the bits and pieces of Chappelle's Show's aborted third season sometime in 2006, both online and on TV. Among the highlights is the eerily prescient sketch, "Dave Takes Comedy Central's Money and Flees For Some Chill-Out Time in South Africa," starring, of course, the ghost of Rick James. [Variety]
· Fox confirms that a Fantastic Four sequel is a go. They boldly plan a July 4, 2007 release—at least until another studio comes along and stakes out the holiday weekend for its bigger, better blockbuster, at which time FF 2 will be rescheduled for February of 2008. [THR]
· Mel Gibson's newly established Con Artists Productions sets up four TV projects, three of which are legal dramas—one invoking LA Law, one recalling Moonlighting, and one also incorporating medical drama, which we will refer to as an Night Court/St. Elsewhere hybrid, just to cover all the 80s television bases. [Variety]
· ABC greenlights a comedy pilot from Ed producers Rob Burnett and Jon Beckerman. which replaces lovable, do-gooding schlump Tom Cavanaugh with lovable, wants-to-rob-a-celebrity schlump Donal Logue. [THR]
· Bravo broadens its horizons to include programs that people actually might want to watch. [Variety]

Last night was the Kennedy Center Honors, which for the uninitiated is kind of like the Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, minus drunken, rambling AC/DC acceptance speeches, but plus big, poofy ballgowns and President Bush. Among this year's honorees were Robert Redford, Tina Turner and Tony Bennett; suffice it to say, simmering anti-Bush resentment tainted the proceedings:

Buried deep within a hard-hitting NY Times Style Magazine profile of current Woody Allen muse Scarlett Johansson's shopping habits is this little nugget, which in its own small, delightful way revives the highly entertaining post-The Island feud between one of America's best-dressed fauxteurs and his onetime star:

Late Friday, Brad Pitt's publicist executed a classic, "issue a press release and run like hell for the safety of the weekend" PR maneuver, dropping this bomb about her client's decision to hyphenate Angelina Jolie's growing refugee brood:

Sit tight and await the coming year-end releases of Narnia, King Kong, the Spielberg thing, and, finally, the gay cowboy movie. In the meantime, the weekend's box office numbers:

· Drunk driver celebrities are everywhere, smirking and red-eyed as they turn your evening commute into a steely deathtrap.
· Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck have a baby daughter, and name her Violet. Child grows up to be obsessive gum chewer, bloats to purple death in freak candy factory accident.
· A Thanksgiving touch-football game, LA style, starring Ari Emanuel, Garry Shandling, Mike Ovitz, Tim McGraw and Faith Hill. After working up an appetite, they sat down to a delicious meal of oven-roasted CAA assistant with all the fixins.
· So A-list that just one 'a' in their last names won't do, Jake Gyllenhaal, his sister Maggie, and her boyfriend and his Jarhead co-star Peter Sarsgaard, are spotted gorging themselves on macrobiotic delights, then find themselves the fusion core of the Brokeback premiere.
· Ten days after a much fanfaired engagement announcement, Kimberly Stewart and Laguna Beach's Talan call the whole thing off. Stewart sells her 5-carat engagement ring and donates all the proceeds to Pakistani earthquake relief. Yes, of course we are kidding.
· George Clooney's HotWheels, actual size, part deux.
· The Simple Life is resuscitated by the E! network, but the new format keeps Nicole and Paris apart, denying us the sweet, sweet music of their classic duet, the "Sada Sa" Greyhound Bus Song (though its basically the Family Feud theme).
· Joel Silver invented Ultimate Frisbee. Um...of course we knew that!
· Now you can pour Donald Trump Vodka in your Trump Ice water bottle and no one at the office will know the better! A reader envisions the bus stop ads, while we envision skipping town when The Apprentice gets here.
· Idol, shmidol.
· Defamer reader challenge: if you go to the Grove and don't see a celebrity, send us a full report!
· Michael Eisner, you just left Disneyland! What are you going to do now?!
· Beware! The end (of lunchtime e-mailing) is nigh!
· Oprah and David make televised animal love; nine months later, a mixed race media Messiah is born.
· Nicole Richie lies to her fans, but looks great doing it.

· A bikini-assisted appearance on E! continues to propel once-forgotten Full House middle child Jodie Sweeten up the horny websearch charts.
· Dude—Snapes on a Plane!
· The way to an Academy member's voting heart is almost certainly through his perforated liver.
· The Smoking Gun guys are definitely keeping themselves busy today.

Friday
· Freitagnachtmusik: The 88 at the Troubadour; Sean Hayes (no, not the actor, wiseass) at the Hotel Café; Jimmy Eat World plays at the Glass House in Pomona.
· The always hilarious (our words, not his publicist's) Andy Kindler joins Dan Mintz for a lovely night of stand-up at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater; later, Jen Kirkman relives her traumatic experiences growing up a "girl dork" at the same venue.
Saturday
· The Wrens at the Troubadour; Kayne West at the Gibson Amphitheatre; Anya Marina at the Hotel Café.
· Bite, scratch, and donkey-punch your way to huge savings on designer clothing at the legendary Billion Dollar Babes sample sale, with the general admission carnage starting at 8am at Quixote Studios.
Sunday
· Rachael Ray gets cookbook collectors totally hot and bothered in under 30 minutes at the Barnes and Noble at the Grove.
· If you locked Metallica and Manheim Steamroller in a log cabin for a week before Christmas with only a keg of beer and a gallon of Spanish Fly, the result might sound a lot like the Trans Siberian Orchestra. (Sunday night at Arrowhead Pond.)

Let's not waste any more of our short time together before the weekend and get right to your responses to today's guessing game. But first, take another sip from the cup of One Stunted, Surly Blind Vice:

Hollywood types are so hypercompetitive that professional athletes can seem like Zoloft-abusing eunuchs by comparison, so the only thing surprising about this Reliable Source injury report for a Turkey Day pick-up football game is that only one player wound up in the hospital:

Hundreds of literature-loving Memphis hearts were broken yesterday when the well-publicized Truth About Diamonds book signing by author and talent-haver Nicole Richie (sans ghostwriter) was abruptly cancelled, "Due to Illness." Blagg Blogg took the news particularly hard, and snapped the sad picture above left. Of course, we were all deeply concerned for Ms. Richie's well being, and had begun to wonder if father Lionel was perhaps not quite as "on the case" as he had promised to be.

Join us once again in this moving moment of heartfelt thanks to this week's sponsors, whose sweet, sweet money keeps us out of (at least twice a week, anyway) the breadline. If you'd like to advertise on Defamer and cause seething resentment in your soon-to-be bankrupt competitors, see this page.

If there's one thing we know we can rely on in this world, it's The Smoking Gun's ability to delight us in the wake of virtually every celebrity-related legal run-in. They've already obtained the mugshots of seemingly pie-eyed Lost motorists Michelle Rodriguez and Cynthia Watros, who were arrested in Honolulu last night under suspicion of pounding too many mai tais before getting behind the wheel. (If you get close enough to your monitor, you can catch a whiff of the rum fumes rising off their images. Try it, it's fun!) And kudos to the police photographer who obviously denied them access to Visine until after the shoot, a bold choice that really paid artistic dividends.