· If it weren't for Dark Knight news, there wouldn't have been much news at all. After dispatching the Joker, Batman took on his toughest foe to date, the deranged Momzo The Clown (specialty: extortion). Batman denies all of the charges, which is just fine with new Oscar frontrunner Aaron Eckhart.
· NBC announced that Jay Leno will be abdicating his Tonight Show throne on May 29, 2009 while a disguised Jay Leno sat in the audience cracking wise. Meanwhile, Jimmy Fallon will be spinning his wheels online for a few months before they let him loose on air.
· Miley "Slut!" Cyrus took to the YouTubes to wage war on her new rival, Selena Gomez.
· If you come within 1,000 yards of Brangelina's test tube babies, Brad Pitt will beat you to a pulp.
· We finally learned what Judd Apatow's favourite season of The Wire was.
· Surfer dude Matthew McConaughey cashed a $3 million check from OK! for baby pictures of young prince Levi.
· Maybe it's just us, but Lyons & Mankiewicz doesn't quite have the same ring as Ebert & Roeper (let alone Siskel & Ebert).
· Cuts at Vantage and Netflix made it another tough week for indie film.
· Fer sure, fer sure, we counted down our favourite Valley Girls.
· Don't bother with MapQuest, NPH can tell you how to get, how to get to Sesame Street.
· And finally, the passing of Estelle Getty affected everyone, from teary YouTube eulogists to our own Molly McAleer. The saddest part? None of the Golden Girls made it to the funeral. Nevertheless, the memory of Sophia Petrillo will always live on.

Read More »

· Kelsey Grammer dropped by The Tonight Show to talk about what it feels like to have a near-fatal heart attack, and the devastating cancellation of Back To You, and the phone call to his hospital bed telling him to clear his Fox offices, and the death of his dog, and the death of his mother. Happy weekend, everyone! [The Tonight Show]
· Just a little taste of what you're missing at Comic-Con. (Warning: May contain traces of bespandexed nutsack.) [Wired]
· The final Britney/K-Fed verdict is in. She has to pay him $20,000 a month in ridiculous-watch-game upkeep fees. [Reuters]
· A rundown of what Comic-Con visitors saw at today's The Wolfman panel included some footage and an eerie tagline—"The power of Satan to change men into beasts"—that we're almost positive was used in a Paris Hilton fragrance campaign. [AICN]
·And finally, we proudly present one of God's Mistakes: The pigkey. [BWE.tv]

Read More »

With two days of dog-hair-flinging and abortion confessionals throwing The View set into chaos, the impish presence of noted slingback sprite Neil Patrick Harris came as a welcome relief. Of course, the panel went straight in for the Britney kill: Harris was open about the experience of hosting the troubled singer's two-episode guest arc on How I Met Your Mother, noting that she was "out of her element," but that it was "cool" and that "she's looking better now." Still, burned before, he acknowledged that anything he said would likely be twisted beyond recognition by a scandal-hungry celebrity media machine. He then insinuated, with nothing more than a cocked eyebrow and sidelong glance to Whoopi Goldberg, that Britney propositioned the five series regulars with a celebratory wrap orgy.

Read More »

Katherine Heigl has never failed to shock us, whether she's yapping about her highly tuned gaydar or wearing dresses made out of The Darjeeling Limited's costume leftovers. But her latest comments on her childhood spent growing up Mormon suggest that, on top of burning Emasculated Husband Joshua Kelley's pinky finger and forcing him to wait until the very second her biological clock beeps "Procreate!" to have kids, she may even make the poor guy raise said kids Big Love-style. As she recently told a British tab:

"I'm not as disciplined about it was I once was, but I hope to find my way back as I get older and a little less selfish...I'm ashamed to say that I've just got very lazy about it. I satisfy my vices instead of fighting them."

Read More »

A note slipped over the Defamer transom this afternoon hints that all is not well in Nottingham, Ridley Scott's reimagining of the Robin Hood legend which was set to begin shooting with Russell Crowe and a really, really, really excited Sienna Miller sometime next month. But we're hearing now that the film — which twists Crowe's Sheriff of Nottingham as the hero against Robin Hood's ruthless thief — is postponed indefinitely. SAG strike fears, as Miller alluded to in June? Unavailable historical background on Maid Marian's merkin? Inquiries to Universal (which last year paid seven figures for the script) and Scott's pals at Imagine Entertainment weren't immediately returned, leaving us in the lurch for a long weekend to come. Alas, we'll always have Costner.

Read More »

The Brits are always fond of reminding us of just how many stars they've discovered, sent our way, and watched dominate the last decade's Best Actress Oscar pool. And Keira Knightley is certainly one of their most notable success stories. But as much as they love gushing over their own born-and-bred A-listers, whenever a newer, younger little Brit with potential comes along, they love yanking that shiny crown off the last pout-y superstar and placing it atop the unknown's pretty-ish head. Which leads us to 16-year-old Georgia "The Next Kiera Knightley" Groome, the upcoming star of the irresistibly-titled Angus, Thongs, And Full-Frontal Snogging, hailed by The Daily Mail as Bridget Jones for teenagers. But after reading more about the film and its quirky dialogue (imagine a script co-written by Diablo Cody and Anthony Burgess), not to mention its leading lady's disturbing ignorance on all things Johnny Depp-related, we came up with three reasons why Georgia will have a hard time filling Keira's impossibly narrow shoes:

Read More »

That familiar feeling is washing over us all again. It's the same feeling that we get at the end of each and every work week. You know what we're talking about. Your brain is tired, your stomach is empty and you're ready for it just to be the weekend already. Well, before you head home to tip back a few root beers, make sure you get a good base going by grabbing hold of this week's Dirt Sandwich with two hands and tearing into it with reckless abandon. Nothing gets the weekend started like Molly McAleer's exquisitely crafted, open-faced look at the wonderous world of celebrity infotainment program. From Christian Bale's arrest for assault to James Blunt's orgy off the isle of Ibiza, you can bet that all of your cravings will be (at least temporarily) satisfied once you let the glory of the Dirt Sandwich wash over you. Enjoy!

• WATCH VIDEO

Read More »

Uh-oh—don't let that crying kid on YouTube see this, lest we prepare for a tsunami of waterworks that could very well short-out the entire internet: None of the surviving Golden Girls showed up to Estelle Getty's funeral. Not even her own daughter. Inside Edition tracked down two of the three to find out where they were:

Read More »

As noted here yesterday, we missed the Fox PR Caravan to San Diego Comic-Con, but that shouldn't suggest we don't (or you shouldn't) care about the geek gangbang unfolding as we speak. To the contrary, we've actually managed to find a handful of highlights worth passing along, from Rose McGowan's overactive tongue to Benicio Del Toro's narcolepsy to an all-Lego Batman — and more! It's the next best thing to not being there, we promise!

Read More »

In the latest Pap Said / Celeb Said scandal, the mystical forests of Brangelina's French estate turned into a bloody battleground where one ruthless pap and the Jolie-Pitts' head of security attacked each other with walkie-talkies and teeth. As the NY Daily News reports, freelance photographer Luc Goursolas was so determined to slip into the compound unnoticed that he spent five hours on foot, decked himself out in camouflaged clothing, only to come face-to-unhappy-face with the soccer team's unamused top guard. As Goursolas claims:

Read More »

To say that Meg Ryan's career is in a free-fall would be to imply that her career hasn't already hit rock bottom. While it's true that she's poised for a potential comeback in this fall's remake of The Women, anyone with half a brain realises that her star died the day the news broke that she was schtupping Russell Crowe on the set of Proof Of Life back in 2000. Making matters even worse for America's Former Sweetheart™, in Meg's newest (straight-to-DVD) movie called My Mom's Hot Boyfriend, she becomes the latest in a long string of actresses to strap herself into a fat suit only to magically "slim down" to win the heart of a handsome man — a trick which stopped being funny the second time that the Friends gang went to that well. While we're not about to get up on a pedestal and start going off about the offensiveness of fat suits, this news did prompt us to go back and take a look at some of the stars who have donned prosthetics to plump up on-screen in the past (rarely, if ever, to humorous effect). Play along with our latest round of Defamer Bingo after the jump.

Read More »

We're prepared to be in the minority of viewers who could pretty much take or leave American Teen, director Nanette Burstein's new documentary about the turbulent senior years of five Indiana high-schoolers. While the film has found a fairly inspired critical following and scored consistent audience accolades during its short time on the festival circuit (starting at Sundance, where Paramount Vantage bought it for around $1 million), we tend to like our characters a little more relatable, our drama a little less forced, our resolutions a little less predictable.

Read More »

· The rumors are true! Darren Aronofsky will write and direct a sequel to RoboCop for MGM, with both parties hoping they can score a piece of this guy-in-a-stupid-costume-noir mania currently gripping the planet. [Variety]
· A third Harold & Kumar movie is coming. Details are scarce, but word has it they will partake of the herb and refer to their skin colours a lot, and that Neil Patrick Harris will make a cameo. [Variety]
· The fate of SAG leadership hangs in the balance, with splintered factions Membership First and Unite for Strength vying not just for control, but also for Most Nerdy Name That Sounds Like A Star Trek RPG Subtitle. [Variety]
· Warner Bros. and Leonardo DiCaprio's production company are "quietly putting out word" that they'd like to make a feature version of The Twilight Zone. But wait! There's a twist ending to this item: Everyone has a pig snout! Beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder. [THR]
· Comic-Con was overrun by "rabid teenage fangirls" at the Twilight panel, who rushed the stage, tore the panel apart limb from limb, and feasted on their flesh. That's the last time we let girls into Comic-Con! [THR]
· MTV is developing a show based on Elizabeth Berkley's teen girl advice site AskElizabeth.com. This strikes us as a terrible idea, but we guess someone has to undo all the damage wrought by The Hills. Might as well be Nomi Malone. [THR]

Read More »

We didn't actually think she had it in her, but the world's most rapidly maturing 15-year old, Miley Cyrus, is behaving like, well, a 15-year old for once. Just as reports surfaced that her rival in tween porn and Disney affection Selena Gomez may be dating Cyrus' ex-boyfriend, we learn that the Battle Of The Tweens has been going on far longer than we thought. About a month ago, the wet t-shirt contestant decided to team up with her BFF and film a YouTube video mocking Selena and her partner in underage midriff-baring crime, Demi Lovato. Have we lost you? Not to worry! The only two things you really need to know before watching this oddly hilarious clip are: we're slightly worried Miley has found her daddy's liquor cabinet, and Demi Lovato is the next Demi Moore.

Read More »

Social networking phenomenon Facebook, everyone's favourite online poke-orgy, was quickly adopted by Hollywood types. As such, buried inside its various features—its Status Updates, its "Wall-to-Wall" graffiti nonsense—there are thousands of showbiz stories just waiting to be discovered. We think of College Road Trip director Roger Kumble, who admitted he was "trying not to hit refresh on Rotten Tomatoes" the day reviews came out accompanied by their dreaded green splat. In that vein, we bring you a screengrab fresh off the home page of comic Orny Adams, best known for being the younger, hungrier ying to Jerry Seinfeld's richer-than-God yang in the stand-up doc Comedian. His status updates—one at 8:12 a.m., the next 6:50 p.m.—tell a whole Hollywood story unto themselves:

Read More »

WHEREAS, the Star Wars franchise comprises six films about the legend of Anakin Skywalker, his son Luke, a bunch of puppets and their exploits with the Force, and

Read More »

Accosted recently by a Defamer correspondent moments after receiving the first ever Just For Laughs Comedy Person of the Year Award in Montreal, Hollywood comedy baron Judd Apatow somehow agreed to commit to a short interview. Later that night, he'd appear before a rowdy crowd at Club Metropolis, hosting an all-stars comedy event billed as Apatow for Destruction. Judd opened the show by launching into a funny set that explored the not-always-tidy-side of family life and getting older. Soon after came Seth Rogen—basically Judd minus 15-or-so grounding years—with a raunchier act that included a riff on frequent self-pleasuring ("I forgot you could use hand lotion for something other than jerking off..."), and a notable preoccupation with all things gay. (On late-in-life movie star Ian McKellen: "As soon as Magneto lifted those cars, the guys sucking his dick dropped 50 years in age.") Newly announced VMAs host Russell Brand closed out the show. A deeply charismatic stage presence with an indelibly dirty mind, he's as comfortable dropping psychoanalytical insights as he is being a horny goofball (a hilarious bit about the gulping sound that means your oral sex partner really cares) or flippantly self-deprecating ("I use homeless people as scabby wishing wells. Vending machines for good karma...").

Read More »

Amid a summer of great American dogs and semi-scandalous ripoffs of ripoffs, the news that NBC is considering Rosie O'Donnell for a weekly variety show gig should provoke a little more than this dull ache in our frontal lobes. After all, this is a chance for more than just showcasing bad celebrity interviews and performances from the newest, cheapest talent from around the nation; this is an hour-per-week of Hasselbeck payback — in primetime, no less, according to EW.

Read More »

It's a shocking turn of events anticipated by only a handful of the most cynical romance-haters: Shayne Lamas, heiress to the Lamas Family acting dynasty, and British Bachelor Guy, a reality TV contestant from England, citing irreconcilable attention whoredom, have announced that their engagement is off. What's more—and we urge you now to take a seat if you aren't doing so already—the two will be going their separate ways forever. From usmagazine.com:

Read More »

Welcome to the latest edition of Defamer Attractions, your regular Friday guide to another oversaturated summer weekend of new movies. While The Dark Knight sets up Batcamp for another week at number one, another brooding franchise goes up against Team Apatow in the also-ran camp. A British classic gets a fine art-house face-lift, meanwhile, and a windfall of new DVD's will keep the agoraphobes among us busy for a while. As always, our opinions are our own, but they're bulletproof, so read on for the only filmgoing advice that matters.

Read More »