The soul-deadening imposition of commercial brands on your moviegoing experience got even more shameless this morning when the oft-overlooked ring of Hell know as "brandcameo" unveiled the winners of its fourth annual Product Placement Awards. You could probably guess at least most of the heavyweight competitors — your Apples, your Fords, your Manolos — from a glance at the last year's worth of releases, but that doesn't make the year's findings any less remarkable in context: The surveyors counted an average of 22.1 brands in each of the 20 films this year to have a No. 1 weekend at the box office. That number is down from 2007, when an average of nearly 25 brands were counted among the year's 32 top releases.

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While you might expect to be mildly offended by the people behind Date Movie, Epic Movie, and Meet the Spartans, it's usually because they're coming out with more movies rather than because of anything in the films themselves. Now, though, they've made the classy move of premiering their latest spoof, Disaster Movie, on August 29th — the third anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina disaster.

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Not to be outdone by the swift, shaky-cam destruction of its transcontinental nemeses in Cloverfield, Los Angeles is getting its own taste of catastrophe in the latest viral sensation to hit YouTube. At least we think it's L.A.; some have suggested that Case 1017 -- the grainy home video of HazMat-suited CDC officials and semi-automatic weapons fire that has attracted 1.1 million views since Saturday -- is a tease for Cloverfield 2 or M. Night Shyamalan's forthcoming Philly disaster epic The Happening. Follow the jump, however, for what turns out to be a much simpler explanation.

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· In this clip from the increasingly depressing Celebrity Rehab, we learn that Brigitte Nielsen's husband doesn't exactly have a firm grasp on the English language. Either that or heavy bouts of boozing really give Brigitte a wicked case of the munchies.
· Never got around to seeing Cloverfield: The Movie but still want to see what the monster looks like? Then take a gander at the toy that's going to retail for $99.99! Why so pricy? Batteries ARE included. [Slashfilm]
· Anne Hathaway's armpits are positively resplendent (if you're into that sort of thing). [Goldenfiddle]
· Lily Allen has gone goth. Didn't see that one coming. [Daily Mail]
· How can this be? CBS decided to renew NUMB3RS but left How I Met Your Mother precariously perched on the bubble. Inconceivable! [TV Decoder]

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· Looking for inventive ways to develop scripted programming during the writers strike, CBS Paramount TV reaches across our northern border to partner with CTV to produce the police drama Flashpoint. which will be scripted and shot in Canada. "[The production values] will be as good as any American production," somewhat defensively notes a source, trying to alleviate fears that CBS is trying to save money by eventually airing some second-rate Mountie melodrama badly overdubbed to eliminate suspicious Canadian accents. [Variety]

· As expected, the WGA has reached an interim deal with the Grammys, saving the highly expendable awards show from suffering the same undignified fate as the Golden Globes. Reacts Recording Academy president Neil Portnow, revealing that he may never have watched a Grammys telecast: "Having our talented writers on the team further ensures the highest level of creativity and innovation, something our audience has come to expect every year." [THR]

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With the secret of Cloverfield now out, legions of American thrill-seeking moviegoers are emerging from theatres with one finger pressed to their puckered mouths, trying to make it to the cineplex restroom before succumbing to the effects of CBS, or Cloverfield Barf Syndrome. Theatres have taken to posting warnings about the film's side-effects (see photo), and some have even gone so far as to set up [spoiler alert] plastic-tarp containment zones, where suspected victims are quickly herded by ushers in HAZMAT suits before they can detonate into a splat of green liquid. With panic over the quickly spreading condition increasing, CNN.com approached some physicians for advice:

"This is a classic case of vertigo," said Dr. Michael G. Stewart, chairman of otorhinolaryngology (ear, nose and throat medicine) at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weil Cornell Medical Center. "You can look around and feel like things are moving, when they aren't."

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You know, Hollywood has a dream, too: Seeing summer box office numbers in the dead of January. This weekend, that dream has finally come to pass, bringing movie executives of all stripes and luxury-car-driving-categories out of their offices and into the streets, to stand together and toss bushels of warm money into the air in a stirring showing of producerly love. The numbers:

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We've already run the advance reviews (what--you don't trust Nicholas Chance, Kid Detective Reviewer?), and given you an exclusive! semi-blurry insider's gallery of Wednesday night's premiere. But with today's opening, everyone can finally check out Cloverfield for themselves--or not, if Godzilla vs. Felicity isn't your thing. (It was totally our thing.) The reviews are in:

· "The doomed Gotham created by producer J.J. Abrams -- he with the golden Felicity, Alias, and Lost touch -- and his team is almost entirely populated by vapid, twenty-something nincompoops. Oops, I mean attractive, indistinguishable young people who handle cell phones, DV cameras, etc., with ease; call one another ''dude''; don't have anything interesting to say; and, perhaps as a result, don't listen to one another, even in an emergency." [EW.com]

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· Actually, it kinda looks like a dude to us.
· Spoiler alert! The Cloverfield Monster ... revealed! Click only if you must.
· "Did I, at any point, say to you, 'Flip the genre'? No. All I said was to put in a few more song and dance numbers."
· If the advance quotes are any indication, the new Pixar tell-all is going to read like a Dreamworks animation picture.
· We agree with The Fiddler, Ledger's Joker looks for the world like Beetlejuice.
· We loves us some Tina Fey, but the trailer for Baby Mama looks stillborn.

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Last night was the premiere of Cloverfield on Paramount's lot, an event they were kind enough to invite us to. Without getting too deeply into the what and the how of it, we'll only say that the movie was the rare release to receive a unanimous thumbs up from Defamer HQ: short, slick, and ferociously sweet.

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