Brett Ratner has an essay on BlackBook's website about how hard it is to be him because everyone is talking about how awesome Brett Ratner is on the internet. Sorry, but all we could find is people making fun of you.

Kristen Stewart thinks she's boring now sans social life. Oh, honey. Lady Gaga wants Kanye to respect the cock(y decision she made to leave their tour). Jon Gosselin: still a cock. Presenting your Saturday Morning Gossip Roundup:

One thing is for sure, where ever you stand on the Roman Polanski case, you are angry today. Fingers are pointing; names are being called. And we're just getting warmed up. Here's your day in Polanski:

Bethenny Frankel has been doing her best to remain in the spotlight as she continues her quest to get people to buy her diet book, which we haven't read, of course, but sounds like a recipe for certain death considering it suggests eating less than 1,000 calories a day and never eating more than three bites of any one dish. Last week, she drummed up some attention by classily lifting up her dress for the cameras at a book party. She's hit up half a dozen events this week, stopping off at IFC's "America's Hottest Rocker Mom Contest" today (fitting since while she isn't a mom, she isn't a housewife either), and, last night, a party for Frangelico at STK. New York caught up with her at yesterday's party and asked her to recount a "scandalous story about herself from back in the day," a request she was happy to comply with, especially since those Jersey girls have kind of upped the ante with their tales of coke-snorting and stripping in recent days:

Michelle Obama was the main attraction at Time magazine's sixth annual 100 "most influential" ceremony at Lincoln Center last night. She was joined by a predictably massive group of A-listers, including Oprah, Harvey Weinstein, Mort Zuckerman, Steve Schwarzman, Jeff Bewkes, Diane Sawyer, Barbara Walters, Whoopi Goldberg, Joy Behar, Carine Roitfeld, Gayle King, Stella McCartney, Claire Danes and Hugh Dancy, Kate Hudson, Liv Tyler, Jay Leno, Lorne Michaels, Jimmy Fallon and Nancy Juvonen, Charlie Rose, David Lauren and Lauren Bush, Ann Coulter, Suze Orman, Arianna Huffington, Kate Betts, Andy Serwer, Paul Krugman, Vivi Nevo and Ziyi Zhang, Andrea Mitchell, Chris Matthews ...

Mariah Carey turns 39 today. Quentin Tarantino is turning 46. Fergie is 34. Dance Theatre of Harlem founder Arthur Mitchell turns 75. British actor Michael York is 67. Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walt Mossberg is 62. Nancy Peretsman, investment banker to Oprah and Martha, is 55. And Talisa Soto, former model and current wife of actor Benjamin Bratt, turns 42 today. Weekend birthdays follow below.

Oh, hey there, literati. Remember when that German factory manager took over Random House? Sad. But take heart: The director of Beverly Hills Cop IV is investing in the biz, too. Exciting!

Your daily fest-news buffet continues with a saint-making Brett Ratner and a worrisome slowdown at the Sundance ticket booth.

Hugh Hefner spent some time last weekend recounting his Hollywood obsession for the LAT. Conspicuously missing from his list: Brett Ratner, who is likely to direct a Hefner biopic in the years ahead.

Hollywood PrivacyWatch: 11/13 - Just saw sweaty dooshy oily sweaty pudgy squishy BRETT RATNER walking in Beverly Hills accompanied by a nonchalant blonde. He was passing us on the sidewalk, eyeballing a red-headed blue-eyed beauty wearing a black Obama Tshirt that had his face on it in sparkles. I stopped to tell the girl that THE WORLD FAMOUS Brett Ratner had given her the thrice-over and she pondered the possibility of crossing the street a different way to catch his eye again. HOWEVER, she did not do so. [Hollywood PrivacyWatch is written by and for Defamer readers; send your sightings to tips@defamer.com.]

Click to viewBoomp3.com A mysterious woman wanted to remain in the shadows and darkness of Hollywood after she was spotted with hotshot filmmaker Brett Ratner outside of Hyde Lounge. Ratner attempted to use some of his directorial skills to make the woman feel more comfortable in front of the camera, but she continued to march down the street with her back turned. Not even running into a couple of doors and a pay phone would stop the woman from walking with a blind eye to the other side of Sunset Blvd. [Photo Credit: INF Daily] *A Call To The Bullpen is a work of fiction. Although the pictures we use are most certainly real, Defamer does not purport that any of the incidents or quotations you see in this piece actually happened. Lighten up, people ... it's a joke.

While conducting interviews at the VMAs yesterday, the nearby booth advertising Rock Band 2 was the cacophonous bane of our existence — though no one was more unhappy to see it than director Brett Ratner. As you may recall, the Defamer-beloved auteur (and big penis enthusiast) aspires to direct a film adaptation based on Rock Band's rival video game franchise, Guitar Hero. Since the idea continues to boggle our minds, we knew we had to venture a question, even if the resulting Defamer-on-Ratner interaction threatened to spin the world off its axis. Fortunately, the Rush Hour 3 helmer was every bit the gentleman. We blame the heatstroke. [MTV]

Art-eschewing, mainstream-tentpole- project-maker Brett Ratner's love for the video game sensation known as the Guitar Hero knows no bounds. His obsession with the instrument sim and its groupie-nailing expansion packs stems back to his formative years at NYU film school, when he'd busk in Washington Square Park, playing as many Police songs as he could using the four notes he was capable of eliciting from a harmonica. The first time he picked up Hero, it gave him the same quaternary musical thrill ("Smoke on the Water," for example, became a four-color kaleidoscopic "red red blue/green green blue blue/red red green/ yelllooowww"), and he since has gone about incorporating the game into many of his smaller projects—everything from Miley Cyrus videos to Mariah Carey videos. But an actual Guitar Hero movie? He'd love a crack, he told MTV Multiplayer:

Paris, je t'aime-a series of shorts, one for each Paris's twenty arrondissements, directed by famous directors and acted by famous actors-was a lovely (if forgivably uneven in parts) ode to a lovely city. It was quiet and subdued, and though many Americans were involved (most notably Alexander Payne directing a heartbreaking Margot Martindale in the film's final story), it just felt very European. So it's not surprising that America is trundling up to ruin it. New York, I Love You is forthcoming, with brilliant famous directors like Scarlett Johansson and Brett fucking Ratner, and now there's a trailer! It's after the jump. I love this big Rorschach test of a city, but I'm not so sure about this movie. (Orlando Bloom cannot act his way out of a beautiful, toned paper bag.)

· With New Line but a shadowy shingle of its former self, Billion Dollar Director Brett Ratner is packing up the Rat Entertainment boxes and moving onto the Paramount lot to marinate in soulmentor Bob Evans's pungent creative vapors. He pledges to no one in particular, "I will not be pitching art films. I want to make mainstream tentpole projects." [Variety] · The End of Ideas: King of All Media Edition: Howard Stern is producing a remake of Rock 'n' Roll High School to be written by Alex "Bill & Ted" Winters. [Variety] · Discovery Channel is launching a reality show that will attempt to execute many of Leonardo Da Vinci's conceptualized inventions, either sending contestants soaring on the winds of 16th Century innovation, or plunging to their bat-winged-flying-contraption deaths. [THR] · The Dark Knight nudges Warner Bros. profits overseas past the $1 billion mark. [THR] · Sam Raimi will direct The Transplants for Disney, details of which they're staying vague about save that it's a "four-quadrant ensemble superhero story with a comedic bent," each a vaguely horrifying ethnic stereotype. [THR]

After the unfortunate reception for The Love Guru, it's just too easy to write off New Line's prospective Austin Powers revival (which Mike Myers is reportedly working on for New Line with former series collaborator Mike McCullers) as yet another ill-advised folly belching the black smoke of Myers's career. In fact, taken as merely a part of the larger phenomenon we at Defamer like to call The End of Ideas, the Powers franchise is but a speck of the shit on Hollywood's collective bathroom wall — a tableau diligently studied today by the haz-mat crew at Entertainment Weekly.

(1) The 9th annual Art For Life Benefit took place on Saturday at Russell Simmons' East Hampton house. Despite tickets not selling out as fast as usual, the event played host to Aretha Franklin, Christy Turlington, Lorraine Bracco, Soledad O'Brien, David Paterson, Diddy, Padma Lakshmi, Brett Ratner, LA Reid, the cast of Real Housewives of New York, Al Roker, Kelly Bensimon, Alina Cho, Simon de Pury, and Porschla Coleman—whose break up with Simmons, judging by their behavior, is either incredibly amicable or no longer in effect. [PMc]

· Corey Haim spent an entire segment of The Two Coreys surfing the Defamer comment section and walked away emotionally damaged. But darker days are looming ahead.
· Angelina Jolie gave birth to the Chosen Twins! No wait, it was just another false alarm.
· McLovin and some starlets, sittin' in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes some little McLovins in a baby carriage! But wait, watch out for that lightning storm!
· Madonna's frosty marriage to Guy Ritchie came thisclose to breaking down this week when reports surfaced that she's been fielding grounders from New York Yankees star Alex Rodriguez. And Lenny Kravitz has something to do with it.
· Your job's a joke, you're broke, your love life's DOA. But don't fret! There's a Friends movie on the way (maybe).
· We wished the happiest of happy birthdays to Lindsay Lohan and Tom Cruise.
· We busted out our long lost graphing calculator and got all scientific on your asses by examining the comedic rise and fall of Mike Myers.
· Nude Nicole Kidman vs. the fully clothed Katie Holmes proved to be an uneven fight.
· Fanboys from sea to shining sea creamed their collective jeans when Megan Fox dumped Brian Austin Green. Brett Ratner called dibs and already has some erotic literature ready for their first date.
· Denise Richards carefully explained to her 13-year-old nephew exactly what a threesome is.
· At long last, anal lubricant got the recognition it so justly deserves.

Brett Ratner gets a lot of shit here at Defamer. We've called him "annoying," "a hack," even... gasp... "a bad director." But one thing we won't do is say the guy doesn't appreciate fine literature. Why, according to Page Six, Ratner was the biggest star at an LA book signing the other night. Of course, that book was The Big Penis Book. And Taschen, the publisher, says it's "profusely illustrated with over 400 historic photos of spectacular male endowments."

Is it possible that one of Hollywood's biggest comedic stars — who has had handlers and publicists coddling him with tales of his own greatness for years — has actually developed some self-awareness? Shocking as it may seem, it sounds like that's what's going on with Eddie Murphy. For example, why is he making a fourth Beverly Hills Cop movie? Not because of something so crass as money, but because "the third Beverly Hills Cop was horrible! I didn't want to leave it like that. The first two were cool and the third one was shitty. [Let's] get the franchise fixed again, clean up this old mess and do a good movie."