We may not have much time left before the End of Days, as an operative has just spotted Brett Ratner on the Fox lot, joining forces with of one of the celebrity world's greatest forces of darkness:
After a weeklong reign as King of Hollywood, Brett Ratner has suffered a rather tragic tumble from his throne. X-Men: The Last Stand dropped 67 percent at the box office in its second weekend (replaced by—will the indignities never cease?— a Jennifer Aniston vehicle), and having suffered this loss of his royal powers, found himself unable to avoid his civic duty. Reports the Defamer Special Courthouse Correspondent:
Brett Ratner, newly crowned King of Hollywood, has mixed feelings about yanking idol Steven Spielberg from his box office throne and defenestrating him from the nearest palace window. Ratner "gamely attempted humility" about X-Men: The Last Stand's success in a chat with NY Daily News JV gossip Lloyd Grove, but we think you already know how his stab at sounding humble turned out:
• Supermodel Naomi Campbell puts her 6-bedroom Park Avenue condo on the block for $5.25 million. Blood-stained BlackBerry and frightened housekeepers not included. As to where she's moving to — isn't Dubai more relaxed about beating your underlings? [Page Six]
• Jay-Z does his best George Clooney imitation and considers building a 40/40 Casino in Las Vegas. [R&M]
• Brett Ratner's X-Men: The Last Stand breaks Memorial Day box office records, and he manages to feign humility. [Lowdown]
• An invitation from Britney Spears and Kevin Federline's wedding is now on eBay for $999.99 — because irony is expensive. [TMZ]
• Despite the general public having 24 hours to do something about the travesty, Anna Nicole Smith remains pregnant. [People]
We imagine that $120 million was all the validation X-Men: The Last Stand director Brett Ratner needed for his superhumanly hacky vision, so a trip to the ongoing flame wars raging on his official messages board probably haven't shaken his faith in his work. And it's not like Ratner doesn't have defenders on his home turf—as you can see in the subject list, a fan (sadly, not CLove1000 ) declares that "All the anal retentive sexless Ratner haters can go to hell!", a sentiment which nicely balances the regrettably violent "I Want To Punch You In The Face" and the sodomy-flavored "You bent X-Men over...", two threads initiated after Ratner himself somewhat prematurely thanked his online community for "how supportive everyone has been."
Before he discovered that America would surge to the multiplexes in Memorial Day weekend record numbers to see how many cars he could blow up in a movie about mutants (answer: too many to count, as evildoing genetic freaks seem to have a nasty grudge against the automotive industry), X-Men: The Last Stand director Brett Ratner risked a grisly gutting by the replica Wolverine claws of disappointed fanboys by taking in public screenings at the Chinese Theatre on Thursday and Friday night. At the midnight Thursday showing, Ratner wisely brought some muscle, as a high-level Defamer operative shares this story:
You spent your three-day holiday weekend trying to relax, but you never really achieved that elusive calm, anxious that you'd have to wait another day for the box office numbers. Know peace:
· In an instant message interview with AOL Music today, Jared Leto announced to the world he's as "gay as a goose." He wisely waited until his fatty period was over, avoiding an embarrassing rejection by his new adoptive people.
· In further goose news, if you haven't seen this moment from last night's American Idol finale, in which one of their creepiest early rejects gets the panty-pooping shock of his life when Clay Aiken (who appears to have found a new best friend in Garnier Nutrisse) joins him on stage, well...you must. You simply must. And while we're at it, here's Kevin Covais, who's probably getting more puthy than you ever thought potthible, warbling through a Bacharach classic.
· And in even further goose news, we proudly present the following comic book movie headlines: "Superman' Director Bryan Singer Relates To Outcast Hero," and "The 'X-Men' come out."
· Our grandmother is a sexier, more coordinated dancer than Paris Hilton. Oh, and there's a nipple slip in there, which would really thrill and titillate us if we hadn't already been introduced to her clitoris on multiple occasions.
The latest advancement in computer generated effects—a convincing reversal of the human aging process—is on display (spoiler alert) in an early scene of X-Men: The Last Stand, in which Ian McKellen's Magneto and Patrick Stewart's Prof. Xavier are rendered 20 years younger for a flashback. As McKellen raved to reporters in Cannes about the technique ("It's as brilliantly done as airbrushing in a magazine. You cannot tell the difference,"), director Brett Ratner fretted about how the powerful technology could possibly change showbiz forever:
As any comic book fan can tell you, behind every superhero is an origin story that explains the genesis of the character's special abilities. This week's Entertainment Weekly dips into X-Men: The Last Stand director Brett "Wolverstein" Ratner's past, revealing how his carefree upbringing and swinging film school days combined to make him the uncanny, hard-partying, hacky mutant that we've come to know and love:
Perhaps not realizing that being a bigshot Hollywood director is an even more reliable way to take advantage of women desperate for a taste of fame than a career snapping pictures of women with no clothes on, guy-who-sits-behind-a-monitor-on- a-movie-set-and-occasionally-mutters-to- no-one-in-particular—that-he'll-fix-it-in-editing Brett Ratner mused to the NY Daily News about a possible side career in the naked lady photographic arts:
• After Paris Hilton's new BFF Brandon Davis hurled an a-bomb of videotaped insults at Lindsay Lohan (who, if you recall, has freckles coming out of her vagina), Lohan exacts revenge by using her tongue to massage the tonsils of Paris' ex, Starvos Niarchos. [Page Six]
• Now that Couric is leaving the Today show, publishers are hungry for her unauthorized biography. Ed Klein is foaming at the mouth. [R&M]
• Meanwhile, not content to be left in the morning show dust, Diane Sawyer makes a subtle, attorney-driven play for the World News Tonight desk. [Page Six]
• Brett Ratner would love to photograph nude women, particularly Lindsay Lohan's 7-foot-long clitoris. [Lowdown]
• Authorities have decided to prosecute "other" Baldwin brother Daniel on cocaine charges. He faces 18 months in jail and, for once, people knowing his name. [CourtTV]
• Jessica Simpson insists that she didn't fire her best friend/assistant CaCee Cobb. She fired a two-timing skank who wouldn't stop being friendly with Nick Lachey. [IMDb]
· Brett Ratner laments that the stories he plants in the tabloids portray him as a "party animal," overshadowing his legacy as America's most extravagantly gifted fauxteur and passion for inept moviemaking, as he allegedly tells no media outlet we can identify, "I'm a serious film-maker and the people I work with know that so whatever is in the tabloids you can't take that seriously. I think, eat, sleep and dream film so that's what my focus is. That's the real me. I love women and I appreciate women but my focus is my work. You got to celebrate. That's the way to blow off steam. It's a hard grueling process and you want people to know that you really appreciate their hard work so I like to throw a few little soiree." [WENN]
· Ratner demonstrates his formidable filmmaking vision by musing about inverting the iconic Game of Death big black guy/little Asian guy fight scene between Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bruce Lee for Rush Hour 3, with little black guy Chris Tucker taking on big Asian guy Yao Ming. Minds officially blown, as we would've expected the far more predictable Jackie Chan vs. Shaq battle. [Kaiju Shakedown]
· And if you can't be in NY tonight to see the Portraits by Brett Ratner exhibition, you can get the same feeling of celebrity essences frozen in time by clicking through the gallery on his web site, and imagining the shutterbug wandering your office while muttering "Oh yeah, on that one Pacino thought I was making a really interesting artistic choice, but actually I just kept dropping the camera in the middle of my shots." [Gawker]
Is there anything Brett Ratner can't do? Despite being relatively un-special, the man can direct movies, sleep with tennis stars, pull a gun on producers, command the attenion of the ever-elusive Lindsay Lohan, and wear a tracksuit whenever he damn well pleases. Now, add to that impressive list Ratner's latest accomplishment: tonight he unveils Portraits by Brett Ratner, a stunning exhibition of the artist's talent for taking his Elph to various after-parties.
Back in November, New Line teased us by whispering in our ear the tantalizing news that it had secured the services of the entire Rush Hour team for the franchise's third installment, providing celebrated fauxteur Brett Ratner with all the tools necessary to fully exploit his hacky gifts. (For example, had Tucker not signed on, Ratner would've been forced to replace him with a stand-in pinching the air out of a balloon, a crude substitute for the actor's trademark high-pitched whine that would've severely hamstrung his cinematic vision.) With the director's support system all in place, Variety reports that New Line has finally greenlighted the Paris-set pic, which will start production late this summer for a release in the summer of 2007. We know that movie magic takes time to properly conjure, but a year seems like an unspeakably cruel amount of time to have to wait to see Tucker and Jackie Chan engaged in a hilarious, language-barrier-hampered argument with a stereotypically rude French waiter, in which none of three agitated parties has any idea why a Chinese gang has decided to terrorize the French capital.
The high-school-quality drama surrounding beloved fauxteur Brett Ratner's apparent mentorship-with-benefits of Lindsay Lohan once again devolved into cat-fighting, with a "source" telling Page Six about Lohan's bedside discovery of Ratner's inconvenient model girlfriend during an unannounced drop-by:
• Though Lindsay Lohan and director Brett Ratner are "just friends," the 19-year-old starlet flipped when she found him in bed with his girlfriend, Alina Puscau. If we saw Ratner in a lusty state of undress, we'd lose our shit, too. [Page Six]
• Rush Limbaugh turns himself in on prescription drug charges and is released an hour later on $3,000 bail. Surely that harrowing experience has taught him a lesson. [TMZ]
• At the Capitol File party following the White House Correspondents Dinner, rapper Ludacris and Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia talk about music. As expected, Scalia loves Word of Mouf. [Lowdown]
• Feeling that perhaps Dallas wasn't the best career move, J.Lo drops ICM agent Ed Limato in favor of William Morris' Dave Wirtschafter. If Wirtschafter talks shit about her in a major magazine, it can only help her career. [Page Six]
• Broadway producers Fran and Barry Weissler pinch-pennies, lose surefire hit production because of thrifty hotel choice. [R&M]
• Rupert Murdoch refuses to give Daily News gossip Ben Widdicombe any marriage tips. The much-younger, Asian wife speaks for herself. [Gatecrasher (2nd item)]
Today's Page Six gives itself over to fauxteur/current Lindsay Lohan daddy-issue manifestation Brett Ratner's hacky charms, featuring both a story about the director's semi-embarrassing, alleged re-gifting of a blanket to his new ladyfriend, and a blind item asking, "WHICH young hotshot director lost a big superhero movie project because he pulled a gun on one of the producers?", a question answered nearly three years ago in Esquire:
