· The great Hammer Screenings at UCLA continue with Oscar-winning director Jessica Yu presenting In the Realms of the Unreal, her 2004 documentary about artist Henry Darger, who spent his childhood in an asylum, worked as a janitor, and like any successful artist, died broke and alone. You know, your typical feel-good movie.
· A smattering of live music: Vent your frustrations from not being hugged enough as a kid at Funeral for A Friend at the Troubadour, or stalk various members of Incubus as Division Group with DJ Kilmore play the Knitting Factory.
· Get a dose of the funny from young, bright comics (while they still have their looks) at The Next Round with Ben Gleib at the (legendary) Improv and presented by the delinquents at CollegeHumor.com.
· We're not going to recommend that you actually watch the show, but roughly one million TV and radio ads indicate that there's a special episode of Alias on tonight. Make it stop!

FilmStew's blog has a recap of last night's "Hollywood's Master Storytellers" (cough,what the fuck?, cough) Q & A with director McG following a screening of Charlie's Angels. Apparently, it took some cajoling by Mr. G before noted cineaste Drew Barrymore would allow him behind the camera:

The folks at NBC's midseason replacement I-see-dead-people drama Medium are looking for an extra with a nice "back end." We love it when casting directors get all coy! And, oh yes, if you've got any pictures of your "front end," they've got a "special address" for that too. They don't want to be accused of being "ass people."

Back when Lindsay Lohan exploded into the national breast-obsessed consciousness by undergoing a seemingly miraculous, overnight bazooming, we never imagined we'd ever have to entertain a debate on whether she'd have an operation to make the world's most-discussed rack smaller. But such is the landscape of the so far very surprising 2005, a brave new year where we wouldn't be surprised if earth's gravity spontaneously reversed, Tom Cruise suddenly became an Orthodox Jew with a psychiatry practice, or if Andy Dick sprouted angel wings and married Michael Eisner. An operative who's seen Lohan's new-old cleavage and new-new cleavage in action takes the floor:

We know that Jude Law is possessed of exquisitely beautiful and delicate features, but that's no reason to make him sound like a lesbian making an honest woman out of her longtime companion. We're pretty sure they used the same wording when Ellen DeGeneres shacked up with Portia de Rossi a couple of weeks ago.

In the NY Observer, Salon movie critic Stephanie Zacharek offers some advice to a guy saddled with the Greatest Actor of His Generation label:

· Vince Neil's televised utterance of the f-bomb on the New Year's Eve Leno show may escape fines because the offending expletive was dropped during the indecent speech "safe harbor" of 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., but the FCC should still find a way to punish Neil and the Crüe for coming out of retirement. [THR]
· Comedy Central picks up State alum project Stella for a 10-episode order. Oh, we so wanna dip our balls in it! [THR]
· The freakishly beautiful Natalie Portman, red hot off of Closer, and the Wachowski brothers, ice cold from the Matrix sequels, team up for the graphic novel adaptation, V is for Vendetta. We've said it before, and we'll say it again: We'd pay to watch Portman buttering toast. Really. Please send us videos. [Variety]
· The PGA nominates a little of everything for their awards, picking The Aviator, The Incredibles, Finding Neverland, Sideways, and Million Dollar Baby for the best picture pool. [Variety]
· ABC wins Tuesday night as people flock to watch the blowout football game that bookended the latest Ashlee Simpson meltdown. [THR]

Has all of this talk of watery destruction and renegade bands of thieves have you craving the warm embrace of a total stranger? If so, you may be in luck. A Craigslist poster is looking to help import the Williamsbergian, hipster-damaged Cuddle Party to Los Angeles. (Indeed, the Cuddle Party site mentions that local Facilitator Training is imminent.) Should you crave some therapeutic spooning, you'd better get on board quickly, before the Kabbalah Centre finds a way to monetize the movement and producers turn it into an ugly sex-for-roles trade.

Page Six looks at a Vanity Fair article detailing a crime wave sweeping through our city's richest enclaves, perpetrated by a shadowy army of off-white superburglars:

Today's LAT says that Hollywood's efforts to offer disaster relief are getting off to a disorganized start, but it's obvious that the tsunami's devastation has touched the entertainment industry in the soft places it didn't even knew it had. Look, even agents are suddenly growing hearts:

The internets are absolutely ablaze with stories of Ashlee Simpson's appearance at last night's Orange Bowl halftime show (good news, we think the team from the local school where all the rich kids go to start their film careers won!), where Simpson eschewed the dreaded "guide vocal" for producing sounds best described as "the sound a tuberculotic infant would make after three days of being subjected to human rights violations at Abu Ghraib."

· "Micro Management is about evil midgets who take over Titan Industries, a United States defense contractor and missile manufacturer, and attempt to use the missiles to blow up Disneyland." Holy fucking shit, someone must make this movie right fucking now.
· Vividblurry provides Britney Spears with a cautionary guide to her inevitable pregnancy. We wouldn't want little DoMe Federline to start her life with any physical disadvantages, would we?
· Apparently tired with conspicuously purchasing her sex tape, Paris Hilton now moves on to conspicuously stealing her sex tape.
· We'd once spent a leisurely afternoon trying to figure out Dennis Quaid, but then we said fuck it—that guy is an enigma.

· Someone at the ArcLight is either a wiseass or completely deranged, as McG will appear in the latest installment of the theater's "Hollywood's Master Storytellers" Q & A following a screening of masterwork Charlie's Angels. But it's worth attending just for the chance that someone will ask him whether he was canned from Superman because he's afraid of flying.
· The Skirball Cultural Center presents The Climax (starring Boris Karloff) as part of its Lifespan series "exploring and celebrating the new longevity." Massive plastic surgery has to figure into this discussion somewhere, right?
· The always great Aimee Mann begins her two-night stand tonight at Largo...unless all of Fairfax Avenue is carried away by the torrential rain.

We've spent the better part of the day avoiding Britney Spears' latest Letter of Truth, but as the afternoon drags on and we slip ever deeper into the recesses of a severe caffeine hole, we find our best efforts at resistance utterly futile in the face of her prose. But where to start? Trying to examine each crucial life update offered by Spears is certainly an exercise in madness, sure to leave us bleeding from the ears and cursing God for gifting the pop star so much and us so little. So we do what we can to preserve the last of our fragile sanity, chipping away a tiny piece of Spears' constantly-evolving Rosetta Stone:

In addition to untold loss of life on the other side of the world, the new year brings its inevitable crop of midseason replacement shows. Tonight, NBC throws its sitcom Committed against the Nielsen wall to see if it sticks. The LAT's Paul Brownfield notes the cruel calculus of NBC's extreme comedy draught, illustrated by the strenuously wacky inclusion of a disturbed clown character:

Before Adam "Seth Cohen" Brody was an impossibly cool nerd on The O.C., he was a more run-of-the-mill kind of wedgie-recipient in high school. A former classmate posts some of his yearbook photos in a discussion forum thread, which includes the above meditation on smiling. "People would always want to be around a happy person rather than a sad person. A smile always looks better than a frown," says Brody, making us momentarily forget our mundane, miserable existences and flash a brilliant—if painfully brief—smile of our own.

Say what you will about director Joel Schumacher's Phantom of the Opera (we have a feeling these comments mostly fall in the "flop" or "sucks" veins), but it could've been far, far worse. An operative tips us to a flight of casting fancy that might've killed off the musical movie-adaptation genre forever:

Hollywood PrivacyWatch celebrity sightings are sent in by our readers. Send yours to tips@defamer.com and let Bruce Willis know the shine off of his head is ruining your high-priced meal.

· Rick Sands, the Miramax COO hardened by years of Harvey Weinstein's cat o' nine tails, assumes the title of president and CEO of DreamWorks. He'll report to David Geffen, whom we expect will issue a totally different kind of daily beating than the ones Sands grew accustomed to at The Max. [Variety, sub. req'd.]
· You hardly needed this told to you: Shrek 2 was the highest selling home video title in 2004. DreamWorks Animation's Jeffrey Katzenberg can now flush entire stacks of hundred dollar bills down the toilet, whereas before he had to peel them off one by one. [THR]
· Just because there's nothing to do in the first week of the year but count the piles of money: Sony wins the year in North American box office thanks to Spider-man 2, while Warner Bros. takes the international box office crown [THR, Variety]
· Paramount execs were taken by surprise by the stories that Brad Grey has been anointed as the next studio head, feeling they weren't consulted. Hmm, maybe they weren't told because they're all about to get fired? [Variety]
· Jerry Bruckheimer gets two drama pilot pickups, including E-Ring for NBC, a supposed West Wing in the Pentagon. Maybe it's time he gets his own channel. Jerry's Steaming Pile of Derivative Shit TV has kind of a nice sound to it. [THR]

Who could've seen that coming? In response to the failure of Who's Your Daddy?, Fox Entertainment head Gail Berman, worried about her job but convinced the show is a winner, will pledge patience and sign up another installment that even further raises the emotional stakes. In Who's Your Mommy?, five barren women are turned loose in a hospital's nursery to grab an infant, then given a two-day head start before being hunted down by the babies' heavily-armed birth mothers.