Accompanying an astoundingly sad-on-all-accounts article about former pop singer Michael Jackson (on forgetting that he's turning 50 years old, not 40: "It all went by so fast, didn't it? I wish I could do it all over again, I really do." Devastating) is an image of what the King of Pop may have looked like had he not had alllll that plastic surgery. It's a well done imagining, a believable cross between Usher and Billy Dee Williams, rather than the ghost of Joan Crawford that you see on the left. A rare vision of one's life had a different turn in the road been taken. Unfortunately, Mr. Jackson, I've not seen your childhood, perhaps it's collecting dust somewhere up in that crumbling personal theme park of yours. But an alternate adulthood? Yes, that's right here. [Mail via LA Rag Mag] Click through for larger image.

· On America's Got Talent last night, David Hasselhoff was refreshingly candid about the stirrings in his loins elicited by Drag Britney. [AGT] · Step! Two, Three, Ball, Step, Ball, Reverse, Change! Watch out stars—Lance means business! [Mollygood] · In this new promotional shot from Land of the Lost, Will Ferrell stands next to the kind of Sleestak you might imagine posing for pictures at Disneyland. [First Showing] · Mmmm...Hannah Montana Sweet & Sour Gummi Cocks. [BWE.tv] · And last but not least, it's Paul Reubens's birthday today. In his honor, enjoy the entire Pee-wee's Playhouse Christmas Special. Happy birthday, Pee-wee! Mm...Birthday cakey. [YouTube, YouTube, YouTube, YouTube]

While other well-photographed actresses might don a pair of pants to go out if their knees were covered in bruises, Kate Holmes is of a different breed. Not only did Holmes attend a performance of August: Osage County with black-and-blue welts studding her bare legs, she did it while leggings were surely close at hand. Are the bruises the result of a suddenly aggressive Suri, a painful rehearsal for Katie's Broadway debut, or a niacin-cleansing ritual gone awry? The Daily Mail takes us inside the scene:

Despite the fact that Jennie Garth is still taunting Shannen Doherty with expertly crafted put-downs, EW was able to wrangle the two 90210 stars for an arm-in-arm photo shoot and revealing Q&A. In it, Doherty reveals that she never really liked Brenda Walsh ("They just took her in a really odd direction that I didn't necessarily agree with at the time") and that she still harbors insecurities begun by the seminal "I Hate Brenda" newsletter. All well and good, but what about the matter everyone still cares about: the long-rumored Doherty/Garth catfights?

Find Me Guilty star Vin Diesel continued to show his support for the latest action opus Babylon A.D. despite the fact that the film's director recently disavowed it. Leaving the TRL studios, Diesel said, "Babylon A.D. isn't some red-headed stepchild that you throw out with the bath water. It's a rip roaring good time with explosions and me and some more explosions. I'm not going to disown it anytime soon. I'll be there on midnight Thursday night. " Diesel expressed a desire to record multiple commentary tracks for the DVD release and has began to brainstorm ideas for the sequel. Before hopping into his limo, Diesel confidentially stated, "I hope we can get Mathieu back for the sequel."

Of all of the recurring cast of characters that populate Molly McAleer's nightly To Do videos, the most beloved figure is probably Molls' dog, Wagandstuff. In this evening's installment, we learn a little bit about what makes this dog jump for joy (quite literally, in fact). Get to the bottom of this mystery and find out what's going on in Los Angeles tonight after the jump. Enjoy!· Club Moscow at Boardner's. · Roommating: The Sex Tape at UCB. · Women's Book Group at Barnes and Noble.

If your acting career isn't going the way you had hoped, may we humbly suggest you kick start things by buying yourself a role in a summer superhero blockbuster? "But that's impossible," you're no doubt saying to yourself. "Hollywood is the quintessential meritocracy, where with nothing but hard work, talent, and some good luck thrown in, all your wildest fantasies can come true!" Well you keep telling yourself that. We'll be over here, emptying our 401k and cashing our Bar Mitzvah bonds to make sure we win this Spider-Man 4 VIP Experience eBay auction, a bounty including:

Bond, Shames Bond: The divorce of actor George Lazenby and tennis pro Pam Shriver has taken a nasty turn from those earlier toddler-scotching allegations that so scandalized the one-time James Bond a few weeks back. New statements by Lazenby's ex-wife Christina Master contend that he "punched her in the face when she was five months pregnant and broke her nose when their son was dying from cancer," according to reports, which add: "She claims he threatened to kill her when she told him she wanted a divorce and says she was so fearful he meant it that it took years before she found the courage to leave him in 1994." Lazenby denied the claims, further challenging Master to turn up medical reports or photos proving her injuries: "I never punched her in my life," he said through a spokesman. You can believe whomever you want — innocent before proven guilty, yadda yadda — but we know where we stand, and we don't buy for a second that George Lazenby has a spokesman. [Daily Mail]

Breaking news from Jon Cryer's rep Karen Samfilippo, regarding the Fox News article that placed him at a John McCain fundraiser: "In fact, Jon is not endorsing McCain or Obama at this point. He went to the fundraiser to learn more about the candidate and would like to do the same with Obama if the opportunity presents itself." Hear that, Barack? A crucial 40% of the titular Two and a Half Men is still undecided and up for grabs! Still: no word, yet, from the similarly sighted Lorenzo Lamas or Craig T. Nelson. We'll keep you posted as the official confirmation of their endorsements comes in. [Previously: Superdelegate Shocker: Jon Cryer Sighted at McCain Fundraiser!]

The film-critic execution chamber has been mercifully quiet for most of the summer, with gripey David Ansen notably still refusing to die as others continue to line up behind him. And while on one hand we're glad to see few women among the condemned, we're reminded today that it's all relative: A recently released study notes that 70% of reviews published in the top 100 American dailies are written by men. Moreover, almost half of those papers don't publish any reviews by women at all. And despite our beloved Dargises, Chocanos, Rickeys and others, we're afraid that not a number you should expect to climb any time soon:

With the exciting news that Brad Pitt has won his second best actor chalice today at the Venice Film Festival—for what the judging committee deemed his "indomitable spirit both on and off the screen, his effortless embodiment of the American masculine ideal, and the way sucking up to him will facilitate future access to his impossibly fertile and glamorous life partner, Angelina Jolie"—we thought it time to finally time to take a look at the movie which ushered him to victory. We speak, of course, of the Coen brothers' Burn After Reading, which had its world premiere tonight at the festival. If Pitt, as Javier Bardem did before him, could win top accolades with a hairstyle this ridiculous looking, then this truly must have been another masterwork from the sibling geniuses. Let's see what the critics are saying. (And yes, spoilers ensue.) · The Guardian uses the word "triumph" and gives it four stars out of five, calling it "a tightly wound, slickly plotted spy comedy that couldn't be in bigger contrast" to No Country for Old Men, but that the Coens film it most closely resembles is "the divorce-lawyer comedy Intolerable Cruelty." Everyone gets a chance to shine comically, but "Pitt, in fact, gets the best of the funny stuff, [though] has by some way the least screen time of all the principal cast." [The Guardian]· Counterpoint! Variety hated it. Calling it a "dark goofball comedy about assorted doofuses in Washington, D.C.," Burn "tries to mate sex farce with a satire of a paranoid political thriller," with "with arch and ungainly results." Further, a "seriously talented cast" has been "asked to act like cartoon characters," with everything turned up to a "grotesquely exaggerated extent." [Variety] · Yeesh. That last one didn't go so well. Let's go back to loving it again! The Times Online also gives it four stars. Noting it's the first Coen-penned screenplay since 2001's The Man Who Wasn’t There, they compare it to Raising Arizona and Fargo (yay!) in its "savagely comic taste for creative violence and a slightly mocking eye for detail." Carter Burwell’s score is a "brilliant...paranoid piece of film music," though if the movie lacks for anything, it's "warmth." [Times Online]

Live From Beijing: Two weeks ago, when soliciting your help in casting Olympian Michael Phelps (thereby sparing him a terrible Hollywood future), we predicted of the athlete, "There's bound to be an awkward SNL-hosting stint yet to come." Today, TV Guide announced, "The Summer Olympics' outstandingly golden boy, swimmer Michael Phelps, will dive into not-ready-for-primetime television as the guest host of Saturday Night Live's 33rd season premiere." Were we simply prescient, or is Lorne Michaels now culling ideas from the digital pages of Defamer? If Phelps appears in a Saved By The Bell skit, perhaps we'll have our answer. [TV Guide]

Though any avid Top Chef viewer knows that the quickest way to get a thumbs-up from judge Padma Lakshmi is to appeal to her love of alcohol, it seems that one former contestant can outdo even Padma when it comes to his appreciation for the hooch. Yes, Wolverine-resembling Season 2 runner-up Marcel Vigneron has been busted by the Laguna Beach PD, who found him driving erratically while tequila-infused saliva foam dribbled from the corner of his mouth. Says the OC Register:

The Democratic National Convention is past the halfway point in Denver, which tonight will emerge as the unlikely epicenter of Steven Spielberg's cosmic restitution for Indiana Jones 4. The director is taking only incremental steps toward recovery for now, however, joining contemporaries Ken Burns and Davis Guggenheim as the DNC's guest contributors of short films for each night. The good news: Spielberg's short celebrates American military veterans, and we guess the guy knows his American military veterans. (NB: It's narrated by Tom Hanks.) The bad news: Kind of like Cannes, Spielberg will be around just long enough to drop off the tape before heading back to lick his Clinton-supporting wounds. Insert frowny emoticon here:

Tuesday's unnerving visit to the set of Sweatin' Your 15 Minutes Away, with Heidi Montag was accompanied by an even more debilitating ebb of confidence in popular culture to ever make us smile again. So imagine the overwhelming (if perhaps coincidental) sense of joy that came along with revisiting Jane Fonda's early-'80s workout-video heyday — a brain-exploding, pre-ironic throwback to an era when only two-time Oscar winners were entitled to such garish Lycra supremacy. Sam Sparro's anthem "Black and Gold" provides the mid-tempo counterpoint, the entirety of which can be observed at Vimeo; our brains are full. Grateful, but full. And does she ever hit the spot. [Vimeo]

As the man who brought us Pretty in Pink's Duckie, you might expect Jon Cryer to have a special affinity for those born on the wrong side of the tracks: the poor, the outcast, even the sexually ambiguous. However, it's apparently his role in Hot Shots! that Cryer identifies with most, because he turned up this week at a fundraiser for another easily downed Naval pilot: presidential candidate John McCain. In fact, according to Fox News, McCain met on Monday with a veritable Who's Who (no, seriously: who?) of Hollywood celebrities at the Beverly Hills Hilton in an attempt to solicit money from the group he hates the most. After the jump, the list of celebs in attendance (there's no Dennis Hopper, but trust us, you don't want to miss it):

· Tyler Perry, whose syndicated sitcom House of Payne could wind up earning him $200 million, now has a series pickup from TBS for a show based on Meet the Browns. Asked how he'd spend all this money, Perry squealed, "Zac Posen said he'd custom-design me a whole line of frumpy dresses. How 'bout that for starters?!" [Variety] · Meanwhile, on the movie front, former co-president of Paramount production Alli Shearmur has hopped aboard Tyler Perry Productions vanity imprint Lionsgate, where she'll oversee a slate of six-to-eight releases a year. [Variety] · Warners will produce Coco Avant Chanel, with Audrey Tautou playing the legendary fashion designer. No word yet on who'll play her little dog. [Variety] · Burn After Reading's world premiere was the hot ticket at the Venice Film Festival, where crowds four-deep piled around the red carpet to cheer on guests of honor Brad Pitt and George Clooney, screaming, "Hey—whatever happened to that gay bed and breakfast you guys were fixing up? Is that still happening?" [THR] · ABC ordered another season of Here Come the Newlyweds, a fun twist on the honeymoon game show genre that requires couples to swap sexual partners, then hunt each other to the death with assault rifles on "human newlywed game preserves." [THR]

Movie tough guy Jason Statham is just the latest celebrity to jump on the mystery stain fad. The Death Race star was spotted leaving popular Italian eatery Café Med with a rather large wet spot on the front of his t-shirt. Statham deflected any questions about the stain with the classic grade school defense, "That's for me to know and you to find out." Statham saw that interest in his stain was being to dwindle once he left the restaurant.

While it pains us to stoop to the animal-threatening tactics of National Lampoon, it seems that Hollywood is far more cavalier with the fates of its four-legged thespians. According to the LAT, one of filmdom's most enjoyable genres — that of the monkey movie — is being assailed by PETA activists, who are demanding that actor chimps be replaced by CG versions. They allege that the trained monkeys are being abused to solicit a performance — and based on this anecdote about "Clyde," the orangutan from Every Which Way But Loose, they may have a point:

One Day at a Time is both the title of a seminal postfeminist late-'70s sitcom and a 12-step mantra, and both apply to its star and recovering substance-abuser Mackenzie Phillips. IMDb lists her as having been clean and sober since 1992, but TMZ is reporting that the actress was arrested today at LAX, allegedly for possession of heroin and coke. She's currently in custody: