Viking movies aren't always the easiest sell (as duds like Pathfinder and The 13th Warrior have proven), but the producers of Outlander had a genius idea to improve the formula: add aliens, exploding spaceships, and Jesus Christ himself. The result is a glorious, AICN-vetted $47 million production (fronted by Jim Caviezel and Ron Perlman) that looks like the sober yet entertaining cousin of the Sam Raimi classic Army of Darkness. Alas, Outlander is only the latest film to fall victim to an innovative release strategy begun by Harvey and Bob Weinstein at Miramax and then perfected at their own Weinstein Company: buy distribution rights to an expensive movie, and then never release it theatrically!Says Dread Central:

There's something about Zohan. The overseas box office had been buoyed recently by a flurry of well-received summer releases, the most confounding being Spain's love affair with Adam Sandler's You Don't Mess With the Zohan. What, exactly, is it about a crimping-iron-wielding Mossad agent that has locals skipping siestas to catch the comedy two, sometimes three times? We sent the data to the Defamer Foreign Box Office Analysis Dept.They sent back a busy graph that showed a confluence of lines plotting summer hours, male bulge humor, and funny Mediterranean accents. Add to that a diversion-hungry populace still shellshocked from the time Gwyneth Paltrow and her redheaded Hell's Angels boyfriend literally ate their way through the country, and you have what could be considered the perfect summer movie storm.

Behind every great man is a great mom—and no one knows that more than Tropic Thunder star Matthew McConaughey, who appears to have chosen a perfectly lovely one to bear him a son, suitable for toting to red carpet events and John Mellencamp concerts in a Coleman beer cooler. But what of McConaughey himself? To whom can we attribute his uncompromisingly freewheeling spirit, his Southern sophistication, and, yes, his undeniable sexual ferocity? To put it a little more floridly: Who planted little Matthew's placenta beneath a tree, and tended to it lovingly until it bore fruit? We now have an answer:

The A-list movie-star incursion on Broadway this fall just got a little B-listier with the addition of Haley Joel Osment to the cast of American Buffalo, David Mamet's 1976 play set for revival in November. And we can't wait: For sheer envelope-pushing, neither Daniel Radcliffe's full-frontal horseplay nor Katie Holmes's Dawson-ization of Arthur Miller is likely to compare to their fellow ex-child star's profane verbal tussles with castmates Cedric the Entertainer and John Leguizamo — a duo whose characters entangle Osment's young, broke schemer Bob in a bluer-than-blue cascade of "cunts," "fucks" and other Sixth Sense-era unutterables. And all it'll cost Osment, 20, is the low, low price of a semester behind at NYU:

At a press conference for the 30 Days of Beauty & Fashion event in Sydney, Australia, actress/model Eva Mendes admitted that she was just the tiniest bit jet lagged from her flight. Mendes told reporters that she has a wonderful aid in fight against her jet leg: energy drinks. Mendes said, "So, right now, my body is telling me that it's Tuesday morning in Los Angeles and I should be asleep, but it's late Wednesday morning here in Sydney and according to most Aussies, I should be up being productive. So, I've had... I don't know how many energy drinks right now, but it's gotten me to the point where my body is feeing like a Tuesday night. I want to say around like 11 pm. I'll be good for a while. I'm not going to do a walkabout, but I could go shopping." Mendes also pointed out that she has an assistant on-call at all times to provide orange slices and a B-12 shot in case she crashes.

· Yup, that's it. And yet we can't help but get caught up in all the silliness, too. Wolf Blitzer? That sounds like a WWI machine gun! LOL! [Late Night] · "Canada Remains Happily Mediocre," says Canada's official online presence. [Canada.com] · No Nuns on the Catwalk: Eurotrash dance single, or Vatican fashion scandal? [Reuters] · You really haven't lived until you've heard Gwyneth Paltrow make an offhand joke about getting fat she knows will never, ever come to pass...in fluent Spanish! [BWE.tv] · "My dad’s not an idiot — he’s nothing short of a genius, in my opinion," says Jack Osbourne, who's making a movie to repair his father's depiction on The Osbournes as the lovably addled Prince of Darkness and Allowance-Distribution. [RollingStone.com] · Nic Cage, in hair and pictures. [Latino Review]

For the 987 readers (whoops — make that 988 and counting since starting this sentence) following "Don Draper"'s Twitter feed, today was an unusually turbulent day at Sterling Cooper Ad Agency. Same thing for the 1,207 folks following "Peggy Olson." You might have been among them, frozen out when AMC reportedly turned to Twitter with complaints about the Mad Men characters posting regular "updates" on the service — discussions which, for whatever reason, resulted in Twitter admin suspending a handful of feeds today until the a fan and media backlash supposedly helped whip them back into place a few hours later. And while at least one AMC critic accused the network of history's "single worst use (misuse?) of social media," other observers seemed baffled that AMC would endanger free advertising. AMC insists that wasn't its plan, and we believe it: If a brief outage could virally promote Mad Men's unofficially official Twitter sites for most of the morning — to the tune of a few hundred new followers in the middle of the series' worst ratings slump — we would have done the same thing ourselves.Sure it's cynical, but hey — Twitter's founders will tell you themselves they "spend more money than [they] make," and a viral scandal seems a reasonably healthy win-win: AMC takes some geek heat in a slow news week. Twitter gets play for its viral-marketing value and influence. Don, Peggy, Bert Cooper and co. get to take the morning off. Mad Men rebounds after Labor Day — new episodes, Twitter feeds, DVD sets and all. The worst part? AMC can never admit brilliantly framing itself in a week when no one is following any news that's not coming out of Denver. Anyway, call us contrarians, but we applaud everyone involved. Especially the 25 people who've grabbed Don Draper's feed in the time it's taken to write this item. Someone's got good taste.

The LAT ran a feature today on the newest male-bonding craze to consume Hollywood power players — and no, it doesn't involve cocaine, Red Bull, or bottle service at Opera. Instead, it's an activity dubbed "Nerd Poker," and it offers almost 100 of Hollywood's behind-the-scenes talents a weekly chance to socialize while playing video games on Xbox Live. Though many use it as a fun way to score meetings and network, it can also allow its members the sort of cathartic outlet they'd typically be arrested for:

As we lamented in yesterday's To Do's, there are only a scant few weeks of summertime left. And Molls, being the redblooded All-American gal that she is, has decided to make the most of it. Tonight's installment of Defamer To Do's comes to you from a few different locales as Molly and her friend Alexis try to make their way back from the beach. Along the way, they battle ominous looking bikers, the dreaded LA traffic and a Coffee Bean employee who seems less than thrilled that he's being filmed, all while telling you everything that's going on in Los Angeles tonight. Enjoy!· Matthew Sweet at Amoeba. · Delta Spirit Record Release Party at Spaceland. · Susan Squire at Book Soup.

We invite devoted Defamer readers to think back now, to almost two years ago to the day. The U.S. dollar dominated global free markets. Whitney Houston was in the middle of a liquor-store-robbery crime spree that left dozens dead. And a little show by the name of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip had captured the imaginations of the American working class, caught up weekly in its by-turns harrowing and inspirational tales from the front lines of the network sketch comedy wars. If you're still with us, you'll too recall Defaker, the Defamer-inspired mock gossip site that attempted to promote the series on NBC.com by opening itself up to visitor comments. Several harsh insights followed ("Aaron Sorkin, I'll be seeing you soon! Posted by: Crack | September 21, 2006 08:30 PM" springs to mind), the site was quickly shuttered, and the ill-conceived exercise was chocked up by the lauded series creator as yet another example of the ugliness that will inevitably spring forth from the anonymous blogging wilds.We review all this as introduction to quite possibly the most exciting online development to roll across our virtual desktops in quite some time. Aaron Sorkin, or someone who has gone to a great deal of effort to convince others he is Aaron Sorkin, has emerged from his self-imposed, blogophobic exile to openly embrace the social networking phenomenon known as Facebook. From his introductory letter entitled, Aaron Sorkin & The Facebook Movie:

Leader of the tween revolution Miley Cyrus could barely hold back her excitement as the entire Cyrus clan headed for an early dinner at a City Wok in Studio City. The famed family rallied together to celebrate Billy Ray's birthday, but sadly, City Wok was not his first choice for a birthday dinner. Billy Ray Cyrus said, "I wanted to go to STK or Chop and get a great big ole steak. But since Miley is the breadwinner in this family, she calls the shots and she picked up City Wok." Miley added, "Egg rolls are going to be super yummers. Happy birthday, Dad!"

In the eternal battle between exes Charlie Sheen and Denise Richards, the latter has just been dealt a significant setback. Though Sheen pulls down a nigh-unbeatable $800,000 for every episode of Two and a Half Men, Richards could at least boast a buzzed-about, cringe-inducing E! reality show, Denise Richards: It's Complicated. Now, according to the New York Post, she may not even have that feather in her cap anymore — it appears that the show has been cancelled.

Time's 'New Faces of Porn' Spotlights Ron Jeremy: It only took 30 years, but the buttoned-down gang at Time Magazine finally deigned to recognize the world's most famous male porn star on the occasion of his new book The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz. We think our mothers brainstormed to jointly conduct the interview — "How did you get your start in the porn industry?" "What was your path to the porn industry?" "Were your friends shocked that you were doing this?" — but the high-up, uncensored namechecking of San Fernando Jones and the Temple of Poon seems to have turned a symbolic page from staid newsweekly to prime wanking material. We'll never be bored in the doctor's waiting room again. [TIME]

If you thought Anne Hathaway had bad luck with boyfriends, we're hearing more today about her even trickier track record with politicians: Skeevy, lying, disingenuous heartbreakers whose hollow promises ring in her ears long after they've been exiled to retirement, disgrace and worse. Honey, we know! We even relate a bit to her early skepticism of Sen. Barack Obama, recalled this week in Denver: "I was kind of afraid of Obama the first time I saw him. ... And I was afraid to trust him and I was afraid to have hope when I first kind of became aware of him." But now, with most of her diaries, nude photos and other personal effects safely in federal custody, what matters most is who's minding the store in Washington. Which means exactly the mile-high rebound it sounds like — coming around on Obama and signing on for the long election slog ahead. And feeling good doing it, if her new, unapologetic take on celebrity politics is any indication:

Though it pains us to say this, we think we may be over Lo Bosworth, the incipient villainess of The Hills' fourth season. When we first met Lo, she was amongst the most breezy members of Hills forerunner Laguna Beach, but there's no place for cute quips on The Hills when out-and-out bitchery will win the day. That, ultimately, is what makes Lo's transformation all the more frustrating — though she has settled into her role as Audrina's archrival for their friend Lauren's attention, her irritating machinations are actually making us root for the blank blogger (and that's saying a lot). With the help of Molly McAleer, we pored over last night's episode and put together a list of the top five reasons we simply can't support Lo anymore. Lo, you're on notice: we're officially frienemies now. [MTV]

There will come a day—maybe not in the near future, or even the distant future, but perhaps thousands and thousands of years from now—when the significance of the early 21st Century pop-cultural phenomenon known as The Hills will make itself fully known. At that time, trillions of shipbound lifeforms coasting through the universe will already have been hard at work, tending slavishly to their Heidi and Spencer Pratt Solemnity Shrines and anointing young LC-alikes in dabs of Suddenly, Audrina—the most seductively floral of all Official The Hills Scents—before sacrificing the virgins to the mighty reality Gods ensconced atop Mt. Bolthouse. Doing so will inch them ever closer to utter and complete, like, enlightenment. In the meantime, however, artifacts like the one above will remain nothing but mysteries, wrapped in enigmas, stuffed into leotards, and adorned with deeply symbolic terrycloth headbands. Tomorrow never dies. We wanna live forever. Let us hear your bodies talk.

Going for the Bronze: Though NBC's Olympic coverage provided the network with television's most watched event anywhere, ever, in the history of the universe, that massive audience hasn't translated into major spikes of interest for NBC's fall shows like Kath & Kim and My Own Worst Enemy. The network spent 65% of its promo time on returning shows (like Lipstick Jungle Lipstick Jungle Lipstick Jungle) but failed to perk awareness for anything but the 80's retread Knight Rider. Still, before NBC shoehorns Michael Phelps into Selma Blair's thong, they've got this bit of recent history to add perspective: the Athens Olympics were used to tout quickly flushed shows like Joey and LAX. Perhaps Kath & Kim will stand on its own merits — that is, as long as they didn't advertise it during the rebellion-inducing beach volleyball marathon. [Variety]

Hello, class. Welcome to Punk Rock 101. Today's lesson is about the seminal LA punk band the Germs, who are finally getting thanks to a new biopic called What We Do Is Secret (playing for the rest of this week at the Nuart). For those of you who are not familiar with the band or why they're deserving of a movie, here's a quick cheat sheet. The Germs made history because they were A) completely insane and B) their singer, Darby Crash, committed the self-mythologizing move of killing himself back in 1980. Unfortunately, he happened to pick the day before John Lennon was murdered to intentionally overdose on heroin, so most people didn't even notice. Flash forward nearly 30 years. In order to support the film's release, three of the original members of the Germs (including former Nirvana/Foo Fighters guitarist Pat Smear) have been playing shows around town with Shane West, the ER hunk who portrays Crash in the flick. I saw one of the shows the new-and-improved Germs played this weekend, and I'm here to answer a few pressing questions, like: Did they suck? Did Shane West suck? Would people bleed? How hot was Bijou Phillips?

Grey's Anatomy star Katherine Heigl seized a golden opportunity and went out for a jog during Los Angeles's magic hour last night. Once she moved past the smog, traffic snarls, and unsavory characters that lined the streets, the beauty of the city surprised Heigl. However, Heigl could not escape a group of photographers who popped out of bushes, trees, and water fountains as she ran. Heigl stopped mid-stride and asked, "Can't I just work on my fitness without you and your entire posse snappily judging me? I need to get in shape for my man, the rocker. No, not the Rainn Wilson variety. He's more like the John Mayer variety, minus all that Jennifer Aniston bashing. Love her, btw. Now, either let me jog in peace or go fetch me a purple-flavored Vitamin Water from the 7-11."

Our visit to the multiplex last weekend went well enough for the most part; we liked The House Bunny just fine, and the Babylon A.D. trailer looked suitably career-ending for our tastes. It wasn't until we exited the theater that our nerves deadened and our hearts sank: There, in a lobby dotted with orphaned popcorn kernels and bereft souls, we had a closer look at a poster for the upcoming Al Pacino/Robert De Niro cop flick Righteous Kill. And while it might seem too easy to write the film off as a gimmicky genre exercise at first blush, it would hardly be fair to do so without seeing it. That said, we noticed five things off the bat that not only implied an alarming sloppiness, but seemed to actively discourage our viewership. After the jump, our essential wake-up call for studios, poster designers and casual fans alike.1. Shave your leading men. We've seen this before on offending posters, most recently when My Best Friend's Girl co-star Dane Cook compared his own mug to "Britney Spears's vagina." But that's Dane Cook, and this is Robert De Niro, and the best Bobby can hope for is maybe "bus driver at 5 o'clock." It's conspicuous and really kind of repellent.