· Did we say we were done with earthquake stories? We lied. Shake it, Judge Judy! (And Judge Penny, whoever you are.) [Access Hollywood] · Were three dimensions not enough for you to enjoy the dead-eyed zombie children delights of The Polar Express? Well, all aboard! TOOT! TOOT! The Polar Express 4-D Experience is on its way. What does the additional D get you? "Upon your arrival at the North Pole...it actually begins to snow inside the 4-D Special FX Theater and when the conductor sings 'Hot Chocolate' and the dancing waiters begin to pour, the audience can smell the delightful aroma of every cocoa cup!'" [NY Post] · Despite a hospitalization, Elizabeth Taylor's flack insists she is nowhere near death: "Her hospital visit was precautionary. She will be returning home shortly. At present, she is surrounded by family, friends and fabulous jewels." And Pepperoni & Bacon Pizza Pops—her favorite. [ET Online] · All hail Siaosi Tupou V, Tonga's new king! [Yahoo/AFP] · Posters for The Canadian Filmmakers Festival feature some fine Canuckistanian send-ups of classic film images. [Super Punch]

Good news for the beleaguered Hollywood paparazzi: LAPD Chief William Bratton opposes a new proposal to place restrictions on particularly aggressive photographers. In fact, he took time out of his daily workout to tell KNBC that the problem lies not with the paparazzi but with the bad girls they photograph — a salient point made amusing by Bratton's brusque verbiage and up-to-the-minute starlet savvy (preserved on video after the jump):

And now, we promise: our very last earthquake anecdote, courtesy of reliable Hollywood lech James Woods. The former Shark star was climbing into his red SUV outside Joan's on Third when the fearsome 5.4 earth-shaker began. Then, says Page Six:

After rumors surfaced last week about being involved in an extramarital affair, Matthew Broderick took wife Sarah Jessica Parker out to dinner in mid town Manhattan on Wednesday night. When asked about the state of their marriage, Broderick said, "I'm going to quote my favorite TV character and say, don't be ridiculous. We're doing great." Parker pensively nodded in agreement with her husband and then flashed the 'A-Okay' hand gesture.

So anyway, we were stroller-pushing with Molls and her young son at the Americana last weekend, and she turned to us and said—what's that? You'd like us to rewind and repeat that again, slowly, and swear up and down we aren't lying? Well we can't do that. All we know is every time we go to her house, there's this kid in diapers there named Collin, and he's usually playing on some exercise equipment (elliptical crosstrainer, exercise ball, whatever), and he keeps referring to her as "mom," and she in response calls him "my favorite little mistake," and they seem to be a happy little family. He's home-schooled, and subsists so far as we can tell on pre-masticated Hostess cupcakes, which she drops directly into his mouth, mama-sparrow style. Here's your To Dos! · KCRW Session with Moby at Malibu Performing Arts Center · Sarah Silverman at Largo · Artist's Night at California Science Center

Perhaps it's due to all those episodes of Behind the Music we watched back in the day, but we've always assumed that no matter how big a fortune a megastar may amass, he or she will eventually waste it all on hookers or blow. Not so, apparently, for Kevin Costner: though far removed from his Waterworld earning power, he's socked enough in the bank to still be worth over $20 million. Unfortunately, he spent that $20 million self-financing the dire-looking comedy Swing Vote. Says the LAT:

Viewers who tuned in Wednesday to Late Night With Conan O'Brien were treated to very special vacation slideshow by Mummy 3 star Maria Bello, who, during a recent visit to China, skipped the Great Wall and the Forbidden City in exchange for the more fantastic tour of Misconceived Bathroom Placards. It's not just the mangled English ("handicapped" = "deformed") and malaprops that make the show-and-tell special, however. Just take a moment to enjoy O'Brien's play-by-play, abetted by headlining guest Kevin Costner's awkward sidekick chuckle. If it's not enough to make you forget Andy Richter, it's at least enough to make you forget this man once won an Academy Award. In any case, we genuinely wouldn't mind if they revived this segment every week. [NBC]

The Golden Age of Villainy may be upon us. Between the accolades and eventual Oscar for Javier Bardem's singular evildoer in No Country For Old Men and the virtual repeat of the same cycle this year for Heath Ledger's Joker, no prospect stokes A-list egos these days quite like a chance to OD on wretchedness. Sony has enough confidence in the era to have undertaken development on the Spider-Man spinoff Venom, a full-length riff on Topher Grace's enemy from Spider-Man 3 that, naturally, will be recast with someone likelier to open a blockbuster. And now, after a few days of Angelina Jolie/Catwoman rumors tailing the Dark Knight follow-up, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Johnny Depp reportedly want a piece of the Bat-action:

· 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]

A Queens resident may have had the highlight of her week or year when she ran into Katie Holmes. Rose Smith was surprised to see the famed wife of Scientologist Tom Cruise, but was shocked to see that she was wearing nearly identical outfits. Smith said, "I would've assumed that Katie's an Anthropologie girl, but she was wearing the same tights that I got at Urban Outfitters. How cool was that? I totes asked her if she needed any help though. You know that blink once, if you're cool. Blink twice, if you want me to get my brother and his truck."

A clearly flailing John McCain has just released his new Obama attack ad and boy, is it a doozy! Employing a risky "Obama is awesome...but is he too awesome?" strategy that seems designed to fail, McCain calls Obama "the biggest celebrity in the world" (because if there's one thing America hates, it's celebrities) and plays footage of Obama's massive rallies and beatific smile that could have come from an Obama b-roll itself. The only signs that something is amiss are the split-second shots of Britney and Paris spliced into the ad — inclusions that have baffled the reps for both washed-up celebutantes. Says the Huffington Post:

Depressing Celebrity Snapshot of the Day: Photographers caught a glimpse of Paul Newman on an excursion this week in New York. The good news: He is still getting around after reports of his terminal lung cancer hit last month. The bad news: His condition appears to have worsened, with the 83-year-old actor in a wheelchair, looking his frailest yet. Continued best wishes to him and his family. That is all. [Daily Mail]

Stopping by Late Show to drum up interest in Pineapple Express, James Franco admitted to David Letterman that this was only his second-ever experience on a talk show. The first was two years ago, when he appeared on The Tony Danza Show: A lightly surreal daytime chatfest hosted by everyone's favorite Who's The Boss-star and guido savante, it relied perhaps a little too heavily on ill-conceived gimmicks and stunts. (The Plinkoesque call-in trivia game Extravadanza immediately pops to mind.) Sure enough, learning that Franco played a boxer in a "horrible movie" he refrains from naming (Annapolis! It was Annapolis!), Danza challenged him first to a push-up contest, and, after Franco politely rejected that offer, a Hook-the-Ring decathalon event that still induces involuntarily facial-twitching and regular nightmares of Danza's "I'm the Lord of the Ring-Hookers!" victory dance.

At a press conference on Wednesday afternoon, Wizards of Waverly Place star Selena Gomez finally announced her decision to run for America's Teen Queen. In her speech, Gomez outlined numerous domestic policies including plans for cheaper lip-gloss, universal gift cards for Forever 21 and weekly Jonas Brothers concerts. During her speech, Gomez refrained from bashing her competitor, Miley Cyrus, even going as far as saying that Cyrus has taken some pretty cool photos, but cool photos aren't enough to lead America. At the end of her speech Gomez said, "We're going to go to the Teen Choice Awards! We're going to be on the Ryan Seacrest radio show, Tom Harkin! The Today Show! Live With Regis & Kelly! Robertson Blvd! The Morning Show With Mike & Julie! Raging Waters! And then we're going to take it all the way to MTV Music Awards and we're going to win! Burbank High football rules! YEAH!"

You're nobody in this town until you've been ripped off, and even then you're just a little more bitter nobody until an actual, attributable success comes along. According to a profile today in indieWIRE, director Alex Holdridge can finally lay claim to both stages in his accelerating career arc: His funny, lyrical LA romance In Search of a Midnight Kiss opens theatrically tomorrow in New York (Aug. 22 in Los Angeles), several years after a less-auspicious development left him burned at the Sony gates. Not long after his micro-budget debut Wrong Numbers hit at the 2001 South by Southwest film festival, Holdridge said he had fielded calls from every major studio looking to adapt his comedy about "unruly teens trying to buy beer for a party on their last night of high school" for Hollywood. Sony eventually hired him to write the script on spec, which apparently took a couple years too many for the studio's taste, as Holdridge discovered when he heard about a new Sony project called Superbad:

Though Steve Carell is a perennial Emmy nominee for his work on The Office, he's never taken home a trophy of his own (even as the show itself won the Outstanding Comedy Award in 2006). Now, the LAT's easily excitable Tom O'Neill thinks he's nailed the reason why: Carell is just too darn creepy in the role.

We'd like, if we may, to squeeze one more magazine cover into our When Glossies Attack gallery of unjustly uglified celebrity covergirls—inspired, of course, by a shot of Gossip Girl's Blake Lively taken, apparently, moments after a freak steamroller accident. The Fug Girls point us to this Marie Claire cover, featuring none other than fashion-awkward DUI-haver, Mischa Barton. How she succeeded in landing this cover, with nothing much more to promote than a movie inspired by and starring a faux-lesbian Soviet pop group, is certainly a topic for discussion. However, we'd like to focus for a moment on the photo itself:

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.

In today's niche-oriented gay world, is there anything that bears, twinks, gipsters (gay hipsters) and the like can all agree on (besides the fact that we totally need a better word than "gipster")? Gay hookup site Manhunt is betting there's at least one figure who can bridge that vast divide, so they've launched a new ad campaign featuring universal gay icon Kathy Griffin — only, according to a sticky press release, they're doing it without her approval:

Shia LeBeouf continues to recover from hand surgery after some spectacular Bayian stuntwork at the corners of LaBrea and Fountain early Sunday morning, resulting in an overturned pick-up truck, plus a massive fireball after the frazzled actor exhaled a gust of 80-proof breath while trying to light a cigarette. We've already explored his conveniently timed Details interview, in which he spoke freely of hard-partying father-son bonding moments, and his inability "to have one drink." ET has video (above) of the interview, in which he charms a giggly off-camera reporter with flippant observations about his renegade drugstore exploits ("Walgreens is a formidable foe, let me tell you guys right now. It was the battlegrounds of my life. The coliseum where all the rumbles happen."). He also openly longs for a time when "actors were magical. Now that paparazzis are rampant the business is losing the magic a little bit. You always feel like people know too much."Variety, meanwhile, has a report from the Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen set, where Bumblebee, Jazz, Ratchet, and the rest are passing the time playing Trivial Pursuit: Totally '80s Edition until their star gets back: