Lest anyone think that highly publicized celebrity trips to Africa to call attention to famine, genocide, or the incredible availability of cheaply procured accessory-orphans don't carry significant risks for socially conscious A-listers, consider the plight of George Clooney following his recent mission to Darfur. Says Page Six:
Beating even the impressive headlines-to-episode turnaround times of Matt Stone and Trey Parker themselves, a Defamer reader drafted this cast photo of the inevitable South Park episode skewering Survivor: Cook Island and its almost-too-ridiculous -to-be-parodied race vs. race premise. We look forward to the requisite scene in which Cartman sensitively explains to Kyle why he can't play along at home, because "there's no bleeping Jew Tribe, Jew," though we can't help but feel this would have been the perfect opportunity for the recently departed Chef to preach in the final moments how it's time we all looked past something as surface as skin color, unless it's a shade of delicious mocha-chocolate covering the large expanse of a plus-plus-sized hooker's ass.
Moments after grumpy, 168-year-old Viacom mogul Sumner Redstone fired his now-infamous "That Tom Cruise Character Is Far Too Nuts To Ever Work For My Company" Shot Heard 'Round The World across the pages of the Wall Street Journal, chatter almost instantaneously commenced that the notoriously thin-skinned Cruise would dispatch his legal strongman, Scary Hollywood Lawyer Bertram "Bert" Fields, to devour Redstone's children. But rather than paralyze his quarry with a quick dose of poison, unhinge his jaw, and slowly swallow his retaliatory prey down until the clearly discernible shape of Shari Redstone bulged from his grotesquely distended belly, Fields instead announced that Cruise has "no intent" to call in a hit, telling The Hollywood Reporter, ESQ:
Oh, publicists and their dirty, dirty tricks! Yesterday afternoon, we passed along a press release from Extra promoting yet another defense of Tom Cruise by producing partner/octogenarian-bully deflector Paula Wagner in such a way that one might reasonably assume we'd be seeing an on-camera interview. Alas, as you can see in the clip above, all we got was some stock footage of the little-seen Cruise/Wagner enforcer and the minimal voiceover paraphrasing of a telephone conversation, leaving us with the disturbing impression that Wagner actually sounds like excitable, celebrity-positive reporter Jerry Penacoli. Thanks for nothing, deliberately deceptive TV flacks!
· Defamer Celebrity Style Secret: Wear your jowls on the back of your neck and your original hairline at the base of your skull to look years younger! [Hat tip to Gilded Moose for alerting us to Michael Douglas' alarming facial tightness.]
"'Hitler was a bad man, but what's wrong with having food here?' said Ashwini Phadnis, 22, a microbiology student as she tucked away a piece of chocolate cake." Real wire story on India's Hitler's Cross restaurant or Onion article? You make the call.
The Gut's figure sketching class is really starting to pay some dividends.
Now that she mentions it, yeah, Kevin Federline does resemble a weasel.
· We highly recommend Defamer blogfather Choire Sicha's piece on the short shrift honkies receive in Snakes on a Plane. Being white on Samuel L. Jackson's plane is more deadly than being a virgin in a slasher flick.
· Every model could really learn something from Jeremy Piven's unconventional hand placement choices.
Vincent "Don Vito" Margera, frequent victim of nephew Bam Margera's merciless pranksterism and an ideal candidate to be stuffed-canneloni'd to death by a Se7en-inspired serial killer, was formally charged today with "two felony counts of sexual assault on a child," after a boozy appearance Friday at an autograph signing event in Colorado resulted in allegations that he groped two underage fans:
Fearing that Viacom-owned celebrity news outlets Entertainment Tonight and The Insider might prefer to run puff pieces depicting Sumner Redstone shopping for the shoes he was wearing when he put expensively shod foot to movie star ass yesterday in booting Tom Cruise's production company off the Paramount lot, producing partner Paula Wagner took her side of the story to Warner Bros.' Extra today, where she offered a somewhat expanded version of the talking points she's already provided to the newspapers. From the press release touting tonight's appearance:
· Bands you can see perform tonight, if tickets are still available and you are so inclined: Goldspot at the Troubadour; Mountain Goats at Amoeba; Dirty Little Secret at Safari Sam's Girl Friday at Spaceland;
· "AFI's 100 Years,100 Movie Quotes" series at the ArcLight screens The Maltese Falcon, whose notable line of Humphrey Bogart dialogue, "I am tired of these motherfucking maltese on my motherfucking falcon," would one day be appropriated by a less artistically ambitious film.
· The Onion AV Club is conning some tequila company into pouring some free product for a party they're throwing at Beauty Bar tonight, complete with a "Jesus' adventures in modernity" theme. Take advantage.
For every breaking People story reporting the sad news of the best boy who got away comes a joyous new celebrity wedding exclusive to take its place. We'll leave it to you, however, to decide how revved up you should get about the recently unknown star of a disappointing summer blockbuster asking his mostly anonymous girlfriend to marry him:
We pass along the following snippet of conspiracy-minded tinfoil-hattery belched up from within Viacom's corporate bowels and into our inbox earlier today not because we believe there's any truth to it, but rather because we were more than a little amused at how its author connected the seemingly coincidental events of yesterday's announcement of Paramount's two-picture deal with longtime Tom Cruise tormentors Trey Parker and Matt Stone to cranky, brittle-fist-shaking Viacom potentate Sumner Redstone's somewhat more attention-grabbing announcement that Cruise is too unhinged to work within his multimedia empire. Enjoy:
There was a time not too long ago when two overexposed starlets could settle their differences in a manner no more complicated than meeting in the VIP area of a crowded, overly trendy club, offering one another withering, body-tracing stares, and then, after a moment of calm in which one could almost hear uninhaled cocaine particles tumble from nearby tables and onto the floor, start beating the ever-living shit out of each other until yanked apart by their respective posses. Regrettably, we are now living in the days of nasty, Sidekick-deployed text messages, prank voicemails, and cloaked Caller IDs, a too-connected reality that leads celebutards to opt for cowardly technobullying over the visceral, problem-solving efficacy of an expertly yanked weave. According to TMZ.com, Paris Hilton recently had something called a SpoofCard canceled for allegedly trying to break into unauthorized voicemail boxes, and in an amazing coincidence, Lindsay Lohan was among the victims of box-hackers like Hilton and 50 other customers booted from the service for their shenanigans. Lohan's flack has passed the issue along to her lawyers, Hilton's rep couldn't be reached, and we're left wondering when the two rivals will rediscover the simple joys of girl-on-girl gladitorialism.
Perhaps one of Hollywood's most transparent dick-measuring rituals masquerading as friendly, if business-tinged, competition is the industry tennis match, where the Important gather at private residences and pricey clubs to determine whose racquet handle truly requires a two-handed grip, then angrily slap around some fuzzy balls until total physical superiority is proven. This week's NY Observer takes a look at the State Of Tinseltown Tennis, identifying the most exclusive, high-powered games in town and featuring interviews with the business's notable enthusiasts, but we were most struck by this section of the article, in which a description of a once-legendary-but now-in-disrepair court seems a clear stand-in for its once-legendary-beturtlenecked-producer-who's-seen-better-days owner:
You've now had some time to digest the fact that CBS has actually gone there, and decided the best way to spice up their castaway game show is by courting contestants from the many shades of the diversity rainbow (wisely omitting the Arab-American Tribe—too terroristy), then running the lucky chosen few under a race-reading UPC bar-code scanner and sorting them accordingly. Highly entertaining is the absurd lengths host Jeff Probst, as demonstrated in this interview with The Slug blog, will shoot for in order to justify this as something other than what it is: a cynical ploy calculated to get people talking and tuning in. RealityBlurred.com also points out that Survivor: Cook Island's far flung cross section of technicolor America may have more in common than their wildly varying skin tones first suggest:
An actual winner (yes, we checked) at Saturday's Creative Arts Emmy Awards sent us this photo of the way she's displaying her statuette. Take this novel Emmy-repurposing as a commentary on how some Creative Arts victors might feel about having their ceremony held in untelevised obscurity a week before the more glamorous primetime event if you must, but we find it a wholly practical use of a glittery eyesore that would otherwise be nothing more than a dust-collecting conversation piece going to waste on a mantel. In any event, we're glad it's being deployed as a toilet tissue holder and not a personal hygiene device, as the aureate angel's pointed wings were clearly not designed to be placed anywhere near sensitive parts of the human anatomy.
Here's Variety on the Cruise/Redstone battle. [Variety]
· And just because we love you, a link to the THR coverage as well! We really never stop giving. [THR]
Fox unleashes primetime streaming hell upon the internets, making available new episodes of Prison Break and Vanished to just about any site capable of hosting video. [Variety]
Steve Buscemi and Dan Aykroyd join the cast of Universal's same-sex-marriage-for-health-benefits comedy I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, with Buscemi as the city official hell-bent on proving Adam Sandler and Kevin James are only gay-for-copay, and Aykroyd as the fire department captain who'll crack wise about how the fake couple really want to fuck each other. [THR]
Morgan Creek Productions lines up $150 million in funding from a French bank, at least 20 percent of which is earmarked to cover production losses for days on which Lindsay Lohan is too dehydrated to show up on the set of their Georgia Rule. [Variety]
Not everything backstage at the Teen Choice Awards was flowing as smoothly as in front of the cameras, where Kevin Federline was boasting in impressive iambic pentameter of his mad skills at spending his wife's money. The Us Weekly blog reports that co-host Jessica Simpson approached Britney Spears, the woman whose career drippings she once hungrily lapped off the TRL studio floor, and, mesmerized by Spears' gigantic belly-melon and accompanying pair of swollen milkfruits, asked her onetime rival if she could kiss the delicious outer shell of her latest happy accident. Spears responded with the fiercest, twangiest "Hell, no!" she could muster, a battle-cry for overly manhandled, extremely pregnant women everywhere. Perhaps it was a politically inadvisable maneuver, but it was the honest, instinctive response of a defensive mother who was aware Simpson had just spent the last week starving herself to fit into a dress, and who could very well have been hungry enough to gnaw through her protective epidermal layers and devour the nutrient-rich fetal contents within.
AZCentral.com reports that yesterday's story about the two rattlesnakes allegedly released into a Phoenix theater showing Snakes on a Plane may have been a hoax. According to police, a blog-savvy serpent probably tried to catch a screening on its own to make up its simple, reptilian mind about whether the film's pre-release hype was warranted, and may not have been let loose into the theater by overzealous fans eager to help their fellow moviegoers replicate the claustrophobic terror felt by the fictional passengers of South Pacific Air Flight 121:
Continuing the volley of public statements being exchanged by displeased Viacom deity Sumner Redstone and representatives of Tom Cruise, the once-beloved, couch-molesting archangel he cast out of his Melrose Avenue Paradise late yesterday, Redstone instructed a PR henchman to publicly scoff at Cruise producing partner Paula Wagner's insistence that Cruise/Wagner had secured independent financing from shadowy, unnamed hedge funds and had been planning to jilt Paramount first, telling the NY Times:
Shortly after the Wall Street Journal transmitted partially mummified Viacom executive Sumner Redstone's (self-serving, possibly face-saving) bitchslap signalling the messy, astonishingly public end of Paramount's 14-year relationship with Tom Cruise and his production company late yesterday, other news organizations scrambled over to Cruise/Wagner to ask them if the impact from the back of Redstone's strong pimp-hand left any liver-spot marks. After rubbing a soothing aloe-based balm into their still-stinging cheeks, Cruise's producing partner and agent (whom, we should note, are married) stirred some outrage, disgust, and veiled threats into a damage control cocktail for the LAT:
