We're not really sure why this is happening (other than these people being weird), but Mamma Mia! is huuuge in the UK. Like, top-grossing film of all time. Beats Titanic, even.

Why won't ShopRite make Adolf Hitler a birthday cake? [LHL]

On SNL last night, Kanye West sounded disturbingly like a quiet man doing bad karaoke. Severe tech problems, or natural talent problems? Click to watch, listen, and judge.

Zounds and ods bodkins y'all, Gossip Girl spin-off news to drop in T-minus now. There have been rattly little whispers circling through TV land about some sort of new offshoot project for the teen soap, and people were all up ins the Speculation Department's secret files trying to find the answers. Most people thought it would be for young Jennifricka, following her to boarding school like that The It Girl book series. But no! Instead the new spin-off will focus on our most useless and wrinkly demographic, old people! Horrible, horrible old people which I will never become (I've my Goldie Hawn wig and Isabella Rossellini to thank for that.) Read more by clicking —>

Jimmy Fallon, the hangdog comedian from Saturday Night Live and Fever Pitch, will be taking over Conan O'Brien's late night spot sometime next year. (Hamilton is really excited about his house band!) The actual start date won't be until March probably, but in the meantime Mr. Fallon will be rolling out a series of 5-minute-long 'webisodes' (annoying modern slang for short things on the internet), starting tonight at 12:35 am, on NBC's website. It will be a great chance for the audience to figure out what they'll be getting with Jimmy, and a really great chance for Jimmy to fuck this whole thing up before he even makes it to air.

Um. Entertainment Weekly has yet another click-heavy pageview generator list-gallery on their website today, this one called the "25 Smartest People in TV." And there, at number 25, are the ladies from The View. Yes, The View. The shrieking, blubbering, facticide lady chat show that features the estimable talents of Sherri "The World is Flat" Shepherd and Elisabeth Hasselbeck, who once threw Rosie O'Donnell in a pond to see if she would float, like a witch. (She did).

The whole sad story of Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt's marriage just gets worse and worse. First the Silly Puddy fake couple from The Hills filthily escaped to Mexico for a totes unplanned elopement beach wedding that Us Weekly was lucky enough to have happened to be there for. So that was like, serendipity and bliss and like cold, oily honeymoon sex and stuff! Now, with that matter of dually plastic and farty bologna-smelling espirit de corps behind them, the couple has soldiered on to new territory: More Us Weekly covers! Involving Heidi's devastatingly sad mom!

Meet Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, an inept Republican politician on the order of, say a Katherine Harris. The Congresswoman hung up on Barack Obama twice today, and then put out a press release about it, and THEN mis-spelled "Barak's" name (and the name of his chief of staff) in the press release. Surely what's going on here is that Ros-Lehtinen, the longest-serving woman in Congress and no stranger to embarrassment, has learned all too well the apparent lesson of Sarah Palin's crank call from fake Nicolas Sarkozy: Dense politicians should not attempt to talk to famous strangers on the phone. But she's still incredibly stupid, as revealed by the hilarious chronology of events she published today:

The trundling disaster that is the Today Show's fourth hour—in which Hoda Kotb and Kathie Lee Gifford pick nits out of each other's hair and talk about hot flashes—rumbled into Horny Town Station this morning. Crooner Harry Connick Jr. was on, promoting something or other, and the ladies just could not get enough of him. Flanking him on two sides they made awkward sex sandwich jokes, prompting Kathie Lee to call the Egyptian Kotb "rye bread." Oy. Then Kathie made a joke about Connick's man business and somewhere Jeanie Linders cackled with delight and I had a flashback to my first year out of college, spent old lady wrangling. Clip is above.

Oohh, a new trend is emerging! One in which grizzled old movie stars like Ed Harris and Clint Eastwood not only act in, direct, and write their own movies, but where they gravelly-voice their way through closing credits songs! Above are snippets from Ed Harris's "You'll Never Leave My Heart" from his blink-and-you-missed-it Western Apaloosia, and Clint Eastwood's lilting, my-god-he-sounds-old ditty "Gran Torino," from the eponymous upcoming film. They sound, um... Well they sound like Ed Harris and Clint Eastwood bein' windblown dudes. Who will be next?? We're hoping for a fabulously gristly Ian McKellan disco ballad.

We hate to beat a dead kangaroo here, but that Australia is showing signs of becoming an epic flop. It's not even doing well in Australia! The country where it was filmed and takes place and was, we suspect, named after! Variety reports that the film has basically done good but not great business since it opened Down Under. Was it overhyped? Variety seems to think so:

I watched two documentaries last night. The first was Frontline's famous 2001 essay "The Merchants of Cool," about the big, cynical business of marketing to young ones. It particularly focuses on MTV and how they, with definitively ugly success, figured out a way to throw advertising at kids without the kids really noticing. Then I watched that network's unveiling of Britney: For the Record, a supposed "tell-all" featuring Britney Spears, the smeared and unfocused pop star, that was, in my opinion, the acme (or nadir, not sure which) of this sneakily integrated marketing strategy. Here was not just the party, not the curious almost-normalness of Ms. Spears, not her childish funny voices, not even just her well-guarded children. No, here was something deeply sad—a bit haunting, a bit evocative—but nonetheless blatantly selling a new album and some chintzy perfumes. It was an infomercial asking us to, in some ways, buy a wayward young person. It was strange and vaguely interesting and I'll talk a bit more about it after the jump.

If ever there was a grim picture of the current financial clusterfuck, it's the once artsy (Björk! sigur rós!), hip, and rich island nation wonderland of Iceland, which fell into cataclysmic economic failure earlier this month. And it happened pretty much overnight. Since the three major banks collapsed under crippling debt and a plummeting currency, job loss has been widespread—the architecture industry, for example, has seen some 75% of its work force laid off in the past few weeks. Now the seemingly peaceful population has devolved into an angry, violent mob, with a gay "troubadour" named Hordur Torfason leading the charge against the government.

Starlets, you never learn, probably because you're not paying attention, probably because you're always as strung out as Twilight star Kristen Stewart looked last night on the Late Show: You must come on David Letterman's program caffeinated and at least attempt to say several interesting things. Mary-Kate Olsen's "so tired" complaint bombed; Lauren Conrad got entertainingly insulted for being otherwise boring. This is the price from promoting (usually vapid) movies from the Late Show couch. Stewart's appearance is one for the protocelebrity textbooks; an epic trainwreck progressing (in the clip after the jump) from severe awkwardness into mild nastiness and, at the very end, a devastating cut spun from precious, precious terrible awful comedy gold.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a five-year low today, closing down nearly 450 points. And the New York Times Co. had an even worse day. The company's stock dove almost 10%, lower than it's been in decades. And just after the close of the markets came the payoff: the company is cutting its dividend to six cents per share, down from 23 cents last quarter. How bad is it? Very bad. How long can the company last before calling bankruptcy if things keep going like this? We're putting the question to you. In one sense, it's wise for the company to cut the dividend, because it needs to conserve all the cash it can get. But it's pretty apocalyptic for its stock, because it just makes it that much more unattractive to investors. The company also released its October revenues just minutes ago. How are those? Horrible! Total revenues are down 9.4% from last year, and ad revenues are down more than 16%.

When it moved Project Runway from Bravo to Lifetime, Weinstein Company transformed the latter cable network from overearnest television for spinsters into something more chic and cheeky, or so some people said at the time. Weinstein Company was promptly sued by Bravo parent NBC Universal, which won an unexpected victory in court and impounded the show. Lifetime has been stewing, bitterly, and yelling at its cats, like a spurned mistress, and now Lifetime has decided it's going to sue Harvey Weinstein's company, presumably for being a slimy jerk who said the divorce was final when really he wasn't even separated yet. This makes 2008 the year of total meltdown for Weinstein:

The Prop 8 fight isn't the only battle raging in California right now. As we complain about the cold here in New York, huge wildfires are quickly gobbling up large swaths of Southern California. Some 30,000 people have fled their homes, and a reported 1,000 houses have been destroyed. It's pretty apocalyptic looking. As one Flickr member noted, there are scenes of scorched earth and sky that remind us of Cormac McCarthy's end of the world novel The Road. We've put together a gallery of some of our favorite images from Flickr after the jump. Harrowing stuff.

Sony yesterday released the new teaser for the apocalyptic epic 2012, sort of a Groundhog Day meets The Day After Tomorrow in which Earth's inhabitants wake up one morning to find director Roland Emmerich once again destroying everything in sight. There's little on hand to illuminate the plot that star John Cusack so vigorously protected earlier this year in a chat with Defamer, but here's what we can suss from a couple viewings so far:1. Emmerich's campy, well-fortified London townhouse? Saved. 2. Tibet? Gone. 3. Killer-tidal wave CGI technology has not advanced especially far in the five years since Day After Tomorrow. 4. Emmerich is returning to the political satire at which he acquitted himself so expertly before stumbling over historical comedy with 10,000 B.C. 5. If you look really, really close, we think you can spot Cusack boogieboarding into the doomed monastery. BONUS: If you're especially determined to get something out of this, amuse yourself and your coworkers by reading the intertitles in your best Don LaFontaine voice. It's fun!

Election night might have been a hopeful triumph for most Americans, but it was an evening of screaming and insults for Canadian Sharilyn Johnson, according to the epic rant she just uploaded to Huffington Post. Johnson had to be in the live Daily Show audience on election night, because she's been watching everything Jon Stewart has ever done since 1994, is also super-into Stephen Colbert, has friends on staff, knows line-runners by name, etc. etc. Johnson (on left in photo) lined up a ticket seven months in advance, confirmed and reconfirmed, traveled to New York from Toronto, waited in line and then watched as her world ENDED.

Oh Emily Brill. The blogging (she's Hamilton's favorite New York writer, for serious) media heiress has stooped to our level. Last night she decided to swallow the horse pill of her pride and watch an episode of bitchy Upper East Side teen soap opera The McLaughlin Group Gossip Girl, and then wrote about it! It could be seen as direct competition for our swatting-at-a-bug-zapper ramblings about the show, except it's much better and, like, informed. You see, unlike us, she's from the world of dough-headed Upper East Side kids, so she can totes relate (or not) to all the interesting characters. She took notes, with her hands!, last night, weighing in on important matters like "is Blair wearing Juicy?" and "did you know that most girls I know... do not like 1Oak??" I did not know! She's posted the chicken scratch on her little website and we've put the pages down below for you too, in case you're lazy (you are). David Mamet scribbles on napkins too, Emily! See what you can parse. It's kinda hard. I think she insults the Bronx in some capacity.