Welcome back to Defamer Attractions, your official tastemaking Bible for everything new and noteworthy at the movies. The second week of the fall season offers another mixed harvest of Oscar bait, multiplex placeholders and indie hopefuls, none more eagerly anticipated than the historically skeevy Dakota Fanning 2.0 drama Hounddog. But we'll get to that momentarily, along with this week's worthwhile DVD releases and an all-call for your own recommendations. As always, our opinions are our own — in times like these, who really wants to share? WHAT'S NEW: The first genuine Oscar-chasing release of the fall, The Duchess will likely split its viewership between pro- and anti-Keira Knightley factions before anyone bothers to acknowledge its broader, bodice-ripping appeal. So yes, Team Knightley: She deftly portrays Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, the late-18th-century heroine with the bitterly controlling husband (Ralph Fiennes), the rabble-rousing side dish (Dominic Cooper) and a surfeit of corsted, pre-feminist longing. The star and the film are beautiful, the direction assured and the awards-season creds affirmed — particularly Fiennes', whose customary wretchedness as the Duke acquires a kind of fascinating tenderness with age. If anyone should be on the Oscar bubble (besides the art and costume crew, which are locks), it's him.Still, in limited release, Duchess isn't competing for any box-office glory; that distinction belongs to Lakeview Terrace, the not-entirely-miserable Neil LaBute thriller featuring Samuel L. Jackson as a sociopathic cop out to get the hot interracial couple next door (Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington). Against sturdy holdovers (Burn After Reading, The Family That Preys) and middling newbies (the Dane Cook slog My Best Friend's Girl, Ricky Gervais's leading-man debut Ghost Town), Lakeview will top out at $15.6 million. Cook will follow with $13.2 million; with half the screens and even less promotion, Ghost Town should still manage an even $6 million. Also opening: Ed Harris's old-old-school Western Appaloosa; Chris Smith's tiny, acclaimed Indian excursion The Pool; the gay-conversion melodrama Save Me; the wrenching immigrant day-in-the-life tale Take Out; and the Duchess-correcting, misogynist fantasia The Pink Conspiracy. THE BIG LOSER: You know, after we just predicted the Weinsteins would once again find their step in the multiplex, trust in Harvey to not only dump another subpar animated fairy tale on an unsuspecting public, but to essentially disown it. Such is Igor's lot, with its backers AWOL, its reviews tepid, and its voice talent (John Cusack, Molly Shannon, Steve Buscemi) trapped in a Straight-to-Flopz™ patchwork about a hunchback pursuing his dream of becoming a mad scientist. MGM is left to collect the grosses for this one, which won't break $5 million on 2,300 screens. Or, as they call it at Weinstein HQ, business as usual.

♦ Leonardo DiCaprio's romance mojo isn't good this week: On the heels of his break up with Bar Refaeli, Gisele is banishing the memory of their relationship by selling the jewelry he gave her at auction. The October 15th Christie's sale will include a diamond pendant necklace estimated to fetch up to $150,000. [WWD]
♦ People's "Best Dressed" list, topped by Kate Hudson and including Gwyneth Paltrow, Sarah Jessica Parker and (of course) Michelle Obama, is a totally random list of averagely-dressed women who happen to have been photographed a lot lately. [People]
♦ Carla Bruni-Sarkozy was photographed in Paris last week for T's winter fashion issue, which comes out October 19th. [WWD]

Dane Cook is finally playing nice these days on behalf of his Mr. Fix-It remake new film My Best Friend's Girl, getting through an entire interview recently without once mentioning his mildly vagina-like face or those other movie-poster mishaps that so traumatized him last month. In their place, readers are treated to hints about Cook's sweeter, sensitive side — the leading man in him who prepares for onscreen interludes with a grueling two-month training routine for his mouth and hands:

• It's no fun living near Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. Neighbors in the West Village say the two are "spoiled brats" since they have bodyguards posted outside their apartment on West 13th Street who make neighbors get off the stoop whenever the twins are arriving home, and the twins keep SUVs idling in front of the building for hours at a time. [P6]

We've been telling you about The End of Ideas for a while now, but generally in the context where otherwise upstanding individuals knowingly attach their names to remakes, rehashes, reimaginings and revisions whose very existence could threaten even a VMA attendee's faith in a benevolent God. (His close neighbors are starting to have their doubts, anyway.) But to think that a Dane Cook movie that even he has found reason to second-guess could in fact be a poorly rendered rip-off of a straight-to-video David Boreanaz exercise from a decade ago? Really, now — that's just unholy. Judge for yourself after the jump as we bring you the special-needs trailer for Cook's forthcoming My Best Friend's Girl and its 2006 counterpart for the forgotten rom-com Mr. Fix It. As an added bonus, find a dormant IMDB comment thread parsing the films' respective plots: "What a rip-off! I predict this movie will never be released..." Alas.

• Britney Spears is supposedly furious with her mother over her upcoming tell-all, which accuses the pop star's former manager of grinding up pills and sneaking them into her meals. She should be in a better mood, however, after she reads all the positive reviews from her appearance on the VMAs last night, where she kicked off the show and later won three awards. [P6, NYP]

Samantha and Mark Ronson (left) headed to lunch at Bar Pitti ... Michael Phelps turning up for an appearance on CBS' The Early Show ... Kim Kardashian getting out of an SUV near Times Square ... Lindsay Lohan shooting scenes on the set of Ugly Betty ... Kate Hudson and son Ryder going for a walk through the Village ... Gerard Butler leaving a lunch in SoHo ... Katie Holmes leaving rehearsals ... Nina Garcia promoting her new book at an event at Saks ... and Adrian Grenier walking through Midtown.

Picture it: Kate Hudson in The Secret of the Volcanic Ash! It's the hilarious romantic adventure of an actress (who may or may not be trying to kill love interest Owen Wilson) who absconds with a lucrative, well-kept secret: a vial of volcanic ash from the jungles of Vanuatu that has the potential to revolutionize women's hair care forever! There's just one problem (and it isn't the movie's predictable third act): this tale is real, and Hudson is getting sued for it. Says the Daily Mail:

• Alessandra Ambrosio just gave birth, but she isn't wasting any time. She's reportedly already looking to sell pictures of her newborn daughter Anja to the tabloids. [P6]

Nothing good in this world can last forever, and so it is with The Wendy Williams Show, which concluded its six-week test run today before it relaunches nationwide in 2009. When we last checked in on Wendy, she was shocking the audience with unorthodox opinions on matters like Heath Ledger's baby (not a random, drive-by splash-off, you'll be happy to know) and The Curse of Jennifer Aniston. Still, for her final broadcast, Wendy ceded the crazy to audience member Rosie, who proceeded to accuse actress Kate Hudson of attempted murder, twice (as well as the inability to fill out a C-cup). We're speechless, so we'll simply quote from Wendy's signoff: "See you in 2009," she said, "just how you like it: real, raw, and regular." Indeed. [The Wendy Williams Show]

All heck broke loose at LAX on Tuesday afternoon when Kate Hudson entered a terminal with sweaty pits. One onlooker remarked, "I had always heard that celebrities were supposedly regular people like you and me, but never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that they would go out in public without applying a little anti-perspirant." Another onlooker, a self-described "excessive sweater", appreciated seeing a fellow sweater living their life to the fullest.

Seeking a cure for her Olympic fever, Kate Hudson and her young son Ryder took the beaches of Manhattan Beach for a serious game of beach volleyball. The mother/son duo eventually managed to get a pick-up game going with two of the members of the paparazzi, but the matchup quickly proved to be lopsided. She hadn't properly accounted for Ryder's small stature and lack of mental focus — when he wasn't busy wandering off and attempting to swim in the ocean, he consistently hit the ball into the lower portion of the net. However, the Hudsons soldiered on with their game, ultimately losing to the Flynet crew 21 - 3.

Lionsgate is reportedly allocating a portion of its new credit line to therapists after Dane Cook, the co-star of the studio's forthcoming "edgy comedy with a dash of romance" My Best Friend's Girl, lashed out today at the poor souls responsible for the film's poster. As if their mission to sell a Dane Cook film wasn't challenging enough, the actor/comedian assailed everything from the designers' Photoshop skills to his own hair ("actually a close up shot of Tom Selleck's Magnum P.I. mustache," he notes) in a quest for cosmic poster justice. For reasons we'll explain after the jump, we think he's being a little hard on the artists. After all, isn't there a little bit "Brittany Spears' [sic] vagina" in all of us?

The September issue of W magazine features actress and Lance Armstrong lover Kate Hudson glaring purposefully down her nose at the camera. "The look is a definite departure for her!" writes W's flack, enthusiastically. The look's not a departure for the magazine industry, though; it's strikingly similar to this 1994 Harper's Bazaar cover. There simply must be new ways of looking at the camera, people. Click to enlarge. [via J'Adore Joey]

• New details about Tina Brown's forthcoming (and Barry Diller-funded) news site: It's going to be called The Daily Beast in an homage the Evelyn Waugh novel, Scoop. [Baltimore Sun, via Gawker]

In a rush to finish her grocery shopping, beloved actress Kate Hudson decided to sneak her shopping cart into the express lane at Whole Foods. Hudson knew that she was well over the item limit for the trendy organic market, but believed her trademark charm would allow her to get away with it. After scanning a few items, the Whole Foods cashier noticed that Hudson was going to be well over the express lane limit and stopped scanning. Hudson wondered what the problem was, but the cashier pointed to the sign above her post with the item limit and added, "I've scanned the express lane limit, ma'am." Hudson asked if the cashier could give her a mulligan this time around and that the next time, she'll wait in the regular line with everybody else. The cashier pensively thought for a moment, then returned to scanning items. The cashier said, "This is only because I loved Raising Helen."

• Kate Hudson totally finished her first Tour De Lance! Congratulations! [P6]

• New revelations from the legal battle between The Weinstein Co. and NBC over Project Runway: It turns out that Tim Gunn didn't get paid a dime for his participation during the show's first season (he got paid just $2,500 per episode for the second), Harvey Weinstein hates Bravo chief Lauren Zalaznick, and Bravo didn't send Heidi Klum a respectable thank-you gift, even after the show became a major hit. [R&M]

Considering the free-lovin’, liberal personalities of two undergarments-fearing stars like Woody Harrelson and Kate Hudson, we were a bit surprised to hear rumors that Woody is “relieved” and happy now that Kate is out of BFF Owen Wilson’s love life for good. Janet Charlton is reporting that “Woody and Kate NEVER got along, but they put aside their differences for Owen...[Woody] never thought she was the right girl for him.” So why would these two hippie dippy celebs find it so hard to get along? After a bit of digging, we came up with three theories, from Woody’s big-screen debut alongside Goldie Hawn, to the skinny-dipper’s habit of setting Owen up with mystery blondes while he and Kate were still together:1. Woody Was Owen's Personal Madam: Back in March 2007, when Owen and Kate were still in Phase One of their double act of a relationship, Wilson reportedly went on a Hawaiian vacation with his partner in paparazzi-bashing crime Harrelson, who owns a crash pad on the island. And the first sign of trouble in paradise came when Wilson was said to be hooking up with a Kate-lookalike coincidentally introduced to him in Hawaii by the Woodster. 2. Woody's Bare Butt Possibly More Scrumptious Than Kate's: And who can forget the, well, unforgettable sight of Harrelson's own set of natural born relationship-killers: the buns seen 'round the world while skinny-dipping with Wilson on a mid-Marley And Me, mid-Kate & Owen: The Sequel jaunt to Miami. Even Kate herself has pointed out her own lack of assets, and no matter how straight the Wilson is, who wouldn't be distracted from their current paramour's figure when face-to-ass with that behind?

Isn't it strange how that rare affliction of being mystically "unable" to gain weight only strikes female celebrities? It seems poor Megan Fox has that very woe to deal with atop her many other personal struggles, like pretending her engagement to one-earring trendmaker Brian Austin Green is still on, and trying ever so desperately to let a director (any director!) just film her nude already. But the newly "scrawny" Fox has reportedly been chastised about her skinny frame by Transformers 2 director Michael Bay, who has demanded that the busty Jolie successor put on 10 pounds or find a new gig. While Megan's resorted to stuffing herself with cake every night in bed, we might suggest the Anne Hathaway Quick Speed Diet: apparently breaking up with a grade A loser leads to dropping 28 pounds in no time!