· Katie Holmes' PR team moves into the Get Famous Friends To Talk About How Whipped Tom Is phase of their Operation Make Katie Seem Like Any Other Totally Normal, Non-Imprisoned Working Actress campaign. Who can doubt your "quiet thunder" when Jada Pinkett Smith is bragging about it?
· A fake bid of just $9,900,101.00 could get you behind the wheel of the General Lee. [via Autoblog]
· Jay Leno has some trouble distinguishing between unfunny Latino comedians; perhaps saving him from total humiliation was that he didn't mistake old pal Paul Rodriguez for joke-stealing pariah Carlos Mencia.
· We think this could be a winning idea for L.A., which easily has the highest concentration of celebrity nail clippings in the entire world.

With Katie Holmes' recent hiring of her "own" publicity team, we knew it wouldn't be long before the efforts of their Operation Make Katie Seem Like Any Other Totally Normal, Non-Imprisoned Working Actress started to appear in the tabloids. Phase One of the campaign is appearing in the new issue Life&Style, which apparently involves reinforcing the strength of Holmes and Cruise's relationship through public ambivalence about some harmless, on-the-job flirting:

· Spinal Tap reunites, with semi-amusing results.
· There's nothing at all weird about Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes' marriage, says official Scientology spokesfriend Jenna Elfman.
· Tracy Morgan to saw off own foot, go on bender.
· Thora Birch finds the idea that her dad tried to direct her sex scene absurd. That's not how movie sets work, silly tabloids!
· Warning: Under no circumstances should you refer to Hunter Tylo's rack as shelf-like, as that apparently angers her lawyers. Also: Who's Hunter Tylo?

PrivacyWatch celebrity sightings are submitted by our readers, and are posted several times a week, so send them in often. Submit yours to tips[AT]defamer.com (please put "sighting" or "PrivacyWatch" in the subject line) and tell everyone about the time you ran your fingers along an apologetically drunk Kiefer Sutherland's abs of steel.

The new edition of Us Weekly offers a fresh installment of the magazine's daring investigative series into the home life of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, which the glossy portrays as only marginally less confining than a Turkish prison encircled by a moat full of sharks with a taste for B-list actress flesh. This week's hot button issue in the star-crossed couple's relationship, according to Us: Scientology "mommy classes" in which Cruise would like his war bride life partner to enroll, a course of instruction aimed at equipping Holmes with the Hubbardian parenting tech necessary to successfully raise Suri within the Church.

One year ago on this very day, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes announced the birth of their first biological daughter, Suri Cruise, the truly miraculous physical manifestation of their awe-inspiring love and, perhaps more importantly, the proof of concept for the highly experimental baby-fabrication techniques that will one day allow the Church of Scientology's leading genetic engineers to populate an entire Celebrity Centre at the hub of a remote Pacific island colony with workers directly produced from Cruise's DNA.

Recently realizing that his weekly, post-Gelson's-run debriefing of the fifteen trusty Level-IV Sustenance-Acquisition Techs who keep his compound stocked with foodstuffs always seems to include troubling reports of new magazine cover stories detailing his stifling control of a frustrated war-bride on the verge of escape, Tom Cruise paused from determining exactly how many links to add to Katie Holmes' ankle chains as a reward for three consecutive days of good behavior, sighed, and decided it might be time to start to start fostering a public illusion about his wife's limited independence. After grudgingly approving a small-time acting job for Holmes, he's now instructed evil agency CAA to direct her to her "own" public relations firm, according to FoxNews.com gossip Roger Friedman:

Victoria Beckham is starting up a book club with her pals Katie Holmes and Jennifer Lopez, and they're not going to be reading the usual book club lady fare (the usual book club lady fare = Anita Shreve novels, anything with 'Love' in the title, anything in which a child dies). No, Victoria apparently wants to take things in a more Oprah-style direction: "Books that Victoria wants to talk about include Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Emma and Sense and Sensibility, as well as tomes by literary giants Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy." Ha, so dumb and pretentious! Or is it? See, Victoria is the only one of those ladies who went to college at all ("Laine Arts Theatre College," but still!) Maybe Victoria is top-secretly quite intelligent. Maybe Victoria is planning to help Katie Holmes escape Tom Cruise's villainous control by slyly underlining the feminist themes in Dombey and Sons! Or, you know, not.

The prison we've always imagined for Katie Holmes involves shackles, rusty radiators, salivating Dobermans, exploding wife-retention collars, and teams of deadly accurate snipers ready to cut short any escape attempts with an expertly placed tranquilizer dart at precisely the moment Tom Cruise's war bride thinks she's just a couple of hurried strides from sweet, sweet freedom, but Us Weekly's cover story-worthy conception of Holmes' imprisonment is one of stiflingly omnipresent in-laws, threatened credit card cancellations, and desperate friendships with the British tabloid libertines through which she vicariously lives. In truth, we shouldn't trivialize Cruise's alleged total control over her credit line as somehow less terrifying than packs of attack dogs reminded daily of their potential quarry's scent; the psychic pain of a billion-year sentence without the hope of regularly scheduled retail furloughs to Barneys would be far worse than anything those ravenous hounds could possibly inflict on her body.

As Katie Holmes gets set to star opposite Queen Latifah in Mad Money—the all-gal, low-budget buddy comedy that promises to do for her career what Taxi did for Jimmy Fallon's—comes the announcement that Maggie Gyllenhaal will be taking over as The Dark Knight's D.A. Rachel Dawes, the role Holmes originated in Batman Begins:

In a suspiciously detailed item that we're sure was not in any way supplied by the baby boutique supposedly offering an estimate (website here! map here!) to decorate a nursery for a possibly forthcoming Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes offspring, TMZ reports that a Team Cruise design-drone was "overheard" discussing plans for a new clone-rearing chamber for the Cruise compound:

It seems that CAA's thinly veiled threats about Queen Latifah's probable depression-induced self-immolation should Katie Holmes not get a part in low-budget chick buddy-flick Mad Money convinced its producers to take a chance on the part-time actress/full-time chained-at-home mom, as today's Page Six reports that Holmes will soon head off to Louisiana for the shoot. But knowing that a film set on the other side of the country might provide escape opportunities so enticing that even the best-trained war bride wouldn't be able to resist them, clingy enslaver Tom Cruise will reportedly tag along:

· Generally satisfied to produce movies that explore the lighter side of blowing shit up, Jerry Bruckheimer (and Disney) have acquired the movie rights to Mark Bowden's Atlantic Monthly terrorism article "Jihadists in Paradise," plunging Bruck into much darker explosion-related territory. [Variety]
· The team behind Batman Begins sequel The Dark Knight continues to make impeccable casting decisions: after allowing Katie Holmes to "walk away" from reprising her character from Begins, they're close to signing up Aaron Eckhart to play Two Face. [THR]
· Al Gore will attempt to reverse global warming through a single day of simultaneous, worldwide rock concerts, a solution that climatologists have already dismissed as rooted more in the former Vice President's passion for the music of John Mayer than in proven science. [Variety]
· Various Fox entities (FX, 20th Century Fox TV, Fox Broadcasting) team up to shower Nip/Tuck creator Ryan Murphy in cash for his showrunning/developing services. [Variety]
· Var thinks that Fox News Channel's right-wing Daily Show knockoff The 1/2 Hour News Hour feels like something "enterprising high-school kids with a video camera could replicate." [Variety]

• Hedge fund managers. They love themselves—because they must. [PJE Los Angeles]
  

Having satisfactorily completed the Celebrity Centre's rigorous, ten-week "My Life Is Great And I Am As Madly In Love As The Day I Signed My Contract: Level VII Post-Betrothal Communications" course, Scientology war bride Katie Holmes is being slowly reintroduced to the public, giving her first interview as Mrs. Tom Cruise to Harper's Bazaar:

Hint: It's not her girdle/control-top pantyhose.

Today's WSJ chronicles how CAA has undertaken the daunting task of resuscitating the career of onetime actress and stay-at-home war bride Katie Holmes, whose last memorable role was that of "Glassy-Eyed Woman Clutching A Baby in the Window While Pondering a Series of Poorly Thought-Through Life Decisions" in the Bracciano production Tom N' Katie's Italian Wedding Spectacular, a much buzzed-about, but critically derided, foray into experimental theater. With Batman Returns follow-up The Dark Knight now officially out of the picture (both the Holmes camp and Warner Bros. seem to have their no-fault, "timing"-related story straight about why she won't be back to reprise her performance as Gotham City's most doe-eyed assistant D.A.), the agency is hoping that smaller, budget-conscious productions might throw their out-of-work client a lower-paid bone:

Citing the kind of unnamed sources that make the supermarket tabloids an infinitely more entertaining checkout line read than the ingredients list on the fifteen cans of cat food the sexagenarian ahead of you is attempting to purchase with an expired coupon, the current issue of Star magazine speculates that Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes have thus far avoided taking recently fabricated baby-unit Suri Cruise out in public because they fear kidnapping plots (SURI IN DANGER? blares the concerned mag's cover copy, next to a photo that in no way could assist potential malefactors in their infant-pilfering efforts) targeting the child. Fortunately, the alleged 24/7 armed security force assigned to Suri-retention detail should be able to prevent any renegade geneticists obsessed with discovering Scientology's baby-manufacturing secrets by reverse-engineering the tyke from absconding with her while Holmes is distracted with self-medicating the despair of her imprisonment with shopping sprees at Barneys.

· If Katie Holmes had not appeared standing next to him in the pre-cropped version of every one of these Getty Images photos of the Pursuit of Happyness premiere, we would have suspected that a newly bloated Tom Cruise devoured her on his honeymoon.
· You know who's probably not getting married in South Africa this Christmas? Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.
Perhaps the most surprising thing in this story about Dustin "Any References To The Character Screech In My Promotional Materials Must Be Rendered In A Smaller Typeface Than My Actual Name" Diamond's contract rider is that anyone was hiring him for promotional appearances a full two years before he put out that sex tape.
A reader pointed out that we overlooked this one in our earlier post about Apocalypto headlines, so we update with: Apocalypt-Ow! Mel's Messy Mayan Movie.
· Your new favorite blog: Cute Things Falling Asleep.

Some opportunistic guests of the Tom Cruise And Katie Holmes Italian Wedding Spectacular apparently have smuggled some furtively snapped images from the ceremony and reception to the tabloids, photos which seem to depict the culminating moment of their matrimonial rite. In the pictures, the couple hold aloft the two glasses of extremely potent sacramental wine which, when quaffed by the glassy-eyed war-bride, induced a state of euphoria so total that any thoughts of escape quickly melted away. With Holmes sufficiently hobbled by drink, Cruise then removed his tie and placed it around her neck, a symbolic yoking of connubial prisoner by eternal enslaver completing the union in the eyes of their Church. Holmes would spend the next two hours in solitude on the dance floor, slowly twirling to poor renditions of Motown songs for their guests' amusement, until Cruise suddenly tired of the display, angrily ordering a pair of burly, nautically attired groomsmen to lock her in their honeymoon suite, which he vowed not to enter "until my wife learns the right way to get down to 'Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay.'"