We know pretty much everyone in the world except a few drones at Defamer HQ can't seem to wait for noted genre waffler Guillermo del Toro's take on The Hobbit, previously reported as a pair of films he'd make over several years in New Zealand with producer Peter Jackson at his side. But last night at the LA Film Festival, where his Hellboy II will premiere Saturday night, del Toro kicked Middle-Earth off its axis by hinting that he wasn't beholden to a second film at all. Not only that, but he confessed an antisocial streak suggesting he might kill the project just to watch it bleed.

With festival fatigue closing in on all sides and the Verne Troyer sex tape still searing our minds one pixel at a time, we really needed a laugh Wednesday night. A panel discussion seemed like it might do the trick: "Funny Women," gathering Jennifer Tilly, Janeane Garofalo, Alyson Hannigan and Illeana Douglas poolside at the W, where comedian/director David Steinberg peppered them with questions when not contributing random career asides of his own.

Corey Feldman's brave hike back from the post-confessional, gofer-sex-abuse wilderness began Tuesday night in Westwood, where he dropped by the LA Film Festival to introduce a screening of The Lost Boys and suffer a clip from the vampire classic's forthcoming straight-to-DVD sequel, Lost Boys: The Tribe. We use the term "classic" loosely; the 1987 original doesn't age that well, but for its cast alone remains one of its era's more interesting (and better-looking) time capsules. And in relation to what we saw of its follow-up's kind of embarrassing exploitation effort, it's just about perfect.

All roads led to rapture for fanboys (and girls, we suppose) over the weekend at the LA Film Festival, where Sunday closed with a glimpse at scenes from the forthcoming X-Files: I Want to Believe. It seemed a busy enough couple of days elsewhere in Westwood, but it wasn't like there were shrieking throngs delivering signed thank-you cards to Diane English after a preview/discussion of her troubled updating of The Women, or a geek-to-seat ratio of 1:1 at the Melvin Van Peebles event on Saturday. This was the sort of a climactic bedlam most fests save for their closing nights, not the last screening on a sleepy Sunday.

Defamer crashed Westwood on Thursday for the opening night of the Los Angeles Film Festival, which hosted the world premiere of Wanted and a whiskey-fueled Broxton Ave. block party to wash the whole thing down. Not that there was so much to digest (cubicle slave James McAvoy meets assassin trainer Angelina Jolie; bullet hails ensue) but we can't deny Wanted is as exhausting as it is kind of dumbly enthralling; for every exquisite gunfight there's at least one baffling plot inversion, and for every potent Jolie scowl there's a grating McAvoy whimper.

Welcome to another edition of Defamer Attractions, your regular guide to what's new, noteworthy and/or nightmarish this week at the movies. Today we hold our noses for the aromatic opening-weekend duel of Get Smart and The Love Guru, crack open the L.A. Film Festival catalog for a bit of a desperately needed counterprogramming, and handpick a few fine new DVD's for the agoraphobes among us. As always, our opinions are our own, but as long as they don't involve Manoj Night Shyamalan's box-office viability, they're also without peer.

We'll take any opportunity we can get for a furlough from our shackles at Defamer HQ, so off we go to the Los Angeles Film Festival, which opens tonight with the world premiere of Angelina Jolie's emaciated-assassin actioner Wanted. Maybe not the gritty, funded-by-credit-cards entry you'd expect from fest organizers Film Independent, but that's what the rest of the event is for; running until June 29, this year's LAFF is enticing enough for us to call in sick at least a few days, maybe even all of next week.