As noted here yesterday, we missed the Fox PR Caravan to San Diego Comic-Con, but that shouldn't suggest we don't (or you shouldn't) care about the geek gangbang unfolding as we speak. To the contrary, we've actually managed to find a handful of highlights worth passing along, from Rose McGowan's overactive tongue to Benicio Del Toro's narcolepsy to an all-Lego Batman — and more! It's the next best thing to not being there, we promise! ·You'll never believe it, but Nikki Finke also stayed home, instead publishing dispatches by the New Times chain's resident nerd-hack Luke Y. Thompson. And what a run he's had, with his marathon Thursday bringing us hints at a Keanu Reeves love-in (we'll get to that) and the indelible image of Rose McGowan's Red Sonja knife-licking. She and Robert Rodriguez apparently remain a couple despite all kinds of fun rumors otherwise and, obviously, despite the worst movie poster to ever debut at Comic-Con. That said, hemogravy is hot with the ladies these days, so maybe we're the ones out of touch.·LYT draws praise, meanwhile, from David Poland, who also decided to crunch some numbers from the comfort of his own couch:

• Raffaello Follieri will miss the monster 30th birthday bash he planned for himself in Capri this weekend, which he'd hoped would reunite him with Anne Hathaway. Instead, he'll probably spend the big day in jail unless, that is, he magically comes up with $21 million in bail money in the next 24 hours. [NYDN]

[Photo Credit: Flynet]

The Departed's Matt Damon comforted his co-star Mark Wahlberg during the fifth game of the Los Angeles Lakers-Boston Celtics NBA finals about the poor reviews Wahlberg has been receiving for his work in The Happening. Wahlberg felt especially hurt about the negative comments about his acting. Wahlberg said, "I really tried with my performance. I did my research. I remembered my lines. But, I gotta admit, I was totally caught off-guard by the fact that we were supposed to be making a B-movie. Nobody told me that."

Call it a midlife crisis, queasiness or just sheer boredom, but good soldier Mark Wahlberg may have finally reached his leading-man saturation point with The Happening. It was bad enough that the gossips attribute his persistent new jitters to his work with "that scary motherfucker Manoj" Night Shyamalan, or that the actor fled Tuesday's premiere and afterparty to watch his Celtics battle the Lakers in the NBA Finals. But no on-screen spookiness could prepare him for the terrifying onslaught of questions about his past with the Funky Bunch:

ManojWatch has been underway at Defamer long enough to know that the director's latest, The Happening, faces a bit of an uphill climb when it reaches theaters at last this Friday. But while previously we'd only had one anonymous review and a pair of introspective pre-mortems with the "press-shy" Shyamalan — the latest appearing yesterday in the LA Times — the film officially screened for press for the first time on Sunday evening. Naturally 20th Century Fox lost our invitation (and thus, we suppose, instructions for a review embargo — we'll never know!) in the mail, but we heard from a reviewer who was there and has new word on Manoj's Folly:

Whether it's the work of just one Manosh-targeting vandal or a number of copycat subway saboteurs, the one thing we know about The Happening adbusting is that we find it fucking hilarious. After New York public transit patrons were left wondering what twist and turns lay at the end of The Penis (spoiler alert: balls!), they now have a whole new slew of questions regarding a Friday the 13th release called, chillingly, The Crapening. [copyranter]

Antipathy toward Manoj Night Shyamalan was easy after Lady in the Water, but the slip-sliding trajectory of his upcoming eco-thriller The Happening has our hearts suddenly and surprisingly enlarged with pity. After a while, there's only so much you can hold against a guy whose actors' line readings are scarier than his plot, who unironically claims he's got something on The Exorcist and whose latest double-shot of bad buzz suggests Shyamalan's days as Genius Autocrat Brat are spiraling to a close. For starters, the flagging Manoj Mystique™ gets the point-counterpoint treatment in today's NY Times:

From last week's revelations about his new "90-minute paranoia film" The Happening to his latest disclosure to USA Today that the movie is "terrifying," M. Night Shyamalan is full of surprises for the first time in years, The concept, that is — not necessarily the execution. And as usual, his enticements have us asking all kinds of questions from the womb-like remove of our Manoj-free sanctum:

Judd Apatow has fulfilled his promise to "shake Americans from their squeamishness about male anatomy in movies" by featuring Forgetting Sarah Marshall star Jason Segel completely nude in the movie's pivotal break-up scene. And as the LAT pointed out yesterday, Segel's manhood provides the film's "most captivating screen presence" (sorry, Kristen Bell). But Apatow and his cool comedy clique aren't the first ones to boldly focus their cinematic lens on male actors' full frontal displays. We took a look back on Segel's predecessors to showcase other (pun intended) ballsy big-screen cameos by the likes of Bruce Willis and Ewan McGregor after the jump. Just a warning, this is NSFW.

Let's face a hard truth: most movies that started out as video games end up sucking pretty bad. Sure, some of them make plenty of money, but are you really able to suspend your critical faculties long enough to enjoy them without gagging a little bit on the forced synergy? Well now, a company called Radar Group is planning to develop "storyverses," which are ideas that can simultaneously spawn video games, movies, and other content. First up: a movie spinoff of the game "Max Payne," starring Mark Wahlberg as a rogue cop. Future ideas: an environmental disaster story, an alien invasion story, and "a horror story in which evil must be hunted down and imprisoned." Will they suck less than previous game/ movie efforts? Well, they're from the "Storyverse," so of course. Everything is different now! [Portfolio; image via Vayacine]

Remember all the "creative differences" this, and "he got way too fat" that flying around after Ryan Gosling abruptly left The Lovely Bones? That was all much ado about nothing, says he! It was simply yet another example of the director having gone too young: "I think, people are making it a far more interesting story than it actually is," he says. "The age of the character versus my real age was always a concern of mine. Peter and I tried to make it work and ultimately it just didn't. I think the film is much better off with Mark Walhberg in that role. Peter Jackson is an incredible filmmaker and I'm here to tell you that he has things up his sleeve that are going to blow peoples' minds. I'm going to be the first person in line to buy tickets." Do the bones dance? Is there a giant-ape/T-Rex battle? Who cares! We're there! [Parade]

Sensing that there might be more to yesterday's announcement that Ryan Gosling's sudden departure from Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones adaptation than a friendly disagreement over competing visions for the film, the sleuths of Page Six dig deeper into this new Hollywood mystery, unearthing disturbing allegations of personality clashes and actorly eccentricity. Egads, we say!

· It's a Hollywood abs-off! Extravagantly six-packed superstar Brad Pitt is in talks to replace Matt Damon and appear opposite famously washboarded former underwear model Mark Wahlberg in the Darren Aronofsky boxing drama The Fighter. Shirts will be doffed, and stomach muscles menacingly flexed! [Variety]
· NBC orders four episodes of the Christmas-themed reality show, Clash of the Choirs, in which celebrities return home to assemble armies comprised of their towns' best amateur singers, then pit these muscial warriors against each other in a primetime TV deathmatch. [THR]
· In perhaps today's most touching news, Katherine Heigl options the rights to adapt bestseller Lost & Found, a project she will produce with the very same mother who didn't believe she would win that Emmy. [Variety]
· Light-fingered sometime actress Winona Ryder joins the ensemble cast of the big-screen adaptation of novelist Bret Easton Ellis's The Informers. [THR]
· And this one is going right on our Season Pass list: VH1 is planning the series Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew, where the Loveline physician will help former reality stars get off the drugs and back to dealing with their semifame in a more healthy manner. [Variety]

It should surprise no one to discover that launching a film at the Cannes festival is an absurdly expensive proposition, as the overseas export of Hollywood's auto-fellating promotional machinery requires the transport, lodging, and constant pampering of scores of entitiled executives, talent, and hangers-on pressed into movie-pimping duty. (Publicists and other support staff, of course, sleep 30 to a motel room and subsist only on the croissant crumbs they brush off their betters' tuxedo lapels on the red carpet.) In looking at the costs associated with properly debuting at Cannes, the LAT notes that at least one maverick studio is doing what it can to halt the budget-destroying insanity:

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 how you're still recovering from catching a glimpse of Courtney Love's midriff on a Hollywood sidewalk.

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 let everyone know about the time you spotted foul-mouthed movie set mutineer Lily Tomlin on your Southwest flight into Burbank.

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 let everyone know about Gwyneth Paltrow's passive aggressive way of saying that you and your kid are taking too much time at the candy counter.

· Paramount will enable the on-screen reunion of The Departed's Mark Wahlberg and Matt Damon, who will star as pugilism-loving, Massachusetts-native half-brothers Micky and Dicky Ward in the boxing drama The Fighter (if they like the script), though it's unclear from the story which actor will be the "Rocky-like" boxing champion and which the "boxer-turned-trainer who rebounded in life after nearly being KO'd by drugs and crime." [Variety]
· VH1 and BET are jointly developing the hip-hop drama series Wifey; if picked up, the show would air at the same time on both networks through its first season in an attempt at "broadening the audience," an unusual arrangement transparently aimed at sparing white viewers the inconvenience of having to find BET on their cable channel guides. [THR]
· Jennifer Hudson's not the only discarded Idol contestant to shake off the public humiliation of rejection and do something with her life. [Variety]
· American Idol and House win Tuesday for Fox. Sure, we could just copy and paste that blurb in every Tuesday trade round-up item for the remainder of the television season, but we prefer to marvel anew each week at Idol's ritualistic Nielsen humiliation of its doomed competition. [THR]
· Michael Bay screens footage of Transformers in NY for attendees of a toy conference, noting to an impressed crowd that the movie's plot was derived entirely from the copy on the back of the original toys' packaging, and even going so far as to explain that Bumblee's dramatic arc was constructed to demonstrate a character of 8 Intelligence and 10 Courage. [Variety]

Only slightly less joyful than discovering who's been tapped on the shoulder by Oscar's golden finger on nomination morning is reading the nominees' reactions. (We sometimes wish the snubbees were approached for comment, too, though processing endless sentiments along the lines of, "How do you think it feels? It sucks!" might drain some of the giddiness from the proceedings.) A round-up of some of the more memorable responses:
· Mark Wahlberg: "I was able to put my real-life experiences with the Boston Police to good use after all. After all the torture I have put [my parents] through, to know they cried happy tears today. I'll think about that for a while." [Variety]
· Al Gore returned to his robotic ways, saying he was "so grateful to the entire team and pleased that the Academy has recognized their work. This film proves that movies really can make a difference." [ABC/AP]
· Stephen Frears on the Achievement in Directing field: "If you get put in a list with those guys you've done pretty well.'' [Guardian/AP]
· Peter O'Toole closed his eyes, and, after a long pause in which he carefully formulated what he wanted to say, replied, "If you fail the first time, try, try, try, try, try, try, try again. Yoicks!" [USA Today]