Remember those Eyeball Benders at the back of Games magazine? No? OK, never mind. Let's just call this a photoquiz! Everyone loves a photoquiz—triple that when it's a Celebrity Photoquiz. And so now we gesture in the vicinity of the above photo—a graceful study of the nape (one of the most underrated body-parts) of an Oscar-winning superstar. Any guesses? The answer is after the jump:
An extremely jet lagged Matt Damon happily posed with a photographer who exclaimed that now he's fucking Matt Damon over and over again. Damon smiled and said thanks, but quickly explained that he had to leave. The photographer said that he wanted to say one more thing before Damon left. Damon sheepishly replied, "What?" The photographer with a mile-wide grin said, "I'm fucking Matt Damon."
· Brad Pitt's shingle, Plan B in name only (we're looking at you, Aniston), buys rights to David Grann manuscript, "Lost City of Z," for Pitt to produce and star in. [Variety]
· Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer replace Meryl Streep and Anthony Hopkins in Tolstoy biopic The Last Station, putting the production down two Oscars but up two Golden Globes (wink!). [Variety]
We take a breather from all things Oscar to celebrate another star-filled reacharound: The premiere of "I'm Fucking Ben Affleck" on Jimmy Kimmel Live last night. It was, of course, the response song to "I'm Fucking Matt Damon," Sarah Silverman's danceable, genre-hopping paean to cuckoldry, delivered as a Valentine to her sweetie on the 5th anniversary of his show.
The long-running "feud" between Matt Damon and late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel reached new heights earlier this month when Damon shot a video in which Kimmel's comedian girlfriend, Sarah Silverman, declared she was "fucking Matt Damon." Immediately after the Oscars last night, Kimmel fired back with a truly epic effort called "I'm fucking Ben Affleck," which included appearances from celebrities like Harrison Ford, Cameron Diaz, Don Cheadle, Robin Williams and Huey Lewis, to name just a few. The Kimmel-Damon fight is, of course, wholly manufactured, but at least has been consistently funny, starting with Kimmel's regular end-of-show gag, "Apologies to Matt Damon, we've run out of time," and extending through to Damon's on-air tantrum about getting bumped and two gags involving Kimmel's special correspondent, Guillermo. Kimmel's latest Ben Affleck video takes the joke to new lengths — and new heights in the art of free PR:
· As a couple of different people have now pointed this out to us, we feel compelled to share: Before Matt Damon was fucking Sarah Silverman, he was all over Scotty's ladyfriend in Eurotrip. [via Lindsayism]
· Robert De Niro has come down with Obamamania.
· Learn all about new Britney Spears lawyer Adam Streisand's not-so-secret connection to another, much more famous Streisand! Yes, it's the one you're thinking of!
· Turner Classic Movies dares the WGA to stay on strike.
Click to view
To celebrate the 5th anniversary of boyfriend Jimmy Kimmel's ascension to ABC's late night throne, Sarah Silverman decided it was time to come clean—in song, unsurprisingly—about the torrid, fuck-filled affair she's been having with secretly devious Hollywood Nice Guy Matt Damon, who's quietly been delivering carnal payback for years of being Kimmel's sign-off joke ("Apologies to Matt Damon, we've run out of time," etc) in the form of erotic pillow fights, up-against-the-minibar penetrations, and Scrabulous-enhanced trysts with the cuckolded host's longtime partner.
Former Sexiest Man Alive sash-wearer Jude Law, whose 2004 recognition as the most desirable pretty-boy in all of Hollywoodland capped a year of overexposure from which the too-hard-working thespian never fully recovered, congratulates current honoree Matt Damon on the accomplishment: "'Keep up the good work, Matt,' Law said of his co-star in The Talented Mr. Ripley, at Sunday night's London premiere of his new film Sleuth, before continuing in a rueful tone, "and no matter how badly your horny nanny begs for it—and she will, I assure you—please, don't give in to temptation. Porking the help just isn't worth it. Trust me." [People]
This week's special issue of People—perhaps the magazine's second-most anticipated installment behind its annual Baby Bumps, Secret Weddings, and Conspicuous Nose Jobs spectacular—brings some happy news: Matt Damon will wear the magazine's Sexiest Man Alive tiara for the next 12 months, a choice that may indicate a seismic shift in the criteria it uses to select its honorees; if this newly established precedent holds, we may be entering a Golden Age of Sexy Lists in which less conventionally handsome Hollywood stars (work out all you want, Matt, you still have the face of a cherub who can't quite lose those last three pounds of baby-angel fat) can compete on equal footing with the throbbing slabs of leading-man-beef who tend to dominate the glossies' evaluations of Hollywood hunksmanship. People explains its choice:
· 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]
In his weekly column in Variety, trade paper potentate Peter Bart dashes off a memo to Matt Damon, hoping to assist the privacy-cherishing megastar in cultivating a public persona somewhere between the "boring and elusive" one he's established by keeping a deliberately low media profile and the tabloid-torment-attracting model developed by the more outgoing characters occupying the genitalia-flashing, DUI-collecting end of the celebrity spectrum. Bart, striving for answers, engages in some deskchair psychoanalysis: Is Damon afraid of a Affleckian career flameout if fans gain US Weekly-supplied information about his daily Starbucks runs? [Ed.note—Please, Jesus, let Matt be a caramel macchiato man!] Does he fear that no one will believe he can kill ten double-agents with nothing more than a soggy phonebook if they know too much about his fancy-boy Harvard education? Probes Bart:
· Ang Lee takes home the Golden Lion for Lust, Caution at the Venice Film fest, the movie you may remember as the recent victim of the MPAA's dreaded NC-17 rating because of its "graphic, artsy-fartsy depiction of fucking." [Variety]
· Gus Van Sant attaches Sean Penn and Matt Damon to his long-in-development biopic of openly gay politician Harvey Milk, with Penn playing Milk and Damon taking the role of his suddenly likable assassin. Tomorrow, competing Milk project director Bryan Singer will escalate the casting arms race by announcing he's got Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt "this close" to signing on to his Mayor of Castro Street adaptation. [THR]
· The Creative Arts Emmys are topped by—surprise!—HBO, with 15 statues. [Variety]
· NBC destroys its Sunday night Nielsen competition with the season debut of Sunday Night Football. [THR]
· In other unsurprising, awards-related news, Gil Cates will be back to produce the Oscars a record-breaking 14th time, which he promises "will be just as overlong and filled with inscrutable interpretive-dance numbers as my 2006 triumph." [Variety]
By now it should be sinking in as you sit down at your computer on this post-Labor Day Tuesday morning: Summer is over, burned off in this weekend's triple-digit heat. Make peace with the unofficial beginning of Fall by reviewing the long weekend's box office numbers (we'll list the four-day grosses because we don't want to cheat any studios out of a few million extra holiday dollars):
The scream-headline urgency of Extra's breaking news press release on the sharp object jutting from Matt Damon's ear on the red carpet of the Berlin premiere of The Bourne Ultimatum had us briefly concerned that the beloved actor had become an exhibitionist self-mutilator as an unhealthy response to the pressure of his constant promotional obligations, but we'd urge you not to succumb to the same ill-informed panic: his publicist says that he was just wearing it to combat a "terrible spasm" in his neck and back. Everything's OK! But what exactly was so terrifying about the needle that the celebrity newsmagazine was scrambling to get an exclusive on That Thing In Matt Damon's ear? After the jump, we think we've found an image of the therapeutic implement that could have brought Hollywood to a standstill if left unexplained:
With the possibility of a disastrous™ writers strike (or, a little later down the line, a combined writers/actors/directors one) looming, THR notes that agents are sweating through their Armani as they try to panic-book clients into any movie that might provide a pre-labor-Armageddon commission. (One needs to look no further than the Reporter's singling out of Jim Carrey, who's collecting roles like a homeless man whose next meal is dependent upon his ability to accumulate a shopping cart full of "good enough" aluminum cans, to see how dire the situation is becoming.) Now that much of the top-flight talent is either booked or sitting the next few months out, the THR piece offers some big names who are still looking for jobs:
Like a stun-gun set to "wake up" applied directly to your genitals, enjoy the jolt of the weekend box office numbers:
