• Jude Law got someone pregnant, but not Rachel McAdams' sister Kayleen — her rep (she's a makeup artist) says "She has never even met him." [Star]
• So. The mother of Jude Law's unborn spawn is:

Samantha Burke. She's an actress/model. Naturally. [TMZ]

• A source says that Samantha Burke wants Jude's cash! She expects "a large maintenance payment and financial costs, including a percentage of Jude's future earnings, agreed in writing." [The Sun]
• According to this report, Samantha Burke is from a wealthy family. Also, she looks good in a retro swimsuit. [Daily Mail]
• "Even Seth Rogen Now Hating on Katherine Heigl." He's talking shit about how she talks shit. And dissed The Ugly Truth: "That [movie] looks like it really puts women on a pedestal in a beautiful way." Plus: "I gotta say, it's not like we're the only people she said some batshit crazy things about. That's kind of her bag now." [NY Mag, LA Times]
• Carrie Prejean is planning to sue the Miss California USA organization for slander, libel, public disclosure of private facts, religious discrimination, intentional infliction of emotional distress and negligent infliction of emotional distress. This should be a big old mess. [Perez]
• Need beach reading? Three celebs have "written" new memoirs: Slumdog Millionaire's Rubina Ali; former Playmate Kendra Wilkinson and Good Charlotte's Joel Madden. [NY Daily News]
• Haterade Headline of the Day: "Tony Romo and Nick Lachey rebound with Jessica Simpson look-a-likes while she's left smooching a dog." [NY Daily News]
• Police chiefs suspected of "snooping" at Sarah Jessica Parker's surrogate's home have been arrested. [NY Post]
• Emma Watson is related to a 16th century witch! Her distant relative Joan Playle was excommunicated from the Church of England for witchcraft in 1592. [E!]
• Eminem's new track, "Warning," is an answer to Mariah Carey's song, "Obsessed." He raps: "You probably think since it's been so long if I had something on you I woulda did it by now, on the contrary, Mary Poppins, I'm mixing our studio session down and sending it to mastering to make it loud, enough dirt on you to murder you, this is what the fuck I do... Mariah, it ever occur to you that I still have pictures?" [Yahoo News via E!]
• Amy Winehouse's wedding album: Found in trash. Seems Blaaaaake threw his copy away. [The Sun]
• Nora Ephron says she hopes Julie & Julia will remind everyone that before EVOO, there was BUTTER, which has now been demonized. "I just do not get that at all," Ephron says, since Julia Child and her husband lived into their 90s. "And they drank like fish," she says. "I don't believe that anything has to do with what you eat, if you don't overeat. All these people who think they can cut down on their cholesterol by eating those awful egg-white omelets. There's something I really hate. It is simply not going to make any difference if you have a couple egg yolks in your omelet." [USA Today]
• Will Katie Holmes be in the Sex And The City 2: Electric Boogaloo? A source says: "The character they want her to play is a really ballsy, high-powered company executive who tangles with Samantha." Sometimes you sort of forget she's an actress, for Xenu's sake. [The Sun]
• Jeepin' jeewillickers! Even though Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar named each of their 18 children a name beginning with the letter J, their first grandchild (from son Josh) will be named Mackenzie. Whether Josh and his wife will have 18 kids with M names remains to be seen. [Star]
• So much sadness: This report claims that Michael Jackson may have had collapsed veins and needle marks all over his body — plus — he may have been dead as early as 8:30 a.m. — four hours before paramedics were called. [ET]
• Warrants filed yesterday allege that Michael Jackson was an addict. It's a violation if Dr. Conrad Murray was "prescribing to an addict." [Yahoo News via AP]
• The Michael Jackson autopsy report: Delayed. [TMZ]
• How will TLC balance Jon & Kate's popularity with the family's right for privacy? Network exec Eileen O'Neill says: "It's a sensitive situation and we navigate that as we go along… It's the family's decision to be involved in the show… We want to stay with them as long as they want to stay with us." [Variety]
• What you'll see when Jon & Kate Plus 8 returns: "Jon and Kate have never said they were perfect," Eileen O'Neill says. "You're still going to see two parents that love their kids, but you'll see them parenting separately." [People]
• This columnist asserts that the return of Jon & Kate will help Kate's image. [MSNBC Scoop]
• And, because no one is sick of these people: Jon Gosselin (and Michael Lohan??) brainstormed a new show: Divorced Dads Club. [Page Six]
• Leonardo DiCaprio's ex, Bar Refaeli, has a new man: multi-millionaire Teddy Sagi, who is among Israel's top 30 richest men. [NY Daily News]
• BREAKING: Katy Perry and Rihanna have become inseparable. [Page Six]
• Mario Lopez says the Saved By The Bell reunion was a long time coming: "Everybody knew the 20-year anniversary was coming up. This People story has been in the works for over a year, long before [late night host] Jimmy Fallon started talking about it. We were all excited about it." But what's next? "Everybody is fired up. People keep coming up to me saying 'When are you guys going to do a show?'" [People]
• Mark Paul Gosselaar says of Dustin "Screech" Diamond: That's a disaster on so many levels… I don't know where his head is. I know probably as much as you know from watching things on TV." Plus, Gosselaar says that when he played Zack on Fallon last month, there was a reason he looked young: "I read a blog [where] some guy said, 'Dude, lay off the Botox.' I've never had Botox before. The wig was so fucking tight, it gave me a mini face-lift." [Newsweek]
• Penelope Cruz looked amazing at the premiere of Broken Embraces, but the airline had lost her luggage. [People]
• Penny Cruz: "I love London... but I have difficulties with the rainy weather." [Telegraph]
• Lost spoilers! CHARLIE. [E!]
• Details of the sort-of Seinfeld reunion on Curb Your Enthusiasm, at the link. [LA Times]
• Lawyers are getting involved in that Twilight recasting drama involving Rachelle Lefevre. [E!]
• Viva la revolucion? Benicio del Toro, Bill Murray, Robert Duvall and James Caan were in Cuba yesterday. [Reuters]
• Paul Giamatti calls some scenes from his new film, Cold Souls, "sort of awkward and painful." [WSJ]
• Billy Crudup will join the cast of Eat, Pray, Love the movie, which also stars Julia Roberts, Javier Bardem and Richard Jenkins. [Variety]
• "Bandslam's account of a teenager's awkward attempts to settle into a new school remind former Friends star Lisa Kudrow of her own adolescence." [Telegraph]
• "Singer Peter Andre has accepted "substantial" damages over a newspaper claim he was unfaithful to his estranged wife, model Katie Price." [BBC News]
• "I really felt this film, which had a love affair with boeuf bourguignon, should come out in winter." — Meryl Streep on Julie & Julia. [USA Today]
• "I heard what he had to say and I knew at this moment my life would never be the same. Life no longer seemed like a series of Random events. I also began to see that being Rich and Famous wasn't going to bring me lasting fulfillment and that it was not the end of the journey." — Madonna, on first hearing about Kabbalah when pregnant with Lourdes. [AP]
• "Phoebe was so spiritual and 'out there' — and I wasn't at all. Not. At. All. If anyone was it was Jennifer [Aniston]. She introduced me to certain books that gave me an insight into that world – Phoebe's supposed world – which was a more spiritual realm." — Lisa Kudrow. [Daily Express]
• "My mom and dad were big hippies and I spent time on communes. I just remember the smell of soybeans everywhere. People were making all sorts of strange things out of soybeans: food, clothing, paper, everything. I suppose if I'd gone to military school, maybe I'd be pining for something like Woodstock. But I'm certainly pining for what it represents, and I think that's what Ang was really after with the film." — Liev Schreiber, on Taking Woodstock. [Style.com]
• "I don't watch Jon & Kate, but I still want to punch that Jon douche in the face.his smarmy,fat alcoholic bloat&Ed Hardy wear piss me off" — Rose McGowan. [Twitter]
• "The Jay-Z controversy is great. We couldn't buy P.R. like this. I think Jay-Z said he saw Auto-Tune used in a Wendy's commercial, and that pushed him over the edge." — Marco Alpert, vice president of the company which markets Auto-Tune, on Jay-Z's latest single, "D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)." [NY Times]
• "Fuck you Katy Perry, you fucking stupid, maybe 'not good for the gays,' title thieving, haven't heard much else, so not quite sure if you're talented, fucking little slut." — Jill Sobule. [The Rumpus]

[Los Angeles, April 16. Image via WENN]

• Sarah Silverman and Jimmy Kimmel have split up again, five months after reconciling. "Sarah initiated the split this time," says a source. "He's bummed." The two had dated on and off for six years.[US Weekly]

• Britney Spears took time off from her Circus tour to visit 40 sick children in a Miami hospital. "She took pictures with the kids and gave them autographed pictures," says hospital spokesperson Cristene Martinez,"The kids were so excited to meet Britney, and having her here was a great distraction for them."[People]
• "I couldn't top Friends. It was one of the best times of my life and it feels like a very precious thing to me; anything that happens from this point is a cherry on top of the cake. The fact that I just get to keep working makes me feel really lucky."- Jennifer Aniston [DailyMail]
• Nadya Suleman has lost yet another publicist: "Not to sound arrogant, but those people depended on me for everything," says former publicist Victor Munoz, "You have no idea what I've had to do for these people. Nadya got real greedy. This woman is nuts. This I can say: what ultimately destroyed the business arrangement was personal reasons."[US Weekly]
• "What's funny, people will say that to me. "We interviewed you right after 'Idol'; you're pretty much the same." I'm like, yep. I don't want to live in a sceney place. I live in Texas, right next to the town I grew up in. I genuinely just love doing music. I'm not really excited about the whole famous thing."- Kelly Clarkson [Newsweek]
• Charles Barkley has reported to jail to serve his 3-day sentence for drunk driving: "You come here when you screw up," Barkley said at a press conference, "I don't blame anybody for this situation but myself." He also took a minute to comment on the Rihanna/Chris Brown situation: "I wish both of them the best, but it's never acceptable to hit a woman. Period." [CNN]
• Hey No Doubt fans: purchase "top price level" tickets to their upcoming tour and receive a pass to download the entire No Doubt catalog. [EW]
• Blind item: "Which celeb was so caned on ketamine at a party she began dancing with a plant?" [BlindGossip]
• Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson says he decided to turn his life around after his mother had to bail him out of jail at age 17. ""My parents were dealing with evictions and repossessions and electricity getting shut off," he says, "and I just realized that I had to get it together." [NYTimes]
• "You start off being a kid in an Adidas top," he continues, "and you end being this guy in a fur jacket and two pairs of f***ing sunglasses. Which, let me tell you, is amazing. Those times were incredible. I wouldn't want to go back to them for all the tea in China. That would be a joke. But I'm glad I lived through all that madness, all the fur coats and the crocodile-skin shoes and the drugs and the women. We made it look like what it is: the best job in the world."-Noel Gallagher [Times of London]
• Alex Rodriguez is apparently wooing girlfriends by buying gift cards to Victoria's Secret: "He's been going into Victoria's Secret for the last seven months and buying $1,000 gift cards, sometimes five or six at a time," says a source, "He must be giving them out like candy." [PageSix]
• If you were impressed by certain bulges in Billy Crudup's Watchmen costume, I'm afraid you were tricked by the magic of the movies. "I'm not saying how much the computer helped," Crudup admits, "Why would the guy with all this power really care about a uniform? . . . I think he kind of feels like, 'You know what? I enjoy a good breeze on my private parts.' " [PageSix]
• And speaking of Watchmen, the movie had a great start, taking in 25.1 million dollars at the box office on Friday. [EW]
• Scarlett Johansson's new brunette do isn't for a movie after all: she just got "bored" and decided to mix things up a bit. ""I was bored one day," Johansson says, "It was raining and I was with a hairdresser friend and we just decided to color my hair. We experimented with a few shades until we got the right one. I like it." [ShowbizSpy]
• Is Christian Bale going to try to save his crazy reputation by doing a romantic comedy? A source says yes: "Christian's reputation has been done no favors by the broadcasting of his rant. He has a habit of going for very dark and moody roles so that's not helping his image either. It was his friend Drew Barrymore who suggested he might try something like a romantic comedy, and it looks like he might star in something with her. Drew is looking for the right script." Just don't let Phil Collins do the soundtrack, okay? [ShowbizSpy]
• Beyonce may sing about heartache, but apparently she's never experienced it: ""Well, fortunately I haven't had any break-ups! This is my first relationship," she says, referring to her marriage to Jay-Z. [JustJared]
• In Miley Cyrus' new book, Miles to Go, she recalls how she stood up to bullies in school: "They started cussing me and telling me to get up. I sat there, frozen. I didn't know what to do," Cyrus writes, "Finally, I couldn't take it anymore. I wasn't chicken. What could they do to me? I was surrounded by people. I stood up, still a foot shorter then they were, and said: ‘What's your problem? What did I ever do to you?'" If you didn't catch that first bit, I wrote, Miley Cyrus' book. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to burn my MFA and cry maniacal tears.[ TheSun]

Watchmen is based on Alan Moore's 1986-87 comic book series, which is considered the Citizen Kane of graphic novels. A film adaptation has been in the works since 1986, and finally wound up with director Zack Snyder. (Moore had his name removed from the project because he didn't like Snyder's adaptation of the graphic novel 300 and says Watchmen is meant to be read.)

Nevertheless, Snyder has created a painstakingly faithful adaptation of the comic. Watchmen is set in an alternate universe in 1985 in which costumed superheroes are part of everyday society, Richard Nixon has been president for five terms, and the U.S. and the Soviet Union are on the brink of nuclear war. When former superhero The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is killed, his former colleague Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) sets out to solve his murder and realizes there is a conspiracy to kill members of the Watchmen, a retired group of superheroes, including Ozymandias (Matthew Goode), Silk Specter 2 (Malin Akerman), Nite Owl 2 (Patrick Wilson), and Doctor Manhattan (Billy Crudup).

Critics agree the film is visually stunning and spectacularly violent. From there, the reactions varygreatly depending on whether the critic is a die hard fan of the graphic novel or, like The New Yorker's Anthony Lane, unfamiliar with these newfangled "comic books." (He laments that Moore's dystopian deconstruction of the superhero marks the end of the "comic strip" and asks, "where did the comedy go?") Below, we take a look at the reviews of Watchmen.

NY Post

Director Zack Snyder's cerebral, scintillating follow-up to 300 seems, to even a weary filmgoer's eye, as fresh and magnificent in sound and vision as 2001 must have seemed in 1968, yet in its eagerness to argue with itself, it resembles A Clockwork Orange. Like those Stanley Kubrick films - it is also in part a parody of Dr. Strangelove - it transforms each moment into a tableau with great, uncompromising concentration. The effect is an almost airless gloom, but the film is also exhilarating in breadth and depth.

The San Francisco Chronicle

Other directors shake the camera to instill excitement. Snyder meticulously choreographs action scenes and thrills audiences with his inventiveness. Other directors go in for brutal realism. Snyder goes in for brutal surrealism, adding little visual grace notes that comment on the action and allow for audience distance. These touches, some of them genuinely odd but strangely right, show an unconscious engagement with the material, the work of a director not going through the motions but pulling from all sides of his brain ... Part conscious and part unconscious, Watchmen tells us of a world without hope and then makes us wonder if we're already living in it.

The Miami Herald

Watchmen is a spectacularly violent movie; Rorschach's dispatch of a child killer, for example, is far more gruesome in the film than in the comic. Axes split heads; saws rend limbs; tides of blood flow. Snyder positively revels in the slow-mo gore, but his camerawork is also effective in the film's dark, quiet moments, such as when he captures the rain dripping slowly from Nite Owl's glasses. And yes, the Mars sets are never quite convincing, and Akerman's Silk Spectre lacks the complexity of her male colleagues (isn't that always the way?). Dr. Manhattan's discourses on humanity are occasionally a drag on the action, though the film never feels bloated even at its considerable length. Still, though Snyder could hardly follow Rorschach's motto — ''Never compromise'' — his faithful vision of this classic comic all worked out in the end.

The New York Times

The infliction of pain is rendered in intimate and precise aural and visual detail, from the noise of cracking bones and the gushers of blood and saliva to the splattery deconstruction of entire bodies. But brutality is not merely part of Mr. Snyder's repertory of effects; it is more like a cause, a principle, an ideology. And his commitment to violence brings into relief the shallow nihilism that has always lurked beneath the intellectual pretensions of Watchmen. The only action that makes sense in this world - the only sure basis for ethics or politics, the only expression of love or loyalty or conviction - is killing.

The Boston Globe

The performances are a mixed bag. Akerman is downright bad, but the role of Laurie was always half real woman and half fanboy fantasy. Crudup, by contrast, manages to get Dr. Manhattan's sub-atomic Zen majesty even under the full-frontal blue pancake makeup and white contact lenses. Goode is miscast as Ozymandias; in a role the comic creators thought of as a jut-jawed Redford type, he only suggests Seth Myers of Saturday Night Live - a petulant lightweight rather than a Master of the Universe. Wilson is good as the neurotic Nite Owl, though, and Haley is tremendous as Rorschach, creating an entire tormented character through whispered voice alone. (When the mask comes off and we finally see his face, it's like the fulfillment of a bad dream.) The movie's Rorschach is the only remaining vestige of Moore's demon message: that we dream up superheroes to break the laws - physical, legal, social - we're too timid to break for ourselves.

Variety

Yet the movie is ultimately undone by its own reverence; there's simply no room for these characters and stories to breathe of their own accord, and even the most fastidiously replicated scenes can feel glib and truncated. As Watchmen lurches toward its apocalyptic (and slightly altered) finale, something happens that didn't happen in the novel: Wavering between seriousness and camp, and absent the cerebral tone that gave weight to some of the book's headier ideas, the film seems to yield to the very superhero cliches it purports to subvert.

The Wall Street Journal

Unless you're heavily invested — as countless fans and fervent fanboys are — in the novel's flawed superheroes, its jaundiced take on heroism and its alternate vision of American history, watching Watchmen is the spiritual equivalent of being whacked on the skull for 163 minutes. The reverence is inert, the violence noxious, the mythology murky, the tone grandiose, the texture glutinous. It's an alternate version of The Incredibles minus the delight.

The New Yorker

Watchmen, like V for Vendetta, harbors ambitions of political satire, and, to be fair, it should meet the needs of any leering nineteen-year-old who believes that America is ruled by the military-industrial complex, and whose deepest fear-deeper even than that of meeting a woman who requests intelligent conversation-is that the Warren Commission may have been right all along. The problem is that Snyder, following Moore, is so insanely aroused by the look of vengeance, and by the stylized application of physical power, that the film ends up twice as fascistic as the forces it wishes to lampoon. The result is perfectly calibrated for its target group: nobody over twenty-five could take any joy from the savagery that is fleshed out onscreen, just as nobody under eighteen should be allowed to witness it.

Newsweek

No one who watches Snyder's 160-minute blockbuster could doubt that he is deeply, sincerely in love with the source material. From its opening moments, his movie is meticulous, even slavish, in its re-creation of Gibbons's imagery, from colors to costumes to composition. Entire sequences are preserved, frame by frame ... Snyder has appropriated Moore's doomsday themes without any sense of how to animate them. That's the trouble with loyalty. Too little, and you alienate your core fans. Too much, and you lose everyone-and everything-else.

New York Magazine

Watchmen was conceived at the height of the eighties disarmament movement, after Reagan's election inspired waves of fresh doomsday scenarios, and its resolution has dated badly: Outlandish even then, it now seems both insanely pessimistic and naïve. As you watch the surviving characters slink away after a long two-and-three-quarters hours, you might long for the relative giddiness of The Dark Knight. Alan Moore refused (in advance) to put his name on the movie, which must have hurt Snyder and company terribly; they've made the most reverent adaptation of a graphic novel ever. But this kind of reverence kills what it seeks to preserve. The movie is embalmed.

Slate

The film is slavishly true to the letter of the book, with a few exceptions: Moore's use of nested narratives-interpolated text from imaginary books and newspapers, comics being read within comics-has been streamlined into a single master story line. But the book's spirit-its paranoia, its dark humor, and above all its bleak anti-triumphalism-has been squelched in the transition to a big-budget action epic. Watchmen fans wondering whether their graphic novel has been ruined will be thrilled to see its key scenes reproduced with storyboardlike fidelity, but those who've never read it will be unlikely to understand what the big deal was in the first place.

Salon

Watchmen is absolutely devastating. Dense, intense, tragic and visionary, this is the kind of movie that keeps setting off bombs in your brain hours after you've seen it. After coming out of the theater, I wandered the frozen streets of Manhattan watching passersby and wondering which was the real city, the apparently peaceful one I inhabit now or the one that faces Armageddon at the mid-'80s height of the Cold War in the Moore-Gibbons universe. If I could have gone back inside and watched the movie all over again, I'd have done it.

Even though she wins my heart with most of her back story — she got suspended from art school for challenging her professors; she stands up to Weeds directors who try to rearrange her performances without permissions; she turned down Shannon Doherty's sloppy seconds, declining to takeover for the departed Doherty on Charmed — I'm sort of put off by her high horse stance on paparazzi.

"She bristles at the attitude that tabloid attention comes with the job, comparing that to saying a sexual assault victim was asking for it by wearing a short dress," according to the Times. Parker then goes on:

I understand the fascination, and I understand the curiosity, but at the same time I understand the fascination and curiosity of staring at someone who has fallen off their bicycle and has a bloody nose. Does that mean you should stand there and point and look at them as though they can't see you? I don't think so. Does that mean you should take a picture of them? Probably not. Does that mean you should take out your cellphone and film them so you can put it on YouTube?

The reason I take umbrage with this stance is because Parker began her career as a theater actress. She has always worked on the stage — according to the Times, her role in Cell Phone is the first "after four years' absence — her longest stretch away from the theater since she was 17." She could likely support herself and her children through a career doing plays in New York and London. But she chose to make the leap into feature films and television. It's a rational choice for sure, but the decision comes along with the trappings of fame. Have the paparazzi gone too far? Absolutely. But Parker's attitude towards the plebes who are interested in her life — and comparing herself to a rape victim in the process — is, to use her own word, inelegant.

You're Welcome to See Her Live, Not to Ask About Her Life [New York Times]

• What happens when you're high on coke and eluding cops in a cornfield? Some maize-y shit! [Daily Mail]
  
• Proving himself to be the poster child for special-needs reptiles everywhere, a one-eyed alligator attacked a golfer in Florida today. Both man and gator are doing fine. [CNN]
  
• Penguins used to be almost 5 ft tall! Monster penguins?! Awe-some. [Guardian]
  
• Mary-Louise Parker and Jeffrey Dean Morgan are kaput. Which is sad because they both have three names. And, uh, we sorta feel like Mary-Louise has been through enough after getting dumped by Billy Crudup shortly before giving birth to his child. [People]
  
• Istanbul has pulled out from hosting a Live Earth concert this summer. We suspect they're being grumpy at being snubbed by France in EU negotiations, which was because (we suspect) France was grumpy that Istanbul got named a cooler city than Paris. Follow? If you give a European city a cookie... [USA Today]

• Snubbed again! Apparently Carrie Underwood is a sexier vegetarian than we are. Harumph. We (and the Catholic school boys in our neighborhood) beg to differ. [ABC News]
• What words of wisdom did Paris Hilton take away from her prison stint? Sayeth the sheriff, "Paris, do a better job in your life." [TMZ]
• 9 U.S. casualties identified today. [DoD]