The Lovely Bones is the story of Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), who is murdered in 1973 by her neighbor George Harvey (Stanley Tucci), after he lures her into his underground den. After her death, Susie, stuck in "the InBetween," watches as her father (Mark Wahlberg), mother (Rachel Weisz), grandmother (Susan Sarandon), sister (Rose McIver), brother (Christian Thomas Ashdale), and a detective (Michael Imperioli), cope with her death and try to solve her murder.

Reviewers say director Peter Jackson, who wrote the film adaptation along with Lord of the Rings screenwriters Fran Walsh (also Jackson's wife) and Philippa Boyens, doesn't do the book justice. While the novel allows readers to create their own image of the afterlife Susie creates for herself, critics dislike Jackson's tacky, overly-saturated CGI vision of heaven. Most of the performances are strong, especially Ronan's, but frequent interruptions by Jackson's fantasy world and a preachy, "Oprah-esque tone" undermine the emotional story of how each family member deals with their grief.

Though the film tones down the more disturbing aspects of the book by having Susie murdered off screen and only hinting at her rape, critics are still offended by how Susie's story is handled. While Jackson's early horror films and Lord of the Rings' work demonstrated that he's fascinated by gory details and Heavenly Creatures revealed an ability to tell a more delicate story, in The Lovely Bones critics say there is too much fantasy and horror, and Jackson shies away from the heart of his source material. Below, the reviews:

NPR

Sitting through Peter Jackson's film of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones is an ordeal. I'm not talking about the subject. The book opens with the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl, so even a good adaptation would be an ordeal. But Jackson's adolescent New Age computer-generated fantasyland is an excruciating fusion of the novel's primal trauma and his own sensibility, which is more at home with juvenile, male-dominated Lord of the Rings epics. There isn't a second that rings true - on any level.

Rolling Stone

The novel never flinched, the movie does. But Jackson, who builds jolting suspense when Susie's sister enters the killer's lair, is drawn to a spiritual dimension. He may oversaturate the Claritin-ad colors in Susie's in-between place, but he infuses the film with a sense that what lies beyond may have the power to heal. All this is conveyed in the remarkable performance of Ronan, an Oscar nominee for Atonement. She and Tucci - magnificent as a man of uncontrollable impulses - help Jackson cut a path to a humanity that supersedes life and death.

Time

Tucci plays the killer not with a madman's sneers and cackles but with a quiet malevolence; he's never more ice-shivery than when he's pretending to be normal. Such a performance could have upset the movie's balance if Wahlberg hadn't provided the solid foundation of parental devotion. The center, of course, is Ronan, the Irish teen best remembered as the girl whose lie set lives tumbling in Atonement. As the dead girl hovering over her family like a guardian angel, Ronan makes Susie seem an ordinary child whom catastrophe has made otherworldly-wise. Through Jackson's art and Ronan's magic, the obscenity of child murder has been invested with immense gravity and grace. Like the story of Susie's life after death, that's a miracle.

The Los Angeles Times

Other elements, including The Lovely Bones' imaginative notion of what Susie's afterlife looks like, are strong, but everything that's good is undermined by an overemphasis on one part of the story that is essential but has been allowed to overflow its boundaries. That would be the film's decision to foreground its weirdest, creepiest, most shocking elements, starting with the decision to give a much more prominent role to murderer George Harvey. Expertly played by Stanley Tucci, so transformed by makeup as to be almost unrecognizable, Harvey is such an unsettling, toxic individual that the actor says he came close to turning down the role. It's not only Harvey that we see in sometimes grotesque detail, it's the bizarre decorations of the underground murder site that we watch him ever so carefully plan and build, as well as the realistic bodies of his previous victims. And there is of course the chilling time the family spends trying to solve Susie's murder.

Entertainment Weekly

Jackson reduces his Lovely Bones, in the end, to the dramatic contrast between the menace of a hateful killer (will he be caught?) and the grief of a loving father (can he avenge his daughter's death?). Sebold's Lovely Bones, on the other hand, is fleshed out with the perilous, irresistible power of sex - the author acknowledges a real world of extramarital sex and sex between young lovers in addition to the heinous rape from which moviegoers are shielded. The filmmaker handled the sexual power of girls beautifully in 1994's Heavenly Creatures. But here he shies from the challenge, shortchanging a story that isn't only about the lightness of souls in heaven but also about the urges of bodies on earth. Jackson forfeits depth for safe, surface loveliness.

The A.V. Club

The Lovely Bones is often moving, almost in spite of itself. Jackson draws excruciating tension out of scenes where the audience knows exactly what's coming but the characters don't, and his dreamlike, allusive handling of Ronan's murder is stunning. The afterlife scenes are gorgeous, even though they often seem to be ultra-glossy updates of sequences he managed with more heart back in 1994 with Heavenly Creatures. And Ronan remains a tender, touching performer, though Wahlberg edges perilously close to his bug-eyed sincerity mode from The Happening. But for all its successes, Bones remains more crafted than sincere, more meant to look achingly pretty on the screen than to resonate in the heart.

The New Yorker

The book was brought off with considerable delicacy-it's really an affectionately detailed portrait of a suburban girl's life. Literalized in the movie, the material is closer to a high-toned ghost story. Jackson intermingles family goings on with Susie's gossamer interventions, and some of the brushed-with-ether imagery verges on the uncanny. Yet Jackson has become an undisciplined fabulist: the movie is redundant and undramatic. Heaven is notoriously harder to make interesting than Hell, but Jackson has outdone other artists in cotton candy-there are luscious hills and dales, and gleaming lakes and fields of waving grain, and sugarplum fairies with music by Brian Eno rather than by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The Lovely Bones has been fashioned as a holiday family movie about murder and grief; it's a thoroughly queasy experience. The lesson that Susie has to learn is that she must "let go" of her past life. Meanwhile, skilled, opportunistic artificers like Alice Sebold and Peter Jackson won't let go of a chance to mingle life and death.

Newsweek

Onscreen, however, The Lovely Bones is a hybrid of unmatching parts-shuffling between thriller, police procedural, family melodrama, and mystical fantasy. There's even a section-when Susie's madcap grandmother (Susan Sarandon) shows up to help the grieving family-during which the movie verges on becoming Auntie Mame. How do you literalize heaven? It's a problem moviemakers have struggled with forever, and Jackson hasn't solved it. Sebold's notion was that everyone creates a heaven to fit her fantasies and wishes. Jackson creates the afterlife of a 14-year-old raised on '70s teen life and pop culture-a kitsch universe of greeting-card imagery and Renaissance Faire clothes. The tackiness, intentional or not, is jarring. Even worse is the vision of Susie and the other murdered girls as a happy, gamboling clan of free spirits. At such moments, the story's willful wish fulfillment seems downright cuckoo.

The New York Times

We all like children, and - at least in our capacity as moviegoers, book-club members and consumers of true-life melodrama - we seem to like them best when they're abused, endangered or dead. Nothing else is quite so potent a symbol of violated innocence, a spur to pious sentiment or a goad to revenge as a child in peril.

[Susie] is, in any case, obsessed with the lives that go on without her, in particular with the ways her siblings and friends and father (Mark Wahlberg, agonized) and mother (Rachel Weisz, narcotized) deal with losing her, something the audience never has to endure. We are always in Susie's company, soothed by her voice-over narration and tickled by her coltish high spirits. This puts a curious distance between us and most of the characters in the film - it makes us, in effect, Susie's fellow ghosts - a detachment that Mr. Jackson's stylish, busy technique makes more acute. His young heroine, played with unnerving self-assurance and winning vivacity by Saoirse Ronan, cares desperately about the poor living souls left in her wake, but it is not clear that Mr. Jackson shares her concern.... the problem with this Lovely Bones is that it dithers over hard choices, unsure of which aspects of Ms. Sebold's densely populated, intricately themed novel should be emphasized and which might be winnowed or condensed.

Slate

The Lovely Bones also exists in the in-between, located somewhere in the interstices between thriller, fantasy, crime procedural (Michael Imperioli, The Sopranos' Christopher, plays the detective who tries to catch Susie's killer), and family-in-dissolution drama. Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz play Susie's grief-addled parents (they also have two younger children, played by Rose McIver and Christian Thomas Ashdale). There are moments that remind you what a master craftsman Jackson can be, like a pulse-pounding suspense scene in which Susie's sister ransacks the killer's house for evidence. But as Susie learns that avenging her death may matter less than giving her family a chance to heal, the movie takes on a weirdly Oprah-esque tone, as if determined to turn child murder into an occasion for personal growth. Scene by scene, the movie alternates between prurient violence and sentimental uplift. If it weren't for the luminous performance of Saoirse Ronan (who, I've said it before and I'll say it again, is going to be a huge star), this would be the kind of movie you'd give up on halfway through.

Variety

With reddish hair, brilliantly alive eyes and a seemingly irrepressible impulse for movement and activity, Ronan represents a heavenly creature indeed, a figure of surging, eager, anticipatory life cut off just as it is budding. Less quicksilver and more solidly built, McIver's Lindsey properly begins in her live-wire sister's shadow only to grow gradually into an impressive figure. Chain-smoking and depleting the liquor cabinet, Sarandon camps it up for a few welcome laughs, while Ritchie seems a likely candidate for teen idolhood. Mainly, it's Wahlberg and Weisz who are shortchanged by the film's divided attention between earthly agony and astral accommodation. Both thesps are OK as far as things go, but that's not nearly far enough.

The Wall Street Journal

And at this point in his working life he can use the prodigious digital resources of Weta, his production facility, to conjure up infinite worlds of special effects. Which, heaven help us, is exactly what he's done to visualize the Inbetween. The result is dumbfounding and ludicrous in equal measure, a too-muchness that makes the excesses of What Dreams May Come seem downright spartan. If Reader's Digest did music videos they might look like this. The screen pulses with bathos and swirls with surreal images, some of them shamelessly intercut with the life of Susie's bereaved family on earth-giant ships in giant bottles, fields of daisies, butterflies, cute dogs, cherry blossoms, baobab trees out of The Little Prince, a hot-air balloon, ice sculptures, snow-covered mountains, a gazebo in a lake, the same gazebo in a corn field, the same field lighted by a lighthouse. By the time Susie finally ascended to the highest realm, I was not only aghast but so exhausted by her surfeit of experience that I heard, as if touched by magic myself, those deathless lyrics from Talking Heads: "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens...."

The Village Voice

In Jackson's hands, The Lovely Bones is doubly appalling. Part Disney's Alice in Wonderland, part Fritz Lang's M, the movie is horrific yet cloying, alternately distended and abrupt, sometimes poignant and often ridiculous... As the novel suggests a form of talk therapy, Jackson's adaptation is a misguided tribute to the magic of the movies-which have always specialized in reanimating the dead. But there is something to be said for representing the actual world and there are some things that can only be visualized in the mind's eye. What heaven could have been more radiant than a child's view of her suburban neighborhood-what spectacle more divine than Susan Sarandon's wig?

Salon

The Lovely Bones is a fiercely delicate and often funny piece of writing, a work of fantasy with a solid footing in reality, and it wouldn't be an easy book for any filmmaker to adapt. Jackson (aided and abetted by frequent collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, who co-wrote the screenplay with him) has reinvented Sebold's story in the most facile and heedless way imaginable: He's turned it into a supernatural thriller.

The Lovely Bones is a perfect storm of a movie disaster: You've got good actors fighting a poorly conceived script, under the guidance of a director who can no longer make the distinction between imaginativeness and computer-generated effects. The result is an expensive-looking mess that fails to capture the mood, and the poetry, of its source material. David Byrne once sang, "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens." There's way too much going on in Peter Jackson's heaven — and yet it isn't nearly enough.

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• Ronnie Wood's 23-year marriage to Jo Wood collapsed after he began dating Ivanova. Their divorce was finalized last month. [AP]
• Sources say Ronnie Wood slapped Ekaterina Ivanova to the ground, then pulled her hair outside a restaurant at 11:30 pm and a restaurant worker called the police. An eyewitness says: "I think they were arguing about her not wanting to go home. He hit her and she was screaming that she didn't want to go with him." [The Mirror]
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"This is NOT a prank or a hoax. I am not joking, even if some will choose to interpret it that way. Cooking a cat is not illegal in my country, in fact it's part of our culture. I'm not asking for money or any other benefit. Fuzzy is my cat and I will not entertain any offers of selling or giving him away. If Miley doesn't tweet again, this WILL happen, and I'm as serious as a heart attack." [ONTD via Ocean Up]

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• Q: I cry when I watch...
  A: "Everything! I'm half Irish-I cry at commercials. I recently saw a movie called The Greatest. We watched it at 8 a.m., and I was ruined for the rest of the day. I had a headache from crying." — Tim McGraw. [Readers' Digest]
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• "Make sure you have a date night just the two of you together, without the kids." — Hugh Jackman's advice on keeping a family happy. [Mirror]
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• "Sometimes when you're young you don't know how to express [your emotions]," Brown says, "so I think it actually would be helpful to talk to a counselor or to somebody who has an expertise in what those [feelings] are." [People]
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• Lori Petty has pled no contest to DUI in connection with a drunken driving arrest from last May and currently has completed 30 days of her court-ordered 60 day outpatient alcohol-treatment program. [TMZ]
• "Scientology is something that's been in my life for 18 years. It's so greatly helped me. Helps me keep the stress down, the happiness up and gives me tools for living a better life. I kind of ignore all the craziness in the press."- Jenna Elfman [LATimes]
• In awesome news: Tim Gunn is set to star in his own Marvel comic book storyline titled "Loaded Gunn," wherein he will fight "crimes against fashion." The comic is part of Marvel's reintroduction of the 60's series "Models, Inc." Maybe he'll use his superpowers to find out whatever happened to Andrae? [AP]
• "We don't target the kind of people who wear money, you know, those that would kill to have the latest designer handbag. We are more for the disenfranchised. We have a punk attitude, I guess."- Boy George on his new clothing line, B-Rude. [People]
• Anna Paquin enjoys working with her boyfriend, Stephen Moyer: "It's great to have the freedom to enjoy your work and not feel like you're leaving your other life behind. It's a pretty sweet setup." [People]
• Susan Boyle's dream appears to be coming true: her album, which doesn't even hit stores until November, is currently #1 on Amazon's best-seller list. [E!]
• Rev. Al Sharpton apparently forgot about the "private" aspect of Michael Jackson's private memorial service and Tweeted his way through the entire ceremony. [E!]
• "We would like to thank all of Michael's loving fans for their tremendous support, and ask that in Michael's memory give of yourself to the charities he believed in, and keep the magic going!"-LaToya Jackson [People]
• Just in case you care: Nick Lachey and Vanessa Minnillo are totally "hanging out" again. [People]
• "Wonderful. One of the absolute best I've worked with. For me, it's her and Jodie Foster. You just don't get any better than that."-Anthony Hopkins on his The Wolf Man co-star, Emily Blunt. [DailyExpress]
• The Edge was quite embarrassed when he realized that a song he'd written sounded a little too close to the a White Stripes tune: "I went back and listened, and it wasn't exactly (Seven Nation Army), but it was way too close," he says, "I played it for Jack [White], and he was like, 'Mmm, it's a bit close, isn't it?'" [DailyExpress]
• Jack Tweed the widower of British reality star Jade Goody, has been arrested on charges that he raped a 19-year-old woman. [DailyMail]
• Apparently, the new female Saturday Night Live hires were replacements, not additions, as Casey Wilson and Michaela Watkins won't be returning to the show this season. [TheComicsComic]
• Screen legend Gary Cooper will be honored with his own postage stamp. [UPI]
• Mark Wahlberg and wife Rhea Durham who already have three children together, are expecting their fourth. [USWeekly]
• "I, in no way, support the destruction of Israel. I am for the two-state solution. I have been to Israel many times and love the country and its people."-Jane Fonda, in response to accusations by Rabbi Marvin Hier that her signature on a letter stating that Tel Aviv was built on destroyed Palestinian villages is a sign that she supports "the complete destruction of Israel." [TMZ]
• The paparazzi is making life tough for Robert Pattinson: "It's a nightmare," says a source, "He almost never leaves the hotel except to go to the set. And when he does, the crew has to go great lengths to find ways to transport him from one location to another undetected. Because of the paparazzi, Rob has been unable to interact with his many fans." Sleep with one eye open, paparazzi. The Twihards do not take kindly to being blocked from their sparkly vampire dreamboats. [ShowbizSpy]
• "The film should be on airlines in two months and off everyone's resume within three. No animals including the horse were injured making the film, so "Steve" counts as no great crime. Bit it does leave one question: Why did anybody think an attractive female star should wear red boots in every scene of a movie?"-Kirk Honeycutt on the Sandra Bullock.Bradley Cooper film, All About Steve. [Reuters]

• Jessica Biel is "the most dangerous celebrity to search in cyberspace," according to security software firm McAfee.

Searching for "Jessica Biel photos" or "Jessica Biel videos," you have a one in five chance of landing on a site that's got spyware, adware, spam, phishing, viruses and other malware. Last year Brad Pitt was number one. This year poor lonely Jennifer Aniston is number 3, behind Beyoncé. [MSNBC]

• In The UK, Whatshername is the most dangerous. [Telegraph]
• Sensitive headline of the day: "IT'S JACKO-CIDE!" [NY Post]
• Cops say that Dr. Conrad Murray waited 82 minutes after Michael Jackson had stopped breathing before dialing 911. Record show that Dr. Murray was on the phone for 47 minutes — in three separate calls — before dialing 911. [People]
• La Toya Jackson will do a one-on-one interview with Barbara Walters, to air Friday, September 11. La Toya released a statement which reads: "I am thankful to the investigators for uncovering the truth to the world, and I look forward to the day that justice will be to served to all the parties involved in my brother's homicide." [ABC News]
• Susan Etok, A doctor from the UK is saying that Michael Jackson wanted to get her pregnant: "He wanted to use his sperm and my eggs to become a dad again. "He was really fixated on my genes." [The Sun]
• Dr. Etok also has written a letter to President Obama, urging him to consider "harsher punitive measures" for "unethical Doctors." [TMZ]
• More evidence that Michael Jackson was not broke, but cash poor. [TMZ]
• "I've known Michael for over a decade and there were times when I could not wake up Michael Jackson." — Uri Geller. [Mirror]
• Janet Jackson will chair the AmfAR event in Milan during Fashion Week. [WWD]
• Kate Gosselin will be on Larry King Live tonight. Are we sick of her yet? [ET]
• On September 14, Oprah Winfrey will announce her first new book club pick in over year. She Tweeted she had "never made a selection like 'this.'" [USA Today]
• The father of Ryan Jenkins says: "If my son was guilty, he was crazy… He was not the boy we knew. The boy we knew was not capable of anything remotely close to this act." [E!]
• Pop star and juvenile diabetes spokesperson Nick Jonas wants to be president. "As much as I joke about it and kind of say it to get a laugh, it is somewhat serious. I don't know if it will happen." [Reuters]
• Crash diet alert: Leonardo DiCaprio is working on an action flick called Inception, directed by The Dark Knight's Christopher Nolan. Apparently there's a scene in which he needs to appear "emaciated," so Leo is cutting back calories and exercising rigorously. [Radar Online]
• Speaking of weight loss, Mark Wahlberg is worried that Christian Bale, his costar in The Fighter, has dropped too many pounds to play a drug-addicted boxer. God, remember The Machinist? [MSNBC via National Enquirer]
• Robin Williams will not be putting on a wig and pantyhose to play Susan Boyle in a biopic, despite what you may have heard. [MSNBC Scoop]
• Kari Ann Peniche, the woman in the Rebecca Gayheart/Eric Dane video, may have effed up by signing a deal with E! for an exclusive interview, and then talking to some magazine. [Gatecrasher]
• Mickey Rourke: Delayed at JFK security on his way to Bosnia. Screeners rifled through his bags and asked him how much money he was carrying. [Gatecrasher]
• Britney Spears took her kids on a pedicab ride through Central Park. [Gatecrasher]
• Bronx Wentz may go into show business. He's been going to work with his mom Ashlee Simpson on the set of Melrose Place and she says: "I'm all about whatever it is Bronx likes to do and wants to do. Definitely going to follow what it is that he loves and hope to be a great parent in that way." [E!]
• David Letterman's former nanny has written a book called Harry and Horsie, based on a homemade gift for Letterman's son four years ago. [USA Today]
• Shia LaBeouf and his Wall Street 2 costar Carey Mulligan: It's on. [Gatecrasher]
• Bob Dylan is in talks with some car companies about being the voice of their GPS systems. He joked that it would probably sound like: "Left at the next street. No, right. You know what? Just go straight." Then he said: "I probably shouldn't do it because whichever way I go, I always end up at one place - on Lonely Avenue." [Mirror]
• Kim Kardashian will executive produce a reality show about her publicist pal Jonathan Cheban. Behind-the-scenes drama! [Page Six]
• Magician David Blaine wasn't rescued by lifeguards from rough surf over the weekend, he was "escorted." "I did swim back by myself," he notes. [Page Six]
• Katy Perry is talking about her boobs again; this time she auctioned a cast of them for charity and claims: "They had to get extra plaster to cast them because they are so big.I was very proud because it was early in my career and they fetched 3,500 dollars, which I think is pretty good." [The Sun]
• Guess who's (maybe) getting her on TV show? Candy Spelling. A scripted show, not a reality show. Candy says, "I wouldn't do a reality show." And! Daughter Tori Spelling says if her mom did get a show, "I wish her the best." [Radar Online]
• Eddie Cibrian's estranged wife to LeAnn Rimes: "He's all yours." [UPI]
• "Eddie is a compulsive liar, cheater and a home wrecker. And he has been an absentee father." — Eddie Cibrian's wife, Brandi Glanville. Estranged wife, that is. [MSNBC via Us Weekly]
• Is this a joke? Pauly Shore has a reality show called Adopted, about his efforts to adopt an African child. [Page Six]
• Lisa Marie Presley's nanny claims she was forced to work 7 days a week without meal breaks or getting overtime. [TMZ]
• Poor 87-year-old Jack Klugman is still trying to get cash from doing TV Show Quincy, M.E. from 1976-1983. This is his second lawsuit over this issue. [Reuters]
• Whatshername is pregnant again?!?!?! [Telegraph]
• "I never really criticized John… He was a very soft-centered guy and we had a lot more in common than people think." — Paul McCartney on John Lennon. [Mirror]
• "Thankfully my sister is with her… I talk to either my sister or my mother, if she is able to talk, every day and sometimes more than once,. But it's been bad. I was trying to get away two weekends ago and then, pow. Something came up with Lifetime and they wanted me to do something and I just - I am very loyal to them. Whatever they want, I'll do it." — Tim Gunn's Project Runway schedule has been keeping him from his dying mother. [MSNBC Scoop]
• "I have to confess I always hated any person from Scotland who went and lost their accent in the slightest. But I've spent a year-and-a-half now playing roles as an American and I'm not comfortable enough doing those accents only when we film, so I have to keep it up all the time. I really hate myself for doing that." —Gerard Butler. [Mirror]
• "I love to spoil Harlow." — Joel Madden. [Page Six]
• "I feel empowered. Finally. When you don't believe in yourself, you feel like you're living in fear. You don't give yourself the opportunity to believe that you can. And as much as you tell yourself you can't do it, you end up not doing it. Me? I was complacent and comfortable where I was. Here, sometimes it's like my music didn't quite work, but overseas it's on top of everybody's chart. I've had more international success than domestic success, and I think that opens my eyes up to music. I mean, I just got back from performing in Lebanon. Lebanon!"— Kelly Rowland, who sings three tracks on French DJ David Guetta's One Love. [USA Today]
• "I mean this from the bottom of my heart: I don't care if I win. I'm not doing this to try and prove that I'm better than someone else at something, I'm doing it because it scares me. Dancing is something that I've always really wanted to be able to do, but never had the confidence and the technique, if you know what I mean. I'm not very graceful, so it's just something that absolutely terrifies me - and it's the main reason that I kind of wanted to do it."— Kelly Osbourne, on Dancing With The Stars. [Daily Mail]
• "Yes, it's true, I don't date Black men. I never have. It's not a prejudice. It's just a personal preference. People always think that Big Papa is Black. I don't know why. I've never dated a Black man. It's not to say it wouldn't happen in the future, but at this time, I never have." — Real Housewife Kim Zolciak. [ONTD]

• Petersen's group aims to appoint a financial guardian to watch over any money made by Suleman's children during the filming of their upcoming reality show. Suleman attempted to have the judge dismiss the petition, but the judge refused. [Reuters]
• Model Jasmine Fiore's body was identified by the serial numbers in her breast implants—a necessary step after, as Dodai mentioned yesterday, her killer had removed her teeth and fingers in an attempt to throw off the police investigation. Suspect Ryan Jenkins of VH1's Megan Wants A Millionaire is still at large. [USWeekly]
• VH1 is still uncertain as to whether I Love Money 3, a show Jenkins competed on, will ever air. [NYTimes]
• "If someone told me that I would [go into space and] never come back, and if I didn't have a family, I would definitely go and spend my last days in outer space. Escaping into another planet or another world or another way of life . . . keeps me centered and balanced."-Mya [PageSix]
• The release of Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Michelle Williams, has been moved from October to February, meaning the film won't be released in time for Oscar consideration this year. [NYTimes]
• Just in case you were wondering, Tilda Swinton is not having threesomes with John Byrne, the father of her children, and current boyfriend Sandro Kopp. "I've been painted as a benign eccentric who's living there while some guy's shagging his sweetheart," Byrne says, "Why would I do that?" [PageSix]
• Angela Lansbury will return to Broadway to play Catherine Zeta-Jones' mother in a revival of A Little Night Music. [DailyExpress]
• Jon Gosselin has been spending his weekends partying it up at Foxwoods Casino with his girlfriend, Hailey Glassman. He shall leave no cliches unturned, my friends. [PageSix]
• Blind Item: "This very large, former A list television actor and now movie actor got his nickname Flash because he likes nothing more than to wear boxers around the set and makes sure his fly always stays open." [BlindGossip]
• "Hollywood is just like high school: The popular people love the other popular people. And the thing is, some people aren't nice. Or they are nice, but only to your face, not elsewhere."- Amanda Seyfried [DailyMail]
• Usher claims to own 10,000 pairs of shoes. [TheSun]
• Britain's Radio 1 has "snubbed" Madonna by refusing to play her new single, Celebration. [TheSun]
• Mark Wahlberg is reportedly concerned about co-star Christian Bale, who may be risking his health in an effort to lose weight for his role as a drug addict in the upcoming film The Fighter. "Christian is a method actor. If a role calls for him to look like a drug dealer, or he has to play someone who hasn't slept in a year, he'll go without food to look the part," says a source, "But the danger comes after he takes off that weight, and then eats everything in sight to put it back on for the next role. That kind of yo-yo dieting can be deadly. Mark and Christian are friends, and Mark is concerned about him." Hopefully this doesn't mean they're done, professionally. [ONTD]
• Bryan Singer is set to remake the 1981 film Excalibur. [DailyExpress]
• According to Heidi Montag, her husband, Spencer Pratt thinks Angelina Jolie is "a home-wrecking hussy." [PopCrunch]
• Meanwhile, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are reportedly "grooming" their daughter, Shiloh to be an actress. [Celebitchy]
• Kristen Stewart will be playing a stripper in the upcoming film Welcome To The Rileys. [Star]
• A source on the set of Twilight flick Eclipse claims that Kristen and Robert Pattinson are "definitely a couple and very much in love. Neither of them is rushing into anything, they are just having a good time hanging out, but they plan to explore their relationship even more while they are filming." [ShowbizSpy]
• Hey Girl, Ryan Gosling is going on tour with his band, Dead Man's Bones, and "the opening act for the shows will be a talent show, organized by the band and featuring local talent in each city." I assume you guys will be at these shows holding up giant signs that read, "Hey Ryan- Eff it, let's get a taco." [JustJared]

• Lily Allen was performing in Helsinki, Finland when she burst into tears. Before the show, she Tweeted:

"Fell over badly last night and I've really fucked my back up. Just had an injection in my bum. How am I gonna get through tonight's gig?" Throwing out your back is terrible! So is Lily's hair/makeup in these pix. [Daily Mail]

• Bill Maher said he once saw Brad Pitt roll the most perfect joint he had ever seen. "I'm an artist," Brad agreed. [NY Daily News]
• Brad Pitt is being added to Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes as the detective's arch enemy. The character of Moriarty was missing from a rough cut of the film, and movie execs insisted the famous nemesis be added to the flick. Ritchie called old pal Pitt (who was in Snatch) and he'll film this week in London. [Mirror]
• The Dancing With The Stars season 9 cast: Revealed! Macy Gray, Melissa Joan Hart, Kathy Ireland, Mya, Iron Chef host Mark Dacascos, Ashley Hamilton, former Dallas Cowboy Michael Irvin, Donny Osmond, Tom DeLay (?!?!?!), Olympic swimming gold medalist Natalie Coughlin, model Joanna Krupa, Debi Mazar, Kelly Osbourne, Aaron Carter, Chuck Liddell, and snowboarder Louie Vito. [ABC News]
• Jennifer Aniston complimented a woman pole-dancing on the set of The Bounty, saying she looked like a professional. The lady replied, "I am!" [Gatecrasher]
• George Clooney plans to sue a photographer who climbed over the wall of his Lake Como home and took pictures of a 13-year-old girl changing in a guest room, as well as snaps of Clooney and gf Elisabetta Canalis. Cloons says: "I don't know about the law in the United States, but in Italy it's illegal for photographers to climb over my wall. He'll also press charges against two magazines who published the photos. [Gatecrasher]
• Beyoncé: Secretly taking ballet classes at Alvin Ailey School of Dance. [Gatecrasher]
• Jon Gosselin went to a party thrown by a student at Parsons School Of Design. He only stayed for 20 minutes, but arrived with a paparazzo and left with two female students. Keepin' it classy. [MSNBC Scoop]
• Even though Paula Abdul won't be on Dancing With The Stars, she MIGHT get a ABC show of her own. Paula's Wacky Clappy Variety Show? [TMZ]
• Madonna performed in Warsaw on Saturday even though it was a holy date, the Assumption of Mary feast. National group Pro Polonia called her a "crypto-Satanist," which is not very crypto. [Daily Express]
• Bob Dylan was on tour and took a walk in Long Branch, NJ, when he was stopped by cops; a resident had reported someone "wandering" around the neighborhood. A cop asked him for I.D. "I don't think she was familiar with his entire body of work," says a town official. [NY Daily News]
• Jennifer Lopez is looking pretty hot on the cover of InStyle and inside she's saying stuff like: "There's nothing as huge as giving birth to another human being and having to be responsible for another life. There's you before kids, and there's you after kids – and they're not the same you." [People]
• Mark Wahlberg was rushed to the hospital on Friday morning after suffering smoke inhalation on the set of The Frighter. A smoke machine was being used for atmosphere and Wahlberg breathed in too much. [RadarOnline, Daily Express]
• Amy Winehouse's divorce from Blake Fielder-Civil will be finalized at the end of the month, but Blake allegedly told a reporter: "I want to take her out for dinner and propose again. I hope that within five minutes we'll be planning where we're next going to get married." [Daily Mail]
• Blake also says: "She is looking beautiful and healthy now and it reminds me of the old Amy." [News Of The World]
• Amy will appear on Strictly Come Dancing in September as a backup singer for her 13-year-old goddaughter Dionne Bromfield, and there's a cute picture of them hugging at the link. [Mirror]
• Bodysnarky opening sentence of the day: "She's looking thinner than ever, but there's one part of Victoria Beckham that looks set to put on a lot of weight very quickly - her wallet. Posh Spice has landed a £3million contract on American Idol…" [Daily Mail]
• Joe Simpson is pushing Jessica Simpson as the perfect replacement for Paula Abdul on American Idol. [Page Six]
• Saturday night after a Fall Out Boy show, Ashlee Simpson and husband Pete Wentz were at a bar when Ashlee got wasted, yelled at Pete and made him leave his own party early. Charming! [Perez]
• Jane Fonda, 71, might marry 67-year-old Richard Perry next year, which would be her fourth wedding. [Daily Express]
• So many contradictory stories about MJ. We first heard that he was strong during rehearsals. This report claims: "Michael Jackson was so weak in his final days he needed to be SPOON-FED meals, his make-up artist has revealed." [The Sun]
• "Michael Jackson's body has been moved in secret to a new crypt, where it's been frozen." [Daily Express]
• This report claims that Michael Jackson will be buried on what would have been his 51st birthday, August 29. Or so says Joe Jackson. [Gatecrasher]
• You know how Michael Phelps was in a car accident last week? Turns out he was driving with an expired license and told cops he had a beer about an hour before the crash. [TMZ]
• George Michael on his car smashup: "Neither of us was charged because we were both stone cold sober. We both think the other is to blame so this is just an insurance fight." [E!]
• Eva Longoria is expanding her restaurant business, and soon she'll have a Beso Vegas and "Besitos" in ariports. [People]
• Kristin Bauer, who plays Pam on True Blood, thinks Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer will have kids together since Anna is "great" with Stephen's kids from previous relationships. [E!]
• Tons of Gossip Girl spoilers at the link, and yes, there are details on Chuck and Blair — with a HOT picture of the Bass. [People]
• Matthew Settle — Gossip Girl's Rufus — skateboards through New York during rush hour. [NY Times]
• Actress Aishwarya Rai has a chest infection with flu-like symptoms. [Times Of India]
• Anna Friel will play Holly Golightly in an upcoming stage production of Breakfast At Tiffany's in London. [Times Of London]
• The Office's Amy Ryan — who plays Holly Flax — is pregnant. [E!]
• An excerpt of Alana Stewart's book, My Journey With Farrah: A Story Of Life, Love And Friendship, at the link. [Daily Mail]
• Bananarama's back. [Daily Mail]
• Aberdeen, Washington has the title of one hometown hero Kurt Cobain's songs, "Come As You Are," posted at the entrance of town. An unofficial park has been established next to the bridge under which Cobain hung out and wrote songs. [LA Times]
• Blind item! "Which D-list relationship recently ended when the gal found out her man's secret vice was boy-on-boy action?" [Gatecrasher]
• "I can't tell you how far from a gold-digger I am. I've never dated a rich man in my life. I've always wondered how girl friends of mine could even ask their boyfriends to buy them clothes." — Samantha Burke, who was impregnated by Jude Law. [Daily Mail]
• "I thought it was an incredibly sexual role and a challenge to be an 'older woman' in the film. Roles always challenge me in some personal way and that was one I wanted to overcome: 'Wow, all of a sudden, you've become the "Older Woman" in a movie. Let's give the younger ones a run for their money.'" — Anne Heche on playing opposite Ashton Kutcher in Spread. [LA Times]
• "This season, I really want to get back to the guerilla style I used to have. I want to try to get back to my roots and make it crazy. In the first episode, I get buried alive in a coffin, six feet under 5,000 pounds of snow. I want people to realize I'm not complacent because I have a little bit of success and a little money. Hopefully in return I can raise the level of the art form to the level other art forms receive, like the cinema.… I just really loved the ability as a kid to do something that adults didn't understand. It was like power. Then I realized as a teenager that there was more to the art of magic than how you did it. It's trying to connect to somebody." — Criss Angel, whose Mindfreak is back on A&E for its 5th season. [LA Times]
• "I like everything about filming except the acting. In recent years I've had really bad attacks where I totally froze up. I thought 'Well, if I am going to get stage fright, then I am packing it in.'" — Hugh Grant. [Daily Mail]
• "I think anybody that's touring is going to have a carbon footprint. I think it's probably unfair to single out rock 'n' roll. There's many other things that are in the same category but as it happens we have a program to offset whatever carbon footprint we have." — The Edge, annoyed by critics of U2's travel. [Daily Express]
• "The Harry Potter books are not explicitly religious in the way that C.S. Lewis's Narnia tales are, but there is a strong sense of evil, and issues of good and evil are not only philosophical issues but also theological issues." —University of Massachusetts-Amherst philosophy professor Gareth B. Matthews. [UPI]
• "I think when I started I was working in the vein of The Dirty Dozen or The Devil's Brigade. But now watching the completed film with audiences, I don't think there has ever been a World War II movie like it. That can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your taste, but it's definitely a thing." — Quentin Tarantino on Inglourious Basterds. [WSJ]
• "Don Cheadle could play me, but I hope they just go with the obvious casting choice." — Richard Belzer, when asked who would play Richard Belzer if his crime novel about a a New York City police detective named Richard Belzer were made into a TV show. [Publishers Weekly]
• "I've had my heart broken before. Truly, truly broken. But when I look back at me in my heartbroken phase, it's pretty hilarious, because it felt so much more extreme than it really was. One of the things I love about (500) Days of Summer is that it doesn't make light of what we go through in romances, but it is honest about it and shows it for what it is, which is often profoundly funny." — Joseph Gordon-Levitt. [Guardian]
• "The speed of news creates so much vertigo. I am a very private person." — Penelope Cruz. [Telegraph]
• "We kind of rolled our eyes at the idea of having to make out." — Amanda Seyfried on her Jennifer's Body girl-on-girl scene with Megan Fox. [Page Six via Entertainment Weekly]
• "I remember really vividly kneeling by my bed as a nine-year-old, saying my prayers and asking God to give me boobs that were so big that if I laid on my back I wouldn't be able to see my feet. Eventually that request was granted. A bit of divine intervention displays the power of prayer. Every time before I go on stage, or go out where I know there will be a lot of press, I take a skipping rope and spend about ten minutes, fully clothed, skipping. I look like Rocky. This way I can ensure that everything is firmly in place and I won't have a wardrobe malfunction. Don't want those boulders doing a show of their own." — Katy Perry. [The Sun]

• Mark Wahlberg married his longtime girlfriend Rhea Durham yesterday in a small ceremony in Beverly Hills. "She looked like a princess and beyond stunning. Mark looked ecstatic," says a source. So much for Nicole 4 Eva! [People]

• In more wedding news, Ali Larter was married this weekend, as well, to actor Hayes MacArthur in Kennebunkport, Maine. [USWeekly]
• And Milla Jovovich is set to walk down the aisle on August 22 to marry her fiance of six years, director Paul W.S. Anderson. [DailyMail]
• Demi Moore, meanwhile, will celebrate her fourth year of marriage to Ashton Kutcher by adopting his surname. "Demi didn't want to change her name at first because it didn't seem right but now she finally feels ready," says a source. [ShowbizSpy]
• Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have allegedly had a bit of a tiff over their final resting places: "Angelina initially wanted to be buried beside her ex-husband Billy Bob (Thornton)," says a source, "She bought his and hers cemetery plots in Louisiana but since then she's changed her will. She's been trying to persuade Brad to make a decision on where they should be buried but he thinks the whole thing is morbid." [DailyMail]
• Pitt has been dealing with the stress by retreating to his separate two-bedroom home, where neighbors say he has been "playing Nick Drake quite loudly." Oh, dear. [DailyMail]
• G.I. Joe star Channing Tatum says he loves being a newlywed: "We've been together, and nothing's really changed. It's pretty much the same as I've felt every day since I met her – and that's just about perfect." [People]
• Disturbing: Charles Manson allegedly runs a memorabilia business out of his cell, selling autographs to morbid collectors. [PageSix]
• Whitney Houston won't be singing live on Good Morning America this September; instead, her performance will be taped the day before, as Whitney "is not a morning person" and would rather not perform at 7:30 am. [PageSix]
• "Michael, after 50 years of waiting, God has finally called you home to do what you do best. He shared your extraordinary talent with us all for many decades and now it's time for you to spread your wings to a much higher level, which of course I know you will do, and join the other angels and give them an incredible eternal performance. Keep the angels smiling, Joker!"- LaToya Jackson, in a post on her website, dedicated to her brother Michael. [USWeekly]
• Jackson's death has been devastating for his mother, Katherine Jackson, who currently has custody of his children: "This pressure is tearing her apart physically and emotionally," says a source, "At her age and in her fragile state of health, more exertion could trigger another stroke. She has full time nursing care but the strain is visibly taking its toll." [DailyExpress]
• Judd Apatow's Funny People won the Friday box office with 8.6 million dollars. [EW]
• Kate Gosselin has reportedly purchased a condo in Rockville, Maryland that's only about a mile away from the home of her bodyguard, Steve Neild. [E!]
• Blind Item:"Which Oscar winning actor has used this as a chat-up line? 'Why don't you to come back to my trailer and let me impregnate you? Think about it – 20 grand a year for life.'" [BlindGossip]
• "I could not be happier. I'm absolutely thrilled with her as a person, as an actor. I've gotten to know her a bit over this time, and I can't speak highly enough of her."-Joan Jett, approving Kristen Stewart's portrayal of her in The Runaways. [ONTD]
• Courtney Love has allegedly been taking the growth hormone Genotropin in an attempt to slow the aging process. "Courtney has been struggling with her weight,' says a source, "She's been using the hormones to help her gain muscle and for anti-ageing and likes the results. But she's not very discreet. She even left a vial of it in her LA hotel room." [DailyMail]
• A source claims that Jessica Simpson's Barbie and Ken themed birthday party was the last straw for Tony Romo, who broke up with Simpson the night before the party was supposed to take place: "There was no way Tony was going to dress up like a Ken doll. He never would have lived it down. His teammates would have roasted him to death. But sadly, Jess just didn't get it!" [ShowbizSpy]
• "I love kids, don't get me wrong, because without them I wouldn't be where I am today, but they do follow me around to the most peculiar places. And they're very loud! When they start screaming it's sweet to see how enthusiastic they are, but I'm going to go deaf sooner than most people. It's impossible to calm them down when they start, I just cover my ears."- Vanessa Hudgens [ShowbizSpy]
• "I don't drink, so how am I going to meet people? I'm going to go up to a drunk guy and be like, ‘Hey, let me take advantage of you'? Not that I'm antisocial. I am kind of antisocial. It's just so intimidating to go from, like, ‘You want to play basketball and get to know each other?' to ‘Let's go on a date and see if it might get dirty.'"- Charlyne Yi on the difficulties of dating. [NYTimes]

[Image via WENN]

• Here's the first picture of Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick with their new twins, Marion and Tabitha Broderick. Big brother James, are you ready for double trouble? [TMZ]

• Britney Spears has dark hair and something that looks like an engagement ring. What does it mean??? [NY Daily News]
• Uh-oh: Us Weekly dropped $120,000 for exclusive rights to Kendra Wilkinson's wedding, but the death of Michael Jackson will push her bridal bliss off the cover. [Page Six]
• Will Michael Jackson's body be put on display in a coffin of glass, like Eva Peron? [The Sun]
• Michael Jackson's mother has been granted temporary guardianship of his three kids. [LA Times]
• According to a source, Michael Jackson almost died once before — in 2004 — he was unconscious and had to be revived. [Fox News]
• Michael Jackson's doctor didn't call 911 for a half hour after finding MJ unconscious. [TMZ]
• The LAPD is trying to identify and interview "multiple doctors" who treated or prescribed medicine to Michael Jackson. [LA Times]
• Michael Jackson's mother Katherine is worried about people stealing from MJ's estate. [TMZ]
• Debbie Rowe has been reaching out to the Jackson family, but has been unsuccessful. [People]
• A will drafted by Michael Jackson in 2002 may be released this week. [WSJ]
• "Michael Jackson's Last Art Purchase." A wicked witch painting. [TMZ]
• "Michael Jackson was spending £30,000 a month on prescription drugs," says this paper, which lied to us yesterday. [The Sun]
• "Michael Jackson's Death: Sorting Fact From Fiction." A run down of all the claims and contradictions. [NY Daily News]
• Two weeks before he died, Michael Jackson completed a video project; his last. [AP]
• Expect some "instant" Michael Jackson books — some due by the end of the week, one coming in July. [AP]
• Michael Jackson's "This Is It" tour is being transformed into a tribute concert in September, and Madonna may take part. [MSNBC Scoop]
• Here is Lindsay Lohan posing like Michael Jackson. [NY Daily News]
• Ladies and gentlemen, a statement from Jon and Kate Gosselin: "During this very difficult time we will be working to focus solely on the needs of our family. This includes no longer commenting publicly or reacting to media stories and speculation. Our goal is to do the very best for our children and that will be done as privately as possible. We appreciate the understanding, support and well wishes from so many. Thank you." [TLC]
• Chris Brown was not at the BET Awards because Al Sharpton and Jay-Z were "very vocal" with producers about not letting him appear. [Gatecrasher]
• A source says: "Jay-Z wasn't having it. He threatened to pull out of the show if Chris was involved, so BET dropped Chris." [Page Six]
• Chris Brown's friend Teairra Mari says: "He's sorry. That's my friend, and I love Chris. He's a good kid-he just made a mistake. He knows that and feels terrible about it." [E!]
• Justin Timberlake went out boozing with Guy Ritchie, and guess which one went home at 2:30am and which one stayed in the pub? Guy was in it til the bitter end. [The Sun]
• How is the filming of The Runaways going? Well, Joan Jett made Kristen Stewart cry. So. [Gatecrasher]
• Some GQ Brüno pictures in which the character is posing with a high school football team have infuriated a school official in L.A., who says: "We've allowed our students to be used, and not in the most glamorous circumstances either." [UPI]
• Susan Boyle on Ugly Betty? Why, yes. [Telegraph]
• Amy Winehouse has been banned from taking in any more stray dogs after resort management had to fumigate her house in St. Lucia. [The Sun]
• George Clooney is not dead. Why are there so many death pranks? That shit is not funny. [TMZ]
• Kate Moss's boyfriend Jamie Hince is getting tired of Kate's lengthy karaoke sessions and is limiting her to half an hour a day. [The Sun]
• Lady GaGa visited an HIV Support Centre in Manchester, UK yesterday, and said: "I've been doing volunteer work since I was two." She also said: "I want to make it fashionable to have safe sex. You must be safe. You can have sex with hundreds of people with a condom on and get nothing. If you have sex without one, then you could get all sorts of problems." To which this paper asks, "Speaking from experience?" [The Sun]
• Ashton Kutcher is Tweeting for the White House. No, really. [Politico]
• Kathy Griffin on NPR! "NPR listeners, I know who you are. I know you guys read books, which I find tedious. You guys might try a book called Us Weekly. OK? It's a really good book. It has a lot of pictures." [NPR]
• Megan Fox spent the weekend in Las Vegas with Brian Austin Green. Back together? [E!]
• Someone threw a drink on Anna Kournikova at a club in Vegas and the tennis player "sprang into action," showing and screaming at the lady. [Page Six]
• Marissa Jaret Winokur continues to blog about her "weight loss journey." She writes: "I downloaded the video of Beyoncé's 'Single Ladies' and started to learn her dance. Let me tell you, if I ever did that dance in a club I would still be a single lady!!! But what a workout! It was free and fun and it kept my son very entertained – it was like a real-life Muppet danced out of his TV and into the living room. It kept him and, sadly, my husband very amused for almost an hour." [People]
• "Hollywood stars Antonio Banderas And Melanie Griffiths' Garden Seized As Spain Cracks Down On Illegal Coastal Homes." They'll lose their 40 foot swimming pool! [Daily Mail]
• Is Antonia Kidman — sister of Nicole and TV personality in Australia — addicted to exercise? [News.com.au]
• Redmond O'Neal with be allowed to leave jail to attend his mother Farrah Fawcett's funeral. [People]
• Law And Order: SVU fans, take note: Christopher Meloni and Mariska Hargitay have finally signed on to stay for two more seasons. [Variety]
• Amy Adams is in negotiations to star alongside Christian Bale and Mark Wahlberg in boxing drama The Fighter. [Variety]
• Some kind of drama involving Kanye West's bisexual girlfriend Amber Rose and a singer named Nicki Minaj, who Amber hit on? [ONTD]
• Here's a Q&A with Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, who says: "We did get word that whoever's in charge of loading [Barack Obama's] iPod requested the record and we got the record in." [Time]
• Best wishes to 92-year-old Zsa Zsa Gabor, who is out of the hospital after a 6-day stay for flu-like symptoms. [AP]
• The Nutty Professor is coming to Broadway, and Jerry Lewis will direct. [AP]
• Whatshername and Whatshisname: fighting in public. [Mirror]
• Blind item! "Which former boy bander looked oh-so-strung-out over the weekend? His diet of booze and nose candy certainly isn't helping his skin-and-bones appearance." [Gatecrasher]
• "I don't watch TV comedy in the UK anymore. We've got some poor copies of Curb Your Enthusiasm, some poor copies of Entourage and some poor copies of Seinfeld. With a few exceptions the Americans seem to be ahead of the game." — Ricky Gervais. [The Sun]
• "I pointed to a spot where I told him I wanted to be buried. Michael had a meltdown right then and there when he heard this. He shrieked and bent over and said, 'No, no, no.' [He said,] 'Don't ever talk about your dying. Don't ever think about it.' I couldn't pretend to understand him. There were so many complicated signals. Did he want me to be his 'older woman' friend? He gravitated to older women. For solace? Succor? A beard? Did he want me to teach him the ropes? I never could quite figure it out." — Jane Fonda, on her relationship with Michael Jackson. [E!]
• "I wish I could say that I was inspired by him for a role, I was inspired by him because I think he was a great artist but he was not the inspiration for Willy Wonka contrary to what most people say. No no no, I never ever thought of playing Michael Jackson in a film, I think if anyone should play Michael Jackson in a film it should've been Michael Jackson. A mother and a father have lost a son, siblings have lost a brother and millions of people around the world have lost someone they love. Children have lost a father so it's obviously a very sad, sad moment." — Johnny Depp. [The Star]
• "At the moment I feel like I need to go away and figure out what I want to do and be myself for a bit. I just want to take a step back from it and not rush into stuff. I need university to give me that break. People think because I'm going to university I'm never going to act again, but it's actually me… I want to… figure out how I feel about everything first. Maybe I'll keep acting, maybe I won't. I just want to find something where I feel I have to do this. Maybe that'll happen when I read a script. It felt like that with Hermione. I want to feel like that again." — Emma Watson, who will attend Columbia University in the fall. [Elle UK, NY Daily News]

• Gossipeuse Janet Charlton claims Jennifer Hudson is knocked up. JHud is currently on tour; her fiancé, "Punk" from I Love New York, is training to become a professional wrestler. [Janet Charlton's Hollywood]

• Amy Winehouse's horribly burned leg is due to a scalding pasta water incident. They tried to make me cook fusilli… [The Sun]
• Rihanna went out clubbing in L.A. and danced and flirted with basketball star Baron Davis. Apparently the DJ said something like Chris Brown should get his ass kicked; the whole crowd cheered — Rihanna included. [Gatecrasher]
• Will Madonna bring Mercy home? Three judges on Malawi's Supreme Court of Appeal will decide on May 4. [The Sun]
• Michelle Rodriguez is a pretty awesome bridesmaid! She broke up a bachelorette party yelling that the stripper was "fat and had a small dick." Then when the dude wanted a lady from the bridal party to kneel for him, Michelle said: "That's bullshit. He should be kneeling for her; this is a bachelorette party." Next? "As the stripper began gyrating and pushing his crotch into the bride-to-be's face, Rodriguez yelled, 'This is the kind of thing that brings out the bisexual in me.' She left in a huff." [Page Six]
• Poor Ann Curry is being sent to both Iraq and Afghanistan war zones. Sarah Haskins was right; the Today show is trying to kill her. [AP]
• Lady GaGa has a new boyfriend and his name is Speedy. Of course. [In Touch]
• Jennifer Garner has been seeing a sex counselor, so she can learn to please her man. A source says: "Ben's great, but he can be very insecure. He likes Jen to play the devoted wife all the time." So Jen sees Dr. Holly Hein for tips of keeping the romance alive and dealing with Ben's "need for attention." "Jennifer doesn't want to lose him. She's in this for the long haul." [Star]
• Here's video of Jen Garner and Matthew McConaughey eating cupcakes while promoting Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past. Warning: It's incredibly dull. [E!]
• The mother and stepmother of Slumdog Millionaire star Rubina Ali had a "catfight" in the street yesterday. In Mumbai, India. And there are pictures in this UK paper. Seriously, what the hell is going on with this poor child? [The Sun]
• Now that singing sensation Susan Boyle is suddenly famous, she has purchased a new fence to surround her house and get some goddamn privacy. [The Sun]
• Susan Boyle's former singing teacher is worried the overnight sensation will damage her voice. [Telegraph]
• Simon Cowell on Susan Boyle: "It had been a long day in Scotland. We'd seen no talent at all. All I knew about her was a name on a sheet of paper. She came out and she looked a bit odd, and the dress looked odd. I gave her five seconds at most. But then she started singing, and within two seconds everything changed." [NY Times]
• Is Paula Abdul going to get up out of her judge's chair and perform on American Idol? She's been dropping hints! [LA Times]
• An "insider" says John "The Player" Mayer has been "recording in a studio and coming on to almost every woman in the vicinity." Plus! He "goes on and on… about how clingy and needy Jen is." Apparently The Player claims Jen Aniston was super emotionally dependent, which is maybe what an immature commitmentphobe might say, so who knows. [MSNBC]
• The US Army is on Twitter — clearly they have nothing better to do — and they want to knock Ashton Kutcher out of the top spot. We're still at war, right? [NY Daily News]
• There is "intense puppy-proofing" going on at the White House, thanks to Bo Obama. [NY Daily News]
• Girls, you know you better watch out: Lauryn Hill will headline the Stockholm Jazz Festival in July. [Yahoo News via AP]
• Debra Messing will be back at NBC with an untitled comedy; the plot? She'll play a laid-off CEO who "is as ill-prepared to be a full-time wife and mother as her husband is to provide for the family." Hilar! [Yahoo News via Reuters]
• A snapshot for the ages: M.I.A., Kanye West, Aziz Ansari and Zoe Kravitz. [The Life Files]
• David Blaine has worked his magic on French model Alizee Guinochet; they're engaged. [Page Six]
• How much would you pay to have lunch with Rosie O'Donnell and Star Jones? Proceeds go to charity… [Page Six]
• Oksana Pochepa, who still claims she is the mystery girl in Mel Gibson's life, keeps a sex diary "with ratings for all her men." This is a combo of slut-shaming and possible lies; kudos to the paper for keeping it classy! [The Sun]
• Perez Hilton went to Criss Angel's show in Las Vegas and Tweeted that it sucked; Criss Angel made and announcement from the stage, saying "We have the world's biggest douchebag asshole in the house!" Now Cirque production company has apologized to Perez but Criss Angel has not. And writing gossip about Perez makes the brain ache. [LVR, LA Times]
• Christian Bale and Mark Wahlberg will star in The Fighter, the tale of Boston boxer "Irish" Mickey Ward and his half-brother Dicky Eklund. [Variety]
• Russell Crowe was on Letterman talking about trying to save Steve Irwin's wildlife reserve — and block a mining operation — in Australia. [News.com.au]
• A lawsuit has been filed against Stephenie Meyer by a former friend who claims Meyer stole her vampire idea. But don't worry, Twihards, it won't halt production of New Moon. Sparkly vampires and Native American werewolves for everyone. [MSNBC Scoop]
• We've heard this before, but here it is again: Gossip Girl's Chace Crawford may replace Zac Efron in the Footloose remake. Possibly because he has the same sideswept haircut? [Mirror]
• This report claims Jessica Biel is so good at pole dancing in her new flick Powder Blue, she's a "natural born stripper." [NY Daily News]
• Amber Tamblyn says that since her new show The Unusuals is shot on location in New York, in between shoots, cast members hit local stores and shop: "No one goes back to their trailers." [Yahoo News via AP]
• Uh-oh: The president of Oprah Winfrey's cable network — due to launch next year — resigned yesterday. [LA Times]
• Woody Allen refused to take park in an "I Love New York" ad campaign, maybe because NYC has so many American Apparels? [NY Daily News]
• With lyrics about suffering and chains, the new Depeche Mode album is "like one long infommercial for B&D." But: "all this would seem creepy, instead of sexy, if the music weren't so hot." [NY Daily News]
• The Cure closed the Coachella festival, but organizers had to pull the plug on the band after 2 1/2 hours: "By the third encore, singer-guitarist Robert Smith informed the remaining audience that he was told he could do only one song but played three anyway. The final number, "Boys Don't Cry," turned into a sing-along as the video screen went dark and the sound system began to power down." [Reuters]
• Blind item: "Which rehabbed actor is back on the sauce? He just can't keep his hands off the booze when he's in L.A.!" [Gatecrasher]
• "You get the financing together and I'll work on the script... I would say [Elaine would] just be getting out of prison." — Julia Louis-Dreyfus on doing a Seinfeld movie. [Daily Express]
• "I most admire Matt Damon and Michael J Fox. I just saw Rounders and it just reminds me. Matt Damon is someone who I want to be. I just want to make his smart choices." — Zac Efron. [Mirror]
• "We definitely don't receive a $100,000 to show up at nightclubs anymore. So that's one huge life-changing difference. It makes me miss the old days, back when Paris Hilton and these fools were cashing in like a gold rush every year." — Spencer Pratt, on how the economy is affecting his life. [LAist]
• "Go to an area where the unemployment rate is the best. Go into a field that you love, but at the same time, that has potential. So many people study the wrong things, they go into the wrong fields, and no matter what they do, it's always going to be a battle throughout life. So find a great area, even if it means that you have to move your family. Find a great area, and a business that works." — Donald Trump's advice for those fired or laid-off. [Time] 
 

• "I lead such a boring life, nobody pays attention... and if somebody does take a picture, it's like I'm eating a burrito, in my sweats, and my mouth is open. It's just — I'm kind of a disgusting, boring person so nobody really pays attention!" — Anna Faris. [Mirror]
• "I don't want to get bored, and I don't want the audience to get bored." — Simon Cowell, on whether next season is his last on American Idol. [NY Times]
• "I had to say it as if it was coming to me very easily. I had to research some of [the words] because the acting coach I worked with told me if I really understood what I was talking about, it would come through a little more true." — Lauren Conrad, on her role on Family Guy, which required her to recite "a lot of facts and a lot of big words." [WaPo]

[Los Angeles, March 18. Image via INF]

• Nancy Pelosi left a health-care forum at the White House to meet with Brad Pitt. This piece calls them "Brancy." [WaPo]

• Everybody on Capitol Hill was atwitter over Brad Pitt being in their midst; Rep. James E. Clyburn says: "I did not realize when the Speaker asked me to chair the Katrina/Rita task force that it would lead to my getting in a position to make my grandchildren so envious of me, because this effort brought the two of us — Brad Pitt and myself together." [Politico]
• This headline sums it up: "Capitol Hill Goes Gaga Over Brad Pitt." [USA Today]
• Back in September, Amy Winehouse was involved in some kind of "incident" (uh, which one?) and now she has been charged with assault. Run back to St. Lucia! [People]
• Oh yeah: It was when she punched a fan who asked for a picture. [The Sun, Daily Mail]
• Um, Amy's husband Blake Fielder-Civil is "besotted" with Francesca Morralee, who is 17. [The Sun]
• Chris Brown appeared in court yesterday but did not enter a plea. His arraignment was delayed until April 6. [People]
  
• Here's a picture of two "fans" outside Chris Brown's court hearing yesterday, with signs which read "I love you Chris." [Concrete Loop]
• After Chris Brown was charged with two felonies, one of Rihanna's relatives told People: "It's about time." [People]
• Rihanna's lawyer told Chris Brown: "I think Rihanna would like this over as quickly as possible. It benefits everybody." Then Brown's own lawyer told Brown: "I've explained it to you that the best thing that could happen in this case is, Don [Rihanna's lawyer] is involved. Didn't I tell you that?" [LA Times]
• Nine days passed before Chris Brown apologized to Rihanna for beating her. [Fox 411]
• The reason Usher backed down on his criticism of Chris Brown? Rihanna. Trying to show support for Rihanna. [MSNBC]
• Chris Brown "hit the town" after his court appearance. Not really… He hung out at a hotel bar with bodyguards. [TMZ]
• What the goop was Gwyneth Paltrow doing getting into a chauffeur-driven car with Christiane Amanpour? [Page Six]
• Jewel and Nancy O'Dell have both withdrawn from Dancing With The Stars due to injuries suffered during rehearsals. What the hell goes on at that show? [People]
• Girls Next Door star Holly Madison will replace Jewel and Nancy. [NY Daily News]
• It may have sounded like there were screaming masses at Michael Jackson's press conference, but there were only 25 people including press. [Gatecrasher]
• But! People trying to get "pre-sale" tickets for Jackson's show are complaining that the website is effed. [Telegraph]
• Even though Heath Ledger's dad told a reporter that the family planned to keep Heath's Oscar "forever," it will actually go to Michelle Williams. Today. She will hold it for Matilda. [LA Times]
• WTF. This report begins, "Madonna has offered a gnarly old hand to Sienna Miller…" [Daily Star]
• Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony were "in tears" watching American Idol finalist Jorge Nuñez. [E!]
• "Regis Philbin Blackmail Shocker!" [National Enquirer]
• David Beckham will stay with AC Milan until the end of the season and will return next season, but he'll be "timeshared" with the LA Galaxy between July and October. [Daily Mail]
• "Flip-flopping" Bachelor Jason Mesnick swears he is not a jerk. [MSNBC]
• Shh! Don't tell anyone, but Lucy Liu is an artist, painting under the pseudonym Yu Ling. Snap up her portrait of two people kissing for a mere $28,000. [Page Six]
• It's all baby-talk all the time on the set of Ugly Betty. [People]
• For an episode of Oprah's show, Dennis Quaid and his wife returned to the hospital where their twins were given an overdose of blood thinner. [AP]
• Vince Vaughn is engaged and the lady is named Kyla Weber; she's a Canadian real estate agent. [Gatecrasher]
• Simon Cowell and ex Terri Seymour went on a dinner date. Cue the "ooooohhhh!" [Daily Mail]
• Gossip Girl's Matthew Settle and his wife welcomed a daughter, Aven Angelica, yesterday. [People]
• "LSD, Easter Island, science fiction and, of course, Lorne Michaels, all played a role in developing the Coneheads sketch for Saturday Night Live. [Page Six]
• Joe Francis denies he accidentally bumped into Brody Jenner's girlfriend at a club, which sparked a screaming match. Joe, ever the pacifist, says: "There was no physical contact, but if you're Brody Jenner and dating an ugly piece of trash…you should expect these types of altercations." [Page Six]
• Ghostface has written a song for Rihanna. Sample lyrics: "Shake it off, wake up… Pretty lady, come about yourself…" [Concrete Loop]
• Fantasia Barrino returns to the musical The Color Purple for a five week stint in Washington DC. [Variety]
• Mark Wahlberg will star in a "dark thriller" which this piece calls "one of the hottest scripts in town." It's set in Boston, so Wahlberg can do his best "Say hello to your mother for me." [The Hollywood Reporter]
• DNA tests prove that Jerry Lewis has a daughter — he mother had an affair with the entertainer back in 1952. He has not publicly acknowledged the woman as his daughter, but his son agreed to a DNA test because "everybody deserves to know where they came from and who they are." [UPI]
• Blind item: "Which flowery former wild child had a bad sexual experience with the creator of a hit TV show - but went for another round because 'she'll try anything twice'?" [Gatecrasher]
• R.I.P. Sydney Chaplin, Charlie Chaplin's son and Tony-award winning actor. [AP]
• "My dad is more of a rock star than me. He embraces the lifestyle. People think having your dad on tour would cramp your style. But I don't have any style - he's got all the right moves. He's living the dream. I am going to check he hasn't trashed the hotel room before we leave each city." — Chris Martin. [The Sun]
• "The biggest thing for me is that I am now going to have to choose between work - this script or that script. Until now, my roles have chosen me; my career has been shaped essentially by never saying no. But now I will have to say no. I just hope l'll be wise in my choosing." — Melissa Leo, about her life post-Oscar nomination. [Guardian]
• "So when I do go out with him I sit and get progressively more pissed, and he's one of those annoying people who remembers everything. I go to him, 'Just have a fucking beer! One beer!' And he says to me that if he has one beer he'll probably end up in a crack house in Kings Cross within 40 minutes. I'm like, ‘Brilliant, I'll come with you.'" — Noel Gallagher, on hanging out with Russell Brand, who does not drink. [The Sun]
• "It's fine if Tori wants her own reality show or wants to write books about her childhood. I just wish she'd leave me out of it. She has plenty to talk about without saying things like, 'I wish I were closer to my mother,' or 'Did you see what my mother wrote on her Web site?' I wish she would call me, rather than say on television, 'I should call my mom.'" — Candy Spelling, whose autobiography, Stories From Candy-Land, is out at the end of the month. [Gatecrasher]
• "Dave [Stewart] and I talk to each other only rarely these days, and I can't see another reunion. He lives in America and I'm over here. We're both working on our own things. For me, it would feel like a step backwards and I want to keep moving forward. I enjoy multi-tasking, so I want to do a lot of different things. I want to keep all the plates spinning." — Annie Lennox. [Daily Mail]
• "I am in perfect health. I'm in very good shape and feeling very good." — Hugh Hefner, knocking down reports that her was "far from his normally alert self" at a recent party. [Yahoo News via E!]
• "It doesn't vacuum, it doesn't wash the dishes or stuff like that." — Charlize Theron, joking about her Oscar. [The Star]
• "I'd love to work with Amy Winehouse. She has a very distinct, sexy, soulful voice and she writes great lyrics." — John Legend. [Mirror]
• "[The role reminds me of ] a period of my life where I had to work several jobs to pay my bills. Something would go wrong and you'd have to take another job to get your car running. That was very real for me." — Amy Adams, on Sunshine Cleaning. [WSJ]

• Christian Bale's four minute verbal attack on a crew member who ruined a shot was replayed and debated thousands of times on the news today, but sources say it was taken out of context.

• Sources on the set of Terminator Salvation say it's unfair that this moment is being replayed all over the media because Bale had warned the director of photography to stop tweaking the lights during filming several times, and the scene being filmed was the "emotional center of the film." [Yahoo, Ain't It Cool News]
• In this video, the Today Show anchors bring their crew on set, play the recording of Christian Bale, and asked the crew what they would do if the anchors cursed at them. Since that's probably a pretty coveted crew job, we're guessing they'd say, "Thank you Mr. Lauer, may I have another?" [People]
• Sam Lufti is suing Britney and her parents for libel and defamation. He claims he urged Britney to reconcile with her parents and that Lynn's book Through the Storm is filled with lies. [Yahoo]
• OMG! Here's a photo of Ed Westwick and Jessica Szohr kissing at a Knicks game. You know you love them! [E!]
• Did Bruce Springsteen plagiarize the music from the Kiss song "I Was Made For Loving You" in his new song "Outlaw Pete"? [The Telegraph]
• People runs photos of Angelina Jolie's family in just about every issue, so to mix it up this week's issue will feature photos of Angie as a baby with her parents and brother James Haven. [People]
• In Cookie Tracy Anderson, trainer of Gwyneth Paltrow and Madonna, claims that she lost more than 60 pounds of baby weight in six weeks. But if you want to know how she lost more than 10 pounds a week, you'll have to buy her DVD, of course. [Babble]
• Mark Wahlberg wants to marry his girlfriend, Rhea Durham, with whom he has three children, in August in a Catholic ceremony. "If we do it here [in Los Angeles], it'll probably just be us and the kids," said Wahlberg. "If we do it in Boston, I would say there'd be a lot more family members, so there'll be some fighting!" [The Star]
• Katy Perry claims that when she told girls at her concert not to date her ex, Travis McCoy of Gym Class Heroes during a concert, she actually jokingly said not to date the lead singer of Death Cab For Cutie, even though that makes absolutely no sense. [The Daily Express]
• Vivica A. Fox is asking the Psychic Friends Network to stop using her "unauthorized likeness" in their commercials. But then why did she film the commercials? [Perez Hilton]
• Erin Brokovich has revealed that her daughter Elizabeth was addicted to cocaine and prescription pills and is now in recovery after going to rehab. Elizabeth says her mother's fame drove her to become a drug addict. [The Daily Mail]
• Tilda Swinton lives in Scotland with her husband and two children, but is also openly having a relationship with a younger man. "It's a situation that I find very healthy. I can maintain my life with my children and their father and spend time with the man I have become very fond of," says Swinton. "It may seem odd but it is certainly the best thing for the children." [The Daily Express]
• A Cameroonian singer is suing Michael Jackson and Rihanna for stealing the hook from one of his songs. Michael Jackson already settled and accepted that bits of the song were used on the 1983 song "Wanna be Startin' Something," but the man is also suing Rihanna for using clips of Jackson's song in "Please Don't Stop the Music." [Yahoo]
• South Carolina authorities say they are considering bringing criminal charges against Michael Phelps because he was photographed smoking pot at the University of South Carolina. [Brietbart]
• Jewel plans to release an album of lullabies this spring, and says she has been writing them all along, "I kind of did it for myself to help myself fall asleep when I really worried, like when I was homeless and I'd fall asleep in my car," she said. [AP]
• Last week Khloe Kardashian broke up with boyfriend Rashad McCants of the NBA's Minnesota Timberwolves. She says, "relationships are so hard in general, even living next door to each other. But [NBA players] have 82 games a year in their season, and I work so much; it's hard to spend time together. It just wasn't as fun as it should have been." [People]
• Legendary Giants defensive end Lawrence Taylor may be on the next season of Dancing With the Stars. This information comes via Ashton Kutcher's Twitter, despite the fact that Ashton acknowledged yesterday that he's addicted and needs to stop Twittering. [People]
• Drew Barrymore says women will relate to He's Just Not That Into You because it's so realistic. She says: "I'm the character I played in the film. I'm surrounded in gay men and I'm single. I love my gay men. That's why I'm so happy! I don't feel upset at all. I'm thrilled!" Also, she has a new tongue piercing. [USA Today]

This cover is from Fall 1992. John Corbett was "that guy from Northern Exposure" and Sex And The City had yet to be unleashed on the American public. The woman he's posing with is MTV VJ Duff. It seems he'd love to just tilt his head and knock her right off the cover.

Ladies and gentlemen: Kristy Swanson, star of a little film called Buffy The Vampire Slayer. She's mad for plaid! Fall 1992.

Did women actually wear quilted vests and tapered pants tucked into boots? This woman did. Fall 1992.

Who could possibly look at a jean jacket and think, "what this thing needs is a see-through panel" ? Fall 1992.

Where are these people now? Winter 1993.

The only thing more frightening than her eye makeup is that platformed and chunky-heeled boot. Not that I didn't covet it, at the time. Let's not talk about the hair. Winter 1993.

Please note the frayed pants hem and Colonial Williamsburg shoes. Did people actually get laid in the '90s? Winter 1993.

A threesome you don't want to watch. And where is her hand? Winter 1993.

Her hideous vest was $82, which has got to be almost $200 in 2009 dollars, right? Anyway. If you lean in, you can hear Arrested Development playing in the background. Winter 1993.

Gah. What's funnier — the hats, the hair, or the sucked-in-cheeks this model is throwing at the camera? Winter 1993.

I would like to pretend I didn't wear something like this to see the Chili Peppers and Ice Cube at Lollapalooza but I can't. The shame is crippling. Winter 1993.

Jeremy spoke in class today. Winter 1993.

Would you look at Ms. Tyra Banks? Getting all close and personal with the dude who sang "I Hate Everything About You? Her eyebrows are… severe. Spring 1995.

The spread says "Café Au Lait," but the message? Black coffee is strong. By the by: This model, credited as "Wale," is Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, also known as Adebisi from Oz or Mr. Eko from Lost. Spring 1995.

No thanks! Spring 1995.

Look closely and you'll see CSI's Gary Dourdan jumbled in this pretty pile-up. Also: Yay, diversity! Spring 1995.

Big toothbrush, little skirt. Are we raving now? Spring 1995.

Oh, dear: The inevitable rollerblading story. "The blading scene is largely about being seen," reads the copy. Spring 1995.

Nuno Bettencourt, on the left, was in Extreme, the band caused "More Than Words" to be on the airwaves. Incessantly. The lady to his right is then-19-year-old Vanessa Paradis, who was releasing an album produced by Lenny Kravitz. Johnny Depp: No where to be found. Winter 1992.

In the interview accompanying these shots of Marky Mark, he uses the word "dope" over and over again. "I think of myself as a very flavorsome rapper. I'm versatile and that's what I think makes my style so dope," he says. "I did a dope rap on voting for MTV. I just started getting hip on voting." Winter 1992.

This actually feels rather current. Could be My Chemical Romance or whatever, no? Winter 1992.

Male supermodel, Marcus Schenkenberg, gives his best "blue steel." Winter 1992.

• Photos have surfaced of Lily Allen kissing a new, older boyfriend in the Caribbean. We think he looks like Anthony Bourdain. [The Sun]

• Hugh Jackman is no longer in talks to star with Catherine Zeta-Jones in Cleo, a 3-D musical directed by Steven Soderbergh which sets the Marc Antony/Cleopatra love story to rock and roll music. Since Jackman has never met a musical he didn't like, we're taking this as a bad sign. [Variety]
• Country legend Merle Haggard had a lemon-sized tumor removed from his lung, but he says he's not going to let cancer beat him and plans to work harder in 2009 than he has in 20 years. Haggard says he's singing much better now that he's quit his daily marijuana habit. [Reuters]
• In case you stupidly went out on New Year's Eve instead of watching Kathy Griffin and Anderson Cooper co-host CNN's Times Square coverage, here's a clip of Kathy making a dick joke, which CNN later edited out of the re-air. [Media Bistro]
• Charles Barkley was arrested on Wednesday morning on suspicion of drunk driving, but it's now been revealed that he had a great reason for speeding. He told the cops he was in a hurry to pickup a girl who had given him a blow job one week earlier, which he described as "the best one he had ever had in his life." [Perez Hilton]
• The surviving members of the Grateful Dead played together in October in support of Barack Obama and had so much fun they decided to get back together and go on tour. So now Obama is reuniting classic bands - is there nothing our president-elect can't do? [USA Today]
• The magic of New Year's was not strong enough to reunite Carey Hart and Pink. At midnight he toasted her and led her onstage at his Las Vegas club, but they didn't share a kiss. Pink played a 30-minute show and they returned to the VIP area to hang out with friends. [People]
• Fergie says she's working out every day before her January 10th wedding in order to fit into her wedding dress. As you recall, she was tragically forced to gain less than 10 lbs for her role in the upcoming movie Nine. [People]
• Rick Salomon, Paris Hilton's sex tape partner, is being sued by a woman who claims he and his roommate brutally beat her at a drug and alcohol-fueled party last July. This is truly shocking - he seemed like such a fine upstanding citizen. [TMZ]
• Mark Wahlberg can't stop urinating in public. Last week he was caught urinating on an LA street, and this time he heard the call while on the golf course and made a mad dash to a nearby bush.[The Sun]
• Heather Locklear has been approached to reprise her role as Amanda Woodward on the new Melrose Place. Could her return spur as much backstage bickering for Melrose Place as Shannen Dougherty's return to 90210? [Yahoo]
• Elmo, Grover, and Oscar the Grouch will be guest starring on an episode of Scrubs airing on January 20. We expect singing will ensue. [UPI]
• Nick Bollea, Hulk Hogan's son, wants to serve his five-year probation in California, not Florida, has applied for permission to move. We sincerely hope he's not planning to use his pre-incarceration appearance on Hogan Knows Best to launch an acting career. [UPI]
• "Yes, my life is incredible but, oh my God. I have to work at it. It's the same for any working woman," says Kate Winslet. But if you're a working woman with a crappy job in an office you're chances of being nominated for an Oscar or asked to make out with Leonardo DiCaprio are considerably slimmer. [The Telegraph]
• Oprah made a $365,000 donation to the Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta, telling the school's director, "I was sitting on my couch and thinking about who I wanted to send Christmas gifts to and I thought about you." It pays to be on the mind of Oprah! [UPI]
• Amy Winehouse may appear in Norwegian court to appeal marijuana possession charges made against her and Blake Incarcerated in 2007, for which they already paid a fine. Being one of the most famous drug addicts in the world probably isn't going to help her case. [UPI]
• Khloe Kardashian has been secretly dating Minnesota Timberwolves guard Rashad McCants since the sumemr. How is it that we've seen hundreds of photos of this woman shopping, and yet she managed to carry out a secret romance for months? [Perez Hilton]
• Jennifer Garner has yet to give birth, so she has a little more time before she goes on 24-hour "has she lost the baby weight?" watch. [Perez Hilton]
• “Most of my heroes did most of their great stuff before they were 33. It’s not that you can’t do great stuff afterwards. You just have to have deadlines, otherwise you’ll spend all day in the sauna.” - Chris Martin on why he wants Coldplay to "do something good" by 2010, when he will turn 33. [The Sun]

[Los Angeles, November 19. Image via x17]

[Guardian, Perez, People]

• More hot water for American Apparel: an accountant is suing for wrongful termination, saying he was fired for refusing to cook the books. [WSJ]
• A Bosnian company is starting an Obama-inspired suit line. Now is he obliged to wear one?! [Breitbart]
• Joan Rivers critiques Michelle's "horrible dress." In fairness, she's totally ambushed by a TMZ reporter. [TMZ]
• Mark Wahlberg says his CK co-moddle Kate Moss looked "like his nephew." “I mean she’s beautiful – she’s a very pretty nephew – but I’m more into curvy women.” In fairness, she started it. [The Sun]

• Three words: Juicy Couture Stroller. A favorite with teen moms everywhere! [Racked]
• Designer Jussara Lee, us, sick of SATC. "The whole Sex and the City thing was a huge influence on ordinary people. It looks too done up to me. It's too much hair. Everyone looks like they've spent too much time, too much money, and then in the end everyone looks the same. It's curious that people would go the whole extent to look so the same." [New York]
• Oy. Macy's takes a major hit. [WWD]
• How do the Vena Cava designers relax? "Cold beer and Steve Martin movies." [Style.com
  ]
• Asia emerges as one of Versace's biggest markets. [WSJ]
• Retailers, shoppers all terrified. Christmas shopping should be a blast! [Washington Post]
• If a photo shoot is deemed too racy for Italian Vogue, you better believe it's NSFW! [NY Mag]
• Meanwhile, Kate Moss rocks the cover of Vogue China. [Models.com]
• "At Lanvin, (Alber) Elbaz did not just resurrect a sleeping beauty and transform it into one of the most desirable fashion brands in Paris today, but with his designs, he has helped up the allure of French fashion overall." [WWD]
• L'Oreal's European supremacy is slipping. [Reuters]
• Payless gives a million dollars to kids in need for the holidays. That's like 500,000 pairs of their shoes! [Payless Gives via NY Mag]
• Poked by Burberry? Luxury labels take to social networking sites. [WWD]
• More on Stella's adorable children's windows! [Telegraph]
• Pucci makes moddles dance with mannequins. "Aside from the mannequins — a sassy gaggle called Girl to be dressed in contemporary styles by Frank Tell — the dancers will intermingle with big round plaster sculptures by Michael Evert." [WWD]
• Roland Mouret breaks into menswear. [Fashionista]