The Reeler reacts to yesterday's $1.25 million sale of The Aaron Eckhart Molests A 13-Year-Old Girl Project: "Think of it like Todd Solondz remaking Crash in a cul-de-sac, but with twice the tampons and a quarter of the self-respect. Ball makes Paul Haggis look like Robert Bresson. This prick couldn't direct traffic in a two-car garage. The hi-def cinematography is barely carpet-commercial grade, slumping into a blown-out honey hue recalling dive bar urinal spatter. The actors grimace through scene upon scene of button-pushing for button-pushing's sake, from bloody panties to competing American flags to adolescent strip/rape scenarios. So controversial, I know. Or maybe I'm the one being facile; do audiences still actually fall for this 'dark suburbia' boilerplate? Is Alan Ball that cynical, or are masturbating 13-year-olds browsing porn mags the newest, freshest angle in the Are You Shocked, America? How About Now? playbook?" [The Reeler]

Faster than you can say "Dakota Fanning Rape Project," the Toronto Film Festival screenings of Alan Ball's Nothing is Private should produce a level of buzz-building, pre-acquisition outrage unseen since the first reports that universally beloved/feared child star Fanning's cinematic virtue would be stolen at the 2006 edition of Sundance. Outraged Fox 411 gossip columnist Roger Friedman previews his early candidate for Feel-Awful Movie of 2007, in which Aaron Eckhart, perhaps overcompensating for the guilt of cashing his No Reservations paycheck, returns to the darker In the Company of Men/Your Friends & Neighbors material of his early career:

It may already be too late to save Little Miss Sunshine's Abigail Breslin from a regrettable Fanningization by the Hollywood machine: "'The greatest thing about Abigail is that she takes direction,' the hunky actor [Aaron Eckhart], who plays a lovable chef, told us. 'She's so smart. She understands the whole script thematically. Most child actors can't do that. They just recite lines their parents recite with them in the hotel room.'" [Rush & Molloy, 2nd item]

· Not only do we now have video to better illustrate yesterday's Homer vs. Ancient Fertility God post, we also have a link to this delightful animated image of what he was planning on doing with that donut. [via BoingBoing]
· Like, in the Batman movies, maybe Two-Face will actually be an evil manifestation of Harvey Dent's repressed homosexuality? [Laughs] Now, that's interesting. Sure, maybe so.
· But as far as we know, no one's yet had a chance to confront Heath Ledger about the Joker as evil manifestation of repressed homosexuality.
· We take back what we said the other day, because now Courtney Love has never looked better.

PrivacyWatch celebrity sightings are submitted by our readers, and are posted several times a week, so them in often. Submit yours to tips[AT]defamer.com (please put "sighting" or "PrivacyWatch" in the subject line) and tell everyone about the time you overhead Jessica Alba politely decline the styling assistance of a fellow Coffee Bean patron.

· Generally satisfied to produce movies that explore the lighter side of blowing shit up, Jerry Bruckheimer (and Disney) have acquired the movie rights to Mark Bowden's Atlantic Monthly terrorism article "Jihadists in Paradise," plunging Bruck into much darker explosion-related territory. [Variety]
· The team behind Batman Begins sequel The Dark Knight continues to make impeccable casting decisions: after allowing Katie Holmes to "walk away" from reprising her character from Begins, they're close to signing up Aaron Eckhart to play Two Face. [THR]
· Al Gore will attempt to reverse global warming through a single day of simultaneous, worldwide rock concerts, a solution that climatologists have already dismissed as rooted more in the former Vice President's passion for the music of John Mayer than in proven science. [Variety]
· Various Fox entities (FX, 20th Century Fox TV, Fox Broadcasting) team up to shower Nip/Tuck creator Ryan Murphy in cash for his showrunning/developing services. [Variety]
· Var thinks that Fox News Channel's right-wing Daily Show knockoff The 1/2 Hour News Hour feels like something "enterprising high-school kids with a video camera could replicate." [Variety]

Not since December's The 40-Year-Old Virgin Hyphen Affair have we stumbled across a movie promotion-related typographical error controversy as potentially explosive as the The Black Dahlia Aaron Heckhart Situation, in which the actor's name is clearly misspelled on banner advertisements our readers have spotted on both LATimes.com and, ahem, this very page [see above composite image]. Online advertising copy editors will be bludgeoned with laptops displaying Eckhart's IMDb page, phone calls fielded from CAA in which the phrase, "Aaron shits bigger than your stupid little period movie!" is angrily intoned, and burlap sacks brimming with defenseless kittens drowned in the L.A. river as apologetic offerings to offended parties. In the end, the typo will be fixed, but no one will ever be the same.