Our latest holiday gift report comes from an ICM staffer who considerately provided us with this brief review and photo of the company's small (estimated retail value: $3.95) token of appreciation for its employees, which doubles as a subtle reminder that as long as one is part of the ICM family, all of one's time belongs to the agency:

PrivacyWatch celebrity sightings are submitted by our readers, and are now posted several times a week—so send them in often. Submit yours to tips[AT]defamer.com (please put "sighting" or "PrivacyWatch" in the subject line) and tell everyone about the time you got lost in the McDreamy eyes of Patrick Dempsey doing some holiday shopping at the Disney Employee Store.

Paramount employees on the studio's Melrose lot are still nursing whatever hangovers they managed on three drink tickets' worth of hooch at last night's holiday party, while any of their marginalized, uninvited CBS Corp neighbors who may have misguidedly attempted to infiltrate the event are quietly wondering whether the genital stun-gunning they received for being caught without a proper bracelet will have repercussions for their future reproductive plans. We've received some reports from last night's festivities, including one from a brave and resourceful CBSer who used Jedi Mind Trick-levels of deception to bypass the gatekeepers, score his free drinks, and take in the opulent, Christmassy delights (which, unfortunately, didn't included the Bono appearance rumored yesterday) that Brad Grey never wanted him to enjoy:

Several of you forwarded us an e-mail announcing in 260-point type that "Tori Spelling invites you to her Dazzling Hollywood Estate Sale in her Valley Home." Our minds ran wild imagining the untold Tori riches to be had—anything from the pay stub from her very first acting gig on Vega$ (inscribed, "Well-earned by my budding little actress! Love, Daddy,"), to a life-size Shannen Doherty soft-sculpture doll, in mint condition save for a few hundred puncture wounds and burn marks. E! Online's Marc Malkin—whose Planet Gossip column photo's sinister smile, '80s preppywear, and ability to produce lightning bolts out of his ear never fails to terrify us—offers a full report from the scene:

It's time to thank this week's sponsors, whose financial support may finally allow us to afford the bottle of fancy rum and carton of store-bought eggnog that will constitute the Defamer Christmas party. If you'd like to advertise on Defamer and bring non-denominational holiday cheer to upscale and affluent consumers desperate for seasonal gift ideas, see this page.

Var on the recent layoffs at THR: cost-cutting newsroom pinkslips, executive axings. THR on the THR layoffs: Exciting new opportunities for promotion from within! [Variety, THR]
Sony Pictures hits the $3 billion box office mark this year (thanks, Da Vinci Code!), a milestone only achieved by other studios three times in the past three years. [THR]
ABC makes a deal with producer Phil Gurin to adapt the German game show Wetten das...? (Wanna Bet? for American audiences, immediately begins its search for a desperate actor whose popularity peaked two decades ago to host. [Variety]
· Andrew "Andre 3000" Benjamin signs on for 1970s basketball comedy Semi-Pro, in which he will battle Will Ferrell to see who can grow the most comically exaggerated Afro. [THR]
Peter Bart discusses where the entertainment industry is heading. His conclusion? We don't know, we stopped reading after the third paragraph. It's Friday, and we really can't handle a glimpse into the future. [Variety]

On Apocalypto's opening day, it's anyone's guess as to whether moviegoers this weekend will have a hearty appetite for Mel Gibson's Grand Guignol vision of a dying Mayan culture, or choose to instead flock to the comparatively benign pleasures of The Holiday, where they'll be spared from even a single instance of Jack Black devouring lovelorn home-swapper Kate Winslet's face. As our early review round-up first suggested, Gibson's isn't a movie for the weak-stomached or faint-hearted, and if a sampling of today's review headlines are any indication, those early warnings of a screen run red with arterial geysers and freshly plucked, still-beating hearts were right on the Mayan-dismembering money:
· Snuff Epic [Indianapolis Star]
· 'Apocalypto' soaks the screen in gore [USA Today]
· Review: Violence overwhelms 'Apocalypto' [CNN]
· Drowning in sea of blood [Edmonton Sun]
· "Apocalypto": Bloody and beautiful [Seattle Times]
· Gibson leads a brutal yet transporting Mayan journey [Boston Globe]
· 'Apocalypto': Bloody lessons [Toronto Star]
· Mayan melodrama: Gibson crafts bloody, breathless tale of doomed civilization [Mercury News]
· Apocalypto: Mel's Bloody New Beginning? [E! Online]
· Rape, murder, mayhem — there goes the civilization [SF Chronicle]
· "Apocalypto": blood, gore and not much more [China View]
· Violent excess mars Gibson's Mayan vision 'Apocalypto' [Int'l Herald Tribune]
· Savage and then some [Dallas Morning News]
· Another bloodbath, Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto" doesn't miss an impalement or a dismemberment. [LAT]
· "Apocalypto": Mel Gibson's latest pretends to care about the fall of man, but it really only wants to impale, flay, disfigure and torture him. Sound familiar? [Salon]

We know that you want us to tell you that fugitive from tax-code-justice Wesley Snipes' arrest for the fraud charges filed against him back in October involved some kind of dramatic stand-off at the Orlando airport, with Snipes finally being dragged off the private jet that returned him to the States from Namibia after ten frantic hours of repelling wave after wave of IRS goons while armed only with eating utensils found in the plane's galley. Unfortunately, Snipes quietly turned himself in, made a brief court appearance in Ocala, Florida (sorry, he didn't wrestle a weapon from a momentarily distracted bailiff, admonish his captors for "not betting on black," then escaping in a stolen police car) and plans to immediately return to the African set of the low-budget zombie flick he's shooting while waiting for Hollywood to come to its senses and restore him to his mid-1990s stardom. Reality, as it so often is, is far less action-packed than the high-paying, shitty movies that got Snipes into this trouble in the first place.

While things certainly seemed touch-and-go for superproducing genius-vampire Brian Grazer and writer/starter war bride Gigi Levangie for a few, uncomfortable months, today's Variety brings hope that their relationship is once again stable; after all, the couple that bankrolls the wife's Jesus-starring romantic comedy pitches for a high six-figure sum together, stays together. Var and Levangie Grazer explain The Prodigal Son, the latest acquisition of eternally supportive husband Brian's Imagine Entertainment:

· A: Probably mass suicide. Staring into the existential void represented by Spears' vagina should almost invariably lead one to the conclusion that life is absurd and meaningless.
Al Gore seems less than psyched that Lindsay Lohan has named him as a sponsor in her planned crusade against the gossip-obsessed media.
· Rosie O'Donnell's not leaving The View, so we expect Elizabeth Hasselbeck isn't quite ready to ease up on the cutting.
We're not even going to pretend that we have any idea why Beyonce's face is rippling like that.
Heads are a-rollin' at the Hollywood Reporter, just in time for Christmas.
Hey, horny manatee!

Some readers have written in with updates about Paramount's CBS-Excluding Holiday Extravaganza, including reports of measures for throttling employees' alcohol consumption, an allegedly huge decorating budget, and whispers of a visitation by someone whose presence would be more buzzed about than a drop-in by the baby Jesus:

Like so many others for whom the Hollywood dream has gone sour, Sable, Cody, and Angel probably started in the business with high hopes, but wound up mostly living hand to mouth, forced into wearing close to nothing and swinging on poles for other's amusement when they weren't being terrorized by a physically abusive svengali. But now comes happy news, as a lawsuit settlement has granted the three hard-luck showbiz vets an early retirement:

· Music round-up: The Faint and Ladytron at the Palladium; Enrique Iglesias at the Wiltern; KT Tunstall at Key Club.
· Spaceland commandeers the ice rink at Pershing Square for an evening of music, laughter, and repeatedly falling on your rapidly bruising ass (does anyone in this town not on the Kings roster know how to skate?) with Very Be Careful.
· Dreamgirls director Bill Condon screens Love Me or Leave Me, the musical biography of singer Ruth Etting, at the Skirball.

The industry gifting season seems to finally be upon us, as we've received a couple of reports that UTA's present to assistants lucky enough to regularly handle the agency's calls have arrived; unfortunately, they seem to have squandered an opportunity for gift-giving creativity, falling back on last year's Wonka-inspired Lucky Bar (pictured—feel free to send in a picture of this year's version for comparison purposes), perhaps hoping to clear out some boxes of spare chocolate they had left over from Christmas '05. Says a reader:

We thought that all of the intramural tension between stranded CBS Corp employees rendered nothing more than unwanted tenants by the Great Viacom/CBS Schism of 2006 and their Paramount landlords would have worked itself out by now, but this report from a member of the Melrose lot's untouchable caste indicates that the holiday season, normally a time for people to put aside their differences over some spiked eggnog and mistletoe-enabled makeout sessions, seems to be providing a fresh opportunity for CBS staffer persecution:

A Defamer operative at last night's cast and crew showing of Mel Gibson's jungle-set gorefest Apocalypto sends in this report, in which the nervous director himself was present to hand-deliver his barbaric, Mayan-flaying baby to the hard workers who helped bring it to the screen:

Having recently bid a bittersweet and final adieu to his closest slop-eating friend in the world, George Clooney has chosen in the difficult days since to focus entirely on his work, if only to keep distracted from the deep sadness that washes over him every time he thinks of the lonely silence where a cacophony of enthusiastic oinks used to be. Among the many busy-making projects he's currently considering is the slim possibility, as related in his response to what must have been a wire reporter's leading question, of starring in a Bollywood musical:

The National Board of Review makes the first official penetration of the awards season orgy, naming Letters from Iwo Jima best film, Martin Scorcese best director, Forest Whitaker and Helen Mirren best actors, and Volver best foreign film. Brace yourself for the imminent deluge of awards and nominations announcements that may or may not have anything to do with a film's Oscar chances over the coming weeks. [Variety]
The Grammy nominations are out! And? These are probably the only words we're going to write about them: Mary J. Blige, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Justin Timberlake are all multiple nominees. [THR/Billboard
At yesterday's HRTS luncheon, showrunners of scripted programming gathered together to bitch about reality television and the absurdity of network censorship guidelines concerning the number of pelvic thrusts one may display during sci-fi show sex scenes. (Answer: as many as you can squeeze in without depicting "rhythmic sex.") [Variety]
· This article about the five actors who've joined Paul Haggis' next directoring effort, In the Valley of Elah/The Untitled Paul Haggis Project, makes absolutely no mention of Crash or its Oscar victory. For a very happy moment, we allowed ourselves to believe the win was just a very bad dream. And yes, we're still carrying around that pain. [THR]
Imagine's Brian Grazer chooses Spike Lee as the directorial vessel through which the superproducer can explore the L.A. riots in dramatic form, signing on to produce L.A. Riots for Universal. Negotiations are ongoing as to whether he can convince his director to bill the movie as "A Brian Grazer (with Spike Lee) Joint." [Variety]

There is little we find more scintillating than news that a moviemaking concern is planning on sinking billions of dollars into the more efficient development of an underexploited, extremely valuable parcel of land in its control, so we note that NBC Universal has announced that it intends to supersize its local production facilities, office space, and overrated theme park over the next 12-25 years, a massive project the company says will create tens of thousands of jobs and usher in an unprecedented, Universal-branded era of prosperity for all citizens of Los Angeles. Among the upgrades in store for Universal City, if neighbors expecting to be inconvenienced by untold years of constant construction don't first burn down the lot:

Since we fear that you think we're taking the rest of the day off any time it takes more than five minutes for new content to appear, we'd like to let you know that we've been having some technical difficulties accessing the interwebs (we don't know whether to blame sunspots or Time Warner incredibly slow takeover of Adelphia's internet service) over the past hour or so. Now that we've found a more reliable connection, posting should resume immediately. As always, thanks for your continued support in these difficult times.