She may be unable to share with her child's father the spoils of his critically spoojed-upon turn in what is well on its way towards becoming the highest-grossing movie of all time ($14 billion on Tuesday alone!), but all is not dark for Michelle Williams. The actress has reportedly found comfort in the arms of Torrance Community Dance Group captain Spike Jonze. The Daily Mail has been keeping a respectful distance from their blossoming love:

• Courtenay Semel, lesbian daughter of Yahoo's CEO was dating heiress Casey Johnson until a drunken hookup with Tila Tequila at some party. Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson totally giggled. [P6]

The Golden Age of Villainy may be upon us. Between the accolades and eventual Oscar for Javier Bardem's singular evildoer in No Country For Old Men and the virtual repeat of the same cycle this year for Heath Ledger's Joker, no prospect stokes A-list egos these days quite like a chance to OD on wretchedness. Sony has enough confidence in the era to have undertaken development on the Spider-Man spinoff Venom, a full-length riff on Topher Grace's enemy from Spider-Man 3 that, naturally, will be recast with someone likelier to open a blockbuster. And now, after a few days of Angelina Jolie/Catwoman rumors tailing the Dark Knight follow-up, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Johnny Depp reportedly want a piece of the Bat-action:

With its enshrinement as The Greatest Film Ever Made safely assured and its box-office trajectory soaring ever upward, The Dark Knight is now being groomed for a spot so exclusive that it only changes hands once per decade: The highest-grossing film in history. Feel free to take the news with a grain of salt, seeing as it came from the notably math-challenged John Horn in today's LA Times; even so, it's hard to argue when Knight is looking at $400 million by this weekend and Titanic sits idle at the dock with $600 million. Seriously — $400 million in two weeks. But as we note after the jump, that last hurdle might be taller than it looks.Observers attribute the record haul-to-date in part to the same repeat viewers who bumped Titanic to No. 1; turnouts among "older moviegoers, families, Latino and African American audiences" are higher than normal as well. And last weekend, anyhow, The Dark Knight enjoyed the advantage of weak competition. Those days are over, though, with the execrable Mummy 3 nevertheless looking at a $50 million opening this Friday and Pineapple Express and Tropic Thunder set to usurp their own cuts of DK's marketshare in the weeks to come. By comparison, Titanic had 15 weeks at number one — most in the late-winter studio dumping grounds of early 1998, as Horn points out, and aided heavily by its inexorable march to Oscar glory. Similar factors could dovetail in unique ways for The Dark Knight, though, as its proximity to both the fertile July market and this fall's more prestigious film crop means Warner can revive its Terry Gilliam-endorsed Oscar chatter just in time to stretch DK's long tail into awards season. Call it Phase 2, even if Warners distribution boss Dan Fellman takes the high road with Horn: "We are honored to be considered in that company. But I think Titanic will hold that record for eternity." Don't sell yourself short, Dan! Or, more importantly, don't underestimate a James Cameron sabotage campaign — we're already seeing evidence of a conspiracy online. That's when you know you're a phenomenon.

While most of the punditocracy is demanding that Sid Ganis engrave Heath Ledger's name on the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor before the month of July comes to a close, the notoriously contrarian ESPN talking head Skip Bayless isn't quite convinced. During today's episode of their afternoon gabfest 1st And 10, Bayless got into a heated argument with the equally opinionated (read: full of shit) mouthpiece Stephen A. Smith about whether or not The Dark Knight was better than Tim Burton's Batman. As these conversations generally go, the topic of conversation quickly switched to Heath Ledger's universally lauded performance as The Joker. That is to say, universally lauded by everyone but Skip Bayless.

• Heath Ledger's father proceeded with funding a nautically-themed bar in Greenpoint, in which Ledger had been a silent partner. The guy who designed Beatrice is involved. [Down By The Hipster, P6]

The Dark Knight's record-breaking opening left us entranced by not only its tsunami of cash, but also by the news, commentary and other unclassifiable phenomena we spotted in its wake around the Web. For your Monday morning convenience, here's a glimpse at what the biggest three-day box-office weekend in history will get you:

Until today, we didn't really know Mamma Mia! had any competition for the weekend's gay-readiest cinematic treat, with the most recent evidence stretching the film's ABBA creds to recommend tips for building your own home disco. Classy, no? But a few Dark Knight contrarians are out there, subverting the conventional wisdom ("Is Mamma Mia! the gay Batman?") and giving the musical's loyalists a run for their gay money:

Welcome to another edition of Defamer Attractions, your weekly cheat sheet to everything new and noteworthy at the movies. This is a fairly easy installment for us, as will happen when the most anticipated superhero movie of, like, ever is threatening to run off with the biggest opening weekend, like, ever. As such, knowing that at least half of you are browsing this from a lawn chair in some long, twisting multiplex queue, let's skip the formalities: This weekend features one blockbuster, a melodic bit of counterprogramming, a primate-centric flop-in-the-making and a concert film for the manic depressive in you. As usual, our opinions are our own, but they are burnished to a soft, infallible glow. Off we go!

"Mr. Ledger's death might have cast a paralyzing pall over the film if the performance were not so alive... He's just a clown painted on black velvet, but he's also some kind of masterpiece." [Times]

Whether he's outmaneuvering the cosmic pox on his films or simply panhandling for his next directing opportunity, Terry Gilliam is a man Hollywood can always count on to deliver his own special brand of crazy when it counts. But whereas we've generally been leery to attribute much more than pity to him over the years, for once we've got Gilliam's back in a scintillating new attack on Warner Bros.

Heath Ledger's performance as the creepy Joker in this week's latest outing for the Batman franchise is being treated with such manufactured reverence—the dead actor's even being touted as an Oscar nominee—that some sort of backlash is inevitable. So who'll start it? A blogger with an admirable absence of decency, John Carney.

Aaron Eckhart and Maggie Gyllenhaal dropped by the Today Show this morning to shill a movie, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. Eckhart earnestly related to host Matt Lauer a story about their deceased costar Heath Ledger which he'd told Ledger's mother — namely, that friends were passing around Ledger's iPod as a form of remembrance:

In light of Pierce Brosnan's brave, warbling turn in Mamma Mia—as well as recent news that Kate Hudson would veer off the Bongo Romcom highway to explore the musical theater side roads in Rob Marshall's Nine—Defamer videologist Molly McAleer has compiled a countdown of 10 Classic Musical Crossover Performances. We've ordered these from least to most successful; some of these actors-who-sing are arguably better singers than they are actors, and have gone on to cut their own records. Some are clearly better actors than singers. And some should probably just give up both and become something sensible like a dental hygienist or insurance broker. We have no doubt you have your own strong opinions on notable omissions; feel free to post video in the comments.

After surviving months of Dark Knight hype, viral outreach and tastefully overblown praise for late co-star Heath Ledger, Defamer finally got its chance at a screening Tuesday to see what all the Bat-fuss was about. And as editor Seth Abramovitch and senior editor S.T. VanAirsdale discovered in their second installment of Defamer Instant Reviews, not everybody is ready to validate its Second Coming status quite yet. Is it good? Absolutely. Is it the best film of the summer? That's where things get complicated — on AIM, of course, because this watershed cultural moment deserves no less.

Andy Dick wears many hats: substance-friendly pansexualist, loving dad, and infrequent cannibal. We can add to that list chicken-wingery-parking-lot-felon, as the comedian was arrested at 2 a.m., found allegedly fondling a teenager in a van parked outside Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant in Murrieta. From TMZ:

Life is rough these days for Verne Troyer, the diminutive, sex-tape-making, back-tax-owing (allegedly), bomb-starring actor whose bout with the tabloids took an introspective turn Tuesday in an interview with E! Denying he had anything to do with the "unauthorized" release of his videotaped tongue-stabbing of ex-girlfriend Ranae Shrider, a sober Troyer inventoried Shrider's motivations for supposedly dropping the tryst at TMZ's doorstep — and, in the process, both defused and started harrowing rumors we could have gone the rest of our lives without conjuring:

It's arguably the most anticipated movie of the last five summers—the second installment of a rare franchise resuscitation, helmed by a maverick suspense master with nary a misfire to a short but stellar career. Weak links would be replaced. Tragedy would strike. And then a lucky few got to see it, instantly dislodging an avalanche of superlatives. The Dark Knight has, until now, been enjoying the best advance word-of-mouth of any release in a surprisingly bountiful mind-candy season that included Iron Man and Wall-E. In fact, it's until only recently been coasting at an astonishing 100% Rotten Tomatoes score. What changed? Two Daves of note filed their pans: The New Yorker's David Denby (who just lavished his highest praise upon Hancock, so take that for what it's worth), and New York's Dave Edelstein. The cumulative effect of the Dave-naysaying? A sizable dent in the dark armor, with the movie's RT score tumbling to 88% at post time. As for our worst fears—that Ledger isn't posthumously Oscar-worthy, just hammy from the grave—Edelstein confirms every last one of them after the jump. We're seeing it tomorrow, after which we'll try to get our Defamer Instant Review up as quickly as possible, for those who are just dying to know how categorically good this movie is, in easy-to-digest IM format.

Poor little Vivienne Marcheline Jolie-Pitt. Not only does she face a future of scratch marks on her chubby cheeks wielded by notoriously jealous Zahara, but the female half of the Chosen Twins has to compete with older sister Shiloh for a spot on Hollywood’s Best Dressed Little Girls list. OK! has released their juvenile version of Mr. Blackwell’s annual rundown, awarding gold stars to everyone from newborn Harlow Madden, with her “mix between chic and rock,” to 2-year old Shiloh’s ability to “navigate the line between girly glam and tomboy cutting edge.” Yes, well done, Chosen One. What skill and grace it must take to lie back, spit up a few gaga goos, and wait for personal dresser Brad Pitt to equip you with a pricey new cashmere-and-diamond onesie. The rest of the list, including the mag’s pick for #1 most fashionable little doomed diva, after the jump.

So finally the next Batman film, The Dark Knight, lurches into theaters this Friday. Anticipation is intense, as Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan's reboot of the franchise, was such a dark success. Of course, though, the real reason to see the film is Heath Ledger as uber villain The Joker. The buddingly talented actor died all too young in a SoHo apartment this past winter, leaving this as his last complete performance. So yeah, that's all we really care about when surveying the early reviews (we already know that Christian Bale will be gruff and brooding, Morgan Freeman sage and weary, Maggie Gyllenhaal unsurprisingly better than Katie Holmes, the film as a whole loud and jangly). So what do the critics say? Mostly, that he's fantastic. The increasingly-irrelevant Peter Travers, of Rolling Stone, calls the performance "mad-crazy-brilliant." The Davids Edelstein and Denby worry that Ledger stepped perhaps too far into the abyss to access the character. Basically, we're excited. Read a digest of the reviews after the jump.