[Lil' Dakota Fanning going to a rehearsal for her Joan Jett movie; image via Bauer-Griffin]

Click to viewBoomp3.com At the Washington DC premiere of The Secret Life Of Bees, a young male fan took a major step forward in his relationship with actress Dakota Fanning. After taking the photo, Billy Walsh asked Fanning if she would be okay with him changing his relationship status on his Facebook profile. Fanning said she wouldn’t mind, but didn’t understand why Walsh would seek her approval. Walsh took a deep breath and explained that Fanning and him have been internet dating for quite some time now and would like to their relationship to the next level. Walsh said, “I’m just started the seventh grade. It’s high time that I settle down with a good girl. A girl like you, Dakota. I can’t be spend all of my junior high years running wild with my bro dawgs looking for a cheap thrills at Stevie Gordon’s pool party. I need to settle down with somebody like you. So, would you mind if it says on Facebook, that ... we’re ... you know ... together?” Fanning was unsure of how to answer Walsh’s question and wanted to think about it overnight. A feeling of dejection swept over Walsh’s young face. He was about to say something when Fanning interrupted him and said, “It’s not a no, but why ruin a good thing by putting a label on it?” [Photo Credit: Splash Pics] *A Call To The Bullpen is a work of fiction. Although the pictures we use are most certainly real, Defamer does not purport that any of the incidents or quotations you see in this piece actually happened. Lighten up, people ... it's a joke.

Welcome back to Defamer Attractions, your official tastemaking Bible for everything new and noteworthy at the movies. The second week of the fall season offers another mixed harvest of Oscar bait, multiplex placeholders and indie hopefuls, none more eagerly anticipated than the historically skeevy Dakota Fanning 2.0 drama Hounddog. But we'll get to that momentarily, along with this week's worthwhile DVD releases and an all-call for your own recommendations. As always, our opinions are our own — in times like these, who really wants to share? WHAT'S NEW: The first genuine Oscar-chasing release of the fall, The Duchess will likely split its viewership between pro- and anti-Keira Knightley factions before anyone bothers to acknowledge its broader, bodice-ripping appeal. So yes, Team Knightley: She deftly portrays Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, the late-18th-century heroine with the bitterly controlling husband (Ralph Fiennes), the rabble-rousing side dish (Dominic Cooper) and a surfeit of corsted, pre-feminist longing. The star and the film are beautiful, the direction assured and the awards-season creds affirmed — particularly Fiennes', whose customary wretchedness as the Duke acquires a kind of fascinating tenderness with age. If anyone should be on the Oscar bubble (besides the art and costume crew, which are locks), it's him.Still, in limited release, Duchess isn't competing for any box-office glory; that distinction belongs to Lakeview Terrace, the not-entirely-miserable Neil LaBute thriller featuring Samuel L. Jackson as a sociopathic cop out to get the hot interracial couple next door (Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington). Against sturdy holdovers (Burn After Reading, The Family That Preys) and middling newbies (the Dane Cook slog My Best Friend's Girl, Ricky Gervais's leading-man debut Ghost Town), Lakeview will top out at $15.6 million. Cook will follow with $13.2 million; with half the screens and even less promotion, Ghost Town should still manage an even $6 million. Also opening: Ed Harris's old-old-school Western Appaloosa; Chris Smith's tiny, acclaimed Indian excursion The Pool; the gay-conversion melodrama Save Me; the wrenching immigrant day-in-the-life tale Take Out; and the Duchess-correcting, misogynist fantasia The Pink Conspiracy. THE BIG LOSER: You know, after we just predicted the Weinsteins would once again find their step in the multiplex, trust in Harvey to not only dump another subpar animated fairy tale on an unsuspecting public, but to essentially disown it. Such is Igor's lot, with its backers AWOL, its reviews tepid, and its voice talent (John Cusack, Molly Shannon, Steve Buscemi) trapped in a Straight-to-Flopz™ patchwork about a hunchback pursuing his dream of becoming a mad scientist. MGM is left to collect the grosses for this one, which won't break $5 million on 2,300 screens. Or, as they call it at Weinstein HQ, business as usual.

The quarterly news cycle addressing Hounddog — a/k/a Untitled Dakota Fanning Rape Project — appears to have fired back up again today, when we read that the Southern-Fried Scourge of Sundance '07 will not receive its planned July 15 release after all. Instead, distributor Empire Film Group will unleash the film on Sept. 5 — the dumping ground better known as Labor Day weekend. While we can't wait for Empire's "early-Oscar-season" spin, we're actually far more intrigued by the pledge for Hounddog's eventual home-video eternity:

Having done our homework about dedicated Hollywood recluses over the last few days, we can assert with 100 percent certainty that despite her disappearance after the Park City clusterfuck that was Hounddog, Dakota Fanning is no John Hughes or Terrence Malick. Nevertheless, while this somewhat frightening video passed along by MTV (with its insistent English narrator positing: "Was she scared off by the negative press for Hounddog, or did she simply run and hide because she hit that awkward pubescent stage? Because it seems like all the little girl roles lately have been filled by others!") helps allay our worst DakotAWOL fears, what replaces them is perhaps eerier than any exile we could have imagined.

Perhaps only proving the adage that the harder you try, the dumber you look, the recently released trailer to rape-prevention spokesteen Dakota Fanning's soon-to-be-released Hounddog gathers three minutes of short-eyed, Southern-fried auteurist poetry in one skeevy bundle for your viewing pleasure.

Perhaps prompted to comment after being more psychologically scarred by Catholic League Righteous Outrage Coordinator William Donahue's conjuring of the image of the oral servicing of a statue of a tumescent Martin Luther King than by anything in the Sundance movie in which her character is controversially raped, 12-year-old thespian Dakota Fanning finally spoke out on the fading uproar over Hounddog:

Regular Defamer readers are by now familiar with a certain indie drama whose progress we have been closely following, set to make its debut at the 2007 Sundance festival. What we've been referring to as the Untitled Dakota Fanning Rape Project—both for its preternaturally gifted and precocious star (Dakota Fanning), and the shocking yet Oscar-worthy act of violence at its center (her rape)—finally appears to have settled on a title: Hounddog. In an exclusive interview with Premiere magazine (it doesn't appear to be online yet, but an OhNoTheyDidn't reader was good enough to scan it in), director Deborah Kampmeier talks about her struggles since the details about her script were released to the press: Among other adjustments, she's had to hire someone just to "screen her hate mail"—a job most Hollywood agents traditionally refer to as "an assistant." She also opens up about the shooting of the actual rape: