A LAFF Riot: We had just recovered from wiping up our salsa wounds after the tortilla chip Yes on 8 massacre at El Coyote when news broke of a brand new front in the Proposition 8 culture war. According to reports, LA Film Festival director Richard Raddon gave $1500 to the "Yes on 8" cause, a revelation that will surely give pause to the Hollywood demographic David Poland is most worried about: "indie publicists, most of the male species of which are gay." Meanwhile, reps for the Palm Springs Film Festival issued a statement reassuring Hollywood that they're as queer and movie star-ass-kissing friendly as ever. Free appletinis at check-in! [The Advocate]

· Things we learned at the Los Angeles Film Festival this week. School Of Rock 2 isn't a pipe dream. Guillermo del Toro isn't going to milk The Hobbit. Women deserve equal talk show hosting rights, too. Nobody wanted to make Animal House. Chris Carter is as secretive as ever. Did somebody order stake?
· The battle between the Paps and the Surfs was kinda like the Greasers versus the Socs, only with the newly blackberry-less Matthew McConaughey playing the role of Dally. But what of the rematch?
· Mini-Me showed the world his mini-me, which should help him knock down that large tax debt.
· Raffaello Follieri, Anne Hathaway's sketchball ex, got pinched for attempting to defraud God. A judge set bail at $21 million, but who's gonna take care of the dog?
· Mary Kate Olsen de-pruned herself long enough to convince Dave Letterman that her old arch enemy Spencer Pratt is, indeed, a prat.
· No one was safe as we counted down the Hollywood's Top Ten Worst Kissers.
· Wall-E manged to get fatties and Republicans up in arms without saying a word.
· Whoa, who raped the Coreys? One mystery solved, one to go.
· AC Slater found himself embroiled in Chesthairgate.
· The Emasculation of Joshua continued, as Katherine Heigl used her whipped husband as an ashtray and made him curl her hair. Joshua did not escape unscathed.
· You can ongratulate Jason Bateman on the impending Arrested Development movie, but be sure you don't bring up pregnant teens.
· We had a dream. We had an awesome dream. Mainly b/c it was filled with lesbian werewolves.
·: Noted blog-hater Patrick Goldstein entered the blogosphere. We can only guess how many of his 1,100 pageviews came from his IP address.
· Which groovy comedy superstar is openly courting other men to touch his monkey? Perhaps they should frequent the Fox and Sony lots?
· Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits. We'll miss you, George.

In what sadly may become a regular feature of our industry coverage here at Defamer, we feel compelled today to recap one of the ugliest weeks in recent memory among those toiling in the independent-film trenches. if you haven't been able to keep it all straight before now, please read on (and keep the liquor handy):

We know pretty much everyone in the world except a few drones at Defamer HQ can't seem to wait for noted genre waffler Guillermo del Toro's take on The Hobbit, previously reported as a pair of films he'd make over several years in New Zealand with producer Peter Jackson at his side. But last night at the LA Film Festival, where his Hellboy II will premiere Saturday night, del Toro kicked Middle-Earth off its axis by hinting that he wasn't beholden to a second film at all. Not only that, but he confessed an antisocial streak suggesting he might kill the project just to watch it bleed.

With festival fatigue closing in on all sides and the Verne Troyer sex tape still searing our minds one pixel at a time, we really needed a laugh Wednesday night. A panel discussion seemed like it might do the trick: "Funny Women," gathering Jennifer Tilly, Janeane Garofalo, Alyson Hannigan and Illeana Douglas poolside at the W, where comedian/director David Steinberg peppered them with questions when not contributing random career asides of his own.

Corey Feldman's brave hike back from the post-confessional, gofer-sex-abuse wilderness began Tuesday night in Westwood, where he dropped by the LA Film Festival to introduce a screening of The Lost Boys and suffer a clip from the vampire classic's forthcoming straight-to-DVD sequel, Lost Boys: The Tribe. We use the term "classic" loosely; the 1987 original doesn't age that well, but for its cast alone remains one of its era's more interesting (and better-looking) time capsules. And in relation to what we saw of its follow-up's kind of embarrassing exploitation effort, it's just about perfect.

It was relatively slim pickings at the festival Monday, especially after Guillermo del Toro's live-in-person monster-rhapsodizing was pushed to Thursday and alas, we missed our 4:30 screening about transsexuals in Colorado. Plan C seemed reasonable enough: Drop by the Geffen Playhouse to see a father-son chat between Ivan and Jason Reitman, in which we figured we might catch Dad's jealous flare-up over Juno's success or Son's symbolic shove of his old man into the shadows at stage right. We got neither, though Jason did come clean about that whole nepotism thing.

At a LAFF panel on Sunday, filmmaker Mike White was discussing the vagaries of screenwriting with fellow directors Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen, Twilight) and Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl), trying to narrow the enduring creative gap between an indie like The Good Girl and a studio picture like the 2003 Jack Black vehicle School of Rock. "I actually just completed a draft of what's potentially the sequel, and I'm still, like, crying as I'm writing the script," he said. "I try to come at it from a personal place—"

Keeping in mind all the optimistic overdrive before and after Sex and the City's $57 million opening weekend, the putative Chick-Flick Revolution should probably feel a little more dug in right now than it actually is. But such is life for the accidental genre, which received another once-over on Sunday at the LAFF when writer-director Diane English discussed (and briefly previewed) her troubled updating of the 1939 all-female ensemble dramedy The Women — a/k/a "Unreleaseable Meg Ryan Project," the subject of its own endless drama and speculation as Warner Bros. determines how it plans to bury it.

All roads led to rapture for fanboys (and girls, we suppose) over the weekend at the LA Film Festival, where Sunday closed with a glimpse at scenes from the forthcoming X-Files: I Want to Believe. It seemed a busy enough couple of days elsewhere in Westwood, but it wasn't like there were shrieking throngs delivering signed thank-you cards to Diane English after a preview/discussion of her troubled updating of The Women, or a geek-to-seat ratio of 1:1 at the Melvin Van Peebles event on Saturday. This was the sort of a climactic bedlam most fests save for their closing nights, not the last screening on a sleepy Sunday.

Defamer crashed Westwood on Thursday for the opening night of the Los Angeles Film Festival, which hosted the world premiere of Wanted and a whiskey-fueled Broxton Ave. block party to wash the whole thing down. Not that there was so much to digest (cubicle slave James McAvoy meets assassin trainer Angelina Jolie; bullet hails ensue) but we can't deny Wanted is as exhausting as it is kind of dumbly enthralling; for every exquisite gunfight there's at least one baffling plot inversion, and for every potent Jolie scowl there's a grating McAvoy whimper.

Welcome to another edition of Defamer Attractions, your regular guide to what's new, noteworthy and/or nightmarish this week at the movies. Today we hold our noses for the aromatic opening-weekend duel of Get Smart and The Love Guru, crack open the L.A. Film Festival catalog for a bit of a desperately needed counterprogramming, and handpick a few fine new DVD's for the agoraphobes among us. As always, our opinions are our own, but as long as they don't involve Manoj Night Shyamalan's box-office viability, they're also without peer.

We'll take any opportunity we can get for a furlough from our shackles at Defamer HQ, so off we go to the Los Angeles Film Festival, which opens tonight with the world premiere of Angelina Jolie's emaciated-assassin actioner Wanted. Maybe not the gritty, funded-by-credit-cards entry you'd expect from fest organizers Film Independent, but that's what the rest of the event is for; running until June 29, this year's LAFF is enticing enough for us to call in sick at least a few days, maybe even all of next week.

We're not sure if Variety editor Peter Bart has simply found his stride as a blogger after years of loathing the medium or if his recent dispatch about the new HBO documentary Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal simply shilled a little too hard to make it as a print story. BUT! Either way, we are more than a little intrigued by Fleiss's latest predicament, the latest in what HBO Docs boss Sheila Nevins calls the "opera" that is the former madam's life:

We long ago gave up our illusions about Film Independent's annual Los Angeles Film Festival being any kind of authentic showcase for, well, independent film. Like when Transformers launched the fest last year? Right. But that's the biz, and if it takes Universal to step in on opening night June 19 with its Angelina Jolie action thriller Wanted just so we can see the revelatory Russian entry Cargo 200 on the West Coast, then that's a price we're willing to pay. (And hell, we'll probably even check out Wanted while we're at it.) Follow the jump for a few more highlights, including Universal's other graphic novel adaptation closing the fest.