Because we're in the business of breathlessly passing along all Katie Holmes-related news, especially items pertaining to the career-strangling Miracle Baby now growing in her womb, we present this tidbit from the always-reliable British tabloid press:

No matter how many movies Zathura producer Peter Billingsley sets up, he'll never be able to escape that bar of Lifebuoy Soap, the hilarious colleagues at premieres pointing their finger guns and saying, "You'll shoot your eye out, kid," or pitch meetings starting with, "You know, I only really took this 'cause I'm such a fan of A Christmas Story, Ralphie, uh, I mean Peter."

A shooting in a Pittsburgh multiplex Wednesday night has resulted in a death, and the removal of the 50 Cent film thought to have incited it:

Ben Stiller is not the only one who has an issue with making movies in a Canadian city. In today's LAT, Jon Favreau relates the hellish, family-scattering experience of being forced to shoot Elf in Vancouver:

Yeah, yeah, yeah; this has nothing to do with New York. But, still, we've got to point out the Deadline Hollywood column in the new L.A. Weekly, because it so perfectly demonstrates why we adore the left coast's Miss Run Amok, crusading nutcase Nikki Finke. This week she's writing on Warren Beatty and his role in the embarrassing failure of Schwarzenegger's propositions in Tuesday's election:

You can hear the whispers and read the stories all you like, but the horror never truly feels real until you start seeing the pathetic ads in the trades.

The Sunday NY Times chronicled Memoirs of the Geisha's noble march through the development process, in which Sony bravely ignored the project's poor prospects for Happy Meal tie-ins, its lack of malicious, sentient stealth bombers threatening the world with nuclear annihilation, and its tragic dearth of Caucasian-friendly roles to finally deliver an Oscar-baiting holiday moviegoing experience:

While we've recently dabbled in more ancient methods of divination to assist with the box office projections, this week we're going back to the tried-and-true method of blind-drunk guesstimating. Crack open that bottle of cheap whiskey and play along at home!

Variety reports that Topher Grace and Seann William Scott will co-star in Paramount's Cockblockers; no need to explain the concept, it's about pretty much exactly what you fear it might be. But what could we possibly love more than reading the word "cockblockers" in the pages of Variety? (Lesser publications were a little more coy about the title.) That there were originally two competing Cockblockers projects in the Hollywood ether, and that the one picked up by Paramount is a sort of Super Cockblockers:

Confident that she's honed her acting chops sharper than a coke-flecked razor blade on the whetstone of Herbie: Fully Loaded and fifteen minutes on the set of Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion, Lindsay Lohan accepts her greatest challenge yet: trying to remember her lines while staring into Jared Leto's pretty, vacant eyes. According to today's Variety, Lohan has signed on to star opposite rumored real-life hump-buddy Leto in Chapter 27, a film about the murder of John Lennon. Leto will channel Lennon assassin Mark David Chapman, while Lohan plays a Lennon fan who gets friendly with Chapman right before he kills the pop icon. The pairing should make for some fascinating conversation on the shoot, with Leto reclining in his trailer, idly strumming a guitar, and musing, "Like, I'm a musician? So I totally understand what it's like to have all these people love you, and, like, have one jealous dude who wants to kill you? I can connect with that. So, like, I'm coming at this from both sides. It's a total mindfuck." To which Lohan will coo, "Totally, baby. Um, also, you're laying on my hair?"

Roughly every five years since primitive man first scrawled a scene on his cave wall depicting his pets brutalizing each other with household items, a "new" study arrives at the same, inevitable, ACME-explosive conclusion: Cartoons are too violent and/or too dirty. But don't blame the MPAA, says president Dan Glickman. Blame yourselves! Blame society!

• Christian Slater, forced to give up his New York hobby of ass-groping, heads to West Hollywood, where he supplements his diet of misbehavior by falling off of Paris Hilton's roof. [People]
• Can we not take a tip from our friends across the pond and offer amnesty for those commuters caught reading embarrassing books? [Friday Project]
• Kate Moss grabs the December cover of Vanity Fair, making it all the more meta when you inevitably use your copy for cutting lines. [Jossip]
• Sex and the City's advertising campaign continues to skank all over Manhattan. [Gothamist]
• Justin Timberlake is being blamed for ruining Shrek 3. Funny: We thought Shrek 2 ruined the franchise. Aw, were we mean to the cute wittle cartoons? [Radar]
• Jesse Sheidlower literally cannot stand your incorrect usage of the word "literally." [Slate]
• For those of you poor spinsters so pathetic as to not land real engagement rings, Daily Candy suggests wearing a fake. [DailyCandy]

Because it's much cheaper to fill a Las Vegas arena with bored, unpaid extras than to shell out for budget-busting CGI fans, BeInAMovie.com offers you the chance to participate in the most desperate movie comeback of our time:

Juggsy TV ghost-whisperer Jennifer Love Hewitt doesn't just sit around on her hands and wait for studios to offer her hooker housewife roles. She goes out and finds hooker housewife roles:

So you're a Woody Allen fan. A big Woody Allen fan, even. And though his last handful of movies have sucked so much you still haven't been able to bring yourself too see Melinda & Melinda, and you've blocked nearly all memory of Anything Else, you still love the early, deep comedies, and the '80s dramas, and the late-'90s light comedies. And he was so, so good on the Oscars — his first one ever! — after September 11. And, because of all that genius, you're willing to look past a lot of his mishegas.

First ballot Hall of Defamer crackpot and former MPAA head Jack Valenti defends the movie ratings system in the opinion pages of today's LAT, arguing that the current G-through-NC-17 guidelines are far superior to the clenched-sphincter, Puritan absurdities of the infamous Hays Code:

Radar Online reports on unbearable tensions in the production of Shrek 3, where Cameron Diaz helpfully "suggested" casting songbird boyfriend (and aspiring horrible actor) Justin Timberlake in a major, tricky role. Timberlake promptly repaid his lady's kindness by "ruining the movie," leaving screwed DreamWorks Animation chief pompom tipJeffrey Katzenberg to muse about ways to rectify the situation and save his money-printing franchise:

Hollywood would be foolish to bet against Harvey Weinstein, even if his just-birthed Weinstein Co. pledges to operate under a policy of fiscal sanity and restraint. The NY Times reports that the New Harvey is willing to yank his belt tight (admittedly, a much easier proposition now that he's dropped much of the weight that could've resulted in a heart attack each time he choked the life from an underachieving employee ) to prove that he can make movies without Disney's open checkbook:

Perhaps it's time to consider soberly the possibility that Mel Gibson's been driven insane by the astounding financial rewards derived from pouring his heart into a snuff film about his savior, The Passion of the Christ. The now dramatically bearded Gibson (think Saddam Hussein with a better stylist) is not only directing in tongues on a full-time basis, but holds press conferences in which he suspiciously withholds details about his newest movie, but generously touches on his heroic battles with diarrhea. The LAT passes along this nugget about Gibson's gastrointestinal distress on the set of Apocalypto:

Early this morning, Universal Pictures issued this press release involving an incident near the Miami Vice location shoot in the Dominican Republic: