Justin Timberlake's stalker—surprisingly, not Brittney Spears—one Ms. Karen McNeil, was busted on Timberlake's property last week. When asked to leave, she wouldn't. So Timberlake danced out a restraining order on this psycho, who'd also tried to follow Axl Rose. Which is sad for Justin Timberlake's publicist. So is the fact that, instead of just loving Justin, she's apparently being possessed by witches. Witches? Witches!

In the nonsensical ramblings, Karen states that she has been targeted by "Babylon witches" who seek to cast their "evil" on her.

Babylon witches? WTF? Has Robert Moses State Park really gotten that bad?

But Timberlake isn't the only one. Ryan Seacrest has a creepy leprechaun who thinks he's been made in Seacrest's image, or something. No, but seriously, this guy's scary, and he has a knife, and now Seacrest has a restraining order against him:

Lawyers for Seacrest got the order from a Los Angeles judge on Friday after Chidi Benjamin Uzomah Jr. was detained at the E! Entertainment Television headquarters the same day. Records show the 25-year-old man is already on probation for a previous incident involving Seacrest. Last month, Uzomah pleaded guilty to three misdemeanours, including carrying a switchblade knife as well as assault and battery. That was after he attacked one of Seacrest's bodyguards outside an event.

Who else? Miley Cyrus has had a ghoulish, pervy, 53 year-old stalker. Who just went free today. This was the guy who thought he was getting secret messages from Miley through the television a la Videodrome. Whereas we all hear "this music sucks, listen to something else," this creep hears, well, someone telling him to do creepy things. Which makes him crazy.

So what's there to understand about these people? Why do they think famous people give a shit about them, you know, besides the fact that they're mentally ill? What causes it? If the Stalker button on the top of this page is blatantly evident voyeurism, among other things, what goes beyond it? I'm sure it's still being studied, somewhere. In the mean time, Bret Easton Ellis plans on showing us the answer. Who else? Ellis is adapting a book for TV about Young Hollywood as seen through the eyes of a stalker. Wonder if he did his research on subjects close to him. Then again, considering his definition of "scary," he might be trying to teach us something. The stalked are scarier than the stalker, maybe?

Nah. Despite the fact that Hollywood's full of scary people, the people they spawn and inspire are even scarier.

Celebrities: they're nothing like us.

[Photo via Bauer-Griffin]

• Meet your new action hero overlord: Chris Pine. Already fronting the rebooted Star Trek franchise, Pine has signed on to play the Jack Ryan role previously portrayed by Harrison Ford and Alec Baldwin in a new go-around adapting Tom Clancy's series of espionage novels. [Variety]

• For those CBS and Viacom employees who feel each day the burden of the Redstone yoke, you can take heart today; Sumner is now less your owner than he was last week. The octillionaire mogul has been selling off the debt of his holding company, National Amusements. For now, however, NA still retains the controlling interest. [Variety]

• As the world waits for the final outcome of Vivendi/GE/Comcast talks over the fate of NBC Universal, Nikki Finke reports that Comcast wants the deal "done and announced in November." So there. [DHD]

• Curse be damned! ABC has won the competition to be the next network to fail with a sitcom by a former Friends star, locking up rights to the Matthew Perry project. [THR]

• The Wrap reports that Alex Young, Co-President of Production at 20th Century Fox is being moved out of the job and into a producing deal. Young was a Tom Rothman protege who has been in the job since 2007. [The Wrap]

• Always on the lookout for a feel good project, director Gus Van Sant and novelist Bret Easton Ellis have picked up the rights to "The Golden Suicides," Nancy Jo Sales' Vanity Fair article about the deaths of downtown artists Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake. [Variety]

• The creator of the Gilmore Girls is coming to HBO. Exec-Producer Amy Sherman-Palladino has signed a deal to develop a dramedy for the cable network. She described the project as the "story of love, hate, family — and finding the perfect opening line," [THR]

• This is what it's come to in the strange, contorted career of Bill Murray; taking Joe Pesci's leftovers. For those who thought Murray's Zombieland cameo was just a little strange— that he was too big, or had been too big a star for the joke about Woody Harrelson being obsessed with him to completely click — you are right. In an interview with Hitfix, Murray revealed the walk on had been intended for Joe Pesci — with whom the joke would have made a lot more sense — but that Murray took the part after Pesci passed. [Hitfix]

The profile details Ellis' move to L.A. and comes in the middle of his writing the "sequel" to his first book, Less Than Zero (which made him a literary superstar at the age of 20), which is tentatively titled Imperial Bedrooms. The article - which isn't avalible online - paints Ellis as kind of sad and living a very existential, somewhat disconnected life. Also, he thinks The Hills is genius. The full quote, transcribed from print:

He is, however-and on this subject, he is highly animated-a huge fan of MTV's scripted reality series of the young and the monied in L.A., THE HILLS. "I think THE HILLS is the greatest show I have ever seen in my life," he says, sincerely. "It is a modern masterpiece. I think that ADAM DeVILLO is a mad genius. He creates it and controls it perfectly." Mr. ELLIS is very specific about the way he watches THE HILLS. "I'm holding off on Season 4 right now. I started watching a bit of it, but I'm waiting until the DVD comes out because I want to see it all so beautifully mastered. Even if you download the show there is that irritating MTV logo in the corner. It doesn't work for me that way. It has to be on a big screen with the sound right up. It blows me away...I'm sorry, but whoever invented HEIDI MONTAG and SPENCER PRATT are just...nothing matches it. I've never see L.A. look more beautiful in a work of art. There are no movies that are as beautiful as that."

This is why I'm never moving to L.A. Just like The City is why you should never move to New York.

He was also, interestingly enough, called out on a social networking site on a date going out ("BRET ELLIS is not a fan of social-networking sites. He has been "caught out" by someone on a dating site, though understandable doesn't care to flesh out that story. He won't try it again.").

Thing is, this makes an interesting point that I've never really considered before. The Hills is the tame, boring drug-less version of Less Than Zero (note to Hills producers: show them doing blow, and I'll watch). A bunch of severely disaffected brats, fucking around with their parents' money, creating an awe-inspiring charade of lives inextricably tied to the celebrity culture of Hollywood. This raises the question: was Less Than Zero the predecessor to The Hills? Do we blame Ellis for Speidi? Is Paul Telegdy off the hook today?

Meanwhile, Fantastic Man, which could be a test-tube baby between Esquire and McSweeny's, is kind of a fascinating product. It's a giant, pretty magazine with nice pages and a strange sense of humor. It costs $11. And it has Bret Easton Ellis on the cover, drinking a Diet Coke. This should tell you what kind of magazine it is: at once both kind of genius and a complete waste of one's time. I love it.

For example, in one issue, there is:

- A 1,000 word essay from the Editor-In-Chief of Interview on waking up with a hangover in Paris.

- A 1,000 word treatise on the greatness that is toast.

- A designation of the word "Super" as their word of the season. This is written on their masthead.

- A selection of single meals art-world people have had recently (one of them: pervy photog Terry Richardson's meal of a vegetarian burrito from Pinche Taqueria in New York. "For dessert, he had a pack of sour Skittles, also very 'yum yum.'").

- And a cover story featuring Bret Easton Ellis with nothing to promote. Did we mention he was drinking a Diet Coke?

You see, we've picked up on a trend amongst "the intelligentsia" of an almost kid-on-Christmas-morning eagerness to run to the theater to see this film just so they can trash it on their blogs and Twitter accounts and in doing so feel superior to the doltish masses who actually derived some sense of pleasure from it. Of course, we have no actual data to back this up, there's just a palpable snobbishness wafting through the air right now that our finely-tuned cultural antennae has picked up on.

Some members of the aforementioned "intelligentsia" who we actually like and hold in high regard have written about the film without really making much mention of the film itself, choosing to focus instead on the "ugly and thoughtless" clothes worn by the other moviegoers at a screening in a notably unhip Manhattan neighborhood instead.

What's perhaps most perplexing about the gripes we've read and heard about The Hangover coming from members of "the intelligentsia" are their genuine professions of profound shock over how "fratty" and "juvenile" the film struck them. It's almost as if they truly expected that a film titled "The Hangover" might actually be some sort of Fellini-esque neorealist high art film.

Another common trait shared by members of "the intelligentsia" who hated The Hangover is that they invariably loved Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience, a film we desperately wanted to like but truly thought was one of the biggest steaming piles of cinematic dung to emerge out of the 21st century.





One last thought about The Hangover—Yes, it's a silly movie, but it's not completely devoid of intelligence, and silly movies seasoned with just a sprinkle of intelligence can often do wonders for the soul. If, that is, you're willing to unclench your anus just over the course of the couple of hours it takes to watch them.

With that said, go see The Hangover and judge for yourself.

Bret Easton Ellis' Tweets via Bret Easton Ellis' Twitter

On the surface, it looked as though the right decisions had been made: get Bret Easton Ellis to adapt his own novel (with co-writer Nicholas Jarecki), cast insanely, and have the youngest and most attractive actors (Heard, Jon Foster, and Austin Nichols) take off their clothes whenever possible. Still, the result is an enervating slog through an overly familiar setting: rich, debauched Los Angeles in the 1980s. Did you know they did coke then? It's true!

Intermittently, director Gregor Jordan captures that trademark Ellis vibe: dreamy surreality punctuated by bursts of tragedy that the numbed, drugged-out characters hardly know how to process. After a startling early car accident, though, the film shifts into low gear—and the removal of the book's vampire storyline means it has even less bite. "What was the point?" everyone asked in the lobby afterwards. Ellis's short stories coalesced into a meditation on mortality and meaning, but there's no theme or drive in the adaptation.

Still, good news for the Mr. Skin fans out there: Senator is releasing the film in April and was merely premiering it at the festival, meaning that screencaps of Amber Heard's performance as The Girl Who Never Puts a Shirt On will live forever, even after this film is long forgotten. Hey, will you look at that? Guess it managed to be a statement on mortality after all!

(Also, film critics: we are totally calling dibs on the headline "Regret to Inform." There, you cannot use it anymore. Thanks!)

Well, even without Robert Downey Jr., we still have a feeling this Ellis flick has a major shot at success, mainly due to the fact that The Informers has one of the most stellar and talented casts we've heard about in some time. The film stars Winona Ryder, Billy Bob Thornton, Kim Basinger, Mickey Rourke, Rhys Ifans, and bittersweetly, Brad Renfro in his final role. Somehow this mesh of fucked up, problem-ridden stars seems like the ideal group to depict Ellis' vision of a bleak and vapid Los Angeles. The more and more we think about it, the inclusion of the clean-cut and chiseled Routh probably would have just messed up this merry little circle of misery anyway.

• BRET EAST ELLIS ADAPTATION 'THE INFORMERS' LOSES ENTIRE VAMPIRE SUB-PLOT AND BRANDON ROUTH TOO? [SlashFilm]
• EXCLUSIVE: UNDEAD REMOVED FROM 'INFORMERS' [IGN]