After discerning that Hathaway's 2009 resolution was to try something new every day, Jimmy Kimmel invited her to do just that by blowing out the candles on a birthday cake with a fire extinguisher. And why not. Hathaway seizes the opportunity to crack a number of double entendres and enough "that's what she said" jokes to make even Michael Scott shoot an anxious glance to the camera. This is going straight in your matchmaking file, Anne—be careful, or Ellen may set you up with James Woods. [Jimmy Kimmel Live!]

WHAT'S NEW: The critical darling Bride Wars — up a stunning 11% from yesterday's Rotten Tomatoes opprobrium — should wrest the top spot from reigning holiday champ Marley & Me, with Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson hugging, mugging and pranking their way to about $18.8 million in the customary early-January junk market. Gary Oldman, so brilliant in his tormented, underrated Dark Knight turn, rejoins TDK co-writer David S. Goyer for The Unborn, which should effectively cash in both men's '08 goodwill in the service of Odette Yustman's tank-topped demonic possession. That might break the top three if Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino slips up en route to 2,800 screens, but we doubt either scenario in the thick of awards season; even at 78, Clint can and will outpace his PG-13 nemesis by low seven figures, about $14.3 million to Unborn's $13.2 million.

Also opening: The Chazz Palminteri goombah-scammerooni boilerplate (complete with autistic son and token Christine Lahti appearance!) Yonkers Joe, and the bittersweet Southwestern indie romance, Tracing Cowboys.

THE BIG LOSER: Not so much a loser as wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time unfortunates, Yes Man and Valkyrie will drop off a little steeper than anyone probably expects — at least 45% each — as their respective constituencies head for Bride Wars and steady-holding awards-bait Benjamin Button and Gran Torino.

THE UNDERDOG: Adapted from a bestseller by T.D. Jakes and mining an underserved, African-American Christian audience that box-office trackers continue to underestimate and/or ignore, the marriage-repair drama Not Easily Broken should manage at least $5.7 million on less than 1,000 screens.

FOR SHUT-INS: New DVD's include the two-disc unrated version of Pineapple Express; the other, lesser pot-culture phenom The Wackness; Vin Diesel's New Year's gift Babylon A.D.; the self-prophesying Disaster Movie; Nicolas Cage's give-the-blind-guy-a-gun masterpiece Bangkok Dangerous; and 2009's first must-have box set, The Waltons: The Complete Eighth Season. Enjoy!

These movies are never about love, or how a man and a woman have decided to spend the rest of their lives together, and long to celebrate this decision with their closest friends and family. These flicks are always about how the female brain goes haywire when she gets a "big day" to be the center of attention. There are scenes involving ridiculous amounts of money spent on disposable things: Dresses worn once, flowers carried for 20 minutes. And does the bride in the films enjoy these lavish luxuries? Of course not! She's too busy fretting and being petty. The brides are always painted as stressed out headcases. Explains Hesse:

"In the movies, planning the wedding becomes the ultimate test in the couple's relationship, and the catalyst that prompts the bride to 'find herself.' She gets plastered (Bride Wars), she spins insane lies (Sweet Home Alabama), she throws punches (My Best Friend's Wedding). If the groom can embrace the bride's edgy behavior (My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Runaway Bride), that means that he can embrace her. But if the groom doesn't embrace her newfound spunk (The Wedding Singer, Wedding Crashers), then she'll end up with a different, more awesome guy who does."

Even though I find the concept condescending, Hollywood keeps making these films, and audiences keep watching them. And this is despite the fact that you know what's going to happen, because the Wedding Movie has a formula. Hesse explains:

"We've been watching it for years. Here Comes the Crazy Bride. Again and again and again… It's puffy, it's poufy, it's crinoline and buttercream. But lick off enough layers of icing, and there lurks the monster. Our heroine must wrestle it to the ground, narrowly escaping disaster, to learn if she's captured the right prince."

The question is, why does this formula have to involve making women look shallow and hare-brained?

Hollywood Wedded To The Formula [Washington Post]

With a small but symbolic cross-section of critics having reported at Rotten Tomatoes, Bride Wars has inspired the first — and what may prove the most vicious, depending on how that Towelhead sequel is coming along — beatdown of 2009. A sampling to date:

· "Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway, who play the would-be brides, are good actors and quick-witted women, here playing characters at a level of intelligence approximating HAL 9000 after he has had his chips pulled." — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

· "Bride Wars pretends to be a satire of wedding mania, but since there's virtually nothing else to the movie, the satire comes depressingly close to endorsement." — Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

· "A crass, despicably sexist piece of Hollywood trash." — Josh Bell, Las Vegas Weekly

· "Will make you hate brides." — Victoria Alexander, FilmsInReview.com

· "The most lamentable thing about the dismal Bride Wars is the total absence of fatalities." — Nick Schager, Slant Magazine

Dammnnnn. The glass-half-full observer in us takes solace from that last, scorching rebuke from one of our '08 Listy winners, but the other half worries that Hathaway's Best Actress Oscar hopes for Rachel Getting Married may find the bad-taste brick wall too tall to climb by late February. We hope we're wrong, but if the wedding dress is the new fatsuit, here's also hoping that lovely new Golden Globe will suffice.

• 'Bride Wars' [Rotten Tomatoes]

Hathaway sat down with Modern Bride to promote the dreaded, nearly-upon-us comedy Bride Wars, and when asked to recall her favorite wedding, she cited her older brother Mike's (that's him with Hathaway on the left). As beautiful as she says the ceremony was, things almost didn't go as planned until Hathaway and company took charge:

"When Mike and Josh booked the place, it was before daylight savings time, and the sun was pretty high up in the sky," she continues. "Now it was at eye level, and it was blinding! Burn-your-retina bright!

"We sent my cousin's boyfriend down to Canal Street [in New York City] with $250 to buy as many sunglasses as he could, and we put them on every other seat. Everybody just put on their sunglasses, and we have some great pictures of that!" she says. "It's all about crisis management, isn't it?"

Sadly, Hathaway's quick thinking doomed a secret scheme set up by her then-boyfriend Raffaello Follieri, who had conferred with the Pope to set the sun just so, all the better to abscond with the blinded crowd's wallets, purses, and carb-free slices of gay wedding cake.

• Anne Hathaway's "Favorite Wedding Moment?" When Gay Brother Got Hitched! [Us]

It's like a perfect storm of Cosmo approved clichés, so it's sort of not surprising that in the past year or so, Kate Hudson has appeared on the cover of pretty much every women's magazine under the sun, including W, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and of course, Cosmo. But it's not like Bride Wars is Hudson's first dip into the tasteless end of the cinematic pool.

On his blog Hollywood Elsewhere, movie critic Jeffery Wells says plainly, Kate Hudson has no taste. Though we all loved her as charming, winsome Penny Lane in Almost Famous, Wells asks, "Is there another actress out there whose name on a movie poster is a more reliable assurance you're going to have a dispiriting or lousy time in a theatre (or in your living room)?" Most recently it's been this terrible looking Bride Wars and the Dane Cook-co-staring fiasco My Best Friend's Girl, but in the years leading up to those dim bulbs, You, Me and Dupree,, The Skeleton Key, and How To Lose a Guy in Ten Days.

And Hathaway, despite a commanding performance in Rachel Getting Married, you're not off the hook either. Wells notes that her three most recent movies have had something to do with weddings: Rachel, Bride Wars, and according to MTV, now she's just signed on to do a film called The Fiance, about "a woman on the verge of walking down the aisle, who decides to cancel her wedding and dump her seemingly perfect fiance. She wants to figure out who she really is, and what she wants out of life. But unfortunately for her inner journey, her meddling parents attempt to patch things up between the couple, and she can’t move on."

Seriously? I know there is a dearth of good scripts out there for young actresses, but come on, Anne. I expected more from you. Kate I'm pretty sure has no talent, but you can actually act. Bride Wars comes out in January of next year, so at least we have a few months respite before the deluge of idiocy.

Saints Protect Us [Hollywood Elsewhere]
The Girl Has No Taste [Hollywood Elsewhere]
Anne Hathaway Has A New ‘Fiance’ [MTV]

According to Fox News, Fox blames her recent dramatic weight loss on a role in Jennifer's Body, a comedic horror film penned by bloggy-inclined Oscar winner Diablo Cody in which Fox plays a "possessed cheerleader." But master fauxter Bay, demanding as ever, has forced Fox to stuff herself silly with late night binges in order to bulk up for Transformers 2: More Shit Blows Up! And as for poor Anne Hathaway? Not only has she allegedly dropped almost 30 pounds in the few weeks since thieving ex-boyfriend Rafaello Follieri finally got nailed, but she's also said to be "throwing herself" into work on Bride Wars, that glee-filled set where disguising her hatred for co-star Kate Hudson has become close to impossible. But hey, at least now Anne can come out the winner in those infamous skirt size comparisons she and Hudson indulge in every time the cameras stop rolling!

[Photo credits: X17, Wireimage, Getty]

• SCARY SKINNY MEGAN FOX STOPPED EATING, FORCED TO GAIN WEIGHT [Fox News]
• HEARTBROKEN ANNE HATHAWAY DROPS 'TWO STONE' AFTER SPLIT FROM JAILED BUSINESSMAN [Daily Mail]

The Fake-Outs: Mid-2007, before Britney was deemed an American Tragedy, she was on her way by tragically dating the poor man's David Blaine, Criss Angel. And photos of her blonde-weaved sunglasses-at-night self wearing a sparkler set the Britney-hungry gossips ablaze, only to disappoint us when no marriage plans surfaced. Another Bimbo Summit alum, Lindsay Lohan, was rumored to be on the soberific path towards married life with then-beau Harry Morton in 2006 after showing up to a premiere purposely placing a ring-adorned hand on her hip. But we all know how that union turned out. And the most recent and admittedly exciting engagement rumors were sparked after photographs of Kate Hudson wearing a real-life wedding band surfaced just as gossip started spreading that she and Owen Wilson were back on. But a major "D'oh!" was heard loud and clear after realizing Kate was filming this flick called Bride Wars and merely in character.

The Real Things: Beyonce Knowles started wearing massive diamonds on all her fingers ever since she could afford them, but the one she wore this January while sitting next to Jay-Z at a concert ended up being the engagement variety after all. And just days after being photographed candidly in her car with a new rock, Jessica Alba confirmed her engagement to the confusing man of mystery that is Cash Warren. As for Mariah Carey, poor girl sparked engagement rumors by publicly showing off her ring from Nick Cannon, only to learn soon after the actual wedding that it was recycled. Oops.

[Photo Credits: Fametastic, Showbiz Spy, Female First, Babble, Stupid Celebrities, Hollyscoop, Daily Mail]

• NOW CAMERON DIAZ FUELS ENGAGEMENT RUMORS AS SHE FLASHES HUGE SPARKLER ON HER WEDDING FINGER [Daily Mail]

Until today we were really pulling for Anne. That skin so porcelain we'd rather eat lunch on it than our own dishes, those big boobs so subtly carried that we barely ever noticed she had big boobs, and her ability to charm any late night host all added up to the exact type of Hollywood starlet we can get on board with. And today's news that she'd finally washed that eurotrash outta her hair added a cherry to an already delicious sundae of a chick. But watching her awkwardly struggle to pick a sentence and go with it after over-enthusiastically waxing perfection on "the divine Miss Kate Hudson!", those normally relaxed shoulders stiffen, those big bewitching eyes rolled ever so slightly, and Hathaway's stripes were shown for the first time.

After attempting to end her rambling by quietly mentioning how much weight she lost for the role and how much skinnier and hotter she was than Kate Hudson based on frequent skirt size comparisons, Hathaway's brain returned from their short-lived vacation, as she churned out a few jokes about straight guys liking big butts. The momentarily shocked View audience resumed their giggling, Whoopi stifled a preachy speech, and chatter as light as air fluttered back through the building. We can almost hear the entire ABC building let loose a collective "Phew!" as the old Anne returned. It's moments like these when we say a little prayer for the ongoing existence of live television and all the unpredictable lapses in good manners that make life worth living.

• THE VIEW [ABC]

Hudson’s recent Fool’s Gold flop hasn’t stopped her from signing up for yet more rom-coms revolving around silly girls and the silly boys they fall for. This September, we’ll see her in what sounds like You, Me And Dupree 2: This Time We’ve Got Dane Cook!, the “meet cute” vehicle My Best Friend’s Girl. And we’ve already seen shots of Kate filming what sounds like The Devil Wears Prada 2: Catfights Leap From The Office To The Altar!, the sure to be laugh-filled Bride Wars with Anne Hathaway and Candy Bergen. Though she has signed on for two dramas — Big Eyes, in which she’ll star as sad painter Margaret Keane, and A Dream Of Red Mansions — we just can’t get excited about “epic tales” set in mid-century China or Gwyneth-inspired attempts at Oscar fever playing a doomed artist.

As for Owen? No Oscars lie ahead, but cash definitely does. Marley & Me is based on the book with millions of fans, meaning a built-in audience awaits. And next year, the maligned money train that was Nightmare At The Museum will deliver its green-eyed sequel. Kate yearning for bucks and credibility, while Owen rolls in the dough with plenty of time to threesome-hop? Where is Dax Shephard when you really need him?

• KATE HUDSON & OWEN WILSON CALL IT QUITS [People]