We are some fucked up people, yo.

I mean, believe me, I totally see the appeal in the universe breaking LA off the coast and hiding it 4,000 feet under the sea, like the afikomen of God that will never be cashed in and found, because—sorry, LA—it's LA. Though apparently some people got teary during the part when the Kogi Truck gets swallowed up by an acid-spewing mutant volcano, so I guess it's a complicated emotion. But why are we so desperate to see what the end looks like? Because we're sadists? Masochists? Because we'd like to imagine a world in which only we exist and everything else just doesn't? [Related: Welcome to Lower Manhattan.] Because we want it all to just be totally fucked and end, and we want a hand in it, like that kid who spends five hours building a beautiful sand castle only to "Godzilla" it out of existence for six seconds?

Or because it looks sick? Which apparently, it did. To the tune of $225M.

The 162-minute disaster epic...blew away the competition and took in $65 million in North America in its opening weekend and $160 million worldwide. All totaled, the Roland Emmerich movie, which cost $200 million to make (and tens of millions more to market) grossed $225 million.

That's gotta be it. When the world ends, it's not like we're going to be able to watch it being so awesome. Also, we're all gonna die and it's gonna be crazy but, like, will it really look that cool? Hell to the no, BobbyBrown! It'll probably look like The Road or something. Gray and stupid and dusty and boring. But that's life, you know? Less Roland Emmerich, more Cormac McCarthy. Besides, only in Fakeland can anybody give a shit about Amanda Peet living through the end of the world. OH COME ON.

And then there's this Precious movie. The critics HATED it. Like this one:

Not since The Birth of a Nation has a mainstream movie demeaned the idea of black American life as much as Precious. Full of brazenly racist clichés (Precious steals and eats an entire bucket of fried chicken), it is a sociological horror show.

Ha, oh, just joking, that's batshit Armond White from the New York Press. This guy eats the innocence of children for breakfast and snacks on Labrador puppies for lunch. Also, he hated Up. But! Precious, which is a "the world sucks" movie of a different stripe, did well, too. Look:

The indie movie "Precious," which Lionsgate bought at Sundance, took in about $6.1 million in just 174 theaters in nine cities. That's an impressive $35,000 per-screen average.

Now, granted: 2012 was on about 40 bazillion more screens, but seriously, compared to the other top per-theater take ($19,095 for 2012), it's a pretty incredible number, and a 200% increase from last week's Precious take. That 200% number is not a joke.

Lesson, learned. It goes something like this: when I make my autobiographical epic, I Hope They Smoke Adderall In Hogwarts, I'm going to make sure to append the words "Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey Present." If only real-Hollywood were so smart. Dumbasses. Imagine if they did that to 2012. They would've made enough money to destroy the world for reals. Until then, we have LA's fake-comeuppance to go see again and again and again. Basically, yes:

[Photo of The Great Alderaan Explosion of '77: "Complicated Feelings," Mixed Media, provided by the artist.]

In the killing fields of NBC chatland, what little peace and stability had been achieved was just been blown to smithereens by a little hint dropped by Jay Leno, that, oh yes, now that you mention it, he'd be willing to take his old slot back.

Pity poor Conan O'Brien; his ratings are off 47 percent from Jay's, competing not just against Leno's legacy but Letterman's ongoing scandal. And then his lead-off batter, in a Q&A with Broadcasting and Cable, drops this:

If someone [from new ownership] comes in tomorrow and puts you back at 11:35, are you thrilled?

Oh, I don't know. Are you married? Whatever you want, honey.

You know I don't believe a word you are saying, right?

I'm not having a bad time at 10 o'clock now. I look at this as a job, and now I'm faced with a challenge, and it's a challenge I find difficult but interesting. I find that when I go to Vegas, whereas before I might not sell out, all of a sudden it's sold out. I seem to be doing better in terms of public appearances. I am reaching a wider audience. Whether that translates to television just yet, I don't know. But I see a difference.

Now why is that, because I'm in the paper every day? I don't know. Because I'm on earlier? I'm actually doing well; this is almost the best year for personal appearances since I started. So there is no negativity there.

Do you want to go back to 11:35?

If it were offered to me, would I take it? If that's what they wanted to do, sure. That would be fine if they wanted to.

If you are Conan O'Brien reading the above, it might occur to you that that 11:30 slot to which Jay is graciously willing to return is the one that you currently occupy.

Elsewhere in the interview, Jay shows himself to be startingly self-aware of the differences between himself and Letterman, and delivering a sort of triple backhanded compliment, saying of Dave's current scandal:

He's not being a hypocrite; Dave has never set himself up as [a model citizen]. If it were me, it would kill me. I'm the guy who's been married 29 years. But Dave has never pretended to be Mr. Moral America, he's never set himself up that way. He's not a hypocrite. I don't know how it will be viewed. He doesn't do corporate days like me, he's not as advertiser-friendly as I am. I'm the guy when Coke or Pepsi is here, I come down and shake hands and take pictures, but he doesn't do that. I don't think it will have a big effect at all.

All this occurs as the backdrop to the ratings horror show of the Leno experiment. The moment we would see the genius of the whole plan, NBC had promised, was when the other networks dramatic shows went into reruns, and there would be low-cost Jay with fresh shows to come in and clean up. Well, last week Jay had his first head-to-head against reruns and the results were not pretty. Leno actually hit his lowest number yet against a CSI: Miami repeat.

And elsewhere, the Leno lead-in seems to be pulling down local news shows across the nation.

So just to sum up the Ben Silverman legacy: NBC has decimated one of its three prime-time hours, its affiliates news shows are sinking, its late night line-up is staggering along at half the viewership of a year ago, and now its 11:30 host must once again watch his back against his network teammate.

The one thing that can be said in this whole arrangement's favor is that NBC getting out of the drama business is probably a great thing for NBC and, certainly a great thing for America. It may not be a law of nature that the big networks are incapable of launching decent dramas, but it certainly looks that way at the moment, and extra-certainly does so for NBC which just surrendered the acclaimed Southland to basic cable. Until the network figures out a way to produce shows that seem to have been created in the same space-time continuum as the HBO shows, Mad Men, Damages and even Lost or 24, it is probably better for everyone that they just sit out a few games.

Box Office Mojo sez: It opened on 120 screens and raked in a total of $369K, for an opening weekend average of $3,075 per screen. That puts Tucker's movie eighth in per-screen revenue out of the nine movies that opened last weekend. Although he came close to matching the $3,100 per screen average of Blind Date (2009).

But sometimes critically acclaimed films don't have boffo box offices. It's just the nature of high art. Let's go to the reviews:

• Reuters: "the film is unfunny from first minute to last, and its half-hearted attempts at emotion merely underscore its general loathsomeness."
• USA Today: "This unfunny, über-misogynistic adaptation of Tucker Max's audacious best-seller of the same name is unlikely to please anyone."
• Chicago Tribune: "The result just might be the most hypocritical feature in the history of film as well as the history of hypocrisy, and along with serving beer, I hope they show 'I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell' in hell."
• San Francisco Chronicle: "That was epic, bro. You should make a movie ...No, you shouldn't! Put down the digital camera, step away from Robert McKee's guide to screenplays, and get back to ramming your head through Sheetrock during spring break."
• New York Times: "a mediocre gross-out movie that barely pushes the envelope."
• Boston Globe: "Ridiculously cheap-looking, smug, scurrilous, but fairly evolved for a project so fundamentally unevolved."

Honestly, no one's given a shit in the past 25 years. Yet as always, with mondo-stratospheric celeb death comes a whole stadium full of dusty grievances. With the fire vid now shocking the internets, the fire safety inspector at the shoot, Captain Don Donester ("DON DONester" - what clever parents he had!) blames director Giraldi for making Jackson stand under the sparks longer so the popstar would "look more majestic."

C'mon, admit it. The moonwalk with one's hair in flames? Chilling, yes. But it does look pretty Olympian.

TMZ called up Giraldi for a response. He said, "That's not true. Whatever." Click. Dial tone. Wow, what a prick!

In true canned spokespersonspeak, Pepsi's response was also a hair toss and shoulder shrug.

We don't know what that footage is. It's 25 years ago. We don't know who owns it, so we have no recourse as far as I know. I can only tell you what I know. We didn't put it up and we don't know where it came from.

Guess they're bitter their latest slogan, "Refresh Everything," hasn't registered with anyone anywhere nohow.

The video clearly shows Jackson doing a few pyrotechnics takes safely and then, on the sixth, everything goes disastrously wrong and his hair is set ablaze. It almost looks as though Jackson doesn't notice it at first, until some guy runs on and just sprays him in the fucking face with a fire extinguisher.

Yes, Heidi and Spencer's rep type person says they're still taping the show. So we guess this was some sour little stunt orchestrated by the pair, NBC, the producers, hosts Damien "Carson Daly's Sloppy Seconds" Fahey and the British lady, everyone. They never showed up at LAX draped in black cloaks! They never even stormed off set! Well, if they did, they still came right back. Even though NBC has them x'ed out on the show's website, we're sure there will be some grand surprise and they'll come shuffling back in, dumb grins on their faces. Which is all terribly annoying and embarrassing.

Really it mostly looks bad for NBC. We expect this kind of stupid stuntery from the reality couple. Their idea of clever is kicking you in the shins and then ten minutes later if you ask them, "Heidi, Spencer... did you guys kick me in the shins?" they giggle and say "Noooo..." So, whatever. But NBC! C'mon, guys. You used to be respectable. You used to mean something. That peacock ain't looking too proud these days, is it? Think about it. Your biggest summer stars are Heidi and Spencer from the goddamned Hills. Shame.

The clip at left should really tell you all you need to know about what had happened. Prepared to rule the roost of abysmally sad celebrities (Lou Diamond Phillips... why?), Spencer declared himself the "King of America" while his wife made weird jokes and said things about Jesus. Their antics, though, were met with either indifference or anger from the other contestants and, upon finding that living in the Costa Rican jungle is not very much like perching one's skinny, champagne-filled behind on a Les Deux banquette, the pair reportedly stormed off the set, never to return.

It's a shame, in a very very small way, because Heidi and Spence were really the only remotely interesting things about last night's premiere episode. As much as we do so love Stephen Baldwin and that one lady who used to wrestle once, we don't imagine we'll stick around to see what happens.

Update: Or, um... Maybe the reason they left the show, or why Spencer did at least, is because they're not actually reality stars. TMZ has an account from a person who was on the Costa Rican set and recounted the following story:

...just before quitting the show, Spencer screamed at producers, "If you give me a script, I'll do what you want. I'm not a reality star. I'm on 'The Hills.'"

Spencer clarified with the following: "I'm a TV producer and a character."

Hm. "I'm not a reality star. I'm on 'The Hills.'" Man oh man does that say it all about... it all.

We got leaked this parody video starring the network's marketing heads Mike Benson and Marla Provencio in which they "pimp" a made-up show called The Smoking Clown. Supposedly it was made a while back for an internal meet-and-greet within the network in which each department tells the others what it is that they do. It's not clear if this was ever shown or if the idea of video showing a bunch of television executives smoking and drinking in the office was squashed before the meeting.

For fourteen profanity-laden minutes, the crack team guides us through the soulless business of commodifying and selling something you absolutely hate. Everything is covered smarmily—from bitchy contract-waving actors, to competition with other networks, to strategies for ensnaring lucrative and elusive kids' eyeballs.

And while it's all pretty ha ha, sure, it's also pretty insidious. In that, while The Smoking Clown doesn't exist, utter ABC dreck like Private Practice does. And, through all of the nefarious means depicted here, the show is fed to and lapped up by brain-addled regular Americans just like you and me. We're being manipulated, people! And they're just sitting back and laughing at us.

Keep an eye out for Lost co-creators Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse playing themselves. Network cross-promotion!

Officials in Mumbai say that Ismail's family house was demolished as part of a pre-monsoon season clean up effort, and that his family had no legitimate claim to the land. The family received no prior notice, and were awoken by the bulldozers, having only minutes to grab belongings and flee the premises.

Officials claim that those who lost homes to the demolitions will be relocated to government housing, though those places are usually far from the city center, making commuting to jobs extremely difficult. There is, of course, the trusts and housing that the producers of the movie set up for the kids, but it looks as though the positive effects of those efforts have yet to materialize.

So where things stand now: One of the child stars of a movie that won eight Academy Awards and has grossed over $300 million in ticket sales just had his shanty house razed by the government and his mother is forced to sit outside with a small plastic bag of her belongings saying "I don't know what I am going to do."

Yeah, I don't think anyone does.

[AP]

It doesn't (yet) look like O'Neal was actually trying to pass any drugs to prisoners, but he was foolish enough to have them in his trunk while parking at a jail, and to then admit to the cops that he had them. Sigh.

You'd think O'Neal would have learned to dodge the cops given what he and his family have been through over the past year or so. A recap:

September: Redmond, son of the actress Farrah Fawcett, was busted for meth possession, along with his father Ryan. Ryan had the meth in his bedroom while Redmond had it on his person. Redmond had a history of heroin problems.

June: Tatum O'Neal, daughter of Ryan and half-sister to Redmond, was busted for trying to buy coke on the street near her Lower East Side apartment. Like Redmond, Tatum also had a history of drug problems, but was in recovery and had reportedly been clean for two years.

June: Redmond pleads guilty to carrying heroin and crystal meth and to driving under the influence in a January incident. He gets three years probation.

February '07: Believing Redmond had overdosed and might awaken only to seek more drugs, his brother Griffin chained him to a staircase at home, TMZ reported. Father Ryan came home and became enraged at Griffin, resulting in a fireplace-poker-swinging confrontation that ended with gunfire. Wow.

On this latest iteration of Bravo's juggernaut series (Drunken Orange County, Grasping New York City, Malapropping Atlanta, Ghetto Fabulous Newark?), there are two sisters, who are married to brothers, and whose brother is married to one of the other Housewives. If that doesn't spell New Jersey better than three big tanks reading "Oil" "Heats" and "Best," I don't know what does. There are interior designers and decorators and entrepreneurs and "one of the first female American Express Black card members in New Jersey." This has to be an early April Fool's joke.

Here are the character descriptions, via People, natch:

Jacqueline Laurita: A former cosmetologist, she is now a stay-at-home mom, but still loves to pamper herself. She has a teenage daughter from her previous marriage and a 6-year-old son with her husband Chris, who owns wholesale apparel businesses and is brother to Caroline and Dina.

Teresa Giudice: Born and raised in New Jersey, her husband Joe owns a successful construction company. Together they have three young daughters, who take up much of her time. A friend of Dina and Caroline, she also loves to shop, get spa treatments and spend time at her beach house on the Jersey Shore.

Danielle Staub: "You either love me or you hate me, there is no in between," says the single mom of two daughters. She prides herself as one of the first female American Express Black card members in New Jersey. She is also active in her local parish and regularly attends mass. She and Jacqueline are friends.

Dina Manzo: Founder of the nonprofit Project Ladybug, which helps children with cancer, she's also an interior designer, an event planner, mother and best friends with her sister Caroline. Her husband Tommy works with his brother (Caroline's husband) at their family's catering business.

Caroline Manzo: She's a mother of three and own a real estate firm and a line of children's accessories. Described as a "feisty spitfire," she's Dina's sister and is on the board of Project Ladybug. She's married to Albert Manzo, brother of Dina's husband Tommy. Dina and Caroline's brother is Jacqueline's husband Chris.

If you jokers think I'm recapping this thing, you can cram it with walnuts.

(Ha Ha! Just kidding Gabe! I'll set my DVR now, sir.)

Oh look, there's video! Always seems to be, huh? The Sun, chronicler of the ages, tells us that Casey Affleck, Joaquin's brother-in-law and potential partner in hoaxery, was also in the crowd, filming away for this alleged documentary. The whole thing looks pretty staged—from Phoenix bragging about his millions of dollars in the bank, to the completely unsurprised and calm look on his face as he sets his mic down on the stage and heads into the audience for a bout of fisticuffs.

The audience was eating it up, chanting "Beat him up! Beat him up!", so that must have felt nice for Phoenix. No matter how out-to-lunch on various handfuls of drugs he may be, which Phoenix undoubtedly is, a performer still enjoys, nay requires!, the love of a sweaty, heaving audience. So even if it's a tiresome, indulgent meta joke, we're all at fault for perpetuating what has become an all too real and sad personal history.

As my distinguished colleague Alex Pareene said, "Someone should probably forward Nickelodeon a copy of the internet."

Um, agreed.

Many watched in horror last night as Paula banked steeply and had her left wing torn off and Randy was sucked out into the the merciless thin air. Many wept as Ryan Seacrest's body was battered by the impact—still alive, but unable to move because of his broken legs, he was engulfed in flames and died in that ruined fuselage.

The trouble with the aircraft—made of gum wads and Popsicle sticks and hopes and dreams and sticky bits of British men's semen—began when the last of the Semifinal 9 were announced. It was, as expected, Lil' Rounds and Scott the Blind Guy. The third position was filled by the prancy Nancy from Puerto Rancy, Jorge Nunez. No Felicia Barton. No Nathaniel the Liongayed. Not even Country Abstinence girl, who probably set some teenage boy hands a' late-night fumble on Tuesday eve. So that was the evening's first great injustice—that we're being asked to believe that Blind Guy woulda made it if he weren't blind, that we're being told repeatedly that Lil' Rounds is some sort of singing genius (apparently we're buying it!), that we're cast suddenly as restless Jacobs, forced to wrestle with the gay curly-haired angel that is Jorge, his eyelashes batting, voice tremoloing.

The second incident, which air traffic controllers report being aware of around 8:43 last night, occurred when the Wild Card announcements were made. AGAIN, no Felicia. No fun gay folks. Twas all rambling idiots. Twas all Megan Joy Corkreys and Jasmine Whodathunkits. Ricky Braddy? Good news! Jesse the Friendly Giant? Sure! Anoop? Whoop whoop Anoop! Let's start rhyming! But fucking Von and TATIANA DEL TORO?

As the aircraft rumbled and the poor Jackie-Jackie Tohns and Ju'not Joyners of the world said their solemn, goodbye world! prayers, Tatiana was brought weeping and farting onto the mainstage, while Seacrest and Cowell smirked—seeming to forget, after all these years, that WE ARE WATCHING. WE CAN SEE YOU, IDIOTS. I'd rather have had a show producer break into my apartment and make my fingers dial strange phone numbers in the still of the night while I slept than again watch such a display of ratings-hungry chicanery. American Idol is only as strong as its weakest manipulation. So this season has just achieved new, skimming-the-trees-and-the-barn-tops lows. Tatiana. Here you are, America. A delicious shit sandwich. Here are some napkins.

Robbed: Felicia Barton, Kristen McNamara, Nathaniel.

Zolciak is infamous for her bizarre blunderbussing on the Bravo reality show, from crying about fake hair and making up a fake cancer story, to feeling entitled to a country singing career when her singing voice sounded like a pile of burnt toast tumbling out of her mouth, to (not-so) secretly dating a rich married "celebrity" named Big Daddy so he'd buy her Cadillacs and things.

Then she started a ludicrous website. Around that time, Kim hired World's Worst Publicist Jonathan Jaxson to get her name out there. He then shuttered her blog for nonpayment last week — though the taunting message announcing its suspension by her "webmaster" is now gone.

So ol' Kim is suing Jaxson —for supposedly messing around with her website and telling people she was broke (she is). Which all makes pathetic, weary sense. Adding a dash of Jaxson's miserable little spice to this sad soup of polyester hair and hoarse cigarette voices is a natural step for this awful story.

The world is dead and rotting. That's basically all there is to this.

Probably the most troubling thing of all is how greedily we've slopped all this stuff up. But after making celebrity baby covers the biggest sellers for the likes of Us, People and OK!, we get the freakshow news we deserve. Still hungry for more and more babies, we've turned to the circus disaster that is regular lives made alien and shocking when bad choices mixed with a few bits of bad luck and stories were born.

Maybe it coms from exhaustion with all the other media. First it was scripted television shows, and then their high-concept reality descendants. And now we've sifted through every last layer of story until we've gone and found a low, universal denominator. People come out of other people's vaginas sometimes. The more that come out of the same one or the younger the owners of the necessary body parts are, the more we're interested. 220 channels and nothing else was on, so we've settled on the baby zoo currently on display on TLC or sitting in a dimly-lit room across from Ann Curry.

While Suleman's desire to go and get herself knocked up with octuplets when she was already a cash-strapped mother of six probably had far more to do with some murky and deep-seated emotional cataclysms than it did with a desire for fame, the end result has been a raft of high profile TV appearances, implied hopes for a reality series, and a website asking fans or followers or whomever to donate money to this Elephantitis-suffering family. Ms. Suleman has become a rickety celebrity simply by making the wreckless decision to bring many children into this world for whom she had no way of caring. Good for us!

Little Mister Patten may not have been courting fame when he got his young girlfriend pregnant, but now he's likely being paid exclusivity fees by the Sun. And, in the wake of the media frenzy surrounding the unsettling story, two more boys have come forward, claiming paternity of 15-year-old Chantelle Steadman's daughter. There are posed photos of the two boys, aged 14 and 16, on Splash, the photo agency where I find many of the silly celebrity pictures I use for Open Caption.

It had become fairly routine for celebrities to profit off the act of procreation, what with the big glossy magazine industry and whatnot. But now common folks are saying "me too!" and the troubling thing is, if you don't already have a certain degree of popularity, you have to make your babymaking pretty sensational to get any attention. And what's sensational is often ugly. Again these folks probably didn't enter into reproduction with designs on tabloid notoriety, but once the first publicist calls or newspaper camera flashes... Well, the Siren call is tough to resist.

Though humanity has its limits, and the public outcry against Nadya Suleman—and the sad revulsion expressed over the Patten thing—suggests that maybe there is a limit to this mayhem. But we don't suspect it will die down quickly. Prepare yourselves for other strange stories, for other curious and unpleasant parlor tricks of the body. After all, while everything's being torn down around it, Coney Island still has its sideshow.

Dollhouse, an Eliza Dushku-starrer about people reprogrammed with new personalities to complete tasks and fulfill wishes, earned about 4.7 million viewers and a low 2.0 share of adults 18-49 on Friday. It's not surprising that the show fared badly. Friday night is a veritable elephant graveyard of doomed and scuttled series and Whedon the Show Creator has never really had large numbers behind him. Critically-lauded cult status, yes. Bochco or even Kelley-sized ratings? Nay. We'll have to wait and see how long Fox soldiers on with D-house—it might depend (in very small part) on the rabidity of devoted Whedonphiles.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, another nerd show I sorta liked, has been swan diving for months. Last year it was television's highest-rated new series of the strike-plagued season. On Friday it garnered just 3.7 million viewers. Tough for a show that just got moved from a far more lucrative Monday night frame.

So Fox's years-long attempt to capitalize on the once-glorious sci-fi success of The X-Files (which started off on Fridays before moving to Sunday nights) continues to fail. Their big J.J. Abrams show Fringe has stumbled, and now these two loud misfires. Thank god for the otherworldly alien beep-boops of American Idol's Paula Abdul. Otherwise the network would seem terrestrial.

[THR]

And having invested so much time in being a good guest himself on shows like Saturday Night Live, Baldwin no doubt disdains your disastrous performance on the Late Show the other night.

On the bright side, this is but the first of many times you'll serve as the punch-line for a joke about drugs or TV interviews. Should keep your name out there.

James Gray, who directed Two Lovers and is also close to Phoenix personally, told ABC News Radio, "if it's an act, it's the most committed act I've ever seen in my life."

"I mean, he built this studio [in his house]. The lengths to which he's taken it are quite extreme."

"Toward the end of the shoot, he kept saying 'Oh I'm so tired, I'm so tired.' You hear that kind of thing and you think it's a joke," he said. "I just ignored it."

Gray said Phoenix got into rap after Gray played the actor some unspecified recording relating to his own teenaged freestyling. "He said, 'I want to do that, I want to steal from that."

Now Gray feels guilty, because Phoenix quit acting. "I feel like I've ruined Joaquin Phoenix for the world."

More worrisome than Phoenix's career switch is the possibility that he's gone off the deep end. Maybe he did so intending it to be part of a hoax, maybe not. But if he's drowning does it really matter?

(Counter theory: It's just a hoax and Gray, who by his own admission is Phoenix's buddy, is in on the whole thing.)