· So Eat Pray Love appears to be languishing in turnaround. We're not really sure what that portends for Warners' parody project, Drink, Play, F@#K, or, for that matter, our own proposed sequel—Puke, Broke, AIDS.
· "No, so honestly—whose Bat-voice sounded less stupid? Bale's or mine? C'mon. You know the answer—you just don't wanna insult your pal."
· Here's some video of Gwyneth Paltrow exposing her left breast seductively in Two Lovers. You know—this is where we start thinking we've been ruined forever by Spain...On the Road Again, because we instantly started craving paella at the first glimpse of nip.
· Dave Holmes presents the "Is this line from...The United States of Tara or the "Just Say No" Episode of Punky Brewster" Challenge! It's guaranteed to be the most fun you've had since our own Who Said It: John Cusack, Diablo Cody Or Bob Ross? trivia game.

The pilot is now streaming at the Showtime website (type in TARA when prompted for a password). What Cody has come up with is Tara, a depressive housewife and muralist-for-hire, played by Toni Collette with the open-mouthed neediness she's capitalized upon since Muriel's Wedding. But unlike Muriel, there's nothing here to make us particularly care about Tara. She's not quite pathetic enough, or crazy enough, or manipulative enough. She possesses none of the guile or sex appeal that made Mary-Louise Parker's pot-dealing mom in Weeds so instantly engaging, none of the ferocity and purposefulness of the women at the center of The Closer and Damages, none of the stifled ambition propelling the Mad Men girls. Tara might talk a lot, but she arrives utterly inert, without any reason to exist.

What Tara does have, however, is a hook. She suffers from dissociative identity disorder, a very real affliction which in Hollywood's hands always seems to offer actors a showcase to flaunt one's broad-ranged capacity for flimsy stereotyping. Why perform one character well, the thinking seems to go, when you can instead embody a half-dozen lazily rendered caricatures, spanning generations, socio-economic backgrounds, and colorful slang lexicons?

And so, just as the mind starts to wander away from the neither remarkable nor well-observed struggles of Tara, her long-suffering and sketchily motivated husband Max (John Corbett), and their two Junospeak-afflicted children (we meet the daughter shortly after she's taken the Morning After pill; their teenage son, meanwhile, is forced to utter the line, "Aunt Charmaine is a hosebeast," among other humiliations), we're introduced to Tara's alter egos: T, the slutty tween, Buck, the trash-mouthed trucker, and, in a future installment, Alice, the happy 1950s homemaker. We'd prefer a Hills marathon, a Larry the Cable Guy special, and some Leave it to Beaver to this. At least there's some authenticity in that artifice.

Of signing on for the series, Collette has said, "I never even contemplated working in TV. And this script arrived and as soon as I finished it I closed the last page and said, 'I have to do this.' It's so well-written, it's like a dream job." We hope that was T talking, because watching the finished product was also something of a dream—one of those meandering and pointless dreams that seems to last forever, but fails to provide a single memorable moment when it's over. The United States of Tara isn't just bad. It's bad four times over.

• The United States of Tara [sho.com]

Boomp3.com

At the 12th annual Hollywood Film Festival awards, popular culture impresario Diablo Cody decided to celebrate Halloween a few days earlier, doing her best zombie walk down the red carpet. Cody described herself as a fresh zombie, just a couple of hours old, but also felt she could go another way with her outfit. Cody said, “It’s a tad Stepfordy too. Like if Pris from Blade Runner was somebody’s wife.”

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]

*A Call To The Bullpen is a work of fiction. Although the pictures we use are most certainly real, Defamer does not purport that any of the incidents or quotations you see in this piece actually happened. Lighten up, people ... it's a joke.