"It was eight years ago, and I find it unbelievable that Meg continues publicly to rehash and rewrite the story of our relationship," the actor tells us exclusively. "Also, I find it regrettable that our son, Jack, has to be reminded in a public way of the turmoil and pain that every child feels in a divorce."

Quaid, who went on to marry real estate agent Kimberly Buffington and have twins last November, adds: "I, myself, moved on years ago and am fortunate to have a happy, beautiful family."

Why, is that a thinly veiled shot at Meg and her lovely adopted daughter, Oprah Winfrey Ryan? Be careful, Dennis: you can shut her down in the press all you want, but Meg Ryan will never be afraid to give you some lip (after all, she's got plenty to spare).

[Photo Credit: AP]

• Dennis Quaid says Meg Ryan's beef over divorce is 'unbelievable' [NY Daily News]

1. Burn After Reading — $19.4 million

The Coen brothers' admirable, totally nonsensical spy farce rode its all-star ensemble like a rented mule, albeit sort of a haunting mutation of mule — one with frosted tips, a hoof-full of Oscars and an unusually foul mouth that nevertheless enticed enough curious viewers to make Burn the biggest opening of the Coens' career. And it's almost enough to settle Focus Features' therapy bill incurred after Hamlet 2.

2. Tyler Perry's The Family That Preys — $18 million

Add another fun fact to Defamer's Tyler Perry Encyclopedia: Five of his six films have now opened among their respective weekends' top two grossers. On roughly two-thirds as many screens as this week's No. 1. With virtually no white people in the audience. Be impressed.

3. Righteous Kill — $16.5 million

And it would have been even more had Robert De Niro and Al Pacino not already fulfilled most Americans' demand to see them sleepwalk through scenes together.

4. The Women — $10 million

Critics be damned — Picturehouse was determined to make this work if it was the last thing it ever did. And, alas, it was.

5. The House Bunny — $4.3 million

The Cult of Anna Faris kept her in the Top 5 with barely a 20% drop from last week. Seriously: If Tyler Perry had an adventurous bone in his body he'd write her into a Madea film and let the Brinks truck do the rest.

Boomp3.com

Apparently the stress stemming from the eagerly anticipated release of The Women has really taken its toll on star Meg Ryan. Ryan uses her over active sweat glands as a way to gauge the public’s interest in her films. Ryan said, “Right before When Harry Met Sally came out, I was sweating buckets. Literally buckets. So, these little wet marks appear to be a sign of good thing to come.”

[Photo Credit: Bauer-Griffin]

*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.

WHAT'S NEW: So Burn After Reading is good — more admirable than likable, really, with the Coen brothers returning to their parched well of overmatched dolts in possession of objects way beyond their ken. This time it's Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand attempting to blackmail a CIA analyst (a bracingly potty-mouthed John Malkovich) whose "memoirs" they've found lying on their gym's floor; Tilda Swinton and George Clooney join in as awkward archetypes of paranoia and aloof, striving America. If we sound glib, that's Burn for you — a plot- and style-allergic screwball comedy that succeeds primarily as an almost-clean break (even Pitt's character is ultimately a red herring) from two decades of recycled Coen tropes.

Alas, it's 20 years too late for some moviegoers, whose Coen aversion will keep Burn and its high-octane ensemble around $16 million for the weekend. That might be enough to surpass the De Niro/Pacino miscarriage Righteous Kill for second place overall, but we don't think anybody will overtake The Family That Preys — or, excuse us, Tyler Perry's The Family That Preys. The distinction matters, too: Even with 1,000 fewer screens than Kill, the dude is a box-office witch with a cult following and increasing crossover juice (Kathy Bates!) that'll push Family to $19.5 million in three days. Not that we've seen it — Perry doesn't avail his films to the press — but it's still fascinating stuff; we'll have more on him here later in the day.

Also opening: The chatty, mostly misleadingly titled Young People Fucking; Takashi Miike's acid-trip spaghetti Eastern Sukiyaki Western Django; the flashback-y Jewish family drama A Secret; the enviro-alarmist doc FLOW: For Love of Water; and Matthew McConaughey's shirtless adventure Surfer, Dude.

THE BIG LOSER: Here and elsewhere, we've made little secret of our disdain for Towelhead, Alan Ball's thoroughly revolting, exploitive, amateurish, illiterate and borderline retarded sketch of molesty, multi-ethnic suburban ennui. It's not worth getting into again — that's what Google's for — but look at it this way: Warner Independent Pictures didn't fold because it couldn't compete; it was poisoned. If you pay money to see this movie, you could be next.

THE UNDERDOG: Don't look now (oh, all right, go ahead) but The Women is up to a 9 percent approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes! The comeback is on! Sort of! Still, don't expect some Sex and the City blockbuster shocker; director Diane English can preach gay quadrants and underserved audiences all she wants, but she's only got her cast — not an HBO institution — to rely on. And how much does a Meg Ryan/Annette Bening/Eva Mendes/Jada Pinkett film open to these days? Not a ton, but more than most are predicting on 3,000 screens. We'll call it for $11 million and not a penny less.

FOR SHUT-INS: This week's new DVD's include the hit Sarah Palin comedy Baby Mama; Tarsem's visually sumptuous Flopzterpiece™ The Fall; the long-awaited (we're serious this time) restoration of the Cinerama benchmark How the West Was Won; the 10th-anniversary edition of The Big Lebowski; and, extraordinarily, Child's Play: Chucky's 20th Birthday Edition. Chucky! 20! Christ, we're like grandparents now.

This is more like it, right? Is there anything better than a week when we won't be writing about The Dark Knight and Tropic Thunder on Monday? And when we can finally throw dirt on Towelhead's fetid corpse? Oh, fall. We missed you. Choose your own adventure, and share below.

· "It's finally here, and it's a major dud." [Rolling Stone]
· "The Women is such an arduous patchwork of 'issues' it ends up a Frankenstein's monster of a chick flick." [EW]
· "This new version of The Women fails to celebrate its characters as women. It patronizes the C-list cast of Meg Ryan, Annette Bening, Debra Messing, Eva Mendes, Jada Pinkett Smith, Bette Midler and Candice Bergen as politically correct pawns." [New York Press]

· "The Women clangs with so many false moments that you practically leave the theater with tinnitus." [MSNBC]
· "The Women isn't so much incompetent — though it has all the visual sumptuousness of a suburban rummage sale — as it is hopelessly tame and muddled. It certainly doesn't help that the movie's lead is completely lacking in the mature glamour that so entranced women filmgoers bracing for a world war, and has had so much plastic correction that her features — all but the ingénue eyes — are immobilized (and this in a movie that sucks whatever laughs it can muster from the Botox-and-surgery subculture). Could that be Meg Ryan peering out from Goldie Hawn's face? Since I have yet to encounter a Ryan comedy in which she fails to flap her hands while pulling on or peeling off woolly socks several fetching sizes too large for her dainty feet, it must be she." [LA Weekly]
· "Watching the high profile unveiling of The Women taking over billboards and window displays all over N.Y.C., it's hard not to be reminded of the fanfare surrounding John McCain's introduction of Sarah Palin as his pick for VP. Both are strategic attempts to court the coveted adult female demographic. Both claim to be exactly what the ladies of America have been waiting for. And both miss the mark entirely." [Premiere]

• The Women [Rotten Tomatoes]

Boomp3.com

At the premiere of The Women, all of the men in attendance were lured away from their dates by the sweet siren song of Cloris Leachman. Leachman, who's slated to compete in the upcoming season of Dancing With The Stars, swept stars like Warren Beatty and Will Smith off their feet with her erotic tales of old Hollywood. Smith said, "Cloris has to be the ultimate cougar. If I wasn't with Jada, I'd make a serious play at her. Although, Warren might give me a run for my money." When asked about her newfound status as the ultimate cougar, Leachman said, "I would say that I still got it, but the fact of the matter is that I never lost it."

[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.

Tina Fey (30 Rock), Glenn Close (Damages), America Ferrera (Ugly Betty), Julia Louis-Dreyfus (The New Adventures of Old Christine), Felicity Huffman (Desperate Housewives), Mariska Hargitay (Law and Order: SVU), Kyra Sedgewick (The Closer), Minnie Driver (The Riches), Elisabeth Moss (Mad Men) and Jeanne Tripplehorn (Big Love): these were the women who were nominated for Emmys, by-in-large playing strong, capable, well-written roles. And what's more, most of these women are, gasp, over 35.

Are there so many more available roles for women of a certain age on TV because producing a television show is that much cheaper? Are aging bodies less obvious on the small screen, and so they're more acceptable? Are Hollywood honchos just stuck believing that women don't see movies, or that men don't want to see movies with anything but eye candy? It's probably a combination of all of the above, and even though those televised, meaty roles are something to be proud of, there is not a single black actress on the short list for Best Actress Emmy (there are two Latinas: Ferrera and Eva Longoria-Parker).

I know I've said this so many times before, but there is something concrete we can do to help: go see movies made by women, or made with women in respectable roles. I'd tell you to go see something specific this weekend, but the only recent release with a plucky female protagonist is Kit Kittredge, and if you're not a Jezemom, I'm guessing that holds limited interest for you. Sigh. We clearly have a long way to go.

Warner Brothers Decides To Embrace The Women [Deadline Hollywood Daily]
Why Won't Warner Embrace The Women? [Deadline Hollywood Daily]
Warner's Robinov Bitchslaps Film Women [Deadline Hollywood Daily]
Sarah Silverman Lands In The Top 10 List Of Emmy semifinalists For Best Comedy Actress! [Gold Derby LAT]
Looks like Mary McDonnell Of 'Battlestar Galactica' And Elisabeth Moss Of 'Mad Men' Are On The Emmy Top 10 List [Gold Derby LAT]

Earlier: Ultimate Chick Flick The Women Is Finally About To See The Silver Screen

We heard back in May that this was one of the titles that might seal Picturehouse's fate at WB; after it did, the studio brass's antipathy was later spun by Nikki Finke as thinly veiled institutional misogyny. An anonymous Finke source sounded a lot like English on Sunday, pegging the budget at a super-low $16 million and citing supposedly positive test screenings. Alas, the clip screened Sunday was leaden, cold and calculated in contrast to the crackling original that just preceded it; Eva Mendes is no Joan Crawford, but who is?

We asked English, who raised the budget herself after the original Ryan/Julia Roberts incarnation crashed back in the late '90s, about rumors Warners was sitting on the film and wouldn't pay to market it this August. She made a puzzled face and shook her head.

"We're going to have a proper release," she said. "They passed on our film, and they passed on Sex and the City as well. They have a particular kind of movie that they do really well, and this isn't their cup of tea necessarily. But they do understand how marketable this film is — they're not dumb, they absolutely do get that. After the success of Sex and the City, they're are currently re-looking at our marketing budget to take better care of us. ... The exception to the rule keeps happening."

Of course, The Women is obviously not Sex and the City — the clear beneficiary of a franchise following and almost unprecedented media support. Anyway, even if this isn't the chick-flick make-or-break we're being led to believe, we did learn from English that gay men are now unofficially the "fifth quadrant" of moviegoing audiences. All the easier to spread the blame in the aftermath, we suppose.