WHAT'S NEW: This is a good weekend to maybe paint the house or just drink — a lot — as Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Journey to the Center of the Earth and Meet Dave jockey for Top 5 position against holdovers Hancock and Wall-E. We admit: We walked out of Golden Army's LA Film Festival premiere, annoyed with its wisecracking self-awareness and degradation of Selma Blair — but that's just us, it seems, as director Guillermo del Toro and his magical make-believe realm of creatures and bad screenwriting have dazzled most critics and are likely to nab $40 million over the next three days. Journey, meanwhile, which places Fraser in 3-D, PG-rated peril somewhere near what looks suspiciously like the Warner Bros. lot, will be lucky to surpass Wall-E for third place around $27 million.

It's a crowded weekend for indies and art houses as well, with the documentary Oscar hopeful Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired making its "official" theatrical debut after a sub-sonic run in April. The Spencer Breslin/Cuba Gooding Jr. balding-teen dramedy Harold also opens, as does Death-Defying Acts, the Weinstein Company shelf-casualty starring Guy Pearce as Harry Houdini and Catherine Zeta-Jones as the con woman who falls for him.

THE BIG LOSER: Speaking of jilted premieres, you can reasonably take Murphy's Meet Dave no-show at face value; the spiritual heir of Norbit should still break $20 million, but if Murphy's latest multi-role hackwork doesn't stop the travesty of Beverly Hills Cop IV in its developmentally-disabled tracks, we don't know what will. Oh, who are we kidding? They'll probably start shooting on Monday, box office (and worn-out welcomes) be damned.

THE UNDERDOG: We recommend the ensemble drama Garden Party with a few reservations: filmmaker Jason Freeland's forced script could use a dialogue polish or eight; it's got more twee sound cues than a Moldy Peaches set; and if wanna-be dreams come true this fast in LA, then we should all be doing lines off each other's asses today by happy hour. That said, the low-profile cast — particularly Vinessa Shaw as a cutthroat realtor (with a past, natch), Willa Holland as a teen looking for her absentee mother or a decent job, whichever comes first, and the endlessly fascinating Patrick Fischler as a skeevy, unassuming porn photographer — does quite a bit with not a lot. And there's a bonus: The most awkwardly choreographed gay-bar dance sequence since Cruising. You heard it here first.

FOR SHUT-INS: Among this week's notable DVD releases: the gross-out psych-horror thriller The Ruins; the pig-nosed Christina Ricci rom-com Penelope; the not-eagerly awaited MTV! Award! Winner! Step Up 2: The Streets; and the masterful Dallas: The Complete Ninth Season.

So what do you think? Anything good on TV this weekend, or any books you might recommend? Or is the Eddie Murphy completist in you racing to the multiplex as we speak. Be honest — nobody is judged here! Well, sort of. Anyway, when is The Dark Knight opening again?

Like his resilient cousins in the roach family, Roger Friedman naturally outlasted the meltdown and later delivered his sterling, tasteful review, "Gwyneth Paltrow Bares a Breast in Film":

You don't really think of Oscar-winner Gwyneth Paltrow as the racy type. But in her new film, Two Lovers, which debuted at the Cannes Film Festival Monday night, she quite surprisingly bares a single breast. The shot is, shall we say, head-on into the camera. And it's for more than a couple of seconds. This is no wardrobe malfunction. It's on purpose. (To paraphrase a great Seinfeld quote: "They're real ... and they're spectacular!")

Of course, this moment — it's the left breast, by the way — is meant to be part of the story; it's exactly what her manipulative character would do to land her man, in this case a character played by Joaquin Phoenix. In Two Lovers, Phoenix plays a mentally jumbled lonely guy who tries to juggle romances with both Paltrow's selfish car crash of a mistress and Vinessa Shaw's girl next door.

Thank you, Roger — back to the hospital, now. Other viewers including Anne Thompson, Glenn Kenny and even Jeffrey Wells (who, mere months after notoriously requesting nude stills of Shaw from 3:10 to Yuma director James Mangold, thinks she's miscast here) managed entire reviews without mentioning the nudity, expressing admiration for the film overall. It's still looking for US distribution, which we hear films featuring Oscar-winning actresses' breasts are highly likely to find.

Also seeking a buyer is Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut Synecdoche, New York. The film stars Philip Seymour Hoffman as a theater director creating "the ultimate play: a city within a city within a warehouse," according to The Hollywood Reporter's interview Monday with Kaufman — who would like to object to his reputation as a recluse, damn it:

The first thing people will say to me in interviews is that you don't do interviews and I'll say "Well, I'm sitting here talking to you!" I don't particularly like to be photographed and I don't like to talk about my personal life — that doesn't make me a recluse. My feeling is that my work speaks about my life in ways that are very generous. ... I live a regular mundane life in Los Angeles. Don't know what else to say except I'm not here cowering in a corner. I don't have a veil over my head. I don't say "I vant to be alone."

Got it! Now that that's settled, perhaps Kaufman and his backers at Sidney Kimmel Pictures might want to answer Anne Thompson's fantastic question: Why the nervous rush to screen it for impatient buyers before its premiere on May 23? "If they had the goods," she writes, "the sellers would hang tough and force the buyers to just stick around and wait." It's still inconclusive to those of us stranded on this side of the Atlantic, but a new batch of clips featuring an aged Hoffman, a tattooed Michelle Williams and the word "urologist" used as a punchline has us smelling a hit. Happy selling, gang.

UPDATE: Our hunch-dar appears to have betrayed us; we've heard from Manohla Dargis herself that she was not the angry critic who fled the Two Lovers scene. We regret the misread; these blind items just get harder and harder!

[Photo: Getty Images]