Us Weekly

Blake Lively & Ryan Reynolds: "With its 300-year-old moss-draped oak trees and stately, columned mansion, the Boone Hall Plantation & Gardens in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, is a favorite venue for couples tying the knot. But it wasn't just the charming post-and-rail fences and lush lawns that appealed to the couple saying 'I do' there September 9th."

Was it the historic slave quarters then? Boone Hall's website seriously boasts about the "eight original slave cabins" and the road in front of the plantation property is quaintly named "Slave Street." I personally find the whole idea of getting married at a Southern plantation totally tacky and repulsive on a soul level, but hey, I'm not Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds.

In theaters this week are Clint Eastwood's slightly anticipated Razzie-contending Hoover biopic J. Edgar — featuring Leonardo DiCaprio and 50 pounds of sweaty, wrinkled silicone as the titular FBI director — and Adam Sandler's terrifying-looking Jack and Jill in which he plays his own sister. To celebrate, Grantland's YouTube Hall of Fame is remembering the worst and least explicable movie-star transformations ever.

Fisher Stevens in Short Circuit

Rafe Bartholomew: John Wayne did yellowface. So did Marlon Brando. Katherine Hepburn? You bet. Yul Brynner? Duh. If so many legendary actors have crude Asian stereotypes on their résumés, then what makes Fisher Stevens' turn as Indian engineer Ben Jabituya in Short Circuit (and the renamed Ben Jahrvi in Short Circuit 2) so horrendous? Well, Wayne, Brando, Hepburn, and Brynner all did their racial damage before 1960, while Stevens broke out his Kwik-E-Mart accent and mocha foundation in the late 1980s. Were we really so ignorant 25 years ago that a white guy from Illinois could spit malapropisms like "I have to go to the Jack" and "Her pants are blazing for you, Newton Crosby!" and audiences wouldn't mind? Apparently, yes. Thankfully, the Short Circuit movies had the perfect antidote to Stevens' unfortunate transformation: the open-hearted humanism of a military robot who has been struck by lightning and brought to life. Johnny Five Alive!

This week, in honor of Leonardo DiCaprio's performance as an old guy in J. Edgar, Grantland's YouTube Hall of Fame is remembering the best, worst, and least explicable movie-star physical transformations ever.

$187,488. That’s not the average price for a condominium in Sheboygan, or the fine levied against Rob Ryan for eating a cheerleader last week in Philly, or the amount of money earned by Warren Buffet’s secretary in the time it took for you to read this sentence. It’s the total global box office for Chapter 27, the misbegotten 2007 film starring Jared Leto as Mark David Chapman, the man who murdered John Lennon, and Lindsay Lohan as a redheaded groupie named, wait for it, “Jude.” (By contrast, the last Harry Potter flick earned $38,672 on its opening domestic weekend. Per theater.) It’s unjust, of course, to judge a work of art — well, let’s just call it a “work” — by profitability alone. Still, the low gross seems particularly cruel considering how hard Leto worked in return for such a paltry sum. Living for weeks on a diet of, no joke, microwaved smoothies of ice cream mixed with soy sauce and olive oil, the former Jordan Catalano packed on 70 pounds in order to portray the tubby assassin, instantly transforming himself from heartthrob into heart-diseased.