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Tom Cruise gets serious about Mother’s Day

Actor shells out almost $1,000 for flowers for Katie Holmes
/ Source: msnbc.com

Tom Cruise is saying it with flowers.

The very publicly besotted new dad shelled out nearly a thousand dollars for a Mother’s Day bouquet for the mom of his new daughter, says a source.

“He spent $900 on pink peonies in a Limoges vase,” a source tells the Scoop. “He had the card signed, ‘Dear Mommy, Happy first Mother’s Day. Lots of Love, Suri and Daddy.” The insider says the bouquet was sent from Lily Lodge, an upscale florist in West Hollywood. The store’s manager declined to comment, but says the source, “I sure hope you get a lot of flowers with nine hundred bucks.”

McKellen prefers ‘Rings’ to ‘Code’Outspoken actor Ian McKellen stars in the upcoming “Da Vinci Code” — but he isn’t a huge fan of the book. In fact, McKellen says that “Lord of the Rings,” a trilogy of books that inspired another movie he starred in, is “100 times bigger” than “The Da Vinci Code.”

People have read “Lord of the Rings” 20 times, McKellen insists, adding that when it was turned into a film, it was “almost like filming The Bible” for some readers. “I think that with ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ I doubt if people have read it more than once,” McKellen told the Scottish Daily Record. “It's not that sort of book. You understand it as you go along and, having understood it, it's like a crossword. Once you've done the crossword you don't rub it out and do it all over again, do you? I don't.”

But, he says, the book has some compelling theories. “Maybe Dan [Brown, author of ‘The Da Vinci Code’] is on to something about the nature of institutions that have been as grounded and as powerful as long as the Catholic Church has,” he said. “Maybe it isn't quite the organization it seems to be from the outside. And maybe there are secrets. And that would be a truth about an organization like the Catholic Church that's probably incontrovertible. But the facts, the details of his criticism, I am happy to believe, have all been made up.”

Notes from all overBritney Spears is getting into the flower business — sort of. The “Oops, I Did It Again” crooner is teaming up with 1-800-FLOWERS to bring out a special Britney Spears Teddy Bear. A portion of each sell will go to her charity... Hundreds of angry Orlando Bloom fans are petitioning his handlers to get him an official Web site that is updated more often. This current one was last updated in May, 2005... Keri Russell’s rep threatened to sue the reporter to first wrote that she’s become a  Scientologist, like her “Mission: Impossible III” co-star Tom Cruise. Russell is laughing off the report, but the actress, who is Jewish, says her grandmothers are not amused. She told the London Daily Mail: “I had all my Jewish grandmothers calling, going, ‘Is Keri a Scientologist? Do we have to be worried?’”

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