It isn’t often that an advertisement featuring a rolling ball of humans, garbage cans, car doors, flower pots, and garden gnomes makes me nostalgic, but that’s exactly what happened when I saw this piece of brilliance. I used to spend a lot of time at the exact spot in Dolores Park where the monstrosity hits.

Have you ever wondered how Sir Ian McKellen gives such great performances? Hint: he pretends to be the character he’s playing.

In this hilarious clip from “Extras,” Sir Ian pulls back the curtain on his process and lets Ricky Gervais know exactly how he does it.

Pornographic publisher Dean Learner, and his most prolific, and horrific, writer, Garth Marenghi, have returned to the small screen with a new show called “Man to Man with Dean Learner.” The geniuses behind Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace have resurrected the characters and placed them in the world of the late night talk show. England’s Channel 4 recently started airing the 6 episode series last week. You can download the first episode here.

Man to Man is broadcast from Learner’s palatial penthouse apartment, and features Learner having a sit-down chat with a different guest each week in front of a live studio audience. For the first episode, Dean tapped the man who he “fell in like” with at first sight, Garth Marenghi.

Dean and Garth spend the episode reminiscing about the ups and downs of their long friendship, as well as Garth’s belief that the Dutch will pose the next world threat, and the hardships of a party with too few toilets. Garth takes the opportunity to plug his new book, “The Oeuvre,” a hardback collection of every novel he’s ever written, all in one easy-to-read volume.

And it turns out Garth has recently embraced his nascent painting abilities, as evidenced by a piece entitled “My Family Without Skin”:

The visual jokes on the show are clever, and some of the dialogue between host and guest is quite witty and enjoyable, but I can’t shake the feeling that a talk show isn’t the right format for these guys. While it does allow the actors to showcase their improv abilities, the show is marred by the raucous studio laughter, which seems especially high in the mix. The laughter is from an audience clearly in on the joke, as they’re laughing at Dean and Garth, not with them. This is in stark contrast to “Darkplace’s” laugh-track free audio.

“Darkplace’s” greatest strengths were the wooden acting, horrible dubbing, scandalously cheap special effects, and some of the most stilted and cliche-ridden dialogue to ever be put on film. “Man to Man’s” format precludes the use of any of these elements. That’s why it’s telling that the funniest moment of the show comes not from anything on “Man to Man,” but from a clip of Garth’s new film, “War of the Wasps,” which features all of the above mentioned attributes:

My friend Eliot recently delved deep into his collection of amazing videos and brought forth a treasure of a PSA from the 80s called How Can I Tell If I’m Really In Love? that features, among other things, the beautiful Bateman brood:

Ted Danson and his staunch refusal to conform to society’s long held beliefs about how to properly recline in an armchair:

A massive cast of guido-fabulous teens, e.g.:

The editing techniques of the 80s zeitgeist that would make any self-respecting graphic designer upchuck:

And much, much more. Check out Eliot’s post for more photos and a hilariously detailed analysis.

LOVE, PSA-STYLE: PART 1 [FAST HUGS]
WHAT’S WRONG WITH MY BRAIN? [FAST HUGS]
THANK YOU FOR BEING A…FITNESS INSTRUCTOR? [FAST HUGS]

Never has my faith in having no faith been so reaffirmed as when I was watching Jesus Camp. Jesus Camp is a documentary about evangelical pastor Becky Fischer and her attempt to assemble, via her Christian summer camp, an army of adolescent God warriors, who she hopes will one day take control of the United States, vanquish the non-believers and secularists from the government, return prayer to schools, outlaw abortion, and advance the aims of evangelism.

Here she is talking about how she wants to fight radical Muslim fanaticism with radical Christian fanaticism:

Even scarier than that is when Fischer takes a page from the US military and begins her brainwashing by breaking down the kids and reducing them to tears in a scene that seriously raises the question of whether these children are being mentally abused. Fischer then cleanses the red-eyed, repentant children with a store-bought Nestle® brand bottle of water.

To me, the tragedy in all this is that the parents are depriving their kids of a happy childhood by filling their heads with religious gobbledygook. For example, take Tory, a 10-year-old girl who likes rocking to Christian heavy metal and can bust some mean break dancing. She admits that sometimes she “dances for the flesh,” and “really needs to get over that.” Somehow I don’t think she came to those conclusions on her own.

I saw the film in Hillcrest, the homosexual hamlet of San Diego. The crowd seemed to be a liberal bunch and laughed in terror throughout the screening. At one point though, a line was crossed and a woman in the audience felt the need to speak directly to the screen. This is the scene that pushed her over the edge. Right when the name of this fictional character was brought up, she yelled out, “Don’t you dare!”

Youtube has many clips from the film, but sadly it’s missing one of my favorite moments. Becky Fischer is shown furiously spraying hairspray into her do, which I have to point out here is a hairstyle most favored by women who drive pick-up trucks and could fix a jetski, if you catch my drift. In the next scene she starts her sermon to the kids by asking coquettishly, “Do you like my hair?” She gets an applause break and fishes for further approval, “How ’bout my eyebrows?” I was at a loss when she said this. There was nothing significant about her eyebrows, save for the fact that she had two. Nevertheless, she still received applause. She then waved a hand over her obese body and said, “and all this..” Amazingly, she then segued into a conversation about sin.

Despite the fact that every edit, musical cue and visual metaphor belies the filmmakers’ impartiality, I have to recommend this film. Because the footage they shot is so mind-blowingly scary/funny/scary again, there’s really no way they could have fucked it up.

Let’s give Becky Fischer the last word on this post since she accurately sums up many people’s opinion of her, yet completely fails to understand the reasons why they’d feel that way.

Leave it to an im conversation that includes the query, “is your little guy limp…or growing[?]” and then devolves into a discussion on the finer points of post-ejaculatory cleanup and cast fetishes to reawaken my dormant interest in politics.

If you haven’t heard by now, Republican Congressman Mark Foley recently resigned after a number of explicit im conversations between himself and a teenage male page were unearthed. ABC News broke the story in the mainstream press:

The tag team comedy combo of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report had some amazing reports yesterday on the coverage:

While The Daily Show focused mainly on ABC’s report, Stephen Colbert took personal responsibility for Foley’s im conversation:

As it turns out, there’s a lot more to the story. Foley had internet sex with a page while awaiting a House vote, later blamed his actions on the firewater, and then claimed clergy abuse. He’s currently undergoing treatment for “alcohol and behavioral problems.”

One of my favorite aspects of this story is how The O’Reilly Factor portrayed Foley as a Democrat at least 3 times on their show this evening. Mistake or mind control?:

Anyway, the whole thing has got me checking the projected new Senate and House seats every day and editing my buddy list accordingly:

My morbid (some would say masochistic) fascination with comedian-to-the-co-eds/the most needlessly gesticulative man ever, Dane Cook, was given a new shot in the arm this weekend when SNL tapped him to host their season opener. He was paired with The Killers, because SNL knows what the kids like.

Dane came bounding out onstage full of exuberance, observations, and squats.

I prayed that his crouched position was an omen of the jokes to come, such as:

Dipping his testes satchel in wax.

Or:

Defecating on other people’s coats.

But the Dane gods did not hear my prayer. It turns out Dane was just limbering himself up for an animated discussion of negative people. I won’t spoil any of that bit though.

Because I’d like to address Dane’s keen observations about youtube. Dane trained his comedic microscope on the website (was he contractually obligated to?) and came to the conclusion that there sure are a lot of videos on there. It’s like he’s become a cultural anthropologist or something. Dane posits that you could type in any random thing and there would be a video for it. He uses the example of “A:F6,” and then describes a video of an obese child singing this over and over. Until Dane said it, the video didn’t exist, but some enterprising fans proved yet again that they were ready and willing to follow Dane off the cliff into a sea of banality.

Hence this:

Anyway, we all know SNL sucks now and that Dane isn’t funny, but sometimes it’s good to get a reminder.

HOW TO PROMOTE A MOVIE [THE ONION AV CLUB]