Never in my wildest fantasies did I think it would be possible that out of the shadows a contender would emerge, ready to dethrone the reigning King of Constipation, Harrison Ford. For decades now the man has made a career of pursing his lips, furrowing his brow, and demanding that he be given something back (his family, his airplane, his crystal skull, etc.).

He wants for the bad men to return his property

And then along came Dennis Quaid in the shitfest that is “Vantage Point.” “Vantage Point” attempts to tell the story of a terrorist kidnapping in a Rashomon style ripoff, replete with rewinds, a vast array of underdeveloped characters, and Quaid grimacing his way through the film.

Quaid plays a shaky secret service agent, still recovering from a bullet wound and frazzled nerves.

The first closeup of DQ reveals he is in dire need of an outhouse

Still looking

Looking left

Looking right

Looking up and to the right

Still no end in sight

Damn it!

Chipmunk imitation! (it kills me that this wasn’t in focus)

Give me back my POTUS!

It’s ok DQ, I’m safe. William Hurt says you can take your exlax now

I think it’s working…

It’s definitely working

Hopefully tomorrow will bring a better bm

If Jackie Stallone isn’t in your life yet, I recommend reading Eliot’s guide (which includes many more photos), then watching this video, which was my first introduction to the human equivalent of a car wreck that is Jackie Stallone. In the video, Jackie Stallone details her patented “rumpology,” which is the reading of ass auras. She deigns not to explain her powers, but when you’re the person that brought Frank Stallone into the world, a certain amount of leeway must be given.

Recently, Chelsea Peretti, one third of the comedienne coven variety shac, started a series on superdeluxe exploring her failed relationships called “All My Exes,” that, after two episodes, is now one of my favorites. I highly recommend watching these (nsfw language).

Today is funny lady day.

Last night, while I should have been catching up on sleep, I was instead catching up on reading every single post (something I’ve only done twice, once here and here) by slut machine. Her blog, One D at a Time, is an intensely funny, extremely well-written, exploration of one woman’s sexuality, a repository for illustrated essays on celebrities that are probably gay, and her ongoing quest for the best bathroom to do a line and a dude in, among other things. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

And the other funny lady I’d like to talk about is Sarah Silverman. Tonight marks the debut of her new Comedy Central program, aptly titled “The Sarah Silverman Program.” I’ve had the good fortune of viewing two of the episodes, and if they are any indication of the rest of the season, the show will quickly become one of my favorites. It’s been receiving glowing reviews from a number of publications and I think The New Yorker’s take on it is a great primer for the show. It also features a snippet of dialogue from tonight’s episode with Officer Jay that is genius, “You know, being a cop, I’ve seen things that make you crap a book on how to puke,” he tells Laura. “But—I’ve never seen your kind of compassion.”

Here’s a video from the pilot:

And as an added bonus, a live set from 6/5/06 at The Largo that I recorded. Enjoy.

Recently the funniest man with the smallest lips decided to start his own talk show. He christened it “The Michael Showalter Showalter” and got Zach Galifianakis as his first guest. Hilarity ensued.

The above amazing video featuring Michael Cera is a parody of the below amazing video featuring Aleksey Vayner:

Awhile back a balding, pink-clad man with a closely cropped mustache and glasses hanging around his neck, appeared on “Real Time with Bill Maher” and, armed with a flame thrower of condescension and over-enunciation, completely obliterated any goodwill I had towards Richard Dreyfuss (which, admittedly, was not much). I don’t know where Dreyfuss 2.0 came from, but he attempted to hijack the show by rambling on and on about his new pet cause, civics, which he is apparently studying at Oxford, and by making broad, unintelligible and nonsensical statements about the state of the world, and what, according to him, is needed to right the universe.

For whatever reason, Dick decided that “Real Time” was the best time to climb atop the largest soap box he could possibly find and talk down to the lonely, unenlightened, civically ignorant proletariat of our country. Dick warned Bill Maher and the rest of his viewers that if “we” (which he elongates into three syllables) do not teach our kids “the ideas that make America a miracle” (he’s a little nebulous on what exactly these ideas are), that “we will lose it” to an axis of evil that, in his mind, include “fundamentalists of any stripe,” “stupidity,” and a third, more ominous force that Dreyfuss refers to simply as “the darkness.”

Dreyfuss then went on to frame the United States in some of the most overblown and unnecessarily dramatic terms I’ve ever heard. He states, “What this country represents is a tiny twinkle of light in a history of darkness and oppression and cruelty.” Jesus, Dick, when did you become such a Debbie Downer? The amazing thing is that Bill Maher and the rest of the guests on the show just sat there and let Dreyfuss spew forth his fountain of inanity and condescension uninterrupted. The only time when Bill actually acted like the host of the show was to correct Dreyfuss when he made the incredible claim that democracy is only 200-300 years old.

So how is this newly enlightened multi-millionaire going to change the world? In what I believe perfectly exemplifies how misguided and out of touch a lot of celebrities are, Dreyfuss has decided that he can best serve the community by helping set up a program to teach civics at a school in, wait for it…Martha’s Vineyard! That’s right, one of the richest municipalities in the country and the same place where “Jaws” was filmed is where Dreyfuss has decided to bestow his beneficence. It seems that, while he has been able to ward off the fundamentalists and keep “the darkness” at bay, stupidity has already overtaken him.

The Donald Rumsfeld I’ll remember

Donald Rumsfeld, the man who can at once query and answer himself, and who so eloquently said of beheading, “Does anyone think that’s a good idea—to chop people’s heads off, to encourage that? I don’t,” has stepped down from his post as Secretary of Defense after completing the job of sufficiently fucking everything up in Iraq.

But there’s more to Don Rumsfeld than just poor judgment and a marked disregard for reality, accountability, and proper planning. There’s a bold willingness to carry out ideas despite a dearth of military support and a mountain of criticism. But when you scratch the surface just a little bit more, and attempt to see past what the liberal, Jew-run media would have you believe, you’ll find that there lies a beautiful poet underneath the craggy old war hawk. A poet longing to sow the seed of his verse all over the land, wherever and whenever he can. Slate.com was able to see what so many others could not, and took to transliterating his oftentimes terse and labyrinthine Pentagon press corp statements into beguiling, quotidian poetry that calls to mind the great William Carlos Williams.

I’d like to share a few of the poems that Slate has extracted from the Rumsfeld Canon:

The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.

—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

Clarity
I think what you’ll find,
I think what you’ll find is,
Whatever it is we do substantively,
There will be near-perfect clarity
As to what it is.

And it will be known,
And it will be known to the Congress,
And it will be known to you,
Probably before we decide it,
But it will be known.

—Feb. 28, 2003, Department of Defense briefing

Happenings
You’re going to be told lots of things.
You get told things every day that don’t happen.

It doesn’t seem to bother people, they don’t—
It’s printed in the press.
The world thinks all these things happen.
They never happened.

Everyone’s so eager to get the story
Before in fact the story’s there
That the world is constantly being fed
Things that haven’t happened.

All I can tell you is,
It hasn’t happened.
It’s going to happen.

—Feb. 28, 2003, Department of Defense briefing

And then there’s the brief, philosophical Rummy ruminations on the state of this crazy thing we call life:

On NATO
You may think it’s something
I ought to know,
But I happen not to.
That’s life.
(July 9, 2003)

On Leaks
Look bumpy? Sure.
But you pick up
And go on.
That’s life.
(May 17, 2002)

On People
They’re going to have
Some impact on
What happens in that country
And that’s not wrong.
That’s life.
(Nov. 16, 2001)

On Criticism
It makes it complicated.
Sometimes, it makes
It difficult.
That’s life.
(Sept. 11, 2003)

THE POETRY OF DONALD RUMSFELD [SLATE.COM]

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: