It’s a time of reflection for those in the unauthorized celebrity picture business. With Paris now firmly behind bars for the duration of June, Lindsay drying up in a posh suite somewhere in Malibu, Nicole trying to clean up her rep in time for her day in court, Brangelina giving it out for free to shill their respective new movies, and nary a rookie Celebritard climbing the ranks, the Paparazzi have a lot of free time on their hands. I wonder what they’ll do with all that free time? I mean really, who wants to spend the summer stalking those idiot Laguna Beach kids? L.C. is hot and all, but at some point you gotta remember why you got into this business. It was to be in the trenches, literally (the ones you dug in the dirt on the Malibu Cliffside while waiting for Tom and Nicole to go to breakfast). It was not to waste your time in front of The Standard at 2:30 am on a Tuesday on the off chance Kristin Cavallari walks out in a slinky dress and boots all over Hollywood Blvd. Though I wouldn’t mind seeing that.
So while the Paparazzi anxiously await the return of their skanky meal tickets from their respective detention centers and publicist enforced club bans, I put together a list of 21 things that the papz are likely to do with all there new found free time.
1. Stalking Jennifer Lopez, just for old times’ sake.
2. Going to the beach. Not to enjoy the ocean, but to practice burying themselves in the sand for the upcoming celebritard bikini season.
3. Hitting the gym. The treadmill, specifically. The new breed of star is mighty quick. Gotta practice getting out of the way of speeding, bloodthirsty Mercedes’.
4. Snubbing George Clooney in public, giving the star a false sense of security, waiting two minutes, and then casually following him around for the rest of the day at a safe, seemingly harmless distance.
5. Having epiphanies about their empty soulless existence, but then ultimately deciding not to get out of Jennifer Aniston’s garbage can.
6. Banding together to heighten the tabloid intensity on Hayden Panetierre in the vein hopes she very quickly becomes the next La Lohan. TV stars make the best celebritards (Hi, Shannen Doherty!). Unfortunately, as we all know, the only person who can truly create a satisfactory is celebritard is the Celebrinator herself, Paris Hilton. And though she is truly omnipotent, not even Ms. Jailbird Hilton can skankify a perfectly respectable young girl from behind bars. She can still give the girl herpes, just not celebritardation.
7. Actually eating in the trendy restaurants they camp out at.
8. Catching up on their Netflix queue. Mel Gibson’s movie Paparazzi has been ironically sitting on their coffee table for months (it’s hard to get up the urge to watch Tom Sizemore act at night when you have to take perp walk pictures of him all day).
9. Sucking up to Harvey Leven.
10. Not returning Jessica Simpson’s publicist’s phone calls.
11. Going to rehab to kick their insatiable, life-crushing Brangelina habit. While at rehab, trying to learn Vietnamese to they can use more effective ways of getting Pax Thien Jolie-Pitt to look at their camera. Something tells me the paparazzi rehab would be about as effective as the gayhab Isiah Washington snored through during FaggotGate.
12. Continuing to bribe Lindsay Lohan’s duplicitous, picture stealing “friends”.
13. Competing in a last man standing style game of “not it!” to determine who will have the unenviable task of having to cover Rosie O’Donnell.
14. Wondering out loud why Tara Reid hasn’t stepped up to get some of the free tabloid limelight. After all, for the next month there will be a considerable dearth of “drunk celebritard falling out of a limo” pics, for which she is immensely suited for.
15. Scrapbooking.
16. Reading all the recent “Ben Affleck Is Coming Back” articles, realizing how much unwarranted hell they caused him back in the day and vowing to somehow make it up to him. Not by ever watching one of his movies, but maybe by not taking those extra forty pictures of him looking scrubby at Starbucks.
17. Recommitting themselves to capturing an illicit shot of Hillary Duff doing anything at all even remotely interesting. This might prove to be a herculean task.
18. Googling Kim Kardashian and still not understanding why her picture is worth anything.
19. Getting drunk and mischievous and sending in an order to Pink Dot for three cases of Grey Goose to be delivered to Promises Malibu under the name “Han, Lo”.
20. Weighing their options of getting out of bed to snap bikini pics of Britney Spears. On the one hand, it’s an easy shot that will sell. On the other hand, they’ll inevitably spend the night throwing up their lunch, followed be restless fever dreams of cellulite-ridden buttocks devouring tiny blue thongs, scored to Britney’s dance club hit “Toxic”. What price dignity, eh?
21. Doing what any normal person with a telephoto lens would do… taking close up, high-res pictures of their junk.
Bangarang!
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In honor of the most hectic day of the year for crazy, on-the-VT-edge postal workers (too soon?), I dug through the garbage bins of the Beverly Hills branch of H & R Block and found a slew of Celebrity Tax Forms. I’m ommitted a lot of the information (such as Paris Hilton listing her occupation as “princess”), but I will reveal some of the more, shall we say, ludicrous things that celebrities try to deduct on their taxes. You’d think for the all the money they make and free schwag they’re given that they wouldn’t need to even itemize their deductions, but apparently stars are just as stingy as us plebes.
Nicole Richie: $7.50 for food-related costs (she went to In-N-Out one time in June last year)
Ed Norton: $800 billion deduction for illegal, untested steroids to get into proper shape to play the Incredible Hulk. Apparently, as smart as he is, he didn’t realize the Hulk would be in CGI. Norton just assumed Eric Bana was that ripped (This isn’t so hard to believe).
There are many great things about the movie 300. The stunning digital cinematography. The slo-mo shots of bloody, epic carnage. Gerard Butler stealing Sean Connery’s trick of playing all his characters with a Scottish accent. Lena Headey’s boobs. But what most people are focused on are the utterly yoked out bodies of the Spartan warriors. Ripped, shredded, ridonkulously pumped, call it what you will, those boys were in wicked good shape. They got that way through a training regimen called, coincidentally, the “300 Reps Workout”. The workout (created by Mark Twight, at his gym 
Paris can do the workout in twenty-two minutes flat. Lindsay has been known to complete two sets back-to-back at twenty-five minutes a piece. Nicole can do the circuit in twenty-one minutes, but she substitutes 50 Dry Heaves for the 50 Single-Arm Drink Lifts. And at her peak, Britney could do the “300 Clubs Workout” in under eighteen minutes. She was a true prodigy!
Paris Hilton – The “300 Clubs Workout” is the reason I am the most highly-regarded Celebritard in the entire world! That’s hot!
THINGS I SAW IN 2006 THAT WERE REALLY, REALLY GOOD
Not every movie is supposed to make you think, some just want to entertain you. And in the case of Jackass Number Two, that’s alright with me. I didn’t laugh more in any other film this year. Gross, disgusting, vulgar, violent and awesome. I make no excuses for loving this flick, or for rating it as high as I did. When a movie so thoroughly entertains you that it takes a couple minutes to come up with something funnier or more subversively brilliant, you put it in your Top Ten, period.
Jack being Jack, Damon being awesomely squirrelly, Leo rocking the crazed “guy at the end of his rope” thing he does so well, Mark Wahlberg spitting some mad Boston game, and Alec Baldwin kicking ass harder than anyone else since his own turn in Glengarry Glen Ross; I loved this movie. Perfectly paced and plotted, superbly cast, acted, shot and edited. The only misstep of the entire picture is the final shot, which I felt was just a bit too on the nose. But that is forgiven, as the flick is so supremely watchable. And it may be the most quotable movie of the year. Anything that came out of Wahlberg or Baldwin’s mouth was pure gold. Here are my two favorite pieces of dialogue from the film:
Gritty, demanding, propulsive and powerful, this Alfonso Cuaron-directed film is the best sci-fi flick of 2006. I was impressed with how confident the film was about the world it created. Set in a dystopian, infertile 2027, the world looks quite like it does today, only with minor futuristic flourishes (which is how it should be. I hate when futuristic movies have us so technologically advanced that the world is unrecognizable. It would take 80 years and many trillions of dollars to erase the poverty line and tech up the lower class, so filmmakers, let’s get off the grift). The forward momentum of the movie is exhilarating. You just can’t look back, the film won’t let you. It has a mission and you are either on board or you’re not. Clive Owen and Julianne Moore are their usual perfection and Michael Caine gives a wonderful performance as a pothead, ex-political cartoonist. I liked other films more than Children of Men this year, but I can’t deny this film’s raw power. Most of all, the film has arguably the most emotional scene in any film all year. When Owen is bringing the baby down the hospital stairs, well let’s just say it got a little dusty in the theater.
I generally loathe all things British. Can’t stand British comedy (especially Monty Python), never got into Guy Ritchie, I want to sock James Blunt in the larynx, and I’d choose Rachel McAdams over Rachel Weisz any day of the week and twice on Sundays. All that is too say my chances of liking a film about the British Royal Family were remote to say the least. And yet, ten minutes into the masterful “The Queen” I turned to my theater companion and said “this is fantastic”. Helen Mirren gives hands-down the best performance of the year. She is pitch-perfect and heartbreaking as Queen Elizabeth II. The journey her character takes to try and understand the changing emotions of her people is as emotional and rewarding a narrative arc as I saw all year. 
Dirt – I can understand Courtney Cox not wanting to ever do another “nice girl” part in her career. If I had to smile in every scene for 237 episodes of Friends, I’d want to play a raving bitch, too. What I can’t understand is basing your new show around a schizophrenic paparazzi with no range beyond “twitchy”. Don’t be fooled by the promos, Dirt is not about Monica Gellar gone bad. It’s about a crazy, unattractive, drugged-out photographer and his inability to cope with his beloved cat’s death. I wish I were kidding. The rest of the show is a send-up of the cutthroat Hollywood rat race that Entourage does better, graphic cable TV sex that Nip / Tuck makes hotter, and racy language I’d rather see coming out of Vic Mackey on The Shield. Killing Shannyn Sossamon in the pilot was a stroke of brilliance, but having nothing else to offer is a mark of supreme short-sightedness. Dirt may have something else up its sleeve, but I’m not interested in waiting around for the big reveal.
January 2007 Crazebrity Power Rankings* 
A few more salient facts:
While we’re on the subject, I was researching the whole dragons suck at the box office phenomenon and found that Dragonheart is the highest grossing flick of the bunch. This surprises me because it stars Dennis Quaid. Long the poor man’s Kurt Russell, The Quaid has never been able to open a movie at the box office, even the blockbusters that were gift-wrapped for him. His Jaws sequel, while kitschy fun (“Overman was killed inside the park. The baby was caught inside the park. It’s mother is inside the park.”), was 
Well, I did not see this coming. But maybe it’s just me. The other day I was walking down the street when suddenly I had a panic attack because the whole sky started turning black. Where was the sun going? Then later that night I couldn’t understand why I was so tired at the end of a day. And then my stomach starting hurting, but I’m not sure why I was hungry, after all, I ate once already that day. Why do these things always happen to me? Why do celebrity marriages always end in tragedy? I’m so confused, and scared.
This whole union was, for lack of a better word, inevitable. I would venture that not a soul that follows pop culture would have suspecting these kids would be the next Newman and Woodward. Or even the next Tori Spelling and that first guy she married and then divorced to be with the guy she’s with now who knocked her up and convinced her to bail on Lifetime movies to run a bed and breakfast in NoCal, even though Lifetime residuals were the only thing keeping her from selling her stuff on eBay, and oops, too late (I think his name is Tom, or something). The Spears-Federline dissolution was so inevitable, I had refused to write about it. I’ll make jokes about Reese Witherspoon having talent before I spend brain power and typing time on the thought that this match made in trailer-trash Hostess Heaven would last beyond the release of her next album (which, by the way, is due out early next year). I just didn’t want to waste my time.
