SPENCER: My God... As of now, ladies, I am in control here, in Crappy Hour, pending the return of Moe Tkacik. If something came up, I would check with Megan, of course.

MEGAN: It would help if I weren't sitting right here, and if you had access to the publishing system...

SPENCER: Curses... and so ends the coup.

MEGAN: Foiled again! If it wasn't for you nosy kids...

SPENCER: So hi from the back seat of my friends Michael and Dafna's Volkswagen Rabbit, careening south on 95, nearing the Susquehanna.

MEGAN: Yes, enough Scooby Doo references, this is totally a place for adults to talk about adult things. Like Paris Hilton.

SPENCER: John McCain is, at this point, the mother of all ironies: Kathy Hilton complaining about "a complete waste of the country's time and attention at the very moment when millions of people are losing their homes and their jobs." Kathy, your family could hire them all; you could house all the Katrina victims who still need housing.

MEGAN: On the other hand, you think someone in McCain's ad department could've called over to the fundraising department and said, hey, um, are these prominent Hollywood Republican friends of his donors? Or gone to Open Secrets.

SPENCER: Notice how the woman in the Times' photo is named Laura Hilton
yeah, really — Rick Davis needs that $4,600 pretty badly! Also, how could you not think about the consequences of pointing out that your candidate is funded by Paris Hilton's family?

MEGAN: They were probably too busy trying to fit as many Antichrist references in thirty seconds as possible without tipping off the non-Rapture contingent.

SPENCER: OK, please explain this to your Jewboy interlocutor
it seems pretty disgusting — every quote is out of context, for instance — but I am surely missing a ton of scriptural dogwhistles.

MEGAN: Okay, so, there's this thing called The Rapture. You're excluded. Apparently, all the "good" Christian evangelicals of the world (so, I'm excluded, too) will be brought directly to God as soon as the Antichrist takes over the world. Someone, somewhere decided Obama is the Antichrist, aka, the harbinger of the Rapture.

SPENCER: Ahhhhh see, and in the Left Behind series, the Antichrist is a Romanian. How diabolical of Obama! We always knew the Devil would have a smooth tongue.

MEGAN: So, technically my understanding is that evangelicals should actually, like, exalt his candidacy and vote for him because the Rapture is a good thing, but I'm sure I'm missing something like their actual belief that they themselves will be Raptured because God knows what they're doing behind closed doors (but, in one case at least, it involved two wetsuits, a butt dildo and auto-erotic asphyxia). But, yes, "The One" is actually "The Antichrist" and not the Messiah. Or the Highlander, for that matter. I wonder whatever happened to that guy.

Oh, nothing, never mind.

SPENCER: Now, if McCain wanted to say that Obama is the Devil he wouldn't just use the booming-voice narrator and the churchy (to my ignorant ears) guitar music in the background, he'd hire the guy who narrate the last track on Integrity's Humanity Is The Devil album.

MEGAN: But, see, the Antichrist isn't the devil exactly. It's different somehow. This is where the fundies lose me too.

SPENCER: Another tin ear for McCain! White dudes will vote for the Highlander.

MEGAN: Yes, totally, Obama needs to start going to cons.

SPENCER: The Antichrist is the Devil's handmaiden or something? Whoa, Baltimore tunnel.

MEGAN: Obama is sucking the devils dick!

SPENCER: I may lose connectivity.

MEGAN: That's cool, I'll wait the whole 3 minutes.

SPENCER: So the Devil is Larry Sinclair, then you know, speaking of things white people like: Barack Obama.

MEGAN: I believe the deal is that the whole thing is pre-ordained anyway, so it's not like Good and Evil, but it's all God's plan or some shit. He is pretty! He's going on vacation to Hawai'i soon, so there will be new topless pictures for us!

SPENCER: My ex-boss has this great catch in today's WaPo story:

Obama's advantage is attributable largely to overwhelming support from two traditional Democratic constituencies: African Americans and Hispanics. But even among white workers — a group of voters that has been targeted by both parties as a key to victory in November — Obama leads McCain by 10 percentage points, 47 percent to 37 percent, and has the advantage as the more empathetic candidate.

So my Q to you: is there any demographic group that can decide the election that McCain leads among?

MEGAN: What I like is that those people don't think either candidate will make a bit of difference in their day-to-day lives! And people say they're not smart. I think he does better among rich old white people. That's, like, Florida.

SPENCER: But this is a GOP goldmine demographic that knows everything about McCain and nearly nothing about Obama, and they're going for Obama hard. That should be a nice campaign palliative now that I'm reading that Obama's lead is gone in the Gallup poll.

MEGAN: And McCain is now vetting Eric Cantor for the Jewish vote and to keep Virginia red. Obama's up in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, though.

SPENCER: That right there is a testimonial to the antipathy of the Tribespeople to the GOP. I think Eric Cantor was the nasally kid who ratted me out to the teacher for feeling up a classmate of mine at East Midwood Jewish Center.

MEGAN: By the way, when we were at dinner with Erica at Zengo that time and I was like, dammit, who is that guy? That guy was Eric Cantor.

SPENCER: Was Joe Lieberman not charismatic enough? Oh right, I forgot: We don't like that asshole, either.

Shit, really? That was why our dinner took for-fucking-ever? I'm going to get J Street to destroy him.

MEGAN: Yes, yes it was. Another reason not to like him. Amusingly, McCain operatives, I mistook him for someone that works for Blunt because I've never seen him do anything but toady up to Blunt. And because he looks 15.

SPENCER: Speaking of blunt, as in unsubtle, and FUCKING IDIOTIC, an Obama ad more annoying than the Encyclopedia Britannica ad with that longhair douche. You know what a campaign getting attacked for elitism needs? More Gwyneth Paltrow.

MEGAN: Also, she's the worst actor in the whole fucking commercial. It's like she thinks she's talking to learning disabled children.

SPENCER: Right, I keep expecting her to tell me that my 50-cent donation will make all the difference to Aspergers' sufferers.

MEGAN: I mean, these are Americans who actually bothered learning to speak another language. Except for her, I mean, she's just in London.

SPENCER: And who approved the two assholes who are like "I'll be voting from Paris!" "Me too!"?

MEGAN: Someone in London, probably.

SPENCER: "...and I'll be eating arugula out of my gay husband's butt on a bed of shredded Bibles! We're just in the next Arrondisement!"

MEGAN: Speaking of arugula, Honest Tea is the new arugula, and that's just unfair because Honest Tea rocks. Just because McCain is from Arizona doesn't mean the rest of us should be forced to drink that swill.

SPENCER: We part company: Arizona ice tea got me through junior high, along with Snapples and Quarterwater.

MEGAN: And now that you're not 12, which would you rather drink?

SPENCER: What kind of elitist would rather drink ice tea that doesn't come from a powder?

MEGAN: Or lettuce that isn't iceberg?

SPENCER: Women of loose morals like yourself, clearly.

[New York, June 23. Image via INFDaily.]

Newsweek:

Many people had a hard time imagining Downey donning superhero garb. In truth, it's hard to imagine "Iron Man" without him. For without his ironic hipster spin, without his rapid, off-speed line readings, which can make the most ordinary exposition sound like tossed-off improvs, this would be just another generic action picture with risible villains, a conventional story arc, and the inevitable showdown between two lumbering hunks of CGI metal—Iron Man vs. the even larger Iron Monger.

But the real treat is for grownups, who get a beguiling character study behind and above the special effects. Favreau — who directed the best Will Ferrell comedy (Elf) and an agreeably mature fantasy (Zathura: A Space Adventure), and before that wrote and starred in Swingers, maybe the sharpest buddy comedy of the '90s — knows that, when making a big movie, you do not leave your I.Q. at the soundstage door; you bend your gifts in different directions. He lends Iron Man the unobtrusive speed and precision of classic comedy. An actor before he was a director, he's not content to let his stars play stereotypes, or even archetypes. Bridges and Toub, and Gwyneth Paltrow as Stark's gal Friday (the most attractive she's been in years), aren't slumming in the least. They're rising to the material, and elevating it.

Like Tony Stark, Iron Man the movie has a maddening way of hiding its light (Downey) under a bushel—actually bushels and bushels—of special effects. During the action sequences (especially the disappointing final one, a face-off between Stark's Iron Man and Stane's Iron Monger), this movie could be any expensive summer blockbuster, with exploding tanks and bisected city buses and faceless mega-robots duking it out on rooftops. But when it's idling in neutral, and we're watching Stark putter in his workshop or seduce unsuspecting journalists, Iron Man abounds in that rarest of superpowers: charm.

The ace up Iron Man's sleeve, quite unexpectedly, is Gwyneth Paltrow, who brings both radiance and gentle intelligence to the role of a glorified housekeeper called Pepper Potts. How she takes out the laundry in those heels is beyond me, but she's a great sport for doing it, and her dry chemistry with our hero is worth a dozen atomic warheads. Downey may be the smartest star in a mask since Michael Keaton, but this fun, rattling picture would be all boys and toys without Paltrow to humour him.

The genius of the production lies in the agility with which it leaps from one mode to another. I'll be happy to see it again — and plan to do so over the weekend — for the pleasure of Mr. Downey's company, plus the genuine sophistication of the world that Tony Stark inhabits when he isn't driving his sexy cars or bedding a sexy writer from a glossy magazine. The serious-ish plot involves Tony's spiritual conversion from an arms magnate to a peacenik at war with his own corporation and the military-industrial complex, not to mention global terrorism, while his comic-book origins give him what amounts to an Achilles heart, a nuclear-powered device that makes him vulnerable as a man and all but invincible as his alter ego.

As Stark soars around in his titanium alloy outfit, aiming fireballs with perfect precision, he is as potent a figure as Superman. He's as rich as Bruce Wayne with an extra dollop of science-guy nerdiness, finished off with a heaping dose of snark. Iron Man's biggest strength is that the fantastically armored suit doesn't overpower the intriguingly flawed character encased within.

Wearing a goatee right out of the beatnik '50s, he's fast and frictionless, as airlessly ironic as a talk-show host who's been shoved onto the air at 3 a.m. and left to his own what-the-hell devices. The key to Downey's mocking, crumpled charm is that no matter whom he's talking to, he's really just nattering to himself. When he climbs into his Iron Man machine suit, with its whirring, clicking limbs and plated chest, flamethrower arms, and mask of a medieval knight, he doesn't disappear behind the tin-can walls of that chunky, atomic-age jet-pack robot. He's still there, a deftly fragile motormouth — a damaged soul who needs armor to fully become himself.

The hero must flex and furrow his brow; the bad guy must glower and scheme; the girl must shriek and fret. There should also be a skeptical but supportive friend. Those are the rules of the genre, as unbreakable as the pseudoscientific principles that explain everything (An arc reactor! Of course!) and the Law of the Bald Villain. In "Iron Man" it all plays out more or less as expected, from the trial-and-error building of the costume to the climactic showdown, with lots of flying, chasing and noisemaking in between. (I note that there is one sharp, subversive surprise right at the very end.)

What is less expected is that Mr. Favreau, somewhat in the manner of those sly studio-era craftsmen who kept their artistry close to the vest so the bosses wouldn't confiscate it, wears the genre paradigm as a light cloak rather than a suit of iron. Instead of the tedious, moralizing, pop-Freudian origin story we often get in the first installments of comic-book-franchise movies — childhood trauma; identity crisis; longing for justice versus thirst for revenge; wake me up when the explosions start — "Iron Man" plunges us immediately into a world that crackles with character and incident.

Downey clearly has a ball playing the weapons dealer Stark, best described as a cross between James Bond, Mick Jagger and Howard Hughes (whom Lee reportedly based Stark on). During an early flashback sequence, he's portrayed as a kid in a testosterone-laced candy store, living in a concrete temple to modernism in Malibu, delegating his longtime assistant Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) to dispatch his one-night stands with dry-cleaned clothes and a limo home, partying with his Pentagon liaison Jim Rhodes (Terrence Howard) in a private plane that, after a few drinks, transforms into a flying strip club. Once the guns start going off, "Iron Man" is fueled by so many explosions and sundry ejaculatory ya-yas that watching it is akin to sneaking into a treehouse past a sign saying "No Girls Allowed."

It's not difficult to guess where this is heading — Marvel stories are all permutations on a handful of stock scenarios — but Favreau doesn't blow it up any more than he has to. In "Elf" and "Zathura" he showed he could integrate special effects and carry the story, but like Downey, he's almost always looking for a comic spin.

A scene in which Tony invites his assistant, Pepper Potts (an appealingly valiant Gwyneth Paltrow), to reach into the hole in his chest and fix his battery is a cheeky cocktail of trust, disgust, love, sex, fear and courage (it's also a key plant for subsequent developments), but above all it plays funny. When a movie is firing on all those cylinders, you know it's a winner.