Sean Penn on Roger Ebert and film criticism

"Everyone's a critic these days aren't they? You put yourself out there, either as an Academy-award winning actor or a social crusader, the price you pay is the slings and arrows of some irrelevant boner goblins I guess.

It's easy to point the finger and be a jackass, but much harder to actually put your heart and soul on the line when it counts.

Reminds me of when Roger Ebert slammed my performance as idealistic gubernatorial candidate Willie Stark in 2006's All The King's Men, calling it - and I quote - 'a scenery chewing performance of biblical proportions.'

That jelly-jawed buffoon has always had it in for me since my riproaring salad days in the eighties. He lambasted my turn as the Django-styled guitarist Emmett Ray in Sweet & Lowdown, and called my performance in 21 Grams 'even worse than a Tabasco-drenched cocktail umbrella down the japseye during unprotected bestial sex.'

But it was when he coldly savaged my directorial skills on The Pledge in an issue of Variety magazine that I knew I had to step in.

I caught him at the premiere of Mystic River and rained down upon him a maelstrom of violence, the likes of which had not been seen since the Battle of Thermopylae.

I was pounding his marshmallow head on the concrete like Whitney pounding a crackpipe. The front of Mann's Chinese Theatre looked like a Jackson Pollock joint when I was done with his tweedy Jimmy Buffett-listening ass.

Ebert goes around telling people that his recent facemelt appearance is due to thyroid cancer, but that's bullshit. I can assure you its because he was on the business end of a kingsize knuckle sandwich smorgasbord from yours truly."

Sean Penn on Kevin Spacey and violence against women

"Wally, I know we haven't spoken in a little while now. I've been too busy kicking ass and taking names with those snaggletoothed limeys and their imperialist claim on the Malvinas.

It ain't the 19th century, England, and you sure as shit ain't Lord Nelson, so you might as well direct that energy into fixing your country's cocksmoking Flintstones-era infrastructure before you start trying to lord it over others like King fuckin' George VI.

But enough of that. I'm here now to drop some jewels like a burglar with Parkinson's. Time for another Sean Penn tale from the trenches of Hollywood. Let's go.

The year was 1998. Cher was riding high in the charts with that tweeked out vocoder shit and I was filming Hurly Burly with my good friends Chazz Palminteri and Gary Shandling. Unfortunately I was sharing top billing with that overrated wannabe Brit and closeted fruit cup K-Space.

That hammy fuck has always been a fly in the ointment you know, a true party pooper and buzzkill. Spacey also has some serious issues with women, most notable of which is that he doesn't like penetrating them.

Now I'm no reactionary bigot. Love of any kind in these crazy end days of ours should be embraced, even if its of the homme sur homme persuasion. Nobody deserves to be gunned down for their sexual orientation by some disgruntled public servant hopped up on Twinkies and self-loathing. Yeah that was a reference to Harvey Milk.

But that limpwristed cockjockey Spaceman took it one step too far. He started blaming everything that went wrong on set with the lovely Anna Paquin, calling her a she-Devil, shouting at her with his trademark pomp and bluster. One time there was a mix-up with the catering crew, and it looked like he was about to get all Ike Turner on Paquin like white on rice. 

You think I'd stand about and let a beautiful woman take a beating from some second rate Redford? Hell to the N-O.

I jumped Spacey and tore him about six or seven new assholes before he even knew which way was up. I'm not a violent man by nature but there's NEVER an excuse for a grown man hitting a woman.

By the time Shandling pulled me off that Keizer Soze pink doughnut fuck, he was bleeding from every orifice as though he'd just been cockpumped by a dozen hardcore bodybuilding motherfuckers out the back of Studio 54 like it was '77 again.

Spacey took off to England not long after, hiding out at the Old Vic in some pencil-pushing job as their artistic director. He claims he wanted to get back to his theatrical roots, but mainly he knows if we cross paths again it'll be on like Donkey Kong."

A Special Valentine's Day Message From Sean Penn

"Now I like some candlelight and canoodling as much as the next guy, but Valentine's Day is nothing but a ploy for corporate douchebags like Hallmark to line their coffers with the hard earned wages of the working man.

You don't need a sanctioned day in the calendar to get your inner freak on, buddies. Like my friend the gregarious child-baiter Roman Polanski always says, 'ever-ree day is zee ... 'ow you say... jour de Valen-teeeeen.'

Now all this talk of hackneyed romantic sentiment and vapid consumerism takes me back to the 1980s, back when I was in over my head with the Material Girl herself. Yep, it's time for another Sean Penn morality tale from the trenches of Hollywood. 

Now I'll be the first to say that I was young, dumb and riding on the Hokusai wave of my ego. I was in my twenties, had a stomach you could carve bread on, plus I still kicked off each morning with a boner the size of the Seattle Space Needle.

You wouldn't think it now with her leather saddle face and goosehonk Jersey Shore accent, but back then Madonna was some primo fuckin' trim my friends. I mean, even before I met her I was spilling gallons of man milk to that Lucky Star video.

So anyway we finally met at the MTV Video Music Awards in '84, I fingerbanged her while Wang Chung were onstage performing and it was on like Donkey Kong.

Amour Fou, as the French call it. That whole time was intense. The combination of that smelly Eye-tie pussy and all the disco dandruff floating around Hollywood sent me temporarily insane. She was always on at me to buy her shit. Cartier this, Vuitton that. And like a fool I complied.

Then coming up to Valentine's Day it all popped off. She said she wanted a diamond encrusted dildo and a romatic sejourn in the Maldives, complete with two white stallions we would ride around the island on in between bouts of frenetic sex.

That's when I had to stop giving in and start getting real.

I took Madonna to one side and told her that being with Hollywood heart-throb Sean Penn should be enough for any woman. Material possessions won't fill a spiritual void. 

And even if she had some grade A poontang that was whistlin' dixie, the Platinum Amex was going back in the wallet with the quickness.

She went berserk, shouting at me through her nose about how she was the greatest music star in the world, the Queen of Pop, and so on and so on and so on until I broke out my Louisville Slugger and went Babe Ruth on her ovaries.

And that was that. We got divorced later that year. I guess what I'm trying to say is, just as Luther Vandross and Janet Jackson confirmed on the Mo' Money soundtrack, 'the best things in life are free'. Love, democracy and clean potable water for the developing world. 

So this Valentine's Day, you can either drop some major benjamins on a fancy restaurant and let them do the heavy lifting ... or you can run your girl a bath, slip on Sade's Diamond Life LP and get all Gene Simmons on her map of Tasmania. You tell me which one is guaranteed to have her painting the walls white."

Sean Penn on Dogtown and the challenges of voiceover work

"It's a tough gig doing voiceovers. You do it wrong and you can destroy an otherwise good project, do it right and people will hardly notice you're there.

Pretty thankless role to play for the most part, like a job as a fluffer on some 3rd rate porn set in the Valley or being English.

Of course, I've tried my hand at narration for my good friend Stacy Peralta on his epic skater documentary Dogtown & Z Boys. That was a clusterfuck of truly biblical proportions. Let me break it down, Steve Hawking-style.

Now for my main man Stacy, this was a true labour of love, a heartfelt rumination on his youth and the emergence of a new kind of physical poetry on the mean streets of 1970s Venice Beach. For the rest of us living in the real world, it was just a bunch of hep-c riddled latchkey brats zipping round on skateboards and acting like shitheads.

Alva was no help here either, these two middle aged has-beens egging each other on like Leopold and Loeb, so convinced they were of their cultural importance and overall badassery.

When Peralta insisted I refer to him as 'the Proust of the half pipe', I knew I was gonna have to drop some serious truth bombs like Brando in Apocalypse Now. Oh the horror, the horror.

I took Stacy to one side and told him that it wasn't my job as the voiceover guy to try and add gravitas to his project, I was just there to call it like I see it. Once the narrator starts pushing some trumped up agenda, your film goes down the toilet quicker than a 12-week Denise Richards scrape job.

Tony Alva started playing the big man of course, dude must have had an acid flashback and thought he was 19 again and started peacocking.

I slapped that fuckin' goose down quicktime and let him know what the fuck was what. I've done time in county jail, and I wasn't gonna be sidelined by some white man in his forties rocking dreads in this day and age... for fuck's sake he looked like Rob Zombie beaten down with the AIDS bat.

Needless to say, Peralta got his act together and we cleaned up at Sundance that year. Like Shakespeare once wrote, 'an empty vessel makes the loudest noise'. Have a think on that one, and I'll catch you on the flipside."

Sean Penn on Michael Douglas and sex addiction

"Hot damn, you thought Ashton Kutcher's mum was up for it 24/7, well she don't have shit on the Dougster back in his prime. When we were filming The Game it was intense. Sexually. 

This was before he got married to Catherine Zeta Jones, and he was on a roll back in the nineties with hit films like Falling Down and The American President.

The combination of playing the POTUS and some beleagured defense contractor who goes batshit with a Louisville Slugger obviously hotwired his brain somehow, and Douglas was out of control like a monkey on Viagra. 

Fincher would talk us through the day's scenes, and Douglas would be rubbing his crotch on the nearest camera stand, whispering "maaaamy" and staring off into the distance. At lunch he would hit the catering table, cock out, stuffing egg salad sandwiches down the front of his pleated Armani trousers and insisting the staff call him "Bad Spanky" and then spit on him.

When he cornered James Rebhorn and insisted he stick two fingers up his rectum and shout  the lyrics to 'Tubthumping' by Chumbawumba in his ear while Douglas beat himself off with a soft fruit peeler, I knew I had to step in.

I took MD to one side and set him straight. I said just because he has some weird Freudian deal due to catching his dad rimjobbing the pool boy as a young lad didn't give him the right to foist his demented proclivities upon the rest of us. Keeping it in our pants is what separates us from the animals. And the French.

Needless to say, he got his act together, zipped up, and delivered a stellar performance as bewildered investment banker Nicholas Van Orton."