Word: hopperful
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...thought I'd be dead before I was 30. Turning 40 stunned me. Fifty is a major miracle, and I think I may even make 70." So say other men who have just rounded the half-century mark, but Dennis Hopper is neither joking nor exaggerating. He is telling the sober truth. For a man whose name was once synonymous with drugs and booze to have survived to the age of 50 -- and have the audacity even to contemplate trying for the standard threescore and ten -- is no minor accomplishment. It is a megamiracle worthy of a Hollywood movie...
...precise, nine Hollywood movies, the number he has appeared in over the past two years, making him one of the busiest actors in a town that twice blackballed him. "When you're hot you're hot," says his friend Jack Nicholson, whom Hopper helped convert from a featured player to a star with their 1969 film Easy Rider. "As an actor Dennis stands out because of his edge, his sincerity, the honesty he conveys. But Dennis also paints. He takes pictures. He's got an extremely fine eye for life. He's a great appreciator with a great vision...
...Hopper's new films are done his way. Some, like last year's My Science Project and last summer's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, are best left off the resume. But one film -- David Lynch's Blue Velvet -- cannot be dismissed. An illustrated guide to Krafft-Ebing, Blue Velvet is perhaps the first film since 1972's Last Tango in Paris to scandalize its audience. At the end people are as likely to erupt in boos as to burst into applause...
...Hopper plays Frank Booth, a murderer, maimer, drug dealer, champion cusser, beer guzzler, helium snorter and Roy Orbison fan. Chiefly, though, Frank is a psychopathic sadist who tortures and humiliates a nightclub singer (Isabella Rossellini) for his sexual pleasure. "When I got the part, I wanted to reassure David that I could handle the role, that I understood the character," says Hopper. "I called him up and said, 'I am Frank.' I've been told that that remark caused the other actors some consternation...
...sips Heineken like a runner-up Homecoming Queen and proclaims with detached conviction, "It's a strange world." Isabella Rossellini is all lips and eyes as the tortured chanteuse. "Hit me, hit me," that S&M cliche, has resonance and poignancy in the context of her performance. Dennis Hopper is to-the-core nasty as the vile drug-killer; he was better in Apocalypse, Now, but it's hard to imagine any actor carrying this role off as well, or with more energy. Brad Dourif, babbling Billy Bibbit of Cuckoo's Nest fame, has a cameo, looking like John Cougar...