Word: mickey
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...Gwen very competently summarized the conventional wisdom you'd already been hearing all day. She didn't really move the ball." - Slate blogger and journalist Mickey Kaus...
...first part of JCVD is bored and contemptuous.) Most of the film, though, is unsparing of the Van Damme legend. With the star, now 47, looking puffy and played out, and with so many references to his off-screen philandering and drug use, the movie bears comparison to Mickey Rourke's turn in The Wrestler, also at Toronto. Except that this one is sharper, crueler, way funnier - part parody, part exposé, especially in an eight-minute take of the star in closeup, where Van Damme makes a confession of his personal and career sins, and the tough guy ends...
...Soon he started making good on my bet. Within a few years, Rourke had won starring roles in a bunch of fascinating weirdies: Francis Coppola's Rumble Fish (Mickey was Motorcycle Boy), The Pope of Greenwich Village, Michael Cimino's Year of the Dragon, the S-M erotic drama Nine 1/2 Weeks (with Kim Basinger, who also made a comeback at Venice in The Burning Plain), the satanic thriller Angel Heart (De Niro was the Devil), as a gangster in Elephant Man makeup in Johnny Handsome and a lowlife genius in a film of Charles Bukowski's Barfly directed...
...special effect monster, his own Incredible Hulk. (It's the rare movie where the closing credits for Makeup and Mr. Rourke's Trainer are well deserved.) Reviewers love watching actors abuse their bodies for their art almost as much as actors love doing it. That's one reason Mickey should be a guest of honor at the year-end critics' awards dinners. Another is that Rourke's bio blends with the story of The Wrestler, but with a happier ending. His career has come back from the dead; any award would be like a posthumous prize to someone...
...even someone like me, who knows in his bones that The Wrestler is bogus, can cheer the return of Mickey Rourke. And not because it's nice that he seems to have turned his life around and focused again on doing what he once did so well, but because the best writers and directors might have to put Rourke on the short list of actors up for great roles. The man from the past has a future again. (See photos of the Venice Film Festival here...