Word: penns
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Starring Sean Penn, Kevin Spacey...
...Basketball vs. Penn...
...most valuable aspect of the movie is the ontological crisis casting director Eddie (Sean Penn) undergoes. One could argue that you don't need a screen version of this play to figure this out, but really this movie can be seen as another attempt at a definitive stage version: Rabe strongly disagreed with Mike Nicholas' 1984 Broadway version, revised the play after directing it himself in 1988 and now finally takes another crack at it with this screen adaptation of beautiful downtown 1998. Many of Rabe's revisions heightened the themes of destiny and accident (e.g engineered or semi-engineered...
...other mocked epigram of your choice. Eddie reads it, rereads it, challenges fellow Hollywood exec Mickey (Kevin Spacey) with it, parses it, looks up the dictionary definitions for its component words, angrammizes it, does virtually everything but paper his walls with it and make a website for it. Penn looks most frighteningly and convincingly insane at this point, even compared to the histrionics of other scenes. The obsession the note holds for him reminds one of starving or parched cartoon characters for whom everything they lay eyes on turns into a rump roast or bottle to be uncorked...
...electronic hearth. How to distinguish anything in this white noise? Reduce everything to a series of zeroes and ones, of equivalences and otherwise? In perhaps the screens' best-ever depiction of date realism, Eddie pigheadedly refuses to allow the don't-mind answer of Darlene (Robin Wright Penn) to two dining options. He wants specifics, he wants the truth, a clear connection or relation, even where it isn't relevant or existent...