Word: roberte
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Last time we spoke, I was moderating a phone interview between you and Robert Smith of the Cure. Did you guys ever get back in touch...
...maybe 40 lb., studded his face and body with the scars of war - to play a has-been fighter hoping for a last shot at the big time. It's the kind of punishment that won kudos for Lon Chaney and Paul Muni in the old days and helped Robert De Niro to an Oscar in Raging Bull playing Jake LaMotta. (He got himself into fighting shape, then he gained a ton of weight! Acting!) One more because: Rourke does strong, sensitive work here, which will cheer his old-time admirers and win him new fans. All praise...
...Wrestler never rose above fight-movie bromides, never dispelled my gloom. The character stereotyping makes Sylvester Stallone's Rocky Balboa, by comparison, seem as swathed in moral ambiguity as Luchino Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers. The movie's serioso sentimentality is doubly strange since the script is by Robert Siegel, an ex-staffer of The Onion and co-writer of The Onion Movie. His old job was puncturing clichés; here he recycles them...
...This decade he did a swell turn, again under a ton of makeup, as a vengeful ex-con in the Robert Rodriguez-Frank Miller Sin City. On his few forays into late-night talk (one visit with David Letterman sticks in my mind), the host would breathe a sigh of relief to find Rourke roguishly charming; the bull hadn't demolished the china. But mostly his rep kept him MIA. When he came up for the role of Randy, he recalled in Venice, Aronofsky told him: "You're a really great actor, and you've just f______ up your career...
...Pentagon has made clear that the U.S. will leave Afghanistan when the ragtag Afghan security forces have been beefed up to the point at which they can keep the peace without help. "Significantly expanding [Afghanistan's national security forces] is, in fact, our exit strategy," Defense Secretary Robert Gates told U.S. troops in Kandahar last week. But that's a strategy that could leave U.S. forces in Afghanistan for quite some time to come. The economy of impoverished Afghanistan is unlikely, for the foreseeable future, to be able to sustain an army big enough to guarantee the country's security...