mickey rourke

Robert Downey Jr.’s rehab is complete—he’s a comic genius shackled to 12-step action movie

From the Summer ’09 Newsmakers family edition

This former champion finds the Mickey Rourke movie disturbing and disrespectful

The Academy Awards offers a David-and-Goliath contest for Best Picture

Kate Winslet and Slumdog Millionaire are the night’s big winners

Now that you’ve seen the official TIFF awards, here are a few of my own. . .

In case you’re wondering if I’ve dropped off the face of the festival, or gone to a party and never come back, I’ve been preoccupied writing for this pesky magazine that we still insist on publishing with ink and paper, which takes longer than blogging because they worry about facts, typos and whatnot. Now time for some catch-up.

The news that Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler took the top prize at that other film festival (you can tell it from ours because the stars pull up to the openings in gondolas, or something) sent me back to Joe Queenan’s early ’90s article from Movieline, “Mickey Rourke For a Day” (not online, but reprinted in this book), where he decides to spend a day impersonating Mickey Rourke and doing and saying things that Rourke had done and said in his movies or in real life. Queenan has not been funny in years, and is now right up there with Kurt Andersen in the pantheon of former Spy magazine guys who are inexplicably given space to write like slightly younger versions of Grandpa Simpson. But back in the early ’90s, when Movieline still existed and was an entertaining, nasty alternative to Premiere, the Mickey Rourke piece was a great satire of Rourke’s attempts to pretend that he was the same bad-ass rebel he played in his movies.

Talk abut unlikely Oscar candidates. First Anne Hathaway—once dismissed as just another pretty woman in Brokeback Mountain,The Devil Wears Prada and Get Smart—dazzles everyone with her hard-edged performance in Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married, which is the clear hit of the festival. And now, just a few hours ago I saw one of the most unlikely Oscar-worthy performances you can imagine: Mickey Rourke in Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler. This film won the Golden Lion, the top prize at the Venice Film Festival, beating out Rachel Getting Married.