The New Republic

BTW if this post had been written by Jamie, all the Jamie haters would have said that they IDed it by the title alone.

- achester99

April 6, 2009 at 2:04pm

I had long supported Mr. Rourke for a cabinet position in the Obama White House. Why Obama didn't name him to the Department of Hollywood, I will never understand. Plus he could send Mickey and the Wrestlemania folks up to Wall Street to make them an offer they can't refuse. We could already be well into the next bubble by now. The sub-prime entertainment industry is ready and waiting to explode. Celebrities are lining up left and right to be bought and sold like houses.

george

- iambiguous

April 6, 2009 at 2:21pm

I thought that Rourke should've won it and was rooting for him to. Penn was fantastic as Milk, what a great great actor is her, and Rourke was fantastic as the wrestler, but Milk kind of closed on itself, as biopics will, do, whereas Rourke and The Wrestler expanded ever beautifully outwards in the emotion they generated.

I love Rourke and Penn as  actors, larger than life characters and as men.

It surprises me not at all that they are great friends.

I loved the acceptance speech linked to here and hadn't seen it before. To call Marisa Tomei's performance courageous was on the money, and she should have won best supporting actress.

- basman

April 6, 2009 at 2:34pm

Sorry, Mr. Orr, but Sean Penn acted circles around Mickey Rourke.  Don't get me wrong, Rourke's performance was heartbreaking and wonderfully honest, but Sean Penn did the tougher assignment of the two and accomplished much more.  Take it from someone who teaches acting (how's that for an attempt to establish some authority on the subject!).

- shaw-man

April 6, 2009 at 4:37pm

Shaw man, I've been thinking about this. I think Sean Penn gave a more demanding performance, iin part by playing so much against type, unlike Mickey Rourke, who sort of played himself, as did Dexter Gordon in Round Midnight. But it's hard (for me) to separate the exemplary acting of an actor from the movie itself as a whole,  and from the emotion the movie arouses. Every time I think about The Wrestler and of the Mickey Rourke figure, I start to feel moved like I'm on the cusp of tears or some such. When I think of Sean Penn and Milk, for as much as I very much liked the movie and *appreciated* his performance, I sense the same lack of emotion as I had when I saw the movie. I for among those reasons would have cast my vote for Mickey Rourke.

- basman

April 6, 2009 at 5:08pm