Mickey Rourke For A Day
Sometimes you don't need to spend hours researching the history of a YouTube video to know that it's something that needs to be seen right away, so here's this old (as in '90s) video in which film critic Joe Queenan tries to be Mickey Rourke for a day, and the movie nerds can sort out its meaning in the universe. It's based on Queenan's famous (but not online) early '90s Movieline article, "Mickey Rourke For A Day". This will be of interest to three types of people:
1. People (like me) who love Diner and have absorbed a lot of recent Mickey Rourke, but were totally unaware that the whole "Mickey Rourke blurs the lines between his actual life and his onscreen life" was a thing before The Wrestler. I'm sorry, movie nerds: I know without looking that Drew Barrymore's birthday is in ten days, but I did not know that fact about Mickey Rourke.
2. Movie nerds.
3. People who like to watch movie critics kick trash cans while pretending to be Mickey Rourke:
Joe Queenan recently wrote this long thing in the Guardian about how he's known Mickey Rourke was going to have a comeback for the longest time but nobody would listen to him. (Thanks to Alex for the tip!)
Posted by Lindsay at 4:45 PM in Comebacks, Video Skeletons
Tags: Joe Queenan | Mickey Rourke
the fact that he made this pre-pre-pre-youtube is remarkable. it's like he knew it was coming. also, in the early 90s mickey rourke could still fucking smoke in a fucking diner.
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This is great -- back in the 90's I bought Joe Queenan's "You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again" (an anthology in which this essay appeared) just based on Spy Magazine's reprinting of the index. "Sometimes you just have to roll the potato."
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Holy shit was I ever wrong. It's "If You're Talking to Me, Your Career Must Be in Trouble." Thanks for the terrible book titles, Hollywood!
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