Penn stations
Cruise, Hutton, Penn. Photos from Rolling Stone’s The Essential Sean Penn
Back in the Paleozoic when there were stand-alone movie theatres where people actually watched movies, my best friend dragged me to the old Circle Theatre on Quezon Avenue to watch a movie called Taps. We may have cut class. Gail had a crush on Timothy Hutton. The movie was alright; all I remember is that it ends tragically, and it was the first time we saw Sean Penn. We did not have a crush on him. His nose was too big for his face (he’s grown into it since), he was not dreamy like Timothy Hutton or cute like his wee beady-eyed costar, what’s-his-name, Tom Cruise. However, we had a sense that Penn was going to be something someday. We’re seldom wrong about these things.
Sean Penn got his first Oscar for Mystic River, in which he plays an ex-con whose daughter is murdered. He was brilliant, Method-y, always on the verge of overreaching, but it worked. In Milk he just disappears into the character. (We were half-rooting for Mickey Rourke. Whenever I see someone carrying a chihuahua I feel like saying, “Loki! You’ve come baack!”)
The role that sealed our loyalty to Sean Penn forever, through marriage to Madonna, brawls with the press, obnoxious behavior and dabbling in politics: Jeff Spicoli the stoned surfer in Fast Times At Ridgemont High.
Saw it again recently. Keanu Reeves owes his acting. . .his movie career to Sean Penn: his breakthrough role as Ted in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure is a pale ripoff of Spicoli. Gnarly.
Three Best Actor winners appear in Fast Times: Sean, Forrest Whitaker as the scary football star, and Nicolas Cage, who then went by his real name Coppola, as a fastfood counter guy. Fast Times is one of those movies that perfectly captures a slice of the zeitgeist. I approve of any movie in which I hear We Got the Beat by the Go-Gos, American Girl by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and Somebody’s Baby by Jackson Browne in quick succession.
Fast Times also starred Jennifer Jason Leigh and Phoebe Cates. Jennifer Jason Leigh has had some killer performances; she should do more movies. The last one I’m aware of is Margot At The Wedding by Noah Baumbach, her husband. Phoebe Cates today looks pretty much the way she did when her poster adorned half the jeepneys in Manila. Fast Times was written by Cameron Crowe (He made his directorial debut some years later with Say Anything, the movie that defined the perfect guy for my generation) and directed by Amy Heckerling. She’s had an interesting career: era-defining pieces like Fast Times and Clueless, crap like Look Who’s Talking Too. I wanted to see her most recent movie I Could Never Be Your Woman, but it closed before I got to the mall. At least it was shown here; elsewhere it went straight to DVD.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
March 3rd, 2009 at 08:11
Yeah I was rooting for Mickey too. To think that Nicholas Cage was one of those being considered to play The Ram when Mickey almost bailed out of the project. Thank God he didn’t, and what a comeback. But you couldn’t go wrong with Sean; he was like destined to play Milk.
Jennifer Jason Leigh co-stars with Philip Seymour Hoffman in Synecdoche, New York, written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, which came out last year but received lukewarm responses from critics. It has Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton, Hope Davis and Michelle Williams in it too.
March 10th, 2009 at 02:44
I was rooting for Mickey Rourke as well, with Sean Penn as my second choice. However, when Penn won and acknowledged Rourke in his speech, I wasn’t as disappointed as I initially was.
In retrospect, the role Mickey played was closer to home than Penn’s was.