Daily Archives: November 29, 2008

Remember when Mickey Rourke was going to be the next big thing? 

He had nice turns in Body Heat:

and Diner:

Some people swear by The Pope of Greenwich Village (I am not one of them): 

But as soon as Rourke became a star, he became less interesting, predictable, a flat-joke, and then he wasn’t a star long, unless you account for his runaway fame in France (and there’s no accounting for that, is there?).  He left Hollywood and became a boxer and then returned to the movies, mostly B-level action movies made for DVD.

Now Rourke is back in the mix. The critics liked him in Sin City. And you can just smell an Oscar nomination for him in The Wrestler, his new feature, which looks to be a downbeat, arty riff on Rocky.

Pat Jordan profiles Rourke (His Fists Are Up and His Guard is Down) in today’s New York Times Magazine:

You meet Mickey, you can’t help liking him. He rescues abused dogs! He cries a lot: over his stepfather’s supposed abuse; the loss of his brother to cancer and his dogs to old age; the failure of his marriage to the actress Carré Otis. He admits he destroyed his own career, because, as he puts it: “I was arrogant. . . . I wasn’t smart enough or educated enough” to deal with stardom. He is candid about the people he has crossed paths with: Nicole Kidman is “an ice cube”; Michael Cimino, the director of “Heaven’s Gate,” “is crazy” and “nuts”; and the producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr. is “a liar.”

So what if he cries at the same moment in the same story in every interview? So what if his candor sometimes sounds like the bad dialogue from one of his many bad movies (“I have no one to go to to fix the broken pieces in myself”) or that his self-deprecation seems culled from the stock stories of so many fading actors (“I was in 7-Eleven, and this guy says, ‘Didn’t you used to be a movie star?’ ”)? So what if he seems disingenuous, at best, when he says he can’t remember that critics nominated him one of the world’s worst actors in 1991 (“I probably would have voted with them”) or even making a terrible movie that went straight to video, “Exit in Red,” in 1996 — despite the fact that the love interest in that movie was then his wife?

Mickey Rourke is, after all, an actor. The roles he has played and the life he has lived have so blurred one into another in his mind’s eye that even he doesn’t seem to know when he’s acting or when he’s being real. He has spent his entire adult life playing not fictional characters but an idealized delusional fantasy of himself.

I love me some Good Times.

James Reynolds Jr. has been called a lot of names. He was Jimmy to his grandmother and Junior to the rest of the family. In school the other kids tagged him Bern, which was short for Bernie Williams his favorite Yankee.

Most people in the Bronx just call him J.R. these days, but in Manhattan he’s known as Mr. Quick.

Some say he sells more designer handbags than anyone else in New York City.

“I just know the flow of the crowds around here,” Mr. Quick explained. “The key is being fast on the setup and the getaway. That’s how I earned my name.”

Mr. Quick moves everything on a small cart. When he locates a good spot the handbags are scooped up and arranged over old bed sheets on the sidewalk.

“People flock like pigeons to popcorn if you hit it right,” Mr. Quick said. “But you don’t want to draw too much attention. That brings the cops and then you’re out of business.”

So Mr. Quick has rules if you want to buy his French-designed handbags that are made in New York.

“The small bags are $20 and the big bags are $40,” he explained to a group outside the Winter Garden Theatre last night. “I don’t make change and don’t even think of asking for a receipt. Take it or leave it.”

Most of them took it.

Mr. Quick pocketed the cash and packed the leftovers. He was headed up Broadway when a woman shouted:

“Stop. Please wait.”

Mr. Quick kept walking, but the woman caught him near 54th Street.

“I just want to buy a bag,” she said. “But our tour bus is leaving so I need to make it quick.”

“That’s my name,” he said.

Sometimes a baseball card encompasses more than just the main player featured within the borders of its photograph. That actuality has influenced one of the habits of the hobby that I particularly enjoy—“sleuthing,” or trying to figure out the identities of the other players on the card, whether they are in the background or off to the side of the card.

In some cases, trying to identify background players is difficult, because of the fuzziness of the photograph or the awkward angle provided by the camera. In other situations, it’s much easier, and on rare occasions, a collector might come to the realization that the “other” player is actually much more famous than the featured player. That is certainly the case with this 1972 “In Action” card of John Ellis (No. 48 in the set), a traveling-man catcher and first baseman who was probably best known for serving as Thurman Munson’s backup in the early 1970s. This card could just as easily have been chosen as the action card for Harmon Killebrew, who happens to be the “other guy” in the photograph—the Twins’ first baseman who is holding Ellis on during an afternoon game at the old Yankee Stadium, sometime in 1971. A member of the 500-home run club and one of the game’s quietly nice guys, “Killer” earned baseball immortality when he was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1984.

Coincidentally (or perhaps not), Killebrew was already featured on another one of the 1972 “In Action” cards, so there was no need to create another action photo for the Twins’ slugger. Still, it’s interesting that Topps cropped the photograph in the way that it did, making “Killer” just as prominent as Ellis on the facing of the card. Did Topps do this intentionally, because of Killebrew’s status as a star, or was it merely an accident? I honestly have no idea, but I do know that this 1972 Johnny Ellis carries no extra value because of the incidental presence of one of the greatest sluggers in the game’s history. This card is worth about the same amount of money as most common cards of 1972’s lower-numbered series, no more and no less. Still, it’s a fun card to have, especially when you can procure a picture of a Hall of Famer at the far more reasonable price of a journeyman.

Ellis might have settled for journeyman status, but he started his career as a popular player in the tri-state area who was once ticketed for stardom at a time when the Yankees badly needed such a quality. As a late 1960s contemporary of Munson, Ellis was actually regarded as an equal prospect by some scouts. In fact, some targeted Ellis, and not Munson, as the heir apparent to the long line of great Yankee catchers that had recently halted after the decline and trade of Elston Howard.

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Back from my day off, and armed with this news:

• Anthony McCarron of the News warns of the landmines inherent in signing a pitcher to a $100+ million contract, and reminds us of the travails of the pitchers who have received them: Johan Santana, Kevin Brown, Mike Hampton and Barry Zito.
• Pete Abraham of LoHud offers us his ranking of the 20 most important people in the Yankee organization today.  His top 3? ….. Joba Chamberlain, Hal Steinbrenner and A-Rod, in that order.
• The rumblings about Pettitte ending up in La-La Land are getting slightly louder, as the Post’s George King details:

“Some,” Colletti wrote in an e-mail about the level of the Dodgers’ interest in Pettitte, who said often at the end of the season that he didn’t want to work for any team other than the Yankees in 2009.

Pettitte apparently has changed his mind after not getting a deal done quickly with the Yankees.

With Monday’s deadline for offering salary arbitration to their free agents looming, the Yankees are faced with a dilemma now that Pettitte has expanded his choices beyond retirement or the Yankees.

If the Yankees offer Pettitte arbitration and he accepts (Dec. 7 is the deadline), he is a signed player and his one-year salary would be determined through the arbitration process.

Considering that is based on the past two seasons, Pettitte would receive an increase from the $16 million he made last year. The Yankees have balked at signing Pettitte, whom they view as a back-end starter, because he doesn’t want to take a pay cut.

Should the Yankees not offer Pettitte arbitration they wouldn’t receive two draft picks as compensation – a first-round pick from the team that he signs with and a sandwich pick.

Pettitte’s dance with the Dodgers could be a ploy to get the Yankees to give him the $16 million he wants.

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