Mickey Rourke..... He doesn't just mug for the cameras anymore. Now...   MICKEY MUGS CANNES

A Parisité Special by Mark Zeller

Imagine this scene: You’re at a sun-drenched terrace restaurant on the coast during a busy lunch hour.

It is a dazzling mid-May day and a crowd of the ‘beautiful’ people are gladly paying $50 a plate to sit at seaside and eat. A tall, well-dressed black man enters and is immediately set upon by a group of hired thugs who try to hustle him out of the restaurant. He loudly demands that they take their hands off of him, which results in two more thugs rushing forward. They grab the man’s clothes and start pushing him to the exit. The victim begins screaming, “Get your hands off me! Who the hell do you think you are! You’ve got no right to do this!” The restaurant goes silent as the man is pushed and jostled. The spectacle ends as the black man cedes his rights and departs as the clatter of plates resumes.

Sounds like a scene from some Hollywood movie about racism, apartheid, or the old American Deep South, right?
Well, you’re not too far off...

This nightmare is called “Mickey and the Goon Squad” or, more rightly, “Mista Rourke Kumz Ta Kan.”

There are two major events for the motion picture industry, the Oscar Awards and the Cannes Film Festival. One thing’s for sure, Mickey Rourke is not winning any Oscars for his performance in Cannes. In an awesome display of pompous immaturity, he gave a vivid demonstration of why practically no one in the film business wants to have anything to do with him.
For example, the scene above.

To fully understand what was going on there, one must first understand Cannes. The International Festival of Films is business. While it may look glamourous and glitzy, it is ten days of non-stop business. It is the only place where the world’s motion picture producers, distributors, theatre owners, writers, directors and financiers can gather to network and do business. Producers from around the globe gather to market internationally. Distributors go to screen films for possible purchase, smaller theatre owners for showing in their chains. Projects under development are pitched by writers and backers. The stars are brought in to hype the movie, meet the distributors, draw the press, promote the product. Billions of dollars are at stake. Cannes is business, big, big business. What you see on the outside is just the advertising done by the professionals at work behind the scenes.

Which returns us to the decline and fall of Mickey Rourke. It’s especially ironic that his last comment before deciding to have lunch was that he was trying to develop his own projects because the major studios didn’t want to hire him. He claims not to understand why, but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure this one out.

Location: a Mickey Rourke press conference in the beachfront restaurant of the Carlton Hotel.
The thugs: Mickey’s ‘bodyguards’, four purported Hell’s Angels in suits.
The black man: Baz Bamigboye, the chief entertainment writer for London’s Daily Mail newspaper!
The reason: Mickey decided to stop the press conference and have lunch and didn’t want any journalists in the restaurant. Even though that’s where the press conference had just taken place and it’s open to the public!
Okay, let’s score a big one for intelligence!

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