Joe Queenan

The news that Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler took the top prize at that other film festival (you can tell it from ours because the stars pull up to the openings in gondolas, or something) sent me back to Joe Queenan’s early ’90s article from Movieline, “Mickey Rourke For a Day” (not online, but reprinted in this book), where he decides to spend a day impersonating Mickey Rourke and doing and saying things that Rourke had done and said in his movies or in real life. Queenan has not been funny in years, and is now right up there with Kurt Andersen in the pantheon of former Spy magazine guys who are inexplicably given space to write like slightly younger versions of Grandpa Simpson. But back in the early ’90s, when Movieline still existed and was an entertaining, nasty alternative to Premiere, the Mickey Rourke piece was a great satire of Rourke’s attempts to pretend that he was the same bad-ass rebel he played in his movies.