The decade in movies: Vol. 2, when all the actors went insane

The “Decade From Hell,” you say? Okay, sure. I’ll give you that. But the naughts was also the decade that half of Hollywood’s actors went insane.

Or, perhaps a more precise way to put it is: It was the decade that a bunch of bigtime Hollywood actors who were already secretly nuts decided to fire their handlers, lift their veils, and let the rest of the world in on the wreckage of their private crazy train.

At the start of the decade, Mel Gibson was still just a big Hollywood actor and sometime director. I’m not sure what it was about the naughts that made Mel decide to let the rat out of the shit house, but he unleashed first The Passion of the Christ, then Apocalypto, two horror movies disguised as history. As an actor, he embraced the post-9/11 ethos of payback, muthafuckuh… He’d already made a movie called Payback (and one called Ransom before that), went the same way with Paparazzi, and will go the same way, again, in the upcoming Edge of Darkness. Mel the vigilante. Let me at ‘em! And of course there was also the fallout from his little “Blame the Jews!” tirade.

It’s been a long decade for Tom Cruise. He hit the naughts with Mission Impossible 2 and Vanilla Sky, after closing out the 90’s on a high (Magnolia). But it’s not so much Cruise’s film choices that point to his crazy, but, as we all know by now, his choices of what to say (or do) on camera. First, he soils Oprah’s sofa.

Notoriously secretive about their cult, Scientologists had always had three things in common: ill-fitting blue jumpsuits, futurist mumbo-jumbo, and being tight-lipped to the press. All right, four: Immortality. But Tom, cruising rapidly up the church ranks, decided the naughts was the time to kick the doors open on the big blue bus. “Come on in! The water’s fine!” For a while it hurt his standing. “Tom Cruise has gone nuts!” But then he did some funny stuff in Tropic Thunder (there’s nothing like silliness to make people forget craziness), stopped talking about the church, had a baby, and got his own Hollywood studio to run. The man’s a survivor. As the decade rolls to a close, it can only be said that life in the Cruise bunker is pretty damned good.

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Cover of Gone in Sixty Seconds [Region 2

Nicolas Cage was already nuts when Gone in 60 Seconds came out in the summer of 2000. Ten years earlier, Cage had done Wild at Heart. Ten years before that? Fast Times at Ridgemont High. By the time of Gone, Cage had been working steadily for twenty years and nobody scratched their heads anymore. Though some people scratched their heads when he married Lisa Marie Presley in August, 2002, only to get divorced four months later. Cage should have known that an intimate union with anyone who had had an intimate union with Michael Jackson had a pretty slim chance at success outside the “no one gets out” gates of Neverland. As we move into our next, hopefully less horrifically awful decade, the only thing that will come as a surprise about Cage is the arrival of a good movie.

Cover of Girl, Interrupted

It almost makes your head hurt to think that back in 2000 Angelina Jolie was still an up-and-comer. Look, she’s behind Winona Ryder in the poster! That’ll never happen again! Back then, Jolie was just another pretty (okay, very pretty) face. She really knew how to hold the screen. Rita Hayworth used to do that. Lauren Bacall. Though back then women didn’t wear their sexual organs on their sleeves. Around Tomb Raider 2, or perhaps Wanted 1, I assumed that Jolie had, at some point in her career, driven her bus off shit mountain, down shit hill, and deep into shit lake. But the truth is, her career’s been shit from the start, though that’s not entirely fair. Schizophrenic is more apt. Or perhaps: Shitsophrenic. Her first feature film was, after all, Cyborg 2, and a short string of low-budget psycho sexual thrillers followed until Gia brought down the big lights and got her into the odd actually good movie. That Jolie was, in essence, the “real” Jolie, if such a thing exists. The girl who loved to wear man-blood and take sexytime to show-and-tell was the same girl who played “the perfect sex machine” in Cyborg 2. Jolie may have erased Billybob from her arm, snagged herself a wholesome Midwestern boy, and birthed a small village, but the woman hasn’t changed. It’s the shit that’s changed. It costs a lot more money now. But she’s still just as crazy as she was in 1995. And that’s my kind of crazy.

It’s a shame about Joaquin Phoenix. The guy is such a good actor, far better than River had ever been. His “quitting” acting has been made even more painful because his final performance, in the otherwise mediocre Two Lovers (it is the best James Gray movie so far, but still) was so good. If this whole “I’m gonna go sing hip-hop now” thing is a piss-take, it’s shaping up to be one of Joaquin’s greatest performances. Or, he’s just drunk.

Billybob Thornton needs to get back to disappearing into character. Slingblade? A Simple Plan? One False Move, which he also wrote with writing partner Tom Epperson. Speaking of that, Thornton needs to get back to writing. Slingblade was excellent (not necessarily because of the writing). One False Move was one of the best neo-noir redneck thrillers of recent memory. Even his racial drama, A Family Thing, was pretty good. It helps to have Robert Duvall and James Earl Jones sitting around. While his partner Tom has gone back to writing novels, and adapting them into screenplays that Ridley Scott will direct (The Kind One), and also written a new script that Billybob will apparently star in, he’s been pretty busy lately doing his own Joaquin Phoenix thing.

Image by irina slutsky via Flickr

Sean Young’s been nuts for decades, but her nutty escapades didn’t used to hurt anyone other than herself. But then she heckled Julian Schnabel at the DGA Awards in 2008, pretty much ruining his moment (and with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, he earned his damned moment). She was escorted out, and soon after checked herself into rehab. No, no, no? For Young, it’s Yes, yes, yes.

A lot of people think Christian Bale went nuts, but it was more like a perfect case of “ape shit.” I’m not exactly sure why he flipped, but I think it can be assumed that 1st A.D. Bruce Franklin, who I believe was the object of the anger, did something stupid in the middle of a take. Or, if not stupid-stupid, then at least insensitive. Here’s the deal with that. Typically speaking, 1st A.D.’s are one of two things. Brutes or assholes. Snicker if you will, but Bale is an actor (“ack-torrrr”) and even though “acting” isn’t necessarily what one thinks about when one thinks about T:S, the guy still has to “be in the zone” while the cameras are churning. And to have some set dude faffing around in his sight line when he was knee-deep in a take? I’d go bat shit too. The problem is perhaps one of size. Normal everyday bat shit? We can all handle that. But combine normal everyday bat shit with a star’s ginormous ego and you better duck, sucker.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Russell Crowe also unleashed the crazy this decade, right into the face of a Mercer hotel clerk, who was having trouble placing a call for the guy. What’s an actor who needs somebody to place his calls to do? Throw the phone of course. Good stuff, Russell. It wasn’t even original. Of course, the Mercer phone incident wasn’t the first altercation Crowe had been involved with. In 2002, he got into a brawl in a Japanese restaurant in London. None of it really hurt Crowe, who will continue to work as long as pal Ridley Scott, another man’s man, continues to make movies. About large men in tights. Both physically and emotionally, but especially physically!

Breakfast at the Lohans.

It’s almost easy to forget, or not even know, what Lindsay Lohan actually is. Singer? Stripper? Socialite? Actually, Lohan is an actor, and a pretty good one at that. Since she started hanging out with Paris, among other unhinged nasty gals, and subsequently became a completion bond issue, Lohan hasn’t been seen much, on-screen anyway. Off-screen she’s been everywhere. But 2009 marked something of a return. She survived a 4 episode stint on Ugly Betty and, unless she wrecks it all, she’s got three new films on her roster. Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse expansion, Machette, is the first, and Lohan fits right in with its post-crazy cast: Steven Segal, Rose McGowan, Don Johnson, Jeff Fahey, effects guru Tom Savini, the list goes on and on, and it’s pretty inspired, in that Grindhouse sorta way. Of course, also on board are Robert De Niro, Michelle Rodriguez, and, from the fake trailer, Danny Trejo, Mr. Machette himself.

Perhaps “the teens,” “the new teens,” “teens 2.0″ (does anybody know what to call next decade?) will be the decade that the actors stop throwing tantrums, realize that the rest of the world isn’t “crazy like me,” decide not to get drunk in public, stop joining cults, start wearing panties in public and just, oh I don’t know, ACT?

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