What the hell has gotten into Josh Brolin?
His résumé is littered with paycheck garbage, the types of movies that you haven’t even thought of in the last decade. (The Mod Squad? Really?) Of course everyone touted 2007 as his turnaround year, but we’re not sure we’d agree. While it’s true that he appeared in no less than four movies last year, the only role that really resonates is his part in No Country for Old Men. In fact, we defy you to even remember the other three movies he was in, without doing an IMDB search*.
Call us crazy, but 2007 won’t be year for which Josh Brolin is remembered. We’re thinking it’ll be 2008.
First he’ll be playing George W. Bush in Oliver Stone’s latest lightening rod of controversy, W. And while we can’t quite figure out if the movie is going to be pretty good, totally bananas, or both, we’re pretty confident Mr. Brolin knocks his performance out of the park. From what we’ve seen, instead of simply going for the easy joke (the squint, the laugh, the silliness), he seems to give President Bush a real undercurrent of gravitas that he may not even deserve.
But what we’re really excited for is to see Mr. Brolin’s role in Gus Van Sant’s Milk. The just released trailer is fantastic and suggests greatness for everyone involved. Playing Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to ever reach elected office, Sean Penn has at least a 90 percent chance of getting an Oscar nomination simply on the trailer alone. And as Dan White, the San Francisco supervisor who clashes politically with Milk and who then eventually kills him (if it happened in real life, does that count as a spoiler?), Mr. Brolin looks to be on point: creepy, pathetic, menacing and downright unlikable. It could be the performance of his career. Mr. Brolin was robbed of an Oscar in 2007. Perhaps Milk will offer a corrective.
*Did you do an IMDB search? You did? Boo! Well for those of you who weren’t dirty cheaters, you’ll be happy to know that the other three Brolin movies from 2007 were Grindhouse: Planet Terror, In the Valley of Elah and American Gangster.
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