22 thoughts on “Mickey Rourke Movies”

1. BOB to STEVE Reply
   April 11, 2020 at 7:58 am

   HI STEVE

   Thanks for the feedback and the scoring comments.

   You could do worse than add Ebert to your sources. He’s a big fave of WH after Joel; and Roger was a great Brando admirer.

   I didn’t know that Mickey had played an IRA member – it’s logical I suppose given his own views on them and his ‘wild boy’ reputation. Thanks for sharing that information.

   Reply

2. Steve Lensman
   April 11, 2020 at 7:41 am

   Hi Bob, thanks for the review, generous rating, info and trivia, always appreciated.

   Glad you enjoyed the posters and stills.

   9½ Weeks, Mickey Rourke’s most infamous film, did not get more than 6 out of 10 from any of my sources. Roger Ebert must be one of the few critics to give it a high score. Leonard Maltin gives it a score of 1.5 out of 4. Maybe I should add Ebert to my ratings sources.

   Rourke has Irish blood on his father’s side and his mother had Scottish ancestry. He played a member of the IRA in ‘A Prayer for the Dying’.

   One of my favorite roles of his was as racist New York cop Stanley White in ‘Year of the Dragon’, an underrated film directed by Michael Cimino who died recently.

   One film scored 10 out of 10 in Rourke’s filmography, The Wrestler. Two more scored 9 out of 10 – Body Heat and Diner.

   Sin City tops IMDBs chart and The Wrestler is no.1 at Rotten Tomatoes.

   Rourke on Hollywood reaction to The Wrestler – “I got the most touching letters and communiques from everywhere. From Emma Thompson, who I’ve never met, to Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, and Jon Voight. I got a letter from Kim Basinger, who I hadn’t heard from in 20 years. I just thought, “Wow.” I mean, for me, I don’t think I could’ve had a better compliment than a few words from Al Pacino.”

   Rourke on Sylvester Stallone – “When I was flat broke and I could hardly pay for a bowl of spaghetti in a restaurant, Stallone gave me a couple of weeks on Get Carter, and that paid my f***in’ rent for eight months.”

   “You know the song “I Fought the Law and the Law Won”? Well, I fought the system and it kicked the living sh’t out of me!”

   Reply

3. BOB on Mickey Rourke Part 3
   April 10, 2020 at 11:46 am

   IMDB credits Mickey with 39 acting awards and 39 nominations overall; and according to the Celebrity Net Worth site Mickey’s net worth was assessed back in 2015 at $15 million [equal to $15.9 million toady]. This compares with the $40 million estimated current net worth of Mickey’s Nine and a Half Weeks co-star Kim Basinger. There is plenty of iconic stuff in Mickey’s Lensman video and it gave me personal satisfaction pleasure warranting a 98.5% rating overall.

   BEST STILLS in ROURKE VIDEO
   1/Wild Orchid
   2/Double Team
   3/The Informers
   4/White Sands
   5/Johnny Handsome with my own ‘up and coming’ Morg. Freeman
   6/Domino
   7/Immortals
   8/Sin City (2)
   9/Once Upon a Time in Mexico
   10/Year of the Dragon
   11/Iron Man 2
   12/The Rainmaker
   13/Rumble Fish
   14/Sin City [one]
   15/The Wrestler – truly splendid still.

   Reply

4. BOB on Mickey Rourke Part 2
   April 10, 2020 at 11:30 am

   MICKEY ROURKE – BEST POSTER SETS
   1/Wild Orchid
   2/Killshot
   3/Desperate Hours – remake of Bogie/Frederic March 1955 movie.
   4/second one for 9 and half Weeks***
   5/two for Prayer for the Dying
   6/Sin City 2
   7/Once Upon a Time In Mexico
   8/Foreign Language one for Angel Heart – with DeNiro as The Devil!
   9/The Pledge
   10/Man in Fire
   11/Rumble Fish
   12/Barfly – my own fave Rourke movie
   13/Sin City [one]
   14/foreign Language one for Body heat
   15/two for The Wrestler
   16/Domino.

   ***STEVE – YOU don’t rate 9 and half Weeks highly but here’s what The Work Horse’s idol [apart from Hirsch] Rogert Ebert has to say about it. “A lot of the success of 9 1⁄2 Weeks is because Rourke and Basinger make the characters and their relationship convincing.” He further elaborated by saying that their relationship was believable, and unlike many other characters in other erotic films at that time, the characters in this movie are much more real and human. Roger gave the movie 3 and a half stars out of 4.

   Reply

5. BOB on Mickey Rourke Part One
   April 10, 2020 at 11:26 am

   I once considered Mickey Rourke who was real life boxer and movies tough guy as a performer with the potential to become a Bruce Willis type screen mega star. However unfortunately that never happened probably largely because Rourke’s acting career eventually became overshadowed by his personal life and career decisions. Directors such as Alan Parker found it difficult to work with him. Parker stated that “working with Mickey is a nightmare. He is very dangerous on the set because you never know what he is going to do.”

   His politics too got him into trouble though he sent out mixed signals about those over the years. For example he supported Republican president George W Bush over the Iraq war and publicly expressed his admiration for Mr Bush; and yet in 2016 Rourke called another Republican Donald Trump “a bully”. In more recent times he has attracted ire by seemingly supporting the paramilitary Provisional Irish Republican Army and by indicating admiration for Russian strong man and perceived dictator Vladimir Putin whom Mickey described as “a real gentleman”.

   Certainly though in the mid-eighties Mickey was the “talk of the town” in glowing terms for a while at least outside the US with the erotic Nine and a Half Weeks which wowed the European crowds in the same way that Last Tango had done some 15 years earlier. Here’s some notes on Mickey’s ‘Tango’

   “Considered too explicit by its American distributor, 9 and a half Weeks was heavily edited for release in the U.S., where it was a box office bomb, grossing only $6.7 million on a $17 million budget. However, it became a huge success internationally in its unedited version, particularly in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, making $100 million worldwide [$225 million in 2019 dollars] It has also now developed a cult following. Its success in France was so strong that it played for five years at a Paris cinema. In São Paulo, Brazil, it played for 30 months in the cult movie house Cine Belas Artes from 1986 to 1989.”

   Reply

   1. Hi Bob, good work moving our comments to this page. Cheers.

      Is James Woods next I wonder? Bruce?

      Reply

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