Oh, yeah...a guy who married Madonna calling other people 'dumb'.. NEW YORK Sparks usually fly, from one quarter or another, when actor Sean Penn meets the press, and it happened again this week at a news conference for the Toronto International Film Festival. Chances were greater, as he was touting a long-expected political drama screened there, the re-make of "All the King's Men."
Among the highlights on Sunday, Penn asked photographers to stop snapping so he could hear questions, and he called President Bush "a Beelzebub -- and a dumb one."
Penn stars in the new movie as a Huey Long-type populist politician in Louisiana, with Jude Law playing a crucial role as his friend, an alcoholic reporter. "One could make the argument that George Bush is a good politician," Penn said at one point, seemingly offering praise. Then he added: "I think the issue is how you define politician. Once upon a time, politics was the organization of things to benefit the people."
An early review this week by E&P's VNU sibling, The Hollywood Reporter, hailed Penn's "charismatic" performance, but added that the movie "doesn't seem to know how to contain it. Writer-director Steven Zaillian's questionable solution is to fit this rambunctious portrait of unruly Southern politics in a monumental frame where Southern Gothic meets Leni Riefenstahl." Variety panned it as "overstuffed."
At the press conference, a reporter returned to the notion of Bush as a good politician, and Penn said the definition has changed -- much as it has for "good actor" which now means, he said, "contest winner" (he is an Academy Award winner himself). "So that's the level of politician I think he's good at," Penn said. "Out of context, he's Beelzebub -- and a dumb one."
Another query: Could he name a good politician? Penn said he wasn't about to "rattle off the cliches....It should be obvious, those people who sacrificed of their talents and their commitment to their country or their people . . . we know who they are and they're not currently in the White House."
