A new and updated edition of my 'Sean Penn: His Life and Times' from Faber & Faber in 2015

I’m pleased to report that I am now properly at work on a new and updated edition of Sean Penn: His Life and Times, originally published by Faber more or less exactly ten years ago, and so certainly due for a fresh lick of paint.

‘Time is a funny thing, huh’, as Tom Waits says in Rumblefish. ‘Time is a very peculiar item...’ I first met Sean Penn in 2001 and later that year secured his consent to do an interview-based ‘oral history’-style book about his life and work. I began work on that book in the autumn/winter of 2002 as Sean was shooting Mystic River with Clint Eastwood and then 21 Grams with Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. One day in the midst of that I called his office to check his whereabouts. ‘Baghdad,’ came the unexpected – unexpectable? – reply. The first Faber hardback edition of Sean Penn: His Life and Times came out in October 2004, six months after Sean won his first Academy Award. A paperback edition followed a year later, with updates that concluded as Sean embarked on a journalistic assignment to Iran and secured the film rights to Jon Krakauer’s book Into the Wild.

So that was then and this is now, a good while later. Of course, lots of people lead very lively lives, whether or not they have the attention of a wider public, but Sean is livelier than most, and so the new section of the book detailing 2005-2015 is going to have plenty of good and all-exclusive meat in it. I hope it will appear around the same time as the release of The Last Face - Sean’s fifth feature as director, starring Charlize Theron and Javier Bardem, on which he is presently at work, the progress of which I have had a fortunate glimpse, and for which – based on the quality of the material, cast, crew, and the calibre of Sean’s previous productions as ‘helmer’ –  cinemagoers would surely be right to entertain high hopes.

Sean Penn, Best Actor, 'Milk': Nobody Does It Better

Oscar Nominees: Good Work, Fellas

Not Oscar's nominees, no, per the photo - but then I know that AMPAS are protective of any and all reproductions of their famous statuette, whereas I do hope Sesame Street are happy to see Oscar the Grouch show up anywhere, as I certainly am and as I imagine those two tourists were too...
No, ordinarily this blog finds it best to yank down the earmuffs and the eyeshades round Oscar Nominations time - an announcement that only marks the end of one round of Drivel being talked across All Media, prior to the commencement of a fresh Drivel festival. But, having glanced at this year's noms list, with a special interest in one or two parties, I have to say I can't remember a year when so many of the Good Guys seem to have won (if you consider the taking-part as winning, which sadly most people don't...)
One can't but be pleased, for example, to see Werner Herzog and Peter Gabriel both getting recognised. Will they both go to the ceremony? They should ride in the limo together, talk about some stuff on the way... Elsewhere, good to see two pictures highly praised at Cannes - the gentlemanly Laurent Cantet's The Class, and Waltz With Bashir - go into the Best Foreign Film pot. I would imagine Danny Boyle, Simon Beaufoy and Anthony Dod Mantle will be a gang for the night as part of the Slumdog Millionaire set, and it seems to me they deserve all the praise in the world for their respective inspired inputs to that picture. This blog need say little more on the subject of Sean Penn and Milk save an extra hearty congrats to Gus Van Sant, who served a long stint on this project, and to Focus Features. And I imagine the 13 nominations for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button must be close to some kind of record? I'll be writing about that picture at length elsewhere, but as with the others above, I think in this case the recognition and applause for the quality of the filmmaking is deeply, deeply deserved. As it so often isn't...