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Posted on 09/01/2025 4:32:59 PM PDT by nickcarraway
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A pox on both of them.
Dumb & dumber.
I’m not a fan of Sean Penn, but watch The Professor and the Madman. Sean Penn and Mel Gibson. Penn plays the madman and seems made for the role; the madman goes full Boston Corbett and emasculates himself at the beginning of the third act, and as far as I’m concerned, Penn should have gone full method and done it irl. Mel Gibson had bottomed out from his crash and burn and was on the atonement trail; his performance packs a punch.
Sean Penn and Mel Gibson: as unlikely a pair of lead actors as one can imagine.
And it’s a true story. Fascinating for those interested in the Oxford English Dictionary, one of the most important early citizen contributors to which was a schizophrenic sentenced to life in a Victorian era insane asylum for cold-blooded murder, he being delusional at the time he committed the crime. Not much was understood about schizophrenia at the time, but the Brits had moved beyond executing raving lunatics.
Never heard of this. Just watched the trailer. It's streaming on Amazon Prime.
Thanks! Gonna check it out.
Although I did like “Sweet and Low Down” where he portrayed Emmet Ray, a fictional 1930s jazz guitarist and who’s nemesis was himself, but the closest one who came to it was Django Reinhardt.
Heinekens.
What did Boston Corbett do, besides killing an actor?
Hardly
The Nebraska album is a reliable cure for insomnia.
after both had become suitably drunk, Bruce asked Sean for sexual favors
Secular hagiography.. these kinda’ stories or tributes seem to start coming out when an older celebrity is fighting a very serious illness. Or if a big entertainment project is being worked on. All publicity is good publicity.
If they award these guys a lifetime award....look out.
Just my humble observation.
He took the Bible verse about plucking out an eye or cutting off a hand if it is leading you into sin, so — being tempted by street prostitutes — he emasculated himself. This was when he was in his street preacher phase.
But we should not make fun of Boston Corbett. (It’s ok to make fun of Sean Penn.) As a boy back in England (or wherever he was from), he had been apprenticed to a hatter and grew up working with mercury. “Mad as a hatter” is a real thing.
Oops. He took the Bible verse literally. Being crazy.
I thought Dumb and Dumber was kind of a stupid movie...
Yup...the film Indian Runner, and the audio album Nebraska are etched in the American psyche. Those titles are referred to almost daily in the media. Not.
Remind one self, don’t commit to an idea formed while drunk. Especially that beer goggle 10 you are falling in love with.
The source material for The Professor and the Madman is The Surgeon of Cawthorne, a very good piece of popular history. The good doctor had a fascinating personal history.
He had spent his early childhood somewhere in the South Seas (I forget which “tropical paradise”) where his patrician New England parents had embarked to live the rest of their lives as missionaries. He was then sent back to live with relatives for a proper starched collar New England education. He was superbly educated and was a proper, medical school educated physician, not the still common apprenticeship track doc.
He became an Army surgeon during the Civil War and chose to stay in the Army — surprising because of his elite education (in something other than engineering) — apparently because he was already having serious psychiatric problems and wanted the discipline and structure.
His brother officers and fellow Army docs recognized that something was amiss. The Army gave him the best medical and psychiatric care available at the time, even committing him for a stint in St. Elizabeth’s hospital. Nothing helped and he had become clearly unfit for duty. At that point, however, he had never committed any acts of violence and did not seem to pose a threat, so the Army gave him a pension, wished him well, and turned him loose.
So far, so good ... but he eventually made his way to the UK. His condition worsened. He had a schizophrenic break in which he thought little men hiding under his bed, in his closets, under his floor and behind his walls were coming to kill him. He rushed outside and spotted one of his tormentors, pulled a gun, chased the poor man through the streets and shot him dead as he was going home to his wife and many children. That’s where the movie picks up the story.
U.S. Army doctor murders honest English working man!!!! The newspapers had a field day with it.
The court heard the evidence, realized he was mad as a hatter, and had him locked up in Broadmoor, which was not a pleasant place to be, as some of the current treatments for the insane were quite tortuous. However, he was clearly a brilliant man, well educated, and when lucid read voraciously. He saw the OED advertisement asking for readers to help in tracking down the origins of words for an historical dictionary, a new idea. Having time on his hands, he became one of the most prolific early contributors.
The director of the OED project had no idea that his valued collaborator was clinically insane. Until he requested a meeting to personally think his genius penpal ... and undoubtedly got the surprise of his life.
Sean Penn and Mel Gibson are both superb in it.
Thanks for reminding me of a very good movie.
I would argue that his character Spicoli had an IQ 50 points higher than his own.
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