{"id":1059,"date":"2008-11-07T08:37:14","date_gmt":"2008-11-07T15:37:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2008\/11\/in-an-action-film-you-act-in-the-action-if-its-a-dramatic-film-you-act-in-the-drama\/"},"modified":"2008-11-07T08:39:31","modified_gmt":"2008-11-07T15:39:31","slug":"in-an-action-film-you-act-in-the-action-if-its-a-dramatic-film-you-act-in-the-drama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2008\/11\/07\/in-an-action-film-you-act-in-the-action-if-its-a-dramatic-film-you-act-in-the-drama\/","title":{"rendered":"“In an action film you act in the action. If it’s a dramatic film you act in the drama.”"},"content":{"rendered":"

from the New York Times<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Hard Body Plays an Old Softie (Himself)<\/nyt_headline><\/h1>\n

<\/p>\n

PeaceArch Entertainment<\/p>\n

Jean-Claude Van Damme in \u201cJCVD,\u201d in which he plays a washed-up, aging movie star named Jean-Claude Van Damme.<\/span><\/p>\n

by DENNIS LIM<\/p>\n

ON the phone the other day\u00a0Jean-Claude Van Damme<\/a>, the martial artist and action hero known in his heyday as the Muscles from Brussels, was sounding anxious and apologetic. He had canceled a trip to New York \u2014 missing a host of engagements, including an in-person interview with this writer \u2014 to remain in Bangkok, where he recently finished shooting a movie. And he wanted to make clear that he had a very good reason.<\/p>\n

\u201cI adopted seven dogs here, and one of them had a heart attack,\u201d Mr. Van Damme said. \u201cI\u2019m sleeping with him every night at the clinic. If I leave him, he\u2019s going to go back into a coma. He\u2019s a very sensitive dog.\u201d The others \u2014 all strays, some disabled (he built \u201ca little wheelchair\u201d for one of them) \u2014 have been sent to his home in Belgium.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

It might be odd to think of Mr. Van Damme, a veteran of steroidal exploitation cinema and a virtuoso of the bone-crunching split kick, as an old softie, but it is also perfectly consistent with the image overhaul implicit in his latest vehicle,\u00a0\u201cJCVD,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0which opened on Friday. Directed by the French filmmaker Mabrouk El Mechri, it allows its namesake to reveal new facets to his screen persona basically by playing himself. A jokey hall-of-mirrors movie with a melancholic streak, it stars Mr. Van Damme \u2014 who turned 48 last month and whose last film to open theatrically in the United States was the 1998 flop\u00a0\u201cKnock Off,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 as Jean-Claude Van Damme, a washed-up middle-aged movie star.<\/p>\n

Thanks in part to a widely circulating online trailer \u201cJCVD\u201d has garnered more attention for Mr. Van Damme than he has received in years. (The last time he made even a remote impact on pop-culture consciousness was when he appeared on\u00a0\u201cFriends\u201d<\/a>\u00a0as himself in 1996 and boasted that he could crush a walnut with his buttocks.) \u201cJCVD\u201d was a word-of-mouth hit at Cannes, and it had its North American premiere at a raucous midnight screening at the\u00a0Toronto International Film Festival<\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at NYTimes.com<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from the New York Times Hard Body Plays an Old Softie (Himself) PeaceArch Entertainment Jean-Claude Van Damme in \u201cJCVD,\u201d in which he plays a washed-up, aging movie star named Jean-Claude Van Damme. by DENNIS LIM ON the phone the other day\u00a0Jean-Claude Van Damme, the martial artist and action hero known in his heyday as the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1059\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}