at a benefit gala for Haiti. It doesn’t take long for the spirits to come crashing down to earth, as Penn, founder and spokesman of the J/P Relief Organization, hits the audience with a Debbie Downer buzzkill. The Russians, he says, are testing hypersonic nuclear weapons; populist demagogues are turning the world economy into a game; and climatologists, warns Penn, give us 11 years before “global catastrophic failure.
Yet you’d be forgiven if you needed a bit of convincing. The template for Penn’s extracurricular missionary zeal has always been: He walks the walk, instead of just talking the talk. Where other celebrities preach about saving the world in self-righteous signifiers, he takes action by going on the scene , and by staying there long after the disaster-relief-volunteer-as-photo-op window has closed.
Yet “Citizen Penn” does acknowledge, without making too big a deal of it, that there’s a way that Sean Penn’s trouble-spot dedication can dovetail a little too exquisitely with his image, creating a kind of aging-James-Dean-of-the-killing-fields persona.
Seen through the eyes of a former emergency planner (me) as opposed to a film reviewer (you), I think the focus of the film is spot on. The reason we get a significant view into the herculean efforts to respond to a disaster is precisely BECAUSE he is in it. It's NOT about him.
Yeah... that’s a double edge sword if you know what he did to Madonna.👀😒
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Source: NBCNews - 🏆 10. / 86 Read more »
Source: ELLE Magazine (US) - 🏆 472. / 51 Read more »
Source: latimes - 🏆 11. / 82 Read more »