This teaser for what’s apparently a forthcoming Jean-Claude Van Damme experimental meta-movie, in which Jean-Claude plays himself in a biopic about his own descent into washed-up, mildly delusional post-actorhood, has me rather excited.
The article at Slate.com that alerted me to the movie is a hoot in its own right, and it captures something of what JCVD meant to boys like me back in his heyday. There was, for all his bluster and over-the-top arrogance, something very vulnerable about him. It’s not that we imagined that we pre-adolescent boys could be anything like Frank Dux, the ass-kicking hero of Van Damme’s greatest film, Bloodsport, but rather that we sensed that if we did happen to be the guy destined to dominate the kumite, we’d deal with it in roughly the same way that Van Damme did — which is to say, more or less like a boyishly enthusiastic pre-adolescent.
