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Sean Penn: His Life and Times
 
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Sean Penn: His Life and Times (Hardcover)

by Richard T. Kelly (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

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Hardcover £16.99 £14.44 47 used & new from £0.01
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 496 pages
  • Publisher: Canongate Books (30 Nov 2004)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1841956236
  • ISBN-13: 978-1841956237
  • Product Dimensions: 23 x 16 x 3.6 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 1,598,016 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Kevin Macdonald, The Guardian, January 15 2005

'A biography that is about as honest, informative and engaging as you can imagine any book about Hollywood could be.' --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.


Empire, November 2004

'A great ‘rise-fall-rise’ story... giving a close-up glimpse of an incendiary but committed talent.' --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
See all Product Description

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Customer Reviews

3 Reviews
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 (2)
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Average Customer Review
4.0 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic read, 4 Dec 2004
By primitivegrrl "primitivegrrl" (Glasgow, Scotland) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   
This review is from: Sean Penn: His Life and Times (Hardcover)
Being a huge fan of Sean Penn, I bought this book expecting just your run of the mill, average but good biography of the man, but Richard kelly delivers so much more. At first the myriad of voices making up the complete story is a little irritating and a bit jarring to read but soon you get into the swing of it and actually begin to hear the different voices in your head. You begin to feel as if you are part of a huge conversation with contributors like Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Bono. Robin (of course), Charles Bukowski etc etc. Each contributor adds a little anecdote or story to progress the life of this great actor which makes for an interesting, funny, sad, and gutsy read.

My only complaint is that it is now going to cost me a forune buying the DVDs for the films of Sean's I dont have already!

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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely brilliant, 20 Dec 2006
By Lovborg (London) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   
This review is from: Sean Penn: His Life and Times (Paperback)
Magnificent biography of an actor whom I have long admired, but who has been illuminated by this corking book.
Kelly's approach is smart, sharp and involving and it would be hard to imagine any other biography serving the subject so well. It's clear that he's a fan, but never craven: what you get is enthusiasm and intelligence - and access to all the key players in this great artist's life. Recommended unreservedly.
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1 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars Pretentious actor gets his friends to help him praise himself at book length, 6 Feb 2008
This review is from: Sean Penn: His Life and Times (Paperback)
Sean Penn is an actor I find difficult to get excited about. I have no opinion one way or the other about his acting. I only read this book because I saw it for £2.

It's an official biography written as a oral history (interviews edited together with next to no prose in-between) so awkward moments are dealt with as quickly and as vaguely as possible. So Shanghai Surprise is barely mentioned at all, and there's no solid information about We're No Angels amazingly expensive production. I mean they were working with Demme Moore and we get not one mention of her insane demands! I want dirt.

He has made very few interesting films and worked with very few interesting directors so it's slim pickings if you're not a Sean Penn fanatic. Even when he does make an interesting movie like Carlito's Way he whines about how he didn't like the film.

It was readable and enjoyable enough but I found the last few chapters to be unreadable as he backslaps himself on his own acting genius and political activism. I had to skip pages as I found him and his friends to be so smug.

The most interesting thing I got out of it was the strange sense of the privileged life he lives. He thinks of himself as a normal non-Hollywood guy, down with the losers and the bums of society. He seems incapable of grasping how corrupt he is with wealth and fame. He name drops like crazy and the book is littered with lots of asides that shows he expects the best things in like. When he was shooting his low budget directorial debut The Indian Runner it's mentioned that they spent a while looking for a mansion for him to stay in when filming. A nice house obviously wouldn't have been good enough for him. Or when shooting 21 Grams he suddenly got a private jet to take him and his co-workers down to New Orleans on a whim, you know, like most people do when they're bored.
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