Zsenitan wrote:

But I have a really profound sympathy for his brand of overcompensation. He's insecure even though he's great at all kinds of things. I mean: he really was a totally badass akido master, and he legitimately was a big movie star, and he actually can play the shit out of some blues guitar - but it's never enough for him, he can't seem to out-succeed his failures. Or perhaps he can't abide just being successful: he wants to inhabit the world he expected or the one he creates in movies.

So he goes and does hacky, weird, awkward shit like get himself declared a tulku or whatever, and he offers asylum to the princess of tibet or something like that, he puts out an energy drink, he works as a cop in Louisiana, he dresses like a strutting Navajo, he claims he's a secret government agent who worked undercover for the CIA, he says mysteriously racist shit at his own blues concert.

Guys who are comfortable being hacks, like JCVD, and guys who have always been giant successes their whole lives and never doubted it for an instant, like Dolph Lundgren - those guys make fun movies, but they don't interest me as people. Steven Seagal is a bittersweet permanent wannabe nerd who incessantly tries too hard and in the wrong way. I'm not saying that I'm exactly the same, but, you know, there's an element of that which informed my cultural retreat into obscurities and antiquities.