I have fairly high hopes for Hidalgo, so I read Actor Mortensen Saddles Up for Movie ‘Hidalgo’ and discovered a few things:
Mortensen, 45, had been admired by movie critics since the 1980s, but was relatively unknown to mass audiences until “Rings” and Aragorn thrust him into the spotlight.
Viggo Mortensen’s 45? I had no idead.
Mortensen is something of a Renaissance man. He paints, writes and co-owns publisher, Perceval Press. He speaks Spanish, Danish and English, and for “Hidalgo” learned some of the language of the Lakota Native Americans.
Interesting guy. Incidentally, he was “born in New York of a Danish father and American mother.” I should have noticed that his name ended in “sen” — Danish names tend to do that.
I decided to look up Perceval Press. They’re fairly left wing. Some product description excerpts:
- Dedicated to Noam Chomsky and using William Blake, Jonathan Swift, and Rumi’s prescient wordplay as its point of departure, Pandemoniumfromamerica is a sonic snapshot of 21st century disorientation and dissent.
- Now that the Bush administration’s occupation of Iraq has become more about enforcing the economic and political objectives of a corporate elite and less about disarming a dictator that used to be an American ally and had nothing to do with the tragedies of 9/11, a spirited and informed analysis is needed more than ever.
- Born in Guanabacoa and living in Regla, both religious centers in Cuba, Pupo has a long association with Santeria (Regla de Ocho), and voodoo. Through photography the artist rediscovers his religion from a new perspective, as a philosophy about life where the visions of the individual serve as doors to access the real world, and provide the true way to “see” what is around us.