«MORE THAN ANYTHING PEOPLE JUST WANT STARS»

And Hollywood, true to form, is wallowing in self-pity. Celebrities want our sympathy and they’re willing to burst our bubble to prove it. Earlier this year, Joaquin Phoenix and Casey Affleck’s mockumentary, I’m Still Here, pulled back the curtain on the kind of devouring, narcissistic personal hell that has afflicted movie stars since the advent of the studio system.Sofia Coppola’s new film, Somewhere, takes it to a whole new level. In it, Stephen Dorff plays a disaffected Hollywood leading man who drifts around his suite at the Chateau Marmont hotel, ordering in strippers, indulging in random sex, and generally having no idea where, what or who he’s meant to be next. His chiselled blankness is as charismatic as it is disturbing – a metaphor for the allure of Hollywood itself, a place where illusion is everything.

-The Globe & mail
january 4 2011