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Remembering Val Kilmer, a Powerful Actor Who Remained a Reluctant Movie Star
Val Kilmer sought stardom but remained ambivalent about it, even as he was indelible in movies from "The Doors" to "Tombstone" to "Wonderland."
He plays a science wizard at Pacific Tech who becomes the mentor to a 15-year-old prodigy, and Kilmer glides through the movie like an elfin jock in fuzzy animal slippers, living on a cloud of superiority, bringing the perfect note of fake seriousness to lines like “I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said, ‘I drank what? With “Tombstone,” Kilmer was practically announcing — to the world and to himself — that he was one of those “character actors in a leading man’s body.” And that, in a strange way, is the very quality that powered his performance in “ Batman Forever ” (1985), which may, after “Top Gun,” be the one bull’s-eye blockbuster choice he ever made. And the movie, unseen by many, in which Kilmer may have done that most powerfully is “Wonderland,” the 2003 drama in which he portrays the porn star John C. Holmes, who went to an incredibly scary place of addiction, fallen fame and violence that was, in a certain way, all but thrust upon him.
Or read this on Variety