Russell Crowe's New Poem Recited at the 2009 BAFTA Awards
Russell Crowe
Imagine there's no heaven.
I don't know if you're loving somebody. To be a poet and not know the trade, to be a lover and repel all women. Twin ironies by which great saints are made, the agonising pincer-jaws of heaven.
If you can walk with crowds and keep your virtue, walk with kings but not lose the common touch, if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much;
yours is the earth and everything that's in it and what's more, you'll be a man.
It's only words, and words are all I have, to take your breath away.
Maybe it's self-referential, meta. It's pastiche, homage, artistic theft of the highest order. It's an ironic wink in the mirror, a gesture copped from an old De Niro movie.
But I think that gives the man far too much credit.
He's the rich man's Gerard Butler, which is to say, the very destitute man's Kirk Douglas. Douglas has written ten books and counting, including more than one autobiography ON TOP OF BEING FREAKING SPARTACUS!
The funnier, more self-deprecating and knowing Crowe tries to be, the worse he comes off. I hate that guy's face and everything that comes out of it, including his mock-faux-pseudo-quasi-poem. In fact, there's only two good things ever to come from Russell Crowe (and no, one of them isn't even Gladiator). One is L.A. Confidential, where he plays a sympathetic version of himself, which is to say: boozy, chunky, skirt-chasing, belligerent, irrational and lunk-headed.
The other good thing is this.
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