Val Kilmer recently took time off from his quest to become the world’s pre-eminent Mark Twain impersonator to film this video for TotalFilm, promoting the 25th anniversary Blu-Ray release of Willow, the best movie George Lucas ever produced. That’s right, Willow is 25 years old, meaning that if you’re referencing Willow with a 20-something, they likely have no idea what you’re talking about. Anyway, a lot of people have sent this to me already, saying “Check it out, Val Kilmer is WASTED!” which would obviously be right in FilmDrunk’s wheelhouse. I could tell you what I think, but why not just watch it and we can go on this journey together:

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve touched on it before when I posted about his stage show, and a lot people in and around LA already know about it, but I’m not sure most people (myself included) understood the full extent of Val Kilmer’s Mark Twain ambitions. That’s right, Val Kilmer, when he’s not cutting off clumps of his own hair with a knife onstage at rock shows, has Mark Twain ambitions. The subject recently came up in Vulture‘s interview with Up in the Air writer (the book, not the movie) Walter Kirn, who’s apparently good friends with Kilmer.

Oh, Val Kilmer. Here’s a tip: His real ambition, and what he’s putting all his time and money into — and this is no joke, because he’s good at it — is to be this generation’s preeminent Mark Twain impersonator. He wants to succeed Hal Holbrook. It’s actually kind of staggering, because no one really knows what Mark Twain’s voice sounded like. There are some descriptions but no recordings.

So he’s developed a show that he puts on somewhat spottily and informally around Los Angeles, where he wears $3,000-worth of prosthetic makeup, and he’s actually awesome at it. He wants to make the same kind of transformation that he did with Jim Morrison when he did The Doors. And as a friend, I think if he can just get a grip on his flakiness, he could really make a splash with this. It sounds a little eccentric, but he’s got a lot of material, because it’s not just old Twain, it’s the drunken, sad, regretful, pensive character that we’re not used to.

That’s right, Val Kilmer has written, produced, and finances his own one-man show that he performs in character as Mark Twain. This show, how awesomely Val Kilmer is it? Well, and I don’t mean to talk out of school, but I’ve heard tell, the thing has Batman Forever jokes. Delivered by Val Kilmer. As Mark Twain.

Here’s a particularly colorful account of one of the shows from Tumblr WalkersWheelhouse, who called it “truly one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever seen.”

- Right off the bat, Mark Twain Val Kilmer makes a Batman Forever joke. You know, because we were in the Hollywood Forever Cemetary. You can just picture him writing it and being like, “I can’t NOT make a Batman Forever joke! People will be expecting it!”

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve heard enough stories about Val Kilmer being nuts that I believe them, and true to form, Kilmer joined the Black Lips onstage at Fun Fun Fun Fest in Austin over the weekend, taking a chainsaw to an amplifier, screaming non-sequitirs, making out with the band, walking in a walker, and eventually chopping off clumps of his own hair with a knife. You know, actor stuff. Supposedly the performance was being filmed for a Terrence Malick movie, a movie I like to think is entitled “An Average Day in the Life of Val Kilmer.”

On Friday, Kilmer hopped onto the Fun Fun Fun Fest stage with the Black Lips and Terrence Malick’s film crew, the latter of which, reports Rolling Stone, was there to capture the actor’s performance for an untitled film also starring Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling, and Natalie Portman. Or was it all just a warm-up? In between chain-sawing through stage equipment and giving himself a surprise haircut, Kilmer told the Austin crowd, “Did they tell you we’re making a movie? We’re not. We’re practicing making a movie.” Regardless of whether the performance was being filmed as a rehearsal or an actual scene, the footage may never see the light of day; Malick recently surprised both critics and his To the Wonder cast when he deleted Rachel Weisz, Michael Sheen, Amanda Peet, and Berry Pepper entirely from his romantic drama.

During the performance, Kilmer further provoked the audience by asking them if they’d like to hear him perform as Jim Morrison, whom he portrayed in the 1991 biopic The Doors. “Do you wanna hear some Doors songs? Well, you’re 20 years too late. No Doors here. We have some windows . . . got some garage. But we’ve got no Doors.” [VanityFair]

Haha, that is a good one, Val Kilmer, we’re all just spitballin here.

I’ll admit, I was not at Fun Fun Fun Fest to gauge audience reaction, but I think Val Kilmer may have overestimated the desire of a bunch of 22-year-old Austin hipsters to hear an actor sing a song their parents were conceived to because he was in a movie about it 20 years ago. That said, I would’ve completely lost my sh*t if he’d sung “Skeet Surfin‘.”

Read the rest of this entry »

I love this picture. I have nothing to add.

[Val Kilmer at Tribeca 2012, via TheDailyMail]

UPDATE: Thanks, Jeremy:

Grindin' rails and eatin' grinders, y'all.

Remember Val Kilmer on a BMX from a few weeks ago? Besides being perfect FilmDrunk Photoshop fodder, it comes from a film by Harmony Korine called “The Fourth Dimension,” which is actually the first of a series of three films, with the next two to be directed by Aleksei Fedorchenko and Jan Kwiecinski. The trailer is below, and besides featuring Val Kilmer as a motivational speaker wearing a bolo tie and fanny pack, and having an awesomely weird auto-tune soundtrack, the titles seem to indicate that the series is part of a Dogme 95-like pledge by the participating filmmakers. Here’s the full text:

Dear director from another land. Here are your instructions. You must forget everything you know. It needs to blur the line between what is real and what is fake. We must never know the truth. You must show us a glimpse of the fourth dimension. We are counting on you.

If you truly “forget everything you know,” wouldn’t you mostly just lay on the floor shitting yourself and drooling? That’s the problem with these pretentious artsy types, their grandiose words are always so full of assumptions and ambiguity. That said, if your “art” happens to include Val Kilmer in a fanny pack and bolo tie giving speeches at a roller rink, sign me up for a monogrammed beret.

Read the rest of this entry »