I'd halfway agree with you on that, Jack, Costner does tend to play "himself" most of the time...but Kevin Costner has done some great movies in his time. I would also say that he did in fact act quite well in some of them. He certainly acted well in JFK, for instance, as far as I'm concerned. He certainly came across well in the one about Elliot Ness.

He hit a point, though, where he became enormously and universally popular...and that's really dangerous for anyone in show biz....because what happens quite soon after that is that a reaction sets in against it, and people can't wait to see their old hero fall from the dizzying heights.

The negative reaction began to set in sometime after "Dances With Wolves", around about the time the Robin Hood film came out...and admittedly, Kevin Costner was miscast as Robin Hood. So that was when he began to appear vulnerable.

And what happened after that? An absolute feeding frenzy of Costner criticism became the soup de jour of the media. Let's all get together and screw Kevin Costner, said the critics and the public. After all, WE were the people who just couldn't get enough of him. WE were the people who put him on the cover of "People" magazine as "sexiest man in the world" only a year or two ago.

Nothing like that can last. People get embarrassed over their own adulation of someone. They decide their hero is not God after all, and they're out to get him from then on. It's like what happened to Springsteen after 1985. Remember? By 1987 you couldn't sell a Bruce Springsteen album in a record store to anyone for 5 cents! The poor guy had become toooooo popular...he got overexposed...and then the reaction set in.

People don't see how they do it. They build up their heroes large...way too large...then they turn on them like dogs when they see them showing a sign of weakness.

It's mean. It's petty. It's nasty. I don't like it.