This wanna be green poserdo-gooder makes my hate list.As an actor, Sean Penn is routinely mentioned among the best of his generation. Nominated for four Academy Awards (with one win, for "Mystic River"), and with a growing slate of credits as a producer, director and screenwriter, his credentials as an artist are unquestioned. The problem is his off-screen persona, which veers from dour and serious to moody and pugilistic. Sure, Penn has served time for getting into fisticuffs with paparazzi and other civil infractions, including (as legend has it, anyway) dangling one photog from a ninth-story hotel room window. But it's his more recent adventures in the political realm that created a place for him on this list. His politics skew heavily to the left, which isn't the problem; it's the ham-handed way he goes about pushing those politics that rankles us. An insufferable earnestness too often makes its way into his approach, like a speech he gave recently at the Coachella music festival. There to promote his "Dirty Hands Caravan" project (which involved a group of do-gooder citizens riding cross-country in three biodiesel buses), he fell painfully flat. The low point was when he admonished the crowd to remember that, while watching the Prince concert later in the day, glaciers would be melting and babies would be raped. That kind of sledgehammer oratory make us, well, cringe.

Attached Images