David Carr in the New York Times waxes poetic about our man and favorite celeb, Steve Buscemi, who always seems to get knocked off in films.

Directors adore Steve Buscemi.
They lavish him with great roles, stellar dialogue, generous screen
time, and then — and there is no nice way to say this — they generally
bump him off.

"When I get cast, I always
flip to the end of the script to see if my character gets beaten up or
killed," Mr. Buscemi said, recalling a history of being stabbed, axed,
shot and fed to a wood chipper. "I really thought that after getting
killed on ‘The Sopranos,’ I should not accept scripts where I die. I
mean, there’s nowhere to go after getting killed by Tony Soprano.

"But
then I got offered this great part in ‘The Island,’ " he said, with a
whaddayagonnado shrug. "I didn’t even make it a third of the way
through the movie."

"I have been surviving a lot more lately, though," he added brightly.

In "Lonesome Jim," which opens tomorrow, Mr. Buscemi does not die, perhaps only because he directed the film and does not play a role.

The Jim of the movie’s title, played by Casey Affleck,
is no barrel of monkeys; he recalls many of Mr. Buscemi’s losers and
victims and perpetrators. He arrives home from the big city on the bus,
his tail not so much tucked between his legs as trailing behind him,
maimed and run over. He is sucked into the gaping maw of a nuclear
family he quietly loathes and spreads his misery — he diagnoses his
condition as "chronic despair" — between bouts of ennui. He is more of
a loser than, say, the ice cream truck driver of "Trees Lounge"
(1996), the first feature film Mr. Buscemi directed, but has a little
better luck with women. The female love interest, played by Liv Tyler, sees something in him that Jim, alas, cannot see in himself.

"I
don’t tend to think of these characters as losers," Mr. Buscemi, 48,
said, pushing around some eggs at French Roast in Greenwich Village. "I
like the struggles that people have, people who are feeling like they
don’t fit into society, because I still sort of feel that way."

Over
breakfast, after taking the F train from Brooklyn, where he lives, Mr.
Buscemi hardly comes across as the twitch he frequently plays in
movies. Sad-sack or homicidal roles aside, he is a working actor
married to a writer and filmmaker, Jo Andres, and they have a
15-year-old son. After his breakout turn as Mr. Pink in Quentin Tarantino’s "Reservoir Dogs" in 1992, he has had big roles in big movies — "Armageddon" and "Con Air"
— and continues to make smaller movies with the pals he came of
professional age with in the 80’s, including Mark Boone Junior, who
played fireplug to Mr. Buscemi’s skinny fireman — his day job at the
time — in comedy bits they worked up. Mr. Boone plays Evil in "Lonesome
Jim," a Hells Angel type who rides a moped.

Mr. Boone, who has
known and worked with Mr. Buscemi for 25 years, is unsurprised by his
success. "He’s got a great face, great eyes, he knows his mechanism and
knows how to use it," he said, adding that in spite of Mr. Buscemi’s
ubiquity, "I think he is underused. There are a lot of things that he
can do besides the kind of roles that he is cast in."

"Lonesome
Jim" made its debut last year at Sundance to mixed reviews. Mr. Buscemi
has no sense of entitlement around his work as a director, but has yet
to figure out the folkways of the movie business…

READ MORE AT THE NY TIMES.