what criterion do you use to judge an actor's performance

who the hell is shitting on 2-time oscar nominee brad pitt??

― the schef (adam schefter ha ha), Monday, February 23, 2009 1:25 PM (24 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ANGELINA JOLIE, am i right, sexually

i think brad pitt is totally a good actor

lol max u r so right

Whether it assists me in achieving a top-notch catharsis. NB: usually requires using a certain amount of tongue.

hes best when hes being funny

better than PSH, probably not. psh's looks are actually an advantage tho, it allows him to disappear into more serious-seeming roles

i bet hes pretty fun to hang out with tho

schef: Alfred is!

omar so challopsy, so Rong

Know your strengths. Matthew McConoughheyneighhey isn't terribly gifted, but at least he gives moderately tolerable Tom Selleck-style performances as manflesh in loads of dinky comedies – after years of doing Serious Drama like Amistad and A Time To Kill.

psh was great in mi3 i thot

better than brad pitt would have been

mcconaughey picks the worst fuckin movies ever

dude if you were in dazed and confused it would all be downhill for you too

are there any actors in d&c for whom that isnt their best movie?

PSH is really good but i dunno, i just prefer brad pitt

better than PSH, probably not. psh's looks are actually an advantage tho, it allows him to disappear into more serious-seeming roles

― s1ocki, Monday, February 23, 2009

i am not sure if i agree with this -- psh is really distinctive in a different "i am a sketchy person and possibly maybe i will molest your children lol" kind of way that i actually find distracting, imo he HAS to play a character like that or i just don't buy it, entirely because of his looks/demeanor. so six of one half dozen of the other in this case.

xpost alfred please you are now repping matt mcconoughey please just stop

psh was great in mi3 i thot

― max, Monday, February 23, 2009 7:28 PM (12 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

sometimes an actor lucks out w. the material imo

i did like PSH in Synecdoche this year, but the Academy preferred his ridiculously miscast role as usual.

lol Alfred, you're really gonna big-up McConoughey

god morbius no one says you HAVE to care about the oscars

Know your strengths. Matthew McConoughheyneighhey isn't terribly gifted, but at least he gives moderately tolerable Tom Selleck-style performances as manflesh in loads of dinky comedies – after years of doing Serious Drama like Amistad and A Time To Kill.

"Tom Selleck" style? You mean the great cinema television actor Tom Selleck?

he means "shirtless"

"manflesh"

Truly mysterious acting like Vanessa Redgrave, Gene Hackman, and Robert Ryan's – in which they don't seem to be doing anything at all except being – is what I admire most.

schef: McConoughey woulda been fine in the Brad Pitt part in Burn After Reading; he wouldn't have even needed crazy hair.

btw this is now incredibly appropriate: http://hollywoodinsider.ew.com/2008/04/matthew-mcconau.html

If at regular points in a film I think, whether consciously or subconsciously, "here is Tom Cruise / Brad Pitt / Philip Seymour Hoffman / Jennifer Connelly" as opposed to just enjoying the images and sounds and story in front of me, then I don't chalk that down as a great performance. If I think someone was bad, but can't put my finger on why, I want to watch again and see if I actually think it's great. If I can't fathom how this character is played by the same guy who was that other character in that other film (A Dark Knight's Brokeback Tale), then I think that's a pretty good sign of an awesome actor.

I could write more but Hollyoaks is on!

mcconaughey isn't hyper enough for that movie, he plays all his roles at half-speed

because he is stoned

lollllllllllll dan's link

mcconoughey would've been ABSOLUTELY ATROCIOUS, like film-ruiningly bad, in burn after reading. are you stoned? seriously?

He's L-I-V-I-N'.

schef, i liked the Oscars a lot more when everyone realized they were trivial, and the general public actually did know this once. Now movie blogs talk about movies solely in terms of awards, all year, and if you bring up ANYTHING that played in less than 500 theaters ppl roll their eyes.

fewer than 500 theaters

btw this is now incredibly appropriate: http://hollywoodinsider.ew.com/2008/04/matthew-mcconau.html

LOL I didn't know.

mcconoughey would've been ABSOLUTELY ATROCIOUS, like film-ruiningly bad, in burn after reading. are you stoned? seriously?

We're not talking about a Preston Sturges film here.

schef, i liked the Oscars a lot more when everyone realized they were trivial, and the general public actually did know this once. Now movie blogs talk about movies solely in terms of awards, all year, and if you bring up ANYTHING that played in less than 500 theaters ppl roll their eyes.

― Dr Morbius, Monday, February 23, 2009 1:34 PM (8 seconds ago)

ok you can keep bringing up this strawman over and over and over again but the "general public" doesn't actually give a crap about "movie blogs" (which is why they're shutting down defamer i guess lol) and ratings will tell you that no one watches or cares about the oscars as anything more than just "oh good for that kate winslet character, she's pretty and charming i suppose!" watercooler fodder. i sometimes just assume you live in a different dimension than me. i mean when was this mythical "once" you are referring to? a much, much higher percentage of americans watched the oscar when you were a kid than they do now and you know it.

you can ruin films that are somehow beneath the level of preston sturges, alfred -- little known fact!

id say stop worrying about movie blogs you dont respect anyway

i work at a pr firm that deals w/ movies and not a single person here has mentioned the oscars yet today, because theyre mostly a hilarious joke and not even publicists give a shit anymore

We're not talking about a Preston Sturges film here.

― The Screaming Lobster of Challops (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, February 23, 2009 7:36 PM (36 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

wtf does this even mean? i don't even think that BAR is slower than a p-sturg film. this is typical film-thread fronting.

People don't watch the Oscars because there's more than three channels showing shit on Oscar night.

yeah no one here has said anything about the oscars either, max. i mean it's like lol whatever that happened i guess kind of territory tehse days.

the oscars are trivial and yet they are fun to watch

schef of course i live in a diff dimension, w/ humping & nachos!

Alfred's right -- there was nothing else on 30 years ago.

Brad Pitt was funny for 5 mins in Burn, then he kept doing the same "look at me act the idiot' thing. Malkovich stole that film.

im not hating on the oscars, i enjoyed them a great deal last night and may even write a blog about them, im just saying, it used to be that everyone cared--then only publicists cared--now only the academy cares, which is why theyre just throwing the little statues at any movie that has a holocaust in it

Yeah, I mean, McConoughey would have been all "look at me, I AM an idiot." It's goofier, more honest.

haha arguing that brad pitt is more suitable to that role than matthew mcc is not exactly a shining endorsement of mr. pitt, morbs.

if you bring up ANYTHING that played in less than 500 theaters ppl roll their eyes.

who does this

xp

who the hell is shitting on 2-time oscar nominee brad pitt??

sounds like the tagline for a leaked scat vid

im not hating on the oscars, i enjoyed them a great deal last night and may even write a blog about them, im just saying, it used to be that everyone cared--then only publicists cared--now only the academy cares, which is why theyre just throwing the little statues at any movie that has a holocaust in it

― max, Monday, February 23, 2009 6:41 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

your twitter feed was strangely silent iirc

thank you G00bie

it seem that when people here are saying "method" they mean that an actor is "really getting into character". you can do this without doing "the method". for instance i have no idea whether jim carrey (who's famous for not breaking character on set) or ddl actually gives three shits about stanislavski or uses sense memory in the way stanislavski or lee strasberg recommend. the signature strategy of "the method" can be boiled down to an actor using the memory of an event from his own life in order to access a feeling that he thinks he needs for a certain moment that he's playing. many people find this useless, and actually counterproductive, since the memory itself is of a different circumstance than what's in the script (and furthermore the feeling isn't being generated between the actors in the drama but is welling up inside one actor, hence more static and less dynamic.) but some people are able to use it to great effect. (personally i think meisner has just the right emphasis on "affect memory" or "sense memory" - use it as a pinch, a goose, not to recall a specific emotion but to recall what trying to do a specific thing feels like. i.e. if your character is trying to get someone to make an exception for him, you can imagine what it feels like to try to convince an airline check-in guy to let you on a plane that's just closed its doors. a specific emotion isn't being summoned up here, but the memory of a specific action. and then you don't remember the airport every time you're on stage - you use it in rehearsal to get into the flow of how you need to be behaving.)

regarding the two levels i outlined above, obviously they can bleed into each other. and some actors (al pacino comes to mind) have become so virtuousic at the second level that they forget to do the first.

with ALL that said, it's interesting to me how successful non-actors can be in movies whereas a non-actor would have no chance on stage. maybe it has something to do with stage acting being a much more artificial thing, more of an art/craft in the classic sense.

somehow this ties in with the traditional diff between british and american acting traditions - brits treating acting as a skill, like sports training, repeating the same thing again and again until it is honed to perfection and outwardly indicative of a precise thing; and americans treating acting as this mystical zone where one never wants to play a line the same way twice, immersing their inner spirit into the truth of the fiction (or something)

some of my favorite films this decade have had nonprofessional actors.

with ALL that said, it's interesting to me how successful non-actors can be in movies whereas a non-actor would have no chance on stage. maybe it has something to do with stage acting being a much more artificial thing, more of an art/craft in the classic sense.

i think it's mostly because on stage you really DO have to maintain a character for 1-4 hours straight with no letting up, practically no breaks, it's much more of a rigorous workout. on a film set you might do 10 minutes of acting, total, in an 12-hour day. it's a completely different skill set.

not to mention stuff like this, by robert bresson - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049902/

xpost

No one has mentioned Robert Downey Jr. I'm unsure where he fits.

he's a Good Egg.

he's iron man (the film)

hes a wonder boy(s)

hes a goth(ika)

he's Chaplin

(did the gags really well)

He's a cartoon. (At least he was in "A Scanner Darkly")