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

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

admittedly i am evaluating this from an unpaid online film critic persp. pay no heed!

i offered no McCon comparison, bcz I don't think I've seen him in anything but magazines since Contact. also I find his abs freakish.

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

this is exactly what i took from Pitt's performance in Burn After Reading

sorry slocks, you should have called me

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.

yeah i agree with this - i saw kristin scott thomas in il y a longtemps que je t'aime recently and it was a revelation, kind of like: oh, THIS is what truly great acting is. there were these astonishing close-ups of her face, and she'd manage to convey these oceans of emotion while barely moving a muscle. and the power came from her, even more so than the script or direction.

that's kind of exceptional though, usually i just judge an actor's performance on believability - am i convinced by them or do they rupture the mood unnecessarily.

i figure, if theyre british, and over 40, theyre probably amazing

that's kind of exceptional though, usually i just judge an actor's performance on believability - am i convinced by them or do they rupture the mood unnecessarily

This is what I do and why I am convinced that had Tom Cruise not tried to go the "I AM SERIOUS ACTOR" route for a while, I wouldn't have started hating him.

Jordan, my editor was on some film site's "roundtable" and when he mentioned The Witnesses (French film set at the dawn of AIDS) as one of the best films he'd seen, these other film bloggies basically said "wow, that's obscure, who would ever see that?" very dismissively. i just found this typical of how where college grad ppl 30-50 years ago sought out international/low-budget films, 98% of them don't anymore, at all, ever. The mass-marketing film culture has become the only film culture, and I'm sad about it.

Yes, but bloggers tend heavily towards self-involved douchebags who should be ignored.

blogging brings out the dbag in the best people

no argument

xp

tho there are outliers

that's surprising since it's easier than ever to see obscure, limited-distribution films

yes, if ppl wanted to see them. they (generally) don't want to.

morbs thats not an argument, thats an anecdote

what evidence do you have that this is the case besides 5 bloggers whose sites you dont even remember?

i want to if they sound good, i think that's the same for most people. i'm sure a lot of people are lazy about tracking down films if they're not easily available, but i don't think i've met anyone who actually has a bias against obscure movies.

the bathos of this year's oscars was unbearable. maybe it's just me but it felt like the gulf between the general perception of the oscars' importance and the academy's perception of their importance reached a new pinnacle. particularly in the acting dept. however they are a guild.

i look at a lotta film sites, God help me.

oh u mean that art films are unpopular? film distributors going out of business.

xxp

there are definitely people who do, at least the bias that "well i should see the big important movies first and maybe eventually i'll get around to these obscure films"

thats as much evidence that theres a big shift occurring in the way we consume movies as it is that no one is watching art films morbs

last year wasnt a good year for big studios either! or for movie theaters for that matter!

b.o. biz is consistently up THIS year...

bcz of Paul Blart Mall Cop, Madea Goes to Jail, etc.

this seems the moment to say that i judge an actor's performance based on how hilarious he/she looks riding a segway

madea is an indie

but whatever. twas ever thus, dude. you're not going to gain anything by bitching about how people like to go to stupid movies.

Like everything else Tyler Perry touches, I am certain it will be amazingly awful

it "made a" fortune this weekend

argh

how frustrating it must be for you that his name can be broken into a pun

technically his name is actually tyler perry, hoos

"ty lerper ry" less funny tho

i dunno dude

i can't say i use any one criteria cos there are a lot of different, and maybe mutually exclusive, ways of being interesting or compelling.

i'm a huge fan of character actors and TV bit players, so i can be really satisfied and impressed with someone really knocking out a great 0:45 as a victim on csi or whatever. there's nothing wrong with figuring out what your schtick is and getting it down to a science. it was like a light going off, in the brief time in college when i thought i wanted to be an actor, watching the wizard of oz for the first time in forever and realizing that all of dorothy's companions were amazing performers, totally specific and fearless and seamless, total pros.

one thing i do really love tho is actor's who have the stagey discipline to really work on language, so I'll always probably over-rate actors who do well with material where the language is very uniquely constructed and moves at its own rhythm -- if u can thrive in mamet or the coens or on deadwood, i'll think you're a good actor.

eh stray apostrophe there

"Madea" is already a variation of "mother dear"

(according to the wikipedia page I was just reading a second ago)

which page makes no mention, in its name etymology, of any other famous theatrical woman whose name sounds a bit like that

fucking appalling

I don't mind Tyler Perry stuff -- sometimes it's entertainingly quaint. But a lot of it is really hard to swallow straight up, as opposed to sitting around thinking about how incredibly archetypal all the characters are and thinking about what those archetypes mean. At point they're practically pantomimes.

Also I don't know much about the guy, but I respect his whole deal here -- building something up from regional theater, being really in touch with his audience but in a way that's accessible to lots of people, being really prolific (it's easier to be prolific when you deal in archetypes, but still, I admire the ability to just churn out working narratives), keeping business control of all his stuff -- ... I mean, it's all stuff that seems commendable, and it's hard to begrudge the guy success he'd appear to have worked up pretty much on his own steam

I don't begrudge the process or his success at all! I begrudge the fact that I really, really, really hate what he does.