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

Dan said DDL is great because of his amazing technical skill makes his performances consistent, which may be true, but it says little about what this technique is, or its relation to consistency.

(slocki: exactly)

charisma and onscreen confidence makes for great actors more than the other shit sometimes.

plus WTF is wrong with appreciation of tangible but non-quantifiable, subjective qualities? insistence that criticism must dwell primarily in the realm of the documentable, provable & measurable seems awfully boring to me.

not to mention impossible

"I will now scientifically prove that nicole kidman is a bad actress"

one of the reasons why DDL tends to be so fucking amazing in movies is because of his psycho method style where he pretty much turns himself into whichever character he's portraying throughout filming, creating a consistency of character that others find difficult to match.

you know who else did this? sean astin in lotr -- he was always looking out for elijah wood and was super protective on set, asking if he was getting worn out, getting him food and stuff, basically samwise mode 24/7 (i heard this on a very informative commentary track btw). no oscars for sean astin to date.

plus WTF is wrong with appreciation of tangible but non-quantifiable, subjective qualities? insistence that criticism must dwell primarily in the realm of the documentable, provable & measurable seems awfully boring to me.

― welcome little swetty (contenderizer), Monday, February 23, 2009 7:58 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

no but if you're having a discussion about what makes a performance good, saying something more substantial than "goodness" is helpful

charisma and onscreen confidence makes for great actors more than the other shit sometimes.

― omar little

i'd say that charism + confidence makes for memorable/appealing/compelling performances.

My point isn't that "method acting is the end-all, be-all", it was that method-acting is what makes DDL great; it is a tangible thing you can point to. There are things about every actor out there who gets accolades or who gets shat upon that you can pick out as evidence for their worth as an actor and how that informs "good acting" and describing that as "they bring out the inner meaning of the character" actually short-changes the whole process IMO.

One of my favorite performances of last year was James Franco in "Pineapple Express". He, to my knowledge, isn't a method actor, but he pretty easily slid into the skin of a desperate-for-friends amiable drug dealer who was equal parts likeable wkiw and clingily repellent and he made it seem effortless. I thought that was a great role for him and it really raised my impression of him as an actor.

Do I know what he did, technically, to get that? No. I wish I did; it would help me with the stage stuff I do.

i think contenderizer should go to see more plays

what is weird for me is that w/live performances i feel like i have better capacity for judging performances even if i dont understand the technical things that make a performance vital

but watching movies/tv im basically an aspie like i honestly cant tell the difference between a ddl performance and matthew mac one except that the idea of ddl in how to lose a guy in 10 days is megalulz 2 me. and i was listening to the S1 mad men commentary tracks this wknd and there were all these moments were the ppl commentating fell into a reverant hush about a performance and i was just ???. w/e level ppl process "believability" on i feel like i'm deaf and blind to

Well I understand consistency to mean that every part of the performance is consistent or harmonious with every other part. Which at the very least is coherent if perhaps still difficut to determine.

Mickey Rourke's oscar.

http://www.aqua-fish.net/imgs/fish/oscar-fish.jpg

not being snarky here but your post sounds like "I'm deaf, can you help me appreciate music?"

xp to lamp

"Consistency" means that, within the story as put forward on the screen, everything the actor does jibes with the way you believe the character would behave given what you know about them and given what is happening to them. Sometimes bad plots/direction make this impossible; when it doesn't, I blame the actor. (For example, I more often than not hate actors who can't/won't do accents.)

dvd commentary is the ultimate hollywod jack off sesh, 2nd to maybe james lipton

3rd was last night's chant of the ever-circling skeletal family around acting nominees.

no but if you're having a discussion about what makes a performance good, saying something more substantial than "goodness" is helpful

― s1ocki

but i did. i described the qualities that i value in performances, those that equate with "greatness" for me. some would say, "great acting is when you can't look away." others that, "great acting is when the peformer seems convincing to me in a wide variety of challenging-seeming roles."

don't see how my appreciation of "intelligence, wit and/or emotional complexity" is any different, or any MORE subjective than any of that.

The other thing I reacted to in your post is that you made it seem like it's only possible to be a good actor in a particular type of movie. Ann Hathaway struck me as a fantastic actress from the first time I saw her, which was flipping through cable channels and stumbling across "The Princess Diaries", a movie that is pretty much a total cookie-cutter piece of nonsense that she managed to imbue with sincerity. I don't know what she did, but she portrayed that character as a real person, to the point where her subsequent kudos in "Brokeback Mountain" and "Rachel Getting Married" are no surprise to me. (Actually, I feel the same way about Heath Ledger, who I first saw in "Roar" and thought was pretty great despite being in one of the dumbest, most ludicrous shows on television that season.)

So much of this is knowing how to approach your source material; there are pieces where approaching it with serious earnest is correct, while other things need to be scenery-chewing excess or else it will fall flat (see Clive Owen and his total bungling of "Sin City" compared to everyone else in the movie). It also doesn't help that acting doesn't exist in a vacuum; so much of what you do is at the whim of the director, who might be forcing you in a direction you can't go or a direction you don't believe in, resulting in a poor performance (I think this was Tom Cruise's biggest problem in "Vanilla Sky").

or an editor

^^^ yeah, I don't have experience with them (lol chorister in regional theater) so I forget about their influence

didn't mean to emphasize any kind of movie or performance over any other. i do think there is a difference between what clint eastwood did in the "dirty harry" movies and what linda hunt did in "the year of living dangerously" (former = movie star, latter = actor), but i don't know that the one is any better or more valuable than the other.

one can be both a great actor and a superstar celebrity type, just as one can deliver great performances in less "serious" sorts of films & roles. ledger's joker being this year's all caps example.

Michael Caine and Gene Hackman have been dreck most of their lives and emerged unscathed.

Chris Walken, as usual, is on another plane – that Zen state where technique, star power, and paying the morgage blur into deliciousness.

they're both actors, dude, they just have different styles and one just happens to be a movie star.

xp

Great thread. Nothing to add really, except it made me think of Spielberg's advice to George Clooney: "If you stop moving your head around, you'll be a movie star."

Too bad Robert Bresson is dead.

^^ of course they're both actors. i'm making a distinction between two acting approaches, one that i'm filing in bin called "movie star", the other in a bin called "acting". perhaps the bin-names i've chosen are unfair or misleading, but i think they convey a certain truth.

if that doesn't wash for you, you could call the second bin "being all self-effacing and technical and shit". same diff.

People get hired for different things. Some are hired because they are being typecast (ie, "just be yourself/do that one thing you do, that's what we want"). Others are hired because they will lose themselves into whatever the role asks ("we know you will shave your head and lose 40 lbs for this role"). Others are hired because of their fan bases ("your last film made $$$$$$$$$$, please read this script and we will make whatever changes are necessary for you to like it").

I don't think you can call Clint Eastwood out as a good example of a "movie star" as opposed to an "actor", particularly after seeing "Unforgiven" and seeing what he is like offscreen.

wasn't calling out clint, was calling out dirty harry. and by extension, the man with no name. clint's career as whole is much harder to pin down with a simple label.

lotta subtlety and good acting in that man with no name stuff

probably been mentioned before didn't read the entire thread but.. this is a tough question and the boring answer for me is: when i notice someone's ACTING, it's bad. for example i just saw Habana Blues, where most of the actors were really trying too hard with lots of arm gestures. or..maybe that's Cuban.

eastwood is fantastic in the leone flicks, but his acting seems to trade more in understatement than the tricky sort of human subtlety i'm thinking of. 90% of the performance consists of poker-faked diffidence taken to perverse extremes: staring, squinting, grimacing, pausing, whispering, spitting. he's got massive screen charisma, his timing is impeccable, and the character is both mesmerizing & totally convincing, but the net result lacks the sort of deep nuance & complexity i'm talking about. this isn't a fault. if the man with no name were more vulnerable, conflicted, transparent and messily human, he wouldn't be anywhere near so iconic.

But if you look at, say, Toshiro Mifune's performances in the Kurosawa flicks on which those Leone movies were based, it's the same kind of performance!

yup

you're really trying to tell me that he's more about understatement than subtlety??

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

― max, Monday, February 23, 2009 7:46 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah basically. this is why valkyrie is aight.

also, people saying no-one cares abt oscars: they do here in britishland!

tbh i think it's hard to judge a lot of acting perfs because quite a lot of them are constructed in the editing room, not just 'best takes' or whatever, but fundamental shit like timing too.

A: The ablility to behave truthfully under imaginary circumstances.

when i notice someone's ACTING, it's bad. for example i just saw Habana Blues, where most of the actors were really trying too hard with lots of arm gestures. or..maybe that's Cuban.

This is a tricky issue, because behavior that is credible in one culture (Russia, Italy, etc.) might read as exaggerated and schticky in another.

s1ocki:

yeah. given that i'm using the words to describe different things. some definitions for "subtle":

fine or delicate in meaning or intent; difficult to perceive or understand: subtle irony.
requiring mental acuteness, penetration, or discernment: a subtle philosophy.
insidious in operation: subtle poison.

the character (the man with no name) uses subtle strategy to make his way in the world. he's a subtle creation. but eastwood's characterization is not at all subtle. it's the opposite of subtle: it's simple, uncomplicated and clear, even obvious, composed of a small handful of iconic gestures and stances that mean exactly what they seem to say.

sooo... you are saying that you think good acting is when you can't tell emotions what the actor is attempting to convey...?

lots of subtlety in his relationship with tuco in the good the bad and the ugly w/r/t how they ultimately begin to interact and come to some sort of alliance, and how he conveys concern, respect, understanding, and affection for him.

hi dere & omar:

no, i'd say that the type of acting i'm describing (as distinguished from star quality screen presence) is characterized by complexity, subtlety, self-effacement, emotional risk & honesty, the avoidance of the broadly iconic.

eastwood isn't a block of stone. he does convey his character's emotions. but he does this in a more understated than a subtle manner. my language is failing me here. i mean, i understand the temptation to treat these words as roughly synonymous...

There is a reason for that temptation:

http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/subtle

Main Entry: subtle
Part of Speech: adjective
Definition: nice, quiet, delicate
Synonyms: attenuate, attenuated, deep, discriminating, ethereal, exquisite, faint, fine, finespun, hairline, hairsplitting, illusive, implied, inconspicuous, indirect, indistinct, inferred, ingenious, insinuated, mental, penetrating, profound, refined, slight, sophisticated, suggestive, tenuous, thin, understated

damn perry

haha my bit of pedantry in this particular festival of it is going to involve noting that the lists of synonyms in a thesaurus do not consist of exact synonyms -- in fact, they kind of shoot to do the exact opposite of that -- so this is a pretty poor way of proving anything

"hey kind of shoot to do the exact opposite of that "

no they dont u crazy

e.g., if contenderizer were making a distinction between "indistinct" acting and "profound" acting, y'all would not be doing thesaurus lols

xpost - umm wtf I think it is pretty safe to say that your average thesaurus strives to provide synonyms encompassing as many different aspects as possible of the original word -- they strive to be broad, not exact

yr. kinda proving my point, omar. "subtle" has connotative associations like: discriminating, exquisite, ingenious, mental (intellectual?), penetrating, profound, refined...

while "understated" is also associated with "subtle", it does not, in and of itself, carry the same connotative associations.

this thread is about to get "great" isn't it

been there for a while