Jack Nicholson

Looking over this list, I account The Shining as the film that ruined Nicholson's career as an actor. It taught him how easy it was to ham it up and persuade audiences to accept it as good acting. He never looked back. Boy howdy, has he been gawdawful the past couple of decades!

btw, I voted Missouri Breaks, just to be contrarian. Chinatown is clearly the strongest horse in this field.

btw, I'm white.

yelling in GF2 (or Panic in Needle Park) is not same as Robot Pacino Yelling

voted easy rider because it's my favorite movie up there, but chinatown will (and prob should) win

I account The Shining as the film that ruined Nicholson's career as an actor. - I see your point, but just because TS birthed the "crazy Jack is gonna snap" schtick that, yeah, got old really quick, doesn't mean that his performance in that film, taken on its own, should be held accountable for The Witches of Eastwick or whatever. To use the Pacino analogy,Glengarry Glen Ross should not be blamed for The Devil's Advocate, even though his lawyer/Satan was essentially a hyper-stylized Ricky Roma.

I'm probably biased, being a horror buff, but I've always thought of the Jack Torrence character as one of cinema's great psychopaths, not necessarily for the cackling and clowning of the film's final third, but for the sinister undertone boiling up between the point when he hurts his son & later starts interacting with ghosts/hallucinations, hitting full stride in the uber-creepy dialog between Jack and the previous caretaker in the washroom. The "here's Johnny" sequence is what people typically associate with the character, but it is that bathroom exchange which best exemplifies the strength of his performance.

Sorry for the lengthy post. I just like The Shining a lot, flawed though it may be.

Sorry for the lengthy post. I just like The Shining a lot, flawed though it may be.

i just watched Louis Theroux in some kind of self-help-hypnosis world and have to say: DON'T APOLOGIZE. that was a good post :)

i'm not a good judge of what makes quality acting, but the movie of these i have enjoyed the most is prob. five easy pieces.

xpost: thanks. I feel a little self-conscious when I'm the only dude on a thread with a long post, which tends to be often, just cuz I'm such a flowery bastard. I wasn't apologizing for my love of TS, but it is a flawed film. The third act just can't support the masterful tone of the first two (but at least it didn't end with an attack of giant hedge bunnies, as King would have preferred).

At first, while voting in polls, I was conflicted about whether I should vote for the objectively "best" thing, or the thing I just happen to like the most. In keeping with the (variably)anti-canonical spirit of ILX, I decided to just go with the latter. So yeah, objectively, Chinatown 9 times out of 10, but I'm voting for the first two-thirds of The Shinning (sic)

i want you to hold this poll between your knees

oh yeah, well I won't stand for your smartness and sarcasm.

can you read THIS sign???

has anyone here seen Woooooooolf? it's pretty great.

i voted the shining in spite of the hamminess; it's just such an indelible movie for me. i could have easily voted for any of his other classic roles.

i'd love to have a film festival of some of those lesser-known/underrated nicholson movies. i've never seen marvin gardens.

Anyone wanna make an argument for The Trip?

Actually, I think he directed that one. I can't remember if he appeared in it or not.

The Pledge is a fantastic novel (I got the Penguin w/Jack Nicholson's face on the cover). Glad to see the film is rated well by some here!

He was good in these films that I did not dig:

Carnal Knowledge (1971)
Terms Of Endearment (1983)
Hoffa (1992)
The Departed (2006)

He could do nothing to make me watch these films again:

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981)
The Witches Of Eastwick (1987)
Batman (1989)
Anger Management (2003)
About Schmidt (2003)

Chinatown easy. The Pledge is good.

Remake of Postman is awful.

gotta be the passenger for me. one of my favorite movies.

The Witches of Eastwick is fun -- my favorite of his hambone performances.

I'm going for Chinatown on this one, definitely. Has there ever been a thread on favourite director cameos? I adore Polanski in this.

Anyone wanna make an argument for The Trip?

I enjoyed that film a lot, but I don't think Nicholson was in it as an actor. Saw it too long ago to make a proper argument for it as a good film, but it was definitely fun.

the trip is the russ meyer one w/ peter fonda right? saw it recently...no jack. think he (co?)wrote it

Yeah, it was Peter Fonda. Corman was the director, not sure if Meyer had anything to do with it. It's kind of Meyer-esque in places, I guess.

Yeah, I just checked on IMDB & Nicholson wrote it. I'm not sure why I associated him so closely with the film. Was he in another, similar, film about the LSD experience?

Psych-Out? Or even Easy Rider?!

vote for easy rider so i'm not the only one

i prefer Wolf to The Shining and Blood & Wine and Batman to The Departed.

xxpost: Sure, ES is pretty psychedelic, but I'm thinking of something where the depiction of the "trip" is the central premise. I'm guessing Psych-Out is the one I'm (not really) remembering or, at least, so the title would indicate.

Also wrote Head, the Monkees movie, but not in it so far as I remember...

he is, for 5-10 seconds.

Poll also doesnt have the film where he played Peter Lorre's son.

I don't know anyone in charge of making movies, but I wish they would start making more movies like Hells Angels on Wheels.

Get on a motorcycle
Go to carnival
Get drunk and stoned
Paint Naked Women
repeat then have fight that goes wrong...

That is a movie. The end is pretty classic as Nicholson has a total 'what the hell just happened' look on his face.

Voted for The Passenger... Tremendous movie and gets overlooked a lot. The Shooting is my #2 pick

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Ironweed got a vote?!

far less scandalous than motherfucking Shining -- quintessential bad Jack, save for red bathroom scene.

aw come on it's a great, funny flick.

hmm, i just watched carnal knowledge. great film.

I saw it while ago, I hadn't even heard about such a film before, and was pleasantly surprised. Great performance by Nicholson as a smug bastard. I think it's quite rare to see Hollywood films where none of the protagonists are really sympathetic at all. (Though did feel sorry for Ann-Margret's character.)

Strikes me as one of those culturally necessary films after the kind of Mad Men era, and I love Ann-Margaret so it was sort of both compulsory and painful viewing. But like a lot of films from that time, it's just so clearly WRITTEN but without the joys of good writing--the worst of naturalism and mannerism, if that makes sense. I just watched The King of Marvin Gardens and had a slightly similar reaction, again with great performances in a game that seems both dreary and rigged. Nice study of classic '70s-film atmosphere though.

Agreed. Ellen Burstyn gives the best performance in KOMG anyway.

I don't think I saw this poll, but Prizzi's Honor deserved a vote. Too bad it was misspelled.

poor easy rider

Nothing for Batman :(

missed this, would have gone Shining.

yeah null points for batman, bit surprised

Really good in Hoffa, which, I was surprised to remember, had some good bits.

Hoffa's pretty ridiculous, but mostly enjoyable - devito's the best dude in that movie though

i think i would've voted for The Border

75 today. Sad scene.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vys2K_18uk

http://life.time.com/culture/jack-nicholson-unpublished-photos-1969/?iid=lf%7Clatest#1

78

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_IVurj2Od0

Orion to thread

Producer Jerome Hellman bought the rights to Theroux's novel as soon as it was published, and Weir committed to filming it. Jack Nicholson was originally offered the lead role, but backed out partly because he could not watch the LA Lakers from Belize, where part of the film was to be shot.[1] He instead went on to star in Terms of Endearment, a role Ford had also been offered.

80 today

The point at which he starts imitating himself is Cuckoo's Nest. Though he doesn't always.

― Pope Rusty I (Dr Morbius), Sunday, May 5, 2013 9:10 PM (three years ago)

i haven't seen this film in a while, but i don't remember jack being too ott in this one. if anything he plays it down considerably from the larger-than-life character in kesey's novel.

I think he means that's where you start to see the seeds sewn for the rat mimicry to come.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK7TiA9qmuU

Film school should just be Jack Nicholson talking about Michelangelo Antonioni for free on the internet. pic.twitter.com/52kRFCjxxs

— John Frankensteiner (@JFrankensteiner) October 15, 2020

The Crossing Guard is okay--over-the-top resolution (which is moving right at the end anyway), good stuff along the way. Sean Penn, one of our finest actors, was probably at the pinnacle of his career, acting in and directing a series of high-profile films. So he's got Nicholson and Angelica Huston, John Savage, Piper Laurie, Robin Wright (his wife), David Morse--it's an actor's film. He dedicates it to Charles Bukowski, so we know he has literary friends (just in case you still think of him as Jeff Spicoli). He gets a good performance out of Priscilla Barnes, from Three's Company. People were probably clamoring to be in anything he directed.

I'd say the best reason to watch it (Nicholson and Huston are fine) is Robin Wright. She so definitively became Claire Underwood for me, it was startling to see her younger, and how natural and quietly compelling she was. She dances to Salt-n-Pepa and it works. No use for Forrest Gump, but I know why Forrest fell in love with her.