Tim Holt is a genius. Don't forget him in Treasure of Sierra Madre!
He could have been one of the biggest stars in Hollywood he had that kind of talent. He discovered early on though that he really liked to make Westerns.
He loved camping out in the hills and riding around on horses. He made a ton of B Westerns for RKO. He also made a butt ton of money doing it.
Another " Huh?" Welles casting decision was Jeanette Nolan as Lady Macbeth.
Everyone was like - who? She generally gets grief from the hoity toity critics. I think she's just fine. There's a real sense of her character getting in over her head that makes perfect sense to me.
Lady Macbeth's demise in the film is unforgettable. The castle this all takes place in is on the top of a mountain for some reason. She slips out a window or off a balcony falls very quietly,
very far to her death.
I've been taking a deep dive in the Columbia "B" movie Westerns The last couple of years.She was in a lot of them!, Mostly as the second or third female lead.. I don't recall her as being particularly memorable in any of them.
Not like she was in Macbeth.
Now I know how I'm going to open my post-apocalyptic novel. Main character sitting at his breakfast table drinking coffee, repeatedly refreshing Gmail , waiting to receive a substack column he gets 5 days a week that he's grown accustomed to reading while he drinks his morning coffee.
The column, a well-written, practical guide to success in nearly all aspects of everyday life, was made a huge difference in the way that he lives. He still goes through 8 or 9 different jobs a year, sure, but he's finding and losing better jobs.
That's what counts.
Our hero is beginning to get worried. The column's almost an hour behind schedule. Good morning sunlight is starting to show through the windows.
Then, our protagonist realizes in sudden shock - The light is flooding in the west facing windows. It's not from sunrise -
Indianapolis has been vaporized in a nuclear attack!
Before you know it, there are glow in the dark zombies shambling up Main Street.
I really don't know how you do it. I let myself get sucked into the substack lifestyle a few months ago. The verdict is still out - though the phrase"high maintenance pain in the ass" comes to mind.
I got into very comfortable routine of REBID in the morning and the associated witty repartee' and bonhamie. And then I would post a couple of photos of my enormously photogenic animals over at Wonkette in the evening, usually good for a butt ton of upvotes. Double digit upvotes are like crack.
Wonkette moved the whole operation to substack. If you wanted to post photos or even comment you really had to have a substack of your own. So I started one.
I had it for a while and I got to thinking- The substack might fit in pretty well with other life plans that I've got. This next year I plan on building a horse-drawn RV made from timber harvested on my property. I'm working now on training the horse to pull said horse-drawn RV. I'm also going to open my own small, exclusive by appointment only nursery with a strong online sales component. Any of these projects or all three of them combined seems like they could provide a strong narrative arc for a reasonbly
successful subscription program for a substack. Maybe successful enough for me to actually stop working and spend my retirement doing things that I want to do. While I'm waiting to get these things up and running I figured I need to actually learn how to use the substack materials to come up with Something that someone might actually want to look at.
I set a goal - I try to post at least four photos a day with appropriate comments. So far I've posted 66 out of the last 67 days. It's getting easier and looking better. I'm getting up the nerve to add video. When that starts to happen I'm really going to need some kind of narrative arc to keep it interesting.
Anyway, the point beyond all that- I often think " Jesus Christ - (most of my thoughts begin with some kind of expletive or blasphemy) How does Roy do what he does 5 days a week?"
A real issue turned up this week though. I found out that Laura Loomer has a substack
And I keep thinking "Why in the world would I want to belong too any club that has her a member?"
Let's face it- there's some pretty shady folks hanging around substack.
Jack Nicholson in The Shining. This is kind of a tepid defense, I won’t give the performance a ringing endorsement and I think the movie would have been even better if he’d made slightly different choices with the character, but it’s hard to believe an actor of Nicholson’s caliber working with a director like Kubrick decided to say “fuck it, I'll give a BAD performance." And Nicholson’s always been a little hammy, he’s never been a subtle actor like Mark Rylance, who can be perfectly still and saying nothing while still communicating that a half a dozen things are crossing his mind.
Most of the criticism is Nicholson played the part like a slightly unhinged jerk from the start. That’s true, but I think he made that choice (or Kubrick made it for him) because only a man who was a cynical and egotistical asshole, but who had now had his ego smashed down to the point he was reduced to taking a job as a caretaker, would have been so susceptible to the Overlook’s influence. The character has to be a deeply flawed, resentful, humiliated-by-life guy who is right on the edge to begin with, lashing out sarcastically at his wife, emotionally distant from his son, or the transformation to insanity/possession makes no sense.
This is interesting, because I didn't know anyone didn't like Nicholson's performance. It's Jack Nicholson in a movie based on a Stephen King novel, people were expecting The Method?
I've seen a few put-downs and like Sunday says one point they make is the guy has nowhere to go from Nicholson's high-pitched beginning. But one of Kubrick's themes is: People don't change.
Oh for sure. Keir Dullea might be up for the bad acting award in some minds because he gives you so little to latch on to in that movie, but I think that's a brilliant choice. He's in the machinery of the spaceship, he's part of it no less than HAL. In fact he might be a much less important part of it than HAL. The extent to which we have become the tools that the monkeys invent around the first monolith -- that's what the movie is about. Maybe.
Keir Dullea also plays an absolute monster in Black Christmas. I think you could ding him (many have!) for the opposite, being too emotional in that one. Like come on, this character should be able to hide some of that seething! But he makes it feel seamless and I think overall the performance is a choice that serves the movie very well.
The kids in “Red Hook Summer” get a lot of grief. Their performances weren’t the greatest of all time, but they didn’t ruin the movie. Spike Lee’s cameo, however, was atrocious. Very underrated film, btw. Remind me when you do great films or performances that are totally overlooked.
Jack Torrance's flaws are skillfully foreshadowed in King's novel; he's clearly somewhat "off" at the beginning of the movie. King focusses on the family drama, Kubrick *seems* to want to make a statement about artists (just my guess!).
Nicholson is one of my favorite actors. Even in his most understated roles, nobody thinks this guy is "normal."
“He’s doing it so well that audience identifies the weakness of the character for the weakness of the actor.”
Hmmm. I’m put in mind of my reaction to the 1998 film 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘎𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴. Minnie Driver is the heroine, an impoverished Jewish intellectual in the early/mid-nineteenth century whom circumstances compel to reinvent herself as a daughter of the Church of England, and to take up a position in the household of some Scottish gentry. The master of the house is one of these Victorian amateurs, a gentleman scientist working to refine the infant art of photography, and Minnie D takes on collateral roles as his lab assistant and mistress. Now the part, as written, directed and performed, is intended to compel our admiration for the protagonist, and it apparently won over a majority of the critics. The spousal unit and I were less impressed: it seemed to us both something like making Glenn Close the heroine of 𝘍𝘢𝘵𝘢𝘭 𝘈𝘵𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯, rabbit and all. In consequence, I have conceived toward Ms. Driver, unfairly, an arbitrary—I will not say dislike, but a predisposition not to seek out her performances, and to approach those I do catch with reservations.
Sir, if you have disparaging things to say about Minnie Driver in Grosse Point Blank, you will be hearing from my second and I shall have satisfaction. Big Night, too.
I watched that for the first time last year. I really enjoyed it. I also watched The Last Tycoon, The other Fitzgerald film from the same period. I thought that was great.
Jack Clayton directed Gatsby. He was a badass! His film, The Innocents, a version of Turn of the Screw adapted by Truman Capote It's one of the really great ghost stories. He also directed Something Wicked This Way Comes from The Ray Bradbury novel with the script by Bradbury.Another really good movie. Disney did a remake a few years ago. I know nothing about it.
This is tough. I can think of a bunch of performances that were universally panned by critics and audiences but I agree with the verdicts. Or performances that I thought were terrible but others didn't. (To be fair to the actors, sometimes they were just in really bad movies to begin with.) The closest I can come to the assignment: There were some who panned Ethan Hawke in "Hamlet" and the performance of Bill Murray in the film, and mostly just the movie itself, but there were many who didn't, and I liked it all.
So instead, this may be well known but here's a fun quote about "Jaws: The Revenge" from Michael Caine addressed to his critics. "I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific."
I agree. The first thing that came to mind for me was Glen Campbell in True Grit. I couldn't believe how bad he was and I'm easy. But I've read others saying he was fine.
Sorry, don't think I got something specifically to the prompt, but your comments on Tim Holt in Magnificent Ambersons made me think about good actors playing limited characters. Limited in their intelligence, in empathy, in emotional range. And that got me thinking of the sad film career of Dana Andrews, who I know for Best Years of Our Lives and Laura, but next time I pick him up he's the scheming and incompetent Admiral Broderick in Otto Preminger's In Harms Way, and then later he's the REALLY incompetent mad scientist Sorenson in the sci-fi film Crack in the World (I think we can say that if your work results in a sizeable portion of the Earth's crust spinning off into space, you are really not very good at your job.) So "Sucks at his job" and "Refuses to listen or learn" don't give even a good actor much to work with, but Andrews was a trouper and he did what he could with what he was given.
I just realized that the reason I'm struggling with this one is that, for the movies I know and like best, all the actors who played in them are dead, all the critics who reviewed them are dead, and anyone who saw them first-run in a theater is dead too. So I know what I like, but what anyone else thought of it is a mystery.
Dana Andrews is underappreciated in general. He's one of my faves. His unconventional looks and clipped way of speaking made him an odd leading man, but he was great at underplaying and "smiling without smiling," which was perfect for noir roles and for wiseguy toughs (e.g. the charming gangster in Howard Hawks' "Ball of Fire."
I learned only within the last couple of years that Dana Andrews' brother was Steve Forrest, the hunky actor known now mostly for the TV show "SWAT" but who guest starred in dozens of programs and was also an interesting foil in the strange George Cukor (!) western "Heller in Pink Tights." Dana and Steve look nothing alike.
He was an alcoholic who sobered up later in life but too late to do his career any good. But also I think it's the roles available to a male lead in 50's Hollywood B pictures. Audiences were willing to accept some emotional range and vulnerability from a male actor immediately post-war ("Godovsky! Bail out!") but by the 50's the pickings were pretty thin, a lot of "adventure" movies playing your basic one-note tough-guy character. Which he did well, but not a showcase for his talents.
I liked Wayne in The Quiet Man and no one else on earth did. The story requires a character with a deeply painful event in his past, and he fits himself to that (and the script to him.
I also liked him in In Harm's Way for reasons I can't quite nail down. He's wound so tight and he never unwinds. I think that is a clever screenwriter's work and it fit him – anyway, he pulled it off.
BTW, as an undergrad I took a one-credit film class on John Ford and wrote a paper about The Quiet Man, and I can't remember a thing about it except that Maureen O'Hara was totally hot.
Every day he came in with some stupid cowboy paintings and said some stupid thing about where the horizon line should be and then left. Totally destroyed any desire I had to be a film director.
How about both thinking the performance is terrible, and later thinking it's great? I.e., Elliot Gould in The Long Good-Bye. When I first saw it I thought, "Oh, come on. That's not Marlowe." Later, though, I thought, "Well, wait..."
For me, The Long Good-Bye is a good example of being really, really annoyed by something and then later deciding it's eh, OK I guess. Because they take the same Johnny Mercer tune and beat it to death over and over in various styles: "Oh, now it's mariachi because we're in Mexico?" That was on my first viewing, it struck me as major distraction, sort of musical "Where's Waldo?" Now I don't mind it nearly as much, although I still think it's kind of dumb. Wikipedia tells me it was Altman's idea.
Was watching Lawrence of Arabia with a couple who'd never seen it, and they absolutely hated O'Toole. Apparently they'd never seen O'Toole in anything, and this was their reaction: The movie would be good without him! But he's a terrible actor! The worst! He can't even hide that he's gay, it keeps sneaking through!
I generally don't watch a huge number of movies, and when I do I don't usually pick out good or poor actor performances. My idea is more about is the movie overall good or bad. I also don't really care what other people think about the movie or the performances. Sometimes if the same actor appears in several movies I like, I might start to think they are good actors.
Overall, I don't have much to say about this category, but I did want to explain why.
The entire cast of "Raising Arizona."
People think they were bad?
There are people who hate that movie. I'm not one of them. 🤣
Very diplomatic!
(Jeez — Peter Sellers was robbed!)
A victim of Hollywood Anglophilia.
https://youtu.be/TpNNNXrGttY?si=MTsabvs-ciy3E_SS
Anyone in "Mommy Dearest." Overwrought, overplayed, and yet magnificent
Tim Holt is a genius. Don't forget him in Treasure of Sierra Madre!
He could have been one of the biggest stars in Hollywood he had that kind of talent. He discovered early on though that he really liked to make Westerns.
He loved camping out in the hills and riding around on horses. He made a ton of B Westerns for RKO. He also made a butt ton of money doing it.
Another " Huh?" Welles casting decision was Jeanette Nolan as Lady Macbeth.
Everyone was like - who? She generally gets grief from the hoity toity critics. I think she's just fine. There's a real sense of her character getting in over her head that makes perfect sense to me.
Lady Macbeth's demise in the film is unforgettable. The castle this all takes place in is on the top of a mountain for some reason. She slips out a window or off a balcony falls very quietly,
very far to her death.
I've been taking a deep dive in the Columbia "B" movie Westerns The last couple of years.She was in a lot of them!, Mostly as the second or third female lead.. I don't recall her as being particularly memorable in any of them.
Not like she was in Macbeth.
Now I know how I'm going to open my post-apocalyptic novel. Main character sitting at his breakfast table drinking coffee, repeatedly refreshing Gmail , waiting to receive a substack column he gets 5 days a week that he's grown accustomed to reading while he drinks his morning coffee.
The column, a well-written, practical guide to success in nearly all aspects of everyday life, was made a huge difference in the way that he lives. He still goes through 8 or 9 different jobs a year, sure, but he's finding and losing better jobs.
That's what counts.
Our hero is beginning to get worried. The column's almost an hour behind schedule. Good morning sunlight is starting to show through the windows.
Then, our protagonist realizes in sudden shock - The light is flooding in the west facing windows. It's not from sunrise -
Indianapolis has been vaporized in a nuclear attack!
Before you know it, there are glow in the dark zombies shambling up Main Street.
"Indianapolis has been vaporized in a nuclear attack!"
If you think this will have any effect whatsoever on Mike Pence's Presidential campaign, you're wrong.
Yeah, had some pressing early-morning business, sorry about that.
I really don't know how you do it. I let myself get sucked into the substack lifestyle a few months ago. The verdict is still out - though the phrase"high maintenance pain in the ass" comes to mind.
I got into very comfortable routine of REBID in the morning and the associated witty repartee' and bonhamie. And then I would post a couple of photos of my enormously photogenic animals over at Wonkette in the evening, usually good for a butt ton of upvotes. Double digit upvotes are like crack.
Wonkette moved the whole operation to substack. If you wanted to post photos or even comment you really had to have a substack of your own. So I started one.
I had it for a while and I got to thinking- The substack might fit in pretty well with other life plans that I've got. This next year I plan on building a horse-drawn RV made from timber harvested on my property. I'm working now on training the horse to pull said horse-drawn RV. I'm also going to open my own small, exclusive by appointment only nursery with a strong online sales component. Any of these projects or all three of them combined seems like they could provide a strong narrative arc for a reasonbly
successful subscription program for a substack. Maybe successful enough for me to actually stop working and spend my retirement doing things that I want to do. While I'm waiting to get these things up and running I figured I need to actually learn how to use the substack materials to come up with Something that someone might actually want to look at.
I set a goal - I try to post at least four photos a day with appropriate comments. So far I've posted 66 out of the last 67 days. It's getting easier and looking better. I'm getting up the nerve to add video. When that starts to happen I'm really going to need some kind of narrative arc to keep it interesting.
Anyway, the point beyond all that- I often think " Jesus Christ - (most of my thoughts begin with some kind of expletive or blasphemy) How does Roy do what he does 5 days a week?"
A real issue turned up this week though. I found out that Laura Loomer has a substack
And I keep thinking "Why in the world would I want to belong too any club that has her a member?"
Let's face it- there's some pretty shady folks hanging around substack.
Like Groucho, I am not sure I want to be a member of any club that would have me as a member
Jack Nicholson in The Shining. This is kind of a tepid defense, I won’t give the performance a ringing endorsement and I think the movie would have been even better if he’d made slightly different choices with the character, but it’s hard to believe an actor of Nicholson’s caliber working with a director like Kubrick decided to say “fuck it, I'll give a BAD performance." And Nicholson’s always been a little hammy, he’s never been a subtle actor like Mark Rylance, who can be perfectly still and saying nothing while still communicating that a half a dozen things are crossing his mind.
Most of the criticism is Nicholson played the part like a slightly unhinged jerk from the start. That’s true, but I think he made that choice (or Kubrick made it for him) because only a man who was a cynical and egotistical asshole, but who had now had his ego smashed down to the point he was reduced to taking a job as a caretaker, would have been so susceptible to the Overlook’s influence. The character has to be a deeply flawed, resentful, humiliated-by-life guy who is right on the edge to begin with, lashing out sarcastically at his wife, emotionally distant from his son, or the transformation to insanity/possession makes no sense.
This is interesting, because I didn't know anyone didn't like Nicholson's performance. It's Jack Nicholson in a movie based on a Stephen King novel, people were expecting The Method?
Opinions may have been revised during the many years since the film's release, but at the time a lot of critics panned his performance.
"I'm sorry, but your portrayal of a man driven mad by evil spirits inhabiting a haunted hotel lacks verisimilitude."
LOL! "Ahhh-cting!!"
I've seen a few put-downs and like Sunday says one point they make is the guy has nowhere to go from Nicholson's high-pitched beginning. But one of Kubrick's themes is: People don't change.
Thanks, I may go back and watch some Kubrick with this in mind. People don't change, but computers, on the other hand...
"Daisy, daisy...."
So is it fair to say Hal shows the greatest personal growth of any character in a Kubrick movie?
You may have something there....
Oh for sure. Keir Dullea might be up for the bad acting award in some minds because he gives you so little to latch on to in that movie, but I think that's a brilliant choice. He's in the machinery of the spaceship, he's part of it no less than HAL. In fact he might be a much less important part of it than HAL. The extent to which we have become the tools that the monkeys invent around the first monolith -- that's what the movie is about. Maybe.
Keir Dullea also plays an absolute monster in Black Christmas. I think you could ding him (many have!) for the opposite, being too emotional in that one. Like come on, this character should be able to hide some of that seething! But he makes it feel seamless and I think overall the performance is a choice that serves the movie very well.
The kids in “Red Hook Summer” get a lot of grief. Their performances weren’t the greatest of all time, but they didn’t ruin the movie. Spike Lee’s cameo, however, was atrocious. Very underrated film, btw. Remind me when you do great films or performances that are totally overlooked.
"Spike Lee's cameo" says it all. No one else in Hollywood would cast him for a millisecond.
Jack Torrance's flaws are skillfully foreshadowed in King's novel; he's clearly somewhat "off" at the beginning of the movie. King focusses on the family drama, Kubrick *seems* to want to make a statement about artists (just my guess!).
Nicholson is one of my favorite actors. Even in his most understated roles, nobody thinks this guy is "normal."
Right, isn't this exactly why you hire Jack Nicholson in the first place?
“He’s doing it so well that audience identifies the weakness of the character for the weakness of the actor.”
Hmmm. I’m put in mind of my reaction to the 1998 film 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘎𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴. Minnie Driver is the heroine, an impoverished Jewish intellectual in the early/mid-nineteenth century whom circumstances compel to reinvent herself as a daughter of the Church of England, and to take up a position in the household of some Scottish gentry. The master of the house is one of these Victorian amateurs, a gentleman scientist working to refine the infant art of photography, and Minnie D takes on collateral roles as his lab assistant and mistress. Now the part, as written, directed and performed, is intended to compel our admiration for the protagonist, and it apparently won over a majority of the critics. The spousal unit and I were less impressed: it seemed to us both something like making Glenn Close the heroine of 𝘍𝘢𝘵𝘢𝘭 𝘈𝘵𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯, rabbit and all. In consequence, I have conceived toward Ms. Driver, unfairly, an arbitrary—I will not say dislike, but a predisposition not to seek out her performances, and to approach those I do catch with reservations.
Sir, if you have disparaging things to say about Minnie Driver in Grosse Point Blank, you will be hearing from my second and I shall have satisfaction. Big Night, too.
Robert Redford got slagged for The Great Gatsby, but I think he nailed just who and what Gatsby was.
It was a genius casting choice -- he was all little boy who never grew up
I watched that for the first time last year. I really enjoyed it. I also watched The Last Tycoon, The other Fitzgerald film from the same period. I thought that was great.
Jack Clayton directed Gatsby. He was a badass! His film, The Innocents, a version of Turn of the Screw adapted by Truman Capote It's one of the really great ghost stories. He also directed Something Wicked This Way Comes from The Ray Bradbury novel with the script by Bradbury.Another really good movie. Disney did a remake a few years ago. I know nothing about it.
This is tough. I can think of a bunch of performances that were universally panned by critics and audiences but I agree with the verdicts. Or performances that I thought were terrible but others didn't. (To be fair to the actors, sometimes they were just in really bad movies to begin with.) The closest I can come to the assignment: There were some who panned Ethan Hawke in "Hamlet" and the performance of Bill Murray in the film, and mostly just the movie itself, but there were many who didn't, and I liked it all.
So instead, this may be well known but here's a fun quote about "Jaws: The Revenge" from Michael Caine addressed to his critics. "I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific."
I agree. The first thing that came to mind for me was Glen Campbell in True Grit. I couldn't believe how bad he was and I'm easy. But I've read others saying he was fine.
I always enjoyed Jim Brown in whatever he was in.
Of course, OJ was pretty funny in the Naked Gun movies.
And perfectly fine in Capricorn One, an early entry in the conspiracy-theory-movie genre.
Sorry, don't think I got something specifically to the prompt, but your comments on Tim Holt in Magnificent Ambersons made me think about good actors playing limited characters. Limited in their intelligence, in empathy, in emotional range. And that got me thinking of the sad film career of Dana Andrews, who I know for Best Years of Our Lives and Laura, but next time I pick him up he's the scheming and incompetent Admiral Broderick in Otto Preminger's In Harms Way, and then later he's the REALLY incompetent mad scientist Sorenson in the sci-fi film Crack in the World (I think we can say that if your work results in a sizeable portion of the Earth's crust spinning off into space, you are really not very good at your job.) So "Sucks at his job" and "Refuses to listen or learn" don't give even a good actor much to work with, but Andrews was a trouper and he did what he could with what he was given.
I just realized that the reason I'm struggling with this one is that, for the movies I know and like best, all the actors who played in them are dead, all the critics who reviewed them are dead, and anyone who saw them first-run in a theater is dead too. So I know what I like, but what anyone else thought of it is a mystery.
Film critic SteveB be all "Bring Out Yer Dead!" every time he's on deadline.
Dana Andrews is underappreciated in general. He's one of my faves. His unconventional looks and clipped way of speaking made him an odd leading man, but he was great at underplaying and "smiling without smiling," which was perfect for noir roles and for wiseguy toughs (e.g. the charming gangster in Howard Hawks' "Ball of Fire."
I learned only within the last couple of years that Dana Andrews' brother was Steve Forrest, the hunky actor known now mostly for the TV show "SWAT" but who guest starred in dozens of programs and was also an interesting foil in the strange George Cukor (!) western "Heller in Pink Tights." Dana and Steve look nothing alike.
He was an alcoholic who sobered up later in life but too late to do his career any good. But also I think it's the roles available to a male lead in 50's Hollywood B pictures. Audiences were willing to accept some emotional range and vulnerability from a male actor immediately post-war ("Godovsky! Bail out!") but by the 50's the pickings were pretty thin, a lot of "adventure" movies playing your basic one-note tough-guy character. Which he did well, but not a showcase for his talents.
I can't watch John Wayne because I feel like he's not acting, he's *posing.*
John Wayne (and many other actors) are like drum beats: neither good or bad in themselves; but in the right place at the right time, they rock
I liked Wayne in The Quiet Man and no one else on earth did. The story requires a character with a deeply painful event in his past, and he fits himself to that (and the script to him.
I also liked him in In Harm's Way for reasons I can't quite nail down. He's wound so tight and he never unwinds. I think that is a clever screenwriter's work and it fit him – anyway, he pulled it off.
I think I could put together an argument (after a few beers maybe) that In Harms Way is his best performance.
BTW, as an undergrad I took a one-credit film class on John Ford and wrote a paper about The Quiet Man, and I can't remember a thing about it except that Maureen O'Hara was totally hot.
Yoicks! When I first read this I saw "I took a one-credit film class FROM John Ford" which, your career arc and all, made me wonder what happened...
Every day he came in with some stupid cowboy paintings and said some stupid thing about where the horizon line should be and then left. Totally destroyed any desire I had to be a film director.
For the want of a level the career was...well, different.
I've never been a Wayne fan, mostly can't stand him, but in "The Shootist" he was fantastic. I don't think anyone else could have played that part.
Huh. Might look it up. Thanks.
John Wayne is superb, as all the great directors including Godard knew
As his flailings against the progress of time and society become more obviously ineffectual, George’s anger becomes more pinched and emasculated
I've never seen the movie, but George sounds like he'd be a Fox News viewer. Anyway, I vote for Diane Keaton in The Godfather.
Seconding Diane Keaton and adding Talia Shire (who should be more integral to the movie than the script allows).
I can't think of a single role I've liked Diane Keaton in, especially "Annie Hall."
How about both thinking the performance is terrible, and later thinking it's great? I.e., Elliot Gould in The Long Good-Bye. When I first saw it I thought, "Oh, come on. That's not Marlowe." Later, though, I thought, "Well, wait..."
For me, The Long Good-Bye is a good example of being really, really annoyed by something and then later deciding it's eh, OK I guess. Because they take the same Johnny Mercer tune and beat it to death over and over in various styles: "Oh, now it's mariachi because we're in Mexico?" That was on my first viewing, it struck me as major distraction, sort of musical "Where's Waldo?" Now I don't mind it nearly as much, although I still think it's kind of dumb. Wikipedia tells me it was Altman's idea.
Whatever Altman wants, Altman gets...
I very much felt Gould fitted himself to the role, which is pretty contrived anyway, but the story is soooo of its time, and Gould's.
Was watching Lawrence of Arabia with a couple who'd never seen it, and they absolutely hated O'Toole. Apparently they'd never seen O'Toole in anything, and this was their reaction: The movie would be good without him! But he's a terrible actor! The worst! He can't even hide that he's gay, it keeps sneaking through!
This would be a perfect fit for a Fun Friday on "Hilariously bad takes."
"Sure, I loved The Godfather, but that guy they got in the lead role, Marion Brando? Too jowly."
OK, now that is funny.
I generally don't watch a huge number of movies, and when I do I don't usually pick out good or poor actor performances. My idea is more about is the movie overall good or bad. I also don't really care what other people think about the movie or the performances. Sometimes if the same actor appears in several movies I like, I might start to think they are good actors.
Overall, I don't have much to say about this category, but I did want to explain why.
This is where I’m at too.
This almost makes me want to try to watch The Magnificent Ambersons again.
It is a wonderful movie, could have made more wonderful if Welles hadn't bailed before the editing.
Sounds like you've tried before and failed?
Yes, although “failed” implies that I still had watching it as a goal when I changed the channel.
I love Citizen Kane, but for some reason The Magnificent Ambersons just doesn’t grab me.
I know for me the first time through just wanting to see the little shit get his comeuppance held my attention. Since then, it's grown on me.