And yet, in a way, not. Punch Drunk Love struck me as what would happen if you took a character from an Adam Sandler movie and stuck him into reality.
Which makes me wonder: (at the risk of hijacking the thread) has the Academy ever given an acting Oscar for a great performance in a crappy, low-aspiring movie?
Simply because I wasn’t expecting much of anything , much less comedic gold:
Peter Graves , Leslie Nielsen and Lloyd Bridges in Airplane!
Who could have even fathomed the possibility of those three being that funny?
Robin Williams in The Fisher King
Robert de Niro in The King of Comedy --truthfully, until then, I wasn’t much of a de Niro fan. Rupert Pupkin changed all that.
Will Ferrell in Stranger than Fiction
I’ve been reading a few things here and there about Grindhouse (trying to avoid spoilers), but everything I’ve seen has said Death Proof is the superior movie. What did you think made Planet Terror better (and light on the spoilers if you could)?
AS for me, I’m sure I’ll think of a real good one later, but Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean was a huge surprise. Captain Jack Sparrow looked amusing from the trailers but I was never expecting that.
Johnny Depp was robbed at the Oscars that year.
If you want to see him in a movie where he is completely different, check out this movie.
Jack Nicholson in Chinatown.
This is an easy one…Marisa Tomei in “My Cousin Vinny”.
Dwight Yokam in Slingblade. I didn’t know much about him before seeing the movie, other than that he was a country singer.
Jim Carrey in The Truman Show. Ace Ventura, The Mask, Batman Forever, and pretty much everything else he’d starred in up to that point convinced me that he was only good at spastic farce, and was wisely sticking to his guns. The Truman Show convinced me that he was a talented actor who just really, really liked the eccentric roles.
Milla Jovovich in The Fifth Element. Bruce Willis held his own, but Leeloo completely made that movie for me. I respect her purely on the grounds that she became fluent enough in the director’s fake language that they would chat in it by the end of production.
All three of the Harry Potter kids. You can’t expect to grab three ten year olds and have them all turn into relatively impressive actors, even if they DO have the luxury of specializing in their roles. (beastiality aside.) But they managed to. 
Hugh Grant when you compare his performance in any two features. He’s one of the few actors whom I consistently fail to recognize during the movie.
Eric Roberts in It’s My Party. I was used to Roberts as a sidekick-y, kind of whiny, lowlife character, but he played a gay man dying of AIDS with an amazing amount of compassion, humor and realism. He further impressed me later in a guest starring role in one of Joe Mantegna’s “Spenser” movies (based on the Robert B. Parker books.) Roberts played a cop with a secret, and he played it very understated and compelling.
The role I always think of when one of these threads comes up is Leonardo DiCaprio in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? He was good.
Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp and Tom Cruise all went through transitions from ‘pretty boy’ to ‘actor’ with a single role for me, with 12 Monkeys, The Brave and Rainman, respectively.
I feel exactly the same way. I had no respect for him until I saw him in Fight Club and Se7en. And Khadaji, Colin Farrell in Phonebooth was the first thing I thought of when I saw the OP.
For a more obscure pick (and closer to pretty than to Brad Pitt’s handsome), I’ll nominate Gael Garcia Bernal in The Science of Sleep. Though he couldn’t have been considered overrated.
Mark Wahlberg stole I Heart Huckabee’s right out from under Jason Schwartzman’s sizeable nose. He’s awesome in Boogie Nights, and the best performance in The Departed. Shockingly, he’s a great actor.
I just saw The Silence of the Lambs again and was reminded how good Ted Levine is as Buffalo Bill in that film. This is the actor who plays Captain Stottlemeyer in Monk.
Justin_Bailey writes:
> I’ve been reading a few things here and there about Grindhouse (trying to
> avoid spoilers), but everything I’ve seen has said Death Proof is the superior
> movie. What did you think made Planet Terror better (and light on the spoilers if
> you could)?
Death Proof is a little boring at times. Quentin Tarantino is usually good at writing dialogue, but he really falls down here. The action scenes are also more varied and interesting in Planet Terror.
Penelope Cruz in “Volver.” She just sucks in English, but you get her speaking her native language and, Damn!
As has been noted, Hayden Christensen in Shattered Glass.
Kim Basinger in The Door in the floor.
Sandra Bullock in Infamous.
Michael Keaton as Batman. He certainly didn’t look the part (of either Bruce Wayne or Batman), but he actually did very well within the constraints of the role and the costume.
Peter O’Toole was brilliant as a young man, then in the 70s or so he got into a pattern of phoning it in for a fat paycheck and his great performances were few and far between (imo). For that reason I was really surprised at his performance as Priam in the (huge budget/great special effects/mediocre everything else) movie Troy, where he actually acted the role. The scene where he approaches Achilles for the body of Hector was one of his best scenes in decades. I later learned that he hated the director and referred to him as a Kraut after the shooting. It made me wonder if Wolfgang Petersen shouted “Stop playing Peter O’Toole!”
Adam Sandler in Spanglish. I usually can’t stand him, but he was downright charming in that one. (I’ve never seen Punch Drunk Love.)
Two sitcom actresses I never thought of as talented during the roles that made them rich went on to become two of my favorite character actresses. Marion Ross from Happy Days was brilliant in a supporting role as the maid in Evening Star and as the Jewish grandma in Brooklyn Bridge and even as the evil grandma in the equally vapid Milwaukee nostalgia sitcom That 70s Show.
Jean Smart from Designing Women played one of the most annoying characters on TV, but later she proved herself WONDERFUL at comedy in the understandably short-lived sitcom Style & Substance (as a manic-depressive control freak Martha Stewart character), as Dr. Crane’s brassy crass high-school crush turned bitter loud single mom on Frasier, the horny lush neighbor in The Brady Bunch, and in several other TV shows and movies she always hits home runs.
On a lesser note, being so used to seeing her co-star and friend Delta Burke play vain aristocratically-rude beauty queens, it was hysterical seeing her as a blue collar “wife and mama” and Valium popper in the no-budget comedy Sordid Lives. In the same movie, Leslie Jordan plays an over-the-top comic role as an institutionalized Texas homo who does drag shows in the day room as Tammy Wynette; while it’s no surprise at all that Leslie is great at comedy, the surprise was that he actually added depth and pathos to a largely one-dimensional character and ironically short circuited the movie’s intended dramatic character (who just comes off as a major whiner). And Olivia Newton John is great as a butch redneck lounge singer.
Oh! Just thought of one Sampiro’s post made me think of:
John Ritter in Sling Blade. I had never seen him play anything but broad comedy, so seeing him play a repressed small town guy impressed the hell out of me.
(I know River Hippie mentioned this movie too, but the references to sitcoms is what reminded me of Ritter.)
Robert Patrick in The Bridge to Terabithia.
