bouncing off the Lou Diamond Phillips thread, I just wanted to say that in order to say that anyone is really a bad actor, you have to take in some really bad acting. And once you’ve seen really bad acting, Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like Meryl Streep.
Really bad acting isn’t that hard to find, just pick up any random, completely unfamiliar straight-to-video title at the video store and you are probably going to run into some Really Bad Acting. And once you’ve seen it, you develop a whole new appreciation for even the lowliest of successful movie stars.
A great director doesn´t need good actors. Of course, it may necessary to get a really stellar performances, but by being able to redo the shots until you get it right and avoiding the performer´s weaknesses, a director who knows what she´s doing can hide a lot of bad acting. Kind of like a good music producer can get a decent pop tune out of a teenage girl picked solely for her looks.
Sophia Coppola in Godfather 3 had probably the worst acting I’ve ever seen in a movie with a decent budget. She clearly had the role via nepotism and no one was going to take it away from her.
I’ve also always been uncomfortable with many aspects of Jeff Anderson’s performance as Randal in Clerks, and it doesn’t surprise me that he didn’t get big roles in anything else Kevin Smith did besides playing Randal in other things. I read that he was nominated for some sort of indie award for new actors for the role in Clerks, but that says more about the typical quality of acting in indie films by newcomers.
Stoid’s point is that the acting you see in major motion pictures is miles and miles above genuinely bad acting. Paul Walker may be a actor of, shall we say, limited skill by the standards of major motion pictures, but by the standard of all actors he’s top two percent. Easily.
Sofia Coppola’s performance in “The Godfather, Part 3” is an example of the very rare case where an actor is really, genuinely not up to snuff in a major production. Rebecca Pidgeon is another, and again, it’s nepotism - she’s DAvid Mamet’s wife. Or you have celebrity cameos. But if someone’s an established actor, they’re competent.
I respectfully disagree. You must not have seen 2 Fast 2 Furious (he somehow regressed from the first film) or Running Scared. I concur on Pidgeon though.
Yes! Her next to Pacino, even bad Pacino…<shiver>. That’s a very good example of how much love can make you blind; Coppola is a very talented director, exhibiting near genius at times - yet he failed to detect that his daughter could not act to save her life.
Luckily she found her niche in directing. She’s a very talented director now, and may well become one of the all-time greats.
The Godfather 3 role wasn’t exactly straight-up nepotism though. The story was that Winona Ryder was set to play the daughter, but she pulled out at the last minute due to exhaustion. Francis Ford panicked and pulled his daughter in to fill the spot. She was woefully unprepared but it wasn’t her fault. She didn’t ask for the role, and he didn’t put her in the movie to showcase her. She never wanted to be an actress for anything other than bit fun anyway.
I’m pretty sure I disagree, but I’m having a hard time thinking of some really awful performances by mainstream actors. Keanu Reeves comes to mind. He is someone who breaks the fourth wall with me every time because of his affect. Oh man, ever see him in much ado about nothing? luckily for him, they seem to find roles for him that ‘work’ anyways most of the time. I think that might be one of the big differences here – big stars are usually treated to decent directors and writing, who know when they ‘work’ for a role. For example, I don’t think Haydn Christiansen is that bad an actor, but holy christ what Lucas did to him the the Star Wars prequels (he even fucked up Natalie Portman’s performance).
They had a fight over money, so Anderson didn’t appear in Mallrats or Chasing Amy. But even without the fight, none of the actors from Clerks ever really went on to do anything else (even with Smith). Even Brian O’Halloran (Dante) just shows up for a few seconds in each film (not counting Clerks II obviously).
I’ve done community theater. Some of it the variety where having a pulse and your own shoes was enough to get you a role.
The OP is exactly correct. Even “bad” mainstream movie actors are still good actors, statistically speaking. They may not be in the right hand tail of the bell curve, but they’re well over the hump.
Yet Reeves has been perfectly fine in a number of films like Tune in Tomorrow . . . , I Love You to Death, My Own Private Idaho, and Feeling Minnesota, where he was cast not because he was a star, but because the director thought him right for the role. Reeves underacts, and many people confuse that with lack of acting. And he also has to overcome the “Bill and Ted” image, even when the role and his acting has nothing in common with that.
In any case, it’s rare for anyone to be a major star without some acting ability, even if it’s the ability to play one type of role well. If you can’t act, your career is short (look up Klinton Spillsbury, for example).
I’m gonna disagree with you there. I had no idea who he was until I saw Coppola’s Dracula, so I had no preconceptions, and I said at the time “that movie was ruined by that guy who played Harker”. He is completely unconvincing as anything other than someone who is just going through the motions of saying their lines, in that movie, and everything I’ve seen him do subsequently. Underacting is at its best when you are convinced that the person doing it is the character. Reeves fails to achieve this on a consistent basis. (I say this as a trained - and not very good - actor.)
Actually, didn’t he just put her in because Winona Ryder, who was meant to play the part, dropped out at the last minute and it was easier than looking for someone all over again at that point?
I disagree. He overacts, but he often does it with a flat affect. It’s a very confusing combination. What he lacks in facial and body expression, he tries to make up for in vocal tone variance, where he goes too far overboard. He is getting better, though. Apparently his humiliating turn in Much Ado spurred him to take actual acting classes, or so I read. They helped.
He was really good in The Gift, too. I love Keanu and my strongest association is naturally Bill & Ted b/c I’ve watched the movies about 100000000 times, but he genuinely frightened/disturbed me in The Gift. I think he’s also perfectly watchable in The Replacements and A Walk in the Clouds.
Re: Dracula, I think he was perfect in the role of Jonathan. He captured the character wonderfully, and I’m not kidding. That sort of weirdly distant, naive, almost blank personality is exactly what Harker was like in the beginning of the novel, and he never got much better, even when he was supposed to be the hero.
