Skill in science and skill in personal relationships are often inversely proportional. In real life and in movie portrayals.
Yeah, Jeff Goldblum definitely transformed the character from just an exposition dump about ‘chaos theory’ (which really had a tangential relationship to the issues at hand which should have been about operations management and system reliability) into a relatable, if kind of sleazy, character. It’s the sort of thing that Jeff Goldblum just does.
It is really a well constructed (if pretty straightforward) narrative bolstered by uniformly good performances. Save for Goldblum, nobody is really chewing scenery, and while the effects were groundbreaking they served to embrace rather than dominate the story (which a shocking amount being purely practical effects). Even though the film was pretty groundbreaking in the use of CGI, the story never hinged on computer animated sequences, and arguably would have worked just as well using stop-motion animation. In fact, Spielberg was initially resistant to full CGI, wanting to use it as just background filler while the dinosaurs would be all animatronic, and only acceded in shots where the scale difference would have been obvious. Nearly all of the direct human-dinosaur interaction scenes are completely practical effects with the exception of the jeep chase sequence.
It is unfortunate that it was turned into a franchise because it was obviously never intended for it, and none of the sequel films make any sense whatsoever, either in the context of the original story or in the real world where people don’t actually want to go to an ‘amusement park’ full of killer dinosaurs. But I blame Fox with wanting to turn Alien/Aliens into an open-ended franchise for really kicking off the idea of an existential horror series where the threats keep getting bigger but somehow never actually killing off all of humanity.
Stranger
G.W. Bailey in Police Academy.
As Lieutenant Harris he was only trying to effectively train cadets to be good cops. But had to deal with Mahoney who was an asshole who needed to be kicked out and with the dipshits who were only there because of the Mayors stupid plan.
J.T. Walsh had a couple good roles like this; Lt. Col. Markinson in A Few Good Men, and Big Bob in Pleasantville.
John P. Ryan as Warden Rankin in Runaway Train
Patrick McGoohan in every role he ever played.
I’m trying to make up my mind about Eli Wallach as Tuco in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. There were no good guys in that movie; and of the bad guys he was having the most fun.
Which is ironic because in the novel he’s a bit of a tough guy hero, if memory serves (he’s not the only character that had a change of personality. I think Muldoon probably qualifies as a bit of an arsehole in the book but is a heroic failure in the film).
Tangential to that: after playing the murderer in a couple of episodes of COLUMBO where he’d clearly understood the assignment, McGoohan directed an episode where Robert Vaughn — who’d already played the murderer in an episode, by likewise doing a ‘smartest guy in the room’ act while irritatedly talking down to the lower-class investigator that he thinks has no real shot at putting this together — again got tapped to so dick around.
The twist is that — uh, spoilers? — in the follow-up outing, it’s just Robert Vaughn doing his Robert Vaughn schtick: behind the half-grin is an expensively-dressed guy who’d rather you stop bothering him; he’s a bit curt and decidedly unhelpful, but he knows the annoyance that he’s talking with thinks he killed someone, and so it plays out like the usual Columbo-And-Murderer repartee, only it’s not some smug bastard pretending he’s not a killer; it’s some smug bastard who doesn’t happen to be a killer.
Nick Searcy has range. He’s played the “Asshole who is right” a few times. The best is in the time travel show Seven Days, where he plays the head of security, in charge of protecting the government-run time travel program. The main chrononaut is a self-centered “rebel” type who is constantly putting the program at risk, and Searcy is the “asshole” who has to not only put up with him, but do everything he can to fix the damage the “rebel” causes. He’s coded as a asshole most of the time, but he’s sincerely concerned with doing his job properly, and kind of has a point about how the “rebel” keeps screwing thing up.
Another example I just thought of: Patrick Fabian as Howard Hamlin in Better Call Saul. Ostensibly the official Bad Guy at first, we find out he’s being forced to be the bad guy by his partner, Saul’s brother, so Saul’s brother can still pretend to be on Saul’s side. By the end of the show, Hamlin is actually one of the most sympathetic characters, even as he’s still kind of a douche.
J.K. Simmons as Milton Berle in Saturday Night.
Jeff Daniels as my #1 go-to “fuck that guy” Flap Horton in Terms of Endearment.
I don’t think of Hamlin as an asshole.
If anything he seems to be the normal guy surrounded by asshole..
Yeah, but he looks like an asshole at first. He’s the guy who tells Jimmy he doesn’t have a job at HHM after he gets his law degree, and he’s the guy who sues Jimmy over the billboard. Even though it’s Chuck doing this through Hamlin, it still makes Hamlin look like an asshole.
I think letting yourself be used to do assholish things like kinda makes you an asshole too.
He steals Gordie’s memento from his dead brother. He assaults and threatens to kill children.
Maybe The Mighty Quinn (1989). Denzel Washington plays Quinn, the local police chief in a small Caribbean resort town. Robert Townsend plays Maubee, a small time crook who has apparently murdered a millionaire.
Quinn is trying to find and arrest Maubee but he laments that everyone in the town seems to be rooting for Maubee to get away. In a conversation about this somebody tells Quinn that Maubee is like Bugs Bunny and that makes him the equivalent of Elmer Fudd - and that nobody ever cheers for Elmer Fudd.
That’s correct. Venkman’s (Bill Murray) confirmation of that is the funniest scene in the movie.
Archibald Cunnigham (Tim Roth) in Rob Roy may be the best villain I have ever seen, but I’d argue he wasn’t evil. He existed in high station at a time when England was organized to actively humiliate and degrade Scotland and he took full advantage of that for his own ends but he wasn’t the architect of anything. He was a sociopath who normally didn’t trust anyone but who now realized he had been shipped off to a land that hated his very accent. From that perspective I am not sure I can really blame the guy for treating lower class Scots with his level of contempt. Had they all seen the film everyone this guy knew socially would agree with everything he did.
In Rob Roy, The English at this time were The Evil.
Good pick.
That line (I don’t care) reminds me of Inspector Javert of Les Miserables. He was born in a jail, and devoted his life to following, and later, enforcing, the law, regardless of how sensible of oppressive the law was. I think he fits in this category as an antagonist who was not evil, but he could be described as fanatical.
Agreed. An excellent performance in an excellent movie.
Nic de Jager as safari tour guide Jack Hind in The Gods Must Be Crazy.