Being nominated 16 times, in an era when there are (arguably) more solid roles for women and increasingly more attention paid to independent films (would anyone have noticed Melissa Leo in Frozen River if it had been made in 1977?) is much more impressive than winning four times, in my opinion.
I have great respect for Katharine Hepburn but she wasn’t in Meryl Streep’s zip code. Even in bad movies, like She-Devil or Mamma Mia!, Streep does the best job that could possibly be done with the material.
Re Mamma Mia- one of the worst movies ever! BUT. The scenery and costumes are beautiful, so I recommend having it on in the background with the sound off and playing some other music.
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I love Meryl Streep and think she is a great incredible phenomenal actress. Having said that, I wish she could make her face a little less mobile. It’s like she’s always moving her mouth or her eyes, smiling, then half-smiling, raising her eyes, lowering her eyes, tilting her head- more now than when she was younger. It seems self-conscious to me.
Thankfully, I have seen neither *Mamma Mia *nor She-Devil, so I’m not qualified to comment on those.
But on the plus side, I wanted to mention her cameo as “herself” in Stuck on You. She could have been forgiven if she’d phoned it in as a silly throwaway walk-on. However, she fully committed to her brief screen time and was possibly the best thing about the movie. (Okay, maybe second-best, behind Eva Mendes’s rack.) What a pro.
To each their own, of course but I absolutely love *Death Becomes Her *and thought Streep especially was fantastic in it. It made me wish she’d do more comedy - I thought she was very, very funny. I agree that Bruce Willis was badly miscast, though.
Personally, I think she’s improved immensely as a performer. I just adore her in Adaptation, for instance. But I used to find her acting curiously studied in earlier films like The Deerhunter. For example, there’s a scene where her character’s father drunkenly slugs her across the jaw as she’s trying to help him up and she does this little, tremulous touching of her jaw as if to say ‘I can’t believe my daddy did this to me!’. But somehow that’s not what I as the viewer took from the gesture - I took instantly and strongly a sense of the actress reckoning we’d all find this terribly convincing , deeply tragic and Great Acting. Pretty jarring in The Deerhunter where otherwise, I think the acting is perfect.
wow, i couldn’t disagree more. i thought she did an amazing job, and i really enjoyed the movie. also, anne hathaway? stanley tucci? emily blunt? they were all great in their roles. of course, it’s quite a stretch to refer to anne hathaway as “the smart fat girl”, as they do in the movie, but that’s hollywood.
to answer the OP, i haven’t seen anything meryl’s done that she wasn’t brilliant in, but i never saw mamma mia or she-devil.
I had another look at her filmography and forgot I did see Before and After, or rather, I forgot she was in it. All I remember is that Edward Furlong and Liam Neeson were annoying and the story was not convincing.
Are you high? That movie was so many levels of awesome and a perfect black comedy. The only flaw in it was, as others have stated, Bruce Willis, who doesn’t do a convincing pussywhipped husband.
No, I’ve never seen her give a bad performance. Even in bad movies she’s very, very good. Awhile back I read an essay by a Hollywood critic who noted that most actors and actresses will, in their bios and press releases, emphasize only their best movies, but Streep will cop to She-Devil just as cheerily as she does to Sophie’s Choice. She is far, far more talented than Hepburn ever was, IMHO, and if there is a just God she’ll pick up at least three more Oscars before she retires.
What’s with all the hate for Mamma Mia? Just because it’s not Martin Scorcese? It’s a bubblegum feel-good movie with great music, awesome scenery, fun choreographies and a pretty great cast all around. You get what you pay for - a light-hearted story with ABBA songs. To stay on topic, Meryl Streep was pretty good in that, as well, her rendition of The Winner Takes It All really pulls the right strings. In any case, as many people already said, her singing is not the worst in that movie.
Yeah, The River Wild was really great. Way better than it could have been with a lesser cast (which also includes Kevin Bacon, John C Reilly, David Strathairn and Benjamin Bratt).
A lot of people at the time were irritated that the producers went overseas to get a big Hollywood star to play the main role. Her Aussie accent is not convincing, and sounds a bit ridiculous. I think it is more that people were prejudiced against her in the role, more than that her performance is actually bad. I haven’t seen it though, so I can’t judge.
I thought Prime (with Meryl Streep as a psychiatrist whose young son is secretly dating patient Uma Thurman) was pretty awful, and Streep didn’t do much to improve it. So I’ll vote for “Prime” and “Mama Mia”.