Is there a generally accepted definition of any? Can you provide examples or counter-examples?
Years ago when I lived in NYC, I used to work with a bunch of aspiring actors, actresses and filmmakers. (yes, we were in the restaurant business LOL!) Anyway, I remember them discussing the movie “Metropolitan”, and gushing about how wonderful this movie was and how it was great art, great directing, world class acting blah, blah, blah. I piped in that I had seen it and couldn’t enjoy it because the acting, in my opinion, was stilted, amateurish and just plain awful. They all ripped me a new arsehole needless to say! I think that the acting in a movie has to be pretty bad for me to notice and to this day I still think that Metropolitan was the most “badly acted” movie I’ve seen to date.
Great actors like Gene Hackman, Meryl Streep, Henry Fonda, Robert Duvall, Gary Oldman and others quite often are able to completely immerse themselves in the characters, in essence ‘becoming’ the character and making the audience buy it. Robert Duvall was Gus McCrae in “Lonesome Dove”. On the other hand, Keanu Reeves is almost always playing a very slight variation on Keanu Reeves; there’s just no depth to his charactarization.
On top of which, even though Keanu is pleasant enough to look at, and can strike a good pose in almost any costume he’s put into, he reads his lines like he’s reading his lines, for the first time. You just have to ask yourself if his guests for dinner can stay awake all the way to the dessert.
Contrast Keanu with Christopher Walken whose bizarre way of reading his lines has brought him lots of great roles. Now, somebody else will have to judge whether Walken is a consistently “good actor” but all you have to do is watch him work with Dennis Hopper in the scene from True Romance http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pm_LbJTvTWA and ask yourself whether Keanu could pull that off. Not to mention the amazing work Hopper does!
How can one tell when an actor is immersed in their character? The sound of their voice? The way their eyes move?
You have to see the character in relation to the other characters, to the period, to the theme of the play or movie or whatever, to the overall point to the production. In addition to being able to convince you that he or she is exactly that character with real emotions and thoughts and lives, the actor has to advance the point of the production. It’s that balance between seeming “real” and seeming “interesting” while keeping the production moving along that separates “good actors” from those not so good.
Similar considerations apply to directors, writers, production crews, and so on.
You’re being told (or shown) a story. Do you believe it? Do you feel it? If so, things are “good” as far as those people are concerned. If not, it may be their fault or it may be just not your sort of story.
Excellent answer. Watch Nicholson in “Chinatown”, then watch him as the same character in “The Two Jakes”. The former works, the latter doesn’t. Of course, the latter bleeds over into a discussion of directing as well, as Nicholson performed that task (badly) for the film. Nicholson is a prime example of a once great actor becoming just variations on Jack Nicholson, cranky old guy who makes faces.
For me, there just isn’t any one rule. It isn’t about what the artist in question does; it’s somehow more about what the audience receives. This makes it a separate proposition for every work; what works for one won’t work for another.
For writing more than acting, I’ve found that a good personal litmus test is whether a given moment surprises and satisfies me, given what has been established up to that point. That is, a “good” bit of screenwriting manages to go in a direction I wasn’t expecting while simultaneously (or immediately afterward) also making me go, “Ohhh… that makes sense!” This applies equally to plot and to character, equally to “big” and “small” moments, and equally to dramatic and comedic bits.
There are innumerable examples of screenwriting that manage only “surprising” or “satisfying,” but not both. M. Night Shyamalan-esque twists generally fulfill the former without hitting the latter - that is, he goes for the “shock” effect, often without bothering to ensure that the big surprise makes any sense in context of the rest of the story. Romantic comedies, on the other hand, usually manage the latter (in order to make the audience go “awwwww”), but are usually so formulaic in doing so that most people can see the end coming from miles away.
Good screenwriters - your Whedons, Moores, and pre-Studio 60 Sorkins - can hit both notes consistently.
Good Acting - Zeldar described it best as a balance between real and interesting. The best actors can make the most boring lines seem interesting.
The best way to spot a good actor would probably be to read the script first and then see what the actor does with his role. If you read Jack Bauer’s lines on 24 you can see how much he brings to the role. The lines by themselves are really nothing special. If it were anyone else the character would not have been so watchable.
Someone mentioned True Romance. Another incredible performance in that movie is James Gandolfini as the henchman that needs to get information out of Alabama. This is a pretty standard scene in any movie. Henchmen are waiting in the homes of main characters in almost every movie where the main character steals from the mob. I don’t remember any of those other scenes, but the one with Gandolfini I can’t forget. He just turned that minor role into something else altogether.
It’s not the lines that the actors say but a lot more in how they deliver them. They have to add the emotions that drive the lines. If the emotions don’t match, the performance will look bad. Any one can pull off your standard Hollywood henchman performance. It takes a brilliant actor to explore what the henchman is feeling in that situation and bring it to the screen. Especially since someone who is in the henchman business probably has a wealth of interesting emotions.
Rarely is there a good movie where either the directing, acting, or screenwriting is bad. You really need all of these to be at least above average to have a good film. No matter how good the director is, he can’t make up for a bad script or bad actors. And no amount of talent in an actor can make up for a crappy director. Just watch Catwoman if you need proof.
A big 10-4, Lakai, on the Gandolfini performance in True Romance. I saw TR long before the first episode of The Sopranos and was a little surprised and quite happy to see him in the lead role there. He’s definitely a “type” and would be incapable of pulling off convincing performances in some types of parts, but I have seen him go from convincing creep to convincing family man to convincing gay hitman to a devilish warden and he makes all those roles his own.
I doubt if he’d bother with King Lear, Macbeth or Hamlet, but damned if that man can’t inhabit a role. He uses every aspect of his personality in every performance, plus a surprising way of “adding spice” at the same time. A consummate actor.
I don’t mind if an actor always plays variations of the same character - if playing yourself was good enough for Bogart, Stewart, Cary Grant and Groucho Marx, it’s good enough for me. What’s important is how *well *they play themsleves: how much conviction they put in their lines, how much of their own charisma and personal magnetism they put in their roles. In other words, how well they sell their scenes.
As Pterry once said, great actors have star quality… which is a lot rarer than talent.