Charlize Theron. I watched In the Valley of Elah yesterday, and was too lazy to get off the sofa to retrieve the box to see who the female lead was – and was totally “no shit” when the credits rolled. I think of her as a former model (this was actually a fairly brief blip on her resume, according to IMDb), but in fact she’s a damned good actress.
This got me thinking about actors who aren’t necessarily on my list of favorites, but who, when I do see them, I think, “yeah, they’re always good.” Liam Neeson is another lead; Mark Wahlberg, Laura Linney, and Catherine Keener are also on the list.
I haven’t seen Charlize in very much (Hancock and Aeon Flux), but she was very good in both, IMHO.
Even in crappy movies, Christopher Walken always makes me smile in anticipation as soon as he first appears. He’s never let me down. Ditto Tom Hanks, Keira Knightley and Johnny Depp (although in very different ways).
I was logging in to say Charlize was great in Aeon Flux, a very underrated movie IMHO. And then I was going to add Walken as my own. You beat me on both counts!!
It’s funny to see Walken in otherwise so-so movies (Poolhall Junkies), it really highlights just how he can dominate the screen so much more than the rest of the cast.
It’s a reference to a character she played on several episodes of “Arrested Development” a character who was developmentally disabled, but so attractive, and with such a cute British accent, that Michael Bluth didn’t realize that she was slow, and fell in love with her. There were a lot of references to a mysterious “Mr. F” which turned out to be an abbreviation of “Mentally Retarded Female”.
Cute as Charlize Theron is, that was by far the worst thing Arrested Development ever did. I was begging for it to end for weeks.
Back on topic: J.K. Simmons has become one of my favorite actors in recent years. He isn’t usually asked to do very much; he’s playing Court Psychologist Guy on about 15 different procedural shows right now. But give him an actual character role and he’s always good. J. Jonah Jameson in the Spider-Man movies, Juno’s father, Garth Pancake in The Ladykillers (benighted and confused as that movie was), BR in Thank You For Smoking… and I haven’t even seen Oz.
Toni Collette. She’s always good, and like Gary Oldman, she’s nearly unrecognizable from one role to the next: the mother in The Sixth Sense; Harriet Smith in Emma; Muriel in Muriel’s Wedding; the depressed mother in About a Boy.
How I overlooked her, I’ll never know. She’s truly an artist and a chameleon. I wonder if that is a double-edged sword for her: she is denied the biggest paychecks because she’s not a huge audience draw, and she’s not a huge audience draw because, unless you already knew the hot, desperate hom in Sixth Sense was also the character from About a Boy, and so on, it would be hard to guess.
Ooh, he is good. How come he’s not a bigger star? I just looked on his IMDB profile, and he’s been in a bunch of movies, but nothing terribly big in the past few years. He was great in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Matchstick Men
