Acting and What is Left Behind.

When I was young somewhere under ten and above five (I don't quite recall) I was in our church’s Nativity Play. I was set to be one of the three wise men, and I don't remember much before or after, just that when I arrived on stage I could not see the north star, but rather a sea of penetrative eyes staring at me, waiting on me to “become” and I was afraid. Afraid like I never remember being afraid before. I truly don't remember much after, save for a kind of feeling I was in the middle of a tornado of hubbub when I was hauled off behind the stage with people offering all kinds of sentiments to make me feel better as I cried my eyes out. I never really looked to the stage again or thought about acting outside of the terms of just immensely enjoying spectatorship until almost 30 years later. I was always shy and in many ways I still am. I prefer the sprawling open worlds of my imagination to the itchy, hot, volatile, oppressive, and restrictive real world that I live(d) in. In the world inside my head I am an avid performer. I love being other people, stepping into the mines of the mind of another person felt like Professor X entering “Cerebro” in X-Men. In the real world I was far too afraid of people's rejection. I learned very early on that there were different planes of existence one could choose to operate on and to think about the world in that way. Finding a way to conjoin the two is the journey I still am on. Acting for me is about the two different planes, the one that lies before it, and the one on the other side of it. Once you enter into that plane which is acting, the better you are able to let go of everything that existed on that other plane behind you, the better, the more effective, the more profound you're acting is

That “truth” we speak of consistently as actors in the study of the craft is about this very idea. The thing about this “truth” is it is not a truth in the sense that it factually or realistically exists on this plane all the time. It's a truth in the sense that it is something that we all strive towards, or something that we deeply want in the most deepest reaches of our spirit. Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote “Our body is the general medium for having a world”. Rene Descartes be damned, the body, our bodies, simultaneously experience itself and the outside, itself and the other. The pursuit of acting and the “act” of acting is the only art so directly a portrait of this philosophy. To make sense of this compromise by interacting consciously with this “truth”, is the ideological ideal that we get to watch or “be” on stage or screen. When we are praising a performance, what we are praising is not simply craft, skill, and technique on display, but that ideological ideal of an aspect of ourselves we would love to be free enough to be. In every single movie ever made there are people doing things that people on an everyday basis never do, that for many of us are physically impossible to do. Some of those things are righteous, some are not. A great deal are necessary to a just world, and a great many are arbitrary and set up by those who are freer than the rest of us, though not free enough to not hate the idea and the possibility of someone being freer.

German Expressionist painter Max Beckmann once said “What I want to show in my work is the idea which hides behind so-called reality. I am seeking for the bridge which leads from the visible to the invisible.” That exact bridge should be the similar goal of actors in many respects and the “crossing” something the critic should be more interested in. Fortunately, in the world of critics there seems to be a rising tide toward exactly this recognized in praise for Jason Momoa in “Fast and Furious X”, Mia Goth in “Pearl”, or Ewan Macgregor in “Pinocchio”. Still there is far too much of a dependency on the attributes most readily associated with realism both in young actors and critics and observers. The bulk of the last several best actor Oscar winners being real life people is an example of this. Ben Affleck in “The Last Duel”, Jared Leto in “House of Gucci” (actually one of his best performances) being up for “Razzies” are in some ways examples of this. Bradley Cooper’s effort in “Maestro is an example of this. The misunderstanding of “The Method” is an example of this. The preciousness around subtlety is an example of this, the general disdain for fantasy as a genre is an example of this. Hamming, Camp, “Over-the-top” the in-and-out of favor nature of the connotation associated with these attributes, the misunderstandings, are in some respects an example of this, and why should that be? When the fantastical is such an inextricable aspect of the medium? What scares us and draws us to movies and these characters is that they are so real and yet so non-real. The “magic” of the movies could not/cannot exist without the cohabitation of these two aspects. These are real people exhibiting real emotions in completely made up circumstances, many times in completely made up places, but the make-believe of it all is more than just the material-physical reality, but that they exhibit behavior and feelings so freely in a world so free of the horde of woes that are visited upon each and every one of us several times a day everyday. In “Lethal Weapon” Danny Glover's Roger Murtaugh who at best could be pulling down 40k a year is free enough not to have to worry too much about the fact that he voluntarily drove his own car through his own living room, nevermind the damage he and Riggs (Mel Gibson) inflict on the city, nevermind the bills they have to pay on a house that seemed just a little less sizable than the “Home Alone” house. He is also free of any worries a black man living in that neighborhood might have in the 80’s and 90’s. In all of real television history have we ever seen anything like Peter Finch's monologue in Network? Just about any one chase scene in an action movie would be the news for the year, and live on infamy for years after. Hell, the OJ Bronco ride was boring as hell and lives on to this day. It is because of these existing realities and the consequences in our “real” world that most of us have never seen these things happen around us. This is a lesson to no one, but it is something that I believe important enough to remain vigilant about being cognizant of in the evaluation of both performance and in many cases movies as a whole.

We admire performance because it finds that particular “truth” of things many of us know and feel but are too afraid to say and do ourselves. That Mr. Finch did it with such reckless abandon, ferocity, and courage in the act, both in the context of the play and in the context of the “act” of playing is the source code of our infatuation. We commend the “I'm not gonna do what you all think I'm gonna do, which is just FLIP OUT!” freedom of Jerry Maguire but we're also at the same time admiring and applauding the freedom of the actor Tom Cruise to find that self that we are all so afraid of so realistically and without any sort of resistance or abandon. The “flip out” is exactly what we want most. It’s release, is what we've been waiting for since he sat down at the table and watched the smug stylings of Jay Mohr as he gaily tells Jerry he's fired. That “truth” is not so much tied to our reality as it is the truth of our collective fantasy, and the movie unconsciously and consciously acknowledges it, as does that very line in the script. You get far enough down the road considering the limitations of our senses and you understand we don't have the slightest conception of “truth” and in that sense every one of us is participating in some form of faith based upon those very limitations. This is the spiritual nature of the “act” of acting. A quick Wikipedia search defines spirituality as a religious process of reformation which aims to recover the original shape of man”. So while this may not be a religion it is a process of reformation, the thing we see when we see somebody able to come back to something resembling our original shape, something that maybe only existed (and never even fully then) when we were children. That these people (actors) are still able to hold onto that, to find that and shed the baggage of this plane to enter into one that is such an idyllic but frightful place to live in…There, in that place is the “god” of acting, proof that the nearest thing we have to utopia is the stage, the imagination of writers, vision of directors, the performance of actors and the movies. Real bodies existing on a screen within real settings surrounded by matter that we understand is part of the connective tissue that is realism. In performance it is reinforced through the tools we have available from whole disciplines and technique’s such as the “Method” or “Meisner technique” to the “magic if” and emotional recall, but it is all of it activated by imagination.

Understanding this magical aspect, this spiritual aspect over my years both in the study of acting and in the observation of it, I've become less and less invested in the realist performances. It's why so many of my favorite performances, especially recently have come from horror; Marianne Jean-Baptiste in “In Fabric”, Agathe Rousselle, and Vincent Lindon in “Titane”, or outlier movies that ask for something very specific but not necessarily real, Taylour Paige, Colman Domingo, and Riley Keough in “Zola”. Kristen Stewart in “Crimes of the Future”, Delroy Lindo’s dialogue in “Da Five Bloods” or Paul Dano’s ghastly yelling in “The Batman” these are things dancing beyond the threshold of good taste and willing to play gleefully in the other world, unshackled by self awareness and pride, or gluttonous bait for prestige. It is why Julius Carry as Sho’Nuff in “The Last Dragon” is unironically one of my favorite performances of all time. In a better world we'd understand the brilliance of what Carry found. Unfettered imagination, anchored by craft. We’d have been as interested in how he constructed this performance as Daniel Day Lewis in “My Left Foot” or “There Will Be Blood”. We’d ask the “how”, “why”, and “what” of a concoction thrust into a proud lineage of performance that includes anyone from Gloria Swanson in “Sunset Boulevard” to Peter Lorre in “Mad Love”, and then beyond him and from him Samuel L. Jackson in “Pulp Fiction”. For Carry to climb into jumper pants, shoulder pads, a Jheri curl wig, and Converse with polarized shades on, entering every room like a superstar pro wrestler is at its core the soul of acting. It's leaving behind this plane for another, smashing together and stitching the real and the very unreal. In reverse the anchored and oppressive reality in Joaquin Phoenix’s performance as The Joker in “Joker” is something I dislike. The script and the banal intention of the movie suppresses the inherent absurdity of the existence of the Joker. Misses almost totally the opportunity to allow Joaquin Phoenix the ability to play with his considerable toolbox and construct something never before seen, rather than what already exists whether in regards to the sociological implications or the “King of Comedy” reference. Using fully ones imagination, besides the public speaking aspect of it, for every fresh actor is the hardest fear to get rid of. The most difficult aspect to shed is the safety of “normal” and “real” and it never stops living with you, fighting you,it is always there. The “how far they're willing to go into this plane of existence” is one of, if not the defining quality of what separates the tiers of actors. It is the profound awe behind watching a Benedict Cumberbatch crawl around on all fours in a skin tight suit with a bunch of little funny balls on it and snarl and growl as if he is a real dragon, something that has never existed. The creation and committed execution of this thing that in any other place would be considered so absurd that you might be committed, especially if you did it on multiple occasions- which is what actors do. I feel one of the reasons why comedians usually make such good actors is due to the built-in nature of the willingness to forego any ideas of things like embarrassment and shame in comedy, which in many ways (both productive and unproductive) have to do with harnessing behavior into rigid categories. So absolutely the guy who was willing to get down to his skivvies and run around pretending he's on fire screaming “Help me Tom Cruise!” with the attachment to the very real reality of body shaming/shame or guardedness completely left behind, of course that guy was probably going to turn out to be a pretty good actor.

“If you speak any lines, or do anything, mechanically, without fully realizing who you are, where you came from, why, what you want, where you are going, and what you will do when you get there, you will be acting without imagination. That time, whether it will be short or long, will be unreal, and you will be nothing more than a wound-up machine, an automation”-Konstantin Stanislavski, “An Actor Prepares”

The above quote from Stanislavski perfectly illustrates this wonderful balancing act. He is talking about the importance of the imagination (the unreal) to delivering us a real performance. It almost perfectly encapsulates exactly this idea that what we actually want to see on the screen is not a replication of our reality, but something just beyond it. By not using the unreal you end up unreal. I would say the same as a spectator, by not paying attention to the unreal in a performance we lose the real, we mistake the art for replication. We are taught a hyper focus on our reality from the moment we are born. From the time we enter school begins a slow careening into an oppression of sorts of our imagination. Indoctrinated to conform to “reality” in a way that represses a lot of our creative and artistic freedom, “reality” becomes the most vehement impediment to a competent actor. So why would I put more emphasis on those actors who do a great job of conforming to this reality over those who are willing to shed it in total? Al Pacino could be as subtle as he wants to be, seem as “real” as me or you standing here when he's in his bag, but even in those movies where he is anchored magnificently to something tangible, something very real, it is still those moments of explosion, those moments of the hyperreal and absurd that stand in our memories. Those represented in some of the most famous scenes in anything from “Dog Day Afternoon” to “The Devil’s Advocate” and of course in “Heat” when from out of the linguistic abyss of his own imagination he dives so far into this other plane that he breaks up the cadence and any expectation of what might come next in a sentence by suddenly screaming “Cause she's got a great ass... and you got your head all the way up it!” That is James Earl Jones monologuing like he’s performing “Macbeth” in “Conan The Barbarian”. That’s Sigourney Weaver pretending she’s possessed by a spirit in bed with spiritual decadency in “Ghostbusters”. Denzel Washington screaming “King Kong ain’t got sh** on me!” in “Training Day”. Isabelle Adjani throwing herself into another dimension in “Possession”, Nicolas Cage in just about anything. People playing outsized versions of ourselves, themselves, with a nod to an alternative existence wherein even everyday people and the mundane are presented with the otherworldly beauty and poetry that is there, but so cravenly concealed by the “real”. That is what I love about acting, and that is what I love most about performance. Technique and craft are vital and integral, but nothing supersedes for me the importance and the value of that very spiritual, metaphysical thing that undergirds this beautiful artistic charade called acting. This is what should be more recognized in the surrounding bodies that observe and critique performance. What could and should stretch the tedious reptition of similar performances not only in the awards ceremonies and “best of” lists, but in the actors as they approach. Climbing into non existence, leaving behind the weight of the real, for the freedom of the imaginary. It is what is imagined and not what is mimicked that should be appreciated in acting, what is left behind, not what is held onto.

Film Diary 9/15: Setsuko Hara splits the veil in “No Regrets for Our Youth.

From the moment you she entered the screen in the “No Regrets for Our Youth”, I knew she was the star. I didn't know her face well enough to know she was Setsuko Hara, but I knew she was Setsuko because her energy told me so. The story of a woman looking for purpose who finds it not in struggle, but during it. Who finds love not in labor, but in commitment to the ideas that drive it, becomes vividly real, in Hara's eyes. An exercise by Kurosawa meant to drive home the power of labor, that ultimately also drives home the power of perseverance and community, becomes vividly real in Hara’s hands, and body. What she crafts; something unique in it specificity, as to how it articulates not only the attributes of struggle and its consequences, but how the woman’s body, and mind respond differently and similarly is quite simply staggering. The site of Yukie’s greatest pain is also the site of her rebirth as someone truly seeking out what she dare didn’t name, or could not…freedom, a living. In No Regrets, Hara gives what instantly became one of my favorite performances ever. Total in its revelation of the arc, impressive in its balance of grace and ferocity, stillness, and poetry, stoicism, but with the internal fire of a large furnace. Every look from Hara into the camera is as if she found God in the veil between the silver screen and the present, and her gift is eternity.

Authenticity, presence, being present, an active listener, emotive quality, physicality, whatever you may think of when you think of acting it's in this performance. It's as much a character actor performance as it is a movie star performance. Every scene that is almost purely about Hara’s considerable presence is right then and there affirmed by her physicality and commitment as a character actor, especially when looking at it across from her work with her work with Yasujiro Ozu which couldn't be further apart as women and yet still attached by a seam. Yukie rises and looks into the camera as the news of her husbands demise is announced, and then walks away and all the sadness of what her world is to become lives in that walk. Her eyes betray the intensity of her perseverance, her unwillingness to go down, to let those who would see her down, watch her display it as well, be they those above her station, below her, or at her side. Her cadence changes, the intensity of it as she grows, as her fire grows. She becomes more skilled at work, and at saying what she means. All of this takes in terms of time ten seconds of screen time in each instance, foreshadowing her future before the movie even gets to it. Every action is statement, from how she plays piano, (ferociously and with no patience) to how she stands after years of work, (arduously but proudly) from placing a hair tie, to allowing her mother to take her basket.

It's the type of performance I will shamelessly plug into any conversation as an excuse to talk about her with glee. It's a conversational art piece, private, but between intimate parties even as a culture. As art it speaks to you and you in turn want to speak to someone about it, and if they see it, they too will want to talk about it. It's telephone, or is it “Ringu”by way of magic in a performance. The arc of Yukie Yagihara is an arduous journey. It is both one of intense and extreme political change (she goes from hating leftist to at the very least adapting foundational principles) and physical change, (from upper middle class to abject poverty by choice) and it is long. Where Yukie begins as a woman is not anywhere near where she is at the end, and the story of that growth exists almost completely in Hara’s performance in her work…literally. When she tills the ground, you feel the back breaking nature of the work in her body. She sets into it, her toes digging into the dirt, her body folding, she makes you feel the blisters on her fingers though they're not shown, and moves with disjointed force in the fields and with the plow and how. Eventually she moves in such a way as you almost here the bones creak and crack. Every step seems as if she's walking through a blizzard in three feet of snow. Kurosawa provides the tedium, expressing it in montage after montage of nothing but the same action and the repetition of the words that give her courage. Hara contextualizes it, and wears the effects of it. The transformation in her face near the end is very little about the make-up and very much about a spiritual transformation that happens from within, from behind the skin of her face. For all her suffering Yukie has found purpose, and in losing her “man” she has found herself , but at what costs? Why?.. Kurosawa makes no bones about it; it's oppression and that oppression goes double for the women. It is not her husband's death alone that causes suffering, it is not what radicalized her either, it is his words in combination with her work, not in a sense of production for corporate ends, but production for human connection and protection. In the end one of her former suitors who himself became a traitor to the cause, tells Yukie “Your sheer life force makes me feel ashamed”. It's a haunting reveal of what alot of men should feel and maybe on occasion about the position they've helped re-ify and hold up, ( when you see women working several steps behind what you have, accompishing more then you with your foot on their back, there is a sense of shame) but it's also an accurate representation of Setsuko Hara’s performance and it's evocative and emotive power. While having seen Hara in a few of Yasujiro Ozu’s films, I consider this my awakening to her powers and it will be through the refraction of her light in this movie that I will watch and study the rest of her career as I watch it.

I Want More for Bradley Cooper.

I may yet be proved wrong, but I watched the trailer for “Maestro” with a modest sense of exhilaration, the kind that is niether hot nor cold but intrigued, mostly due to the fact that it was Bradley Cooper's latest. I like Bradley Cooper, have since I first saw him on screen. He's funny in a way that isn't built into a need to prove he's more than a pretty face, nor a way that is meant to hide his insecurities. He has a well of vulnerability that I think can present itself in ways that repel you or invite you to give him a big warm hug. I expected, initially to come out of the Maestro trailer anticipating it's release with a fervor backed up by the strong debut of “A Star is Born” and instead came out reminded of how underwhelmed I've been with Cooper's post- Hangover career. I would not presume to be able to offer anything approaching a salient or sharp commentary on Jewish identity and/or the teetering balancing act of cultural appropriation as it pertains to that identity and more specifically the ethical issues around the use of a prosthetic nose to play a Jewish character or real life person. My interest (or in this case disinterest) in Cooper's role is far less political and far more simplistic; I don't find it to be an interesting choice for Cooper and I think it represents as of late a pattern as it pertains to his choices. More to the point his choices since transitioning to the sphere of “prestige” actor and that by comparison Jake Gyllenhaal who’s had a somewhat similar career path and was also interested in the story behind Maestro is far more intriguing for it.

My intro to Cooper was in 2005’s “Wedding Crashers” as the petulant hair trigger boyfriend of Rachel McAdams’s Claire Cleary. Cooper was painfully on the mark as “Sack Lodge”, the kind of man stunted by an idea of manhood that never grew past what he saw it as in sixth grade. His portrayal was so accurate and yet so absurd it nestled itself in the sweet spot of being as repulsive and hard to watch as it was magnetic and attractive. Cooper would flounder around flashing his particular kind of brilliance in similar roles and movies of varying quality until 2012 when he hit a two run double with David O’ Russell’s “The Silver Linings Playbook” and Derek Cianfrance’s “The Place Beyond the Pines”. While I'm indifferent to the former; a rudderless non impactful sludge of ideas that aren't communicated very well, the latter was a revelation of a film and a sound awakening to the other possibilities for Cooper's distinctive charms. As Avery Cross in “The Place Beyond the Pines”, Cooper inverted and turned on its head the qualities he tried so hard to manufacture in Silver Linings and other Hangover wannabes (A-Team is great though!) and latched onto something that was as disagreeable and disdainful as he was in The Wedding Crashers in ways that movie was too ridiculous to take to the house. In the Wedding Crashers, Silver Linings, and The Place, Cooper is playing immature men who for one reason or the other haven't grown up, but in Crashers he is diving head first into being disreputable, in Silver Linings he teeters from likeable and unlikeable and doesn't really find a great balance in either, and in The Place he is as close to on the money as it gets. There was a similar boyish quality in “Sack Lodge” as “Avery Cross”, a similar unease with who he was, but it was far more vulnerable, and much more voluminous than that of Sack Lodge. It gave Cooper thereto unprecedented amounts of empathy and sympathy. Depth he hadn't mined and we hadn't seen until that very moment, verisimilitude that I didn't think he was capable of, and from that point on it seemed Cooper was in a different space in Hollywood.

Cooper’s filmography from that point reads like a who's who of Oscar mainstays, he has worked with David O’Russell several times, as well as Clint Eastwood, (twice) Guillermo Del Toro, Dan Trachtenberg, Thee Paul Thomas Anderson, and is now on his second prestige project directed by and starring himself. Jake Gyllenhaal had a similar career trajectory in that it was very herky-jerky to start. Hollywood did not seem to know what to do with him. One day he was in “The Day after Tomorrow” the next he was in “Brokeback Mountain”, one “Zodiac” the next “Prince of Persia”. The difference in these movies is actually to be admired (except Prince of Persia…like ..why?) but they were flopping, and as a consequence Gyllenhaal despite showing the same skills we all see today, had not found his stride, I don't even know that he had found land yet. Land and a stride would arrive, starting with David Ayers “End of Watch”. I found Ayer’s movie to be a dutifully proud evocation of mediocrity in whole, and pure copaganda but Gyllenhaal was absolutely brilliant in it as was his scene partner Michael Pena. From that point Gyllenhaal began an unprecedented record of escape tricks from any sense of patterned thinking around what movies he's going to do, while simultaneously only increasing his value as an actor in that realm of Hollywood that some might call the “A list”. Gyllenhaal’s type of director is as elusive as his type of movie and it shows. He has worked with Denis Villeneuve (twice) Antoine Fuqua (twice) Tom Ford, Daniel Espinoza, Bong Joon-ho, Jacques Audiard, Michael Bay and Guy Ritchie. Coopers filmography for all its stature, elicits no such sense of wonder, intrigue or quality. I am bored, watching the trailer from Maestro elicited not one tiny infinitesimal particle of interest from my body, and if anything I might have yawned without knowing it.

What “An American Sniper”, “Burnt” “Joy”, “The Mule”, “A Star is Born”, and now “Maestro” represent to me is yearning, a not so hidden desire to be seen as worthy of respect from a certain type of peer. It’s a damned good career, but not a particularly interesting, or arresting one. In my experience with people and I mean that anecdotally -this is not some universal truth I have found - in the people most often given to looking for what's for them, the choices appear more erratic than those who are looking for a type. Jake Gyllenhaal is picking roles by what's for him in a way that I think is true to what Jake Gyllenhaal likes and desires to see himself in and it shows in the variety of his work. Bradley Cooper on the other hand seems to be sticking with the idea of what someone who has now achieved the status he recently achieved is supposed to do. For most of us that may have watched Helen Mirren's long and illustrious career we would not assume (and nor would Hollywood) that she would want to do a Fast and Furious movie - I mean why shouldn't she? - but it wouldn't be something that us or Hollywood in general would see for her, yet she did want to do it and for no other reason but to have a good time, something she admitted on The Graham Norton Show. Bradley Cooper has movie star idol looks, and a healthy dose of frat boy machismo, but there's also something a little dangerous, something a little dead behind the eyes and his most interesting projects right along with his best work have been those which explored where the roads of those traits lead a lot more. Those sensibilities and quirks which flipped that movie star idol-ness to show the idleness, the listlessness around evolution or vulnerability. If he didn't go for the obvious I think Cooper could play a good Android, or strange life form via Scarlett Johansen in “Under the Skin”. He has some of that sense of crossed wiring as if he was growing human, rather than already one, and there's a childlike quality to Cooper that belies a kind of innocence and newness to experience that would serve him well in this kind of role. By no means has Cooper had a bad career, I just haven't found it very fascinating. By comparison Gyllenhaal has been the exact opposite. Gyllenhaal’s career has been one of frantic movement and absorption with a string of unique choices that have ended up in an extremely high dosage of quality as well as memorable performances. “Donnie Darko”, “Bubble Boy”, “Night Crawler”, “Okja”, “Enemy”, “Prisoners”, and “Ambulance” show a varied willingness to play with both the straight and the crooked, menacing and innocent, beautiful and ugly. I just don't find Bradley Cooper's career to be anywhere near as littered with those type of performances. I thought he was very appropriately good in “A Star is Born”, but I could think of several other actors who could have done it either just as good or better, and the role is literally one that has been done time and time again with far more interesting choices in how to bring that character to life, never mind that he was out acted by just about everybody in that movie especially Sam Elliott and Lady Gaga. What I see in “Maestro” and his playing Bernstein is just another calculated aim for prestige as is his choice to direct it. I'm not saying that he doesn't bear some deep fondness for Bernstein, I'm not saying there isn't something else that drew him there, but I am saying, I want more for Bradley Cooper. I want something that actually shakes me up, I want choices that feel as distinctive as his tan in A-Team. I want him to do the type of films that bring out the magma, the quartz, the crystallized marrow of Cooper's soul in the same way that Anthony Mann would bring out the dark blue side of Jimmy Stewart. In the way that “One-Hour Photo” and “Insomnia” allowed Robin Williams to show us the things that pained him on the inside, to show us that live wire act was always teetering on sadness and melancholy. I am saying I find what Ive seen to date to be dreadfully ho-hum and respectable and I find that almost, almost as fundamentally impoverished as I do the identity aspect of it for what of that he bears responsibility for.

Journal: Regina Taylor's Defiance in “Clockers”

Clockers is a movie that arrests and engrosses scene by scene, building tension with surly direction while preaching with creative narrative choices. It is amongst the most sermon oriented of Lee’s films, and that is where its weaknesses lie, but its strengths are many and chief amongst them is the emotionally rich quality of the performances. In a movie where Lee’s tendency towards pontification can feel heavy-handed and oppressive, Lee’s performers give a masterclass in how to tell a story subtly, while acting in a style that is far more bombastic and complimentary to Lee’s sensibilities. One thing about a Spike Lee film is you cannot afford to be a small actor in them, and this is the arguably the biggest I've seen any troupe in his films. I don’t know that it’s true (even for me) but I’ll be damned if many times during this revisit I didn’t inadvertently blurt out “This is the best acted Spike Lee film we have. There are a great deal of performances in to choose from in this film, but three in particular are central to this; Regina Taylor (Iris Jeeter) Harvey Keitel (Rocco Klein) and Delroy Lindo (Rodney Litle). My focus here is Regina.

“Clockers Like all great noir films is very character oriented, the one stock character missing is the well chronicled “Femme Fatale, but the detective(s), the gangsters, are here, our anti hero or “Patsy” in Mekhi Pfifer’s “Strike”, and though its not the exact model of Femme Fatale elements of what makes the femme fatale such an iconic character trope in films history is here too in Iris Jeeter. In discussing the great dames of film noir film critic Christina Newland has this to say about the quality of these women; “ Their power may lay in their feminine wiles, but they frequently challenge male domination, the traditional family structure, and prove as strong counterpoints to the complacent women of many other male-oriented genres.” While the movie doesn’t give much in the way of an inner life beyond protecting her son to Iris, actress Regina Taylor imbues her character with as much as she can of one so that her rage is not caricature but fully lived in and conceptualized rage. It's in her walk and both of the scenes that she appears in which resembles to me in its purity of energy and it's ferocity in its intentional focus to resemble the way the Ultimate Warrior would enter the ring in wrestling. It's also in the way she puts her finger in strikes chest as she says “I know your mother..Gloria” which carries with it the very history she speaks of as we are immediately transported to a time where she saw these boys as much more than “death dealing scum” which provides the actual power of the scene as compared to the message that most readily flies out from under the verbiage used. Where the quality of the figure Newland discusses first becomes crystallized though is in her second appearance. Even more physical than the first, (having already warned Strike) the feeling-out period is over and she now launches at strike with such fury that it almost fools one into believing it is a radical defiance of the very socialized idea of womanhood even as it plays upon the borders of the “angry black woman trope”. Taylor’s physicality is an explicit challenge of male domination, she almost dares any of them to do anything about it especially Mekhi’s strife. Bathed in the confidence of knowing she is not to be played with despite the very real likelihood that if she flinches even a little, there is no guarantee one of these men would be against hitting her, she steps into these men's circle with the exact amount of masculine energy she has seen these men perform time and time again, only it is a far more truthful one. It is the purity of her anger, the righteousness of it and the ownership of it that keeps all at bay and at least a few of them genuinely scared. It's a performance that is rooted in truth and not just that of the performance, but of many a real life black woman in hoods and projects just like this one in anywhere USA. Her size is the linchpin to to the degree of authenticity. If she couldn't be big enough, bold enough in her performance to back that intensity, it falls flat and less you focused on the “performing” aspect. Taylor's commitment is plain and it is visceral. In her eyes, in her mouth especially as she leaves, and in her movement, concise and precise as they are. This commitment assists and serves the story in all kinds of ways not the least of which is it takes the focus off of the murkiness of message and whether it's good or not to view drug dealers who are themselves victims of the same system as “scum” on onto the authenticity of the feeling, the emotion behind it and the justification behind it in the woman and in her basic desire to protect her child. It's a performance that I think deserves much more of a light than what it has gotten and I wanted to make sure I had documentation of my own that I saw it.

“Fishes”: A Masterclass “How to” on cameos.

“The Bear”(FX), the latest TV sensation seemingly on track to fill the hole left by HBO's most recent cultural cache hit “Succession”, built the foundation for it's reputation in its initial season. A Chicago-ish show ostensibly about the restaurant business, ultimately about family and character, that made the foundation of those themes characterization, (both in terms of writing and acting) told in the frenetic anxiety ridden style of Uncut Gems, was a bonafide word of mouth hit by the time it was midway through it's inaugural season. I call the Chicago based TV show Chicago-ish, because as far as I, an outsider from California can tell, it seems clear that it loves Chicago and wants to be identified as an authentic Chicago show but that that authenticity from everything I've read is polarizing. I bring that up because I believe the goal of authenticity is a vital aspect of the show overall and thusly of the shows characterizations and then subsequent to that, it's casting. The television landscape today is mostly filled with three types of actors; former or current movie stars, character actors that have now become recognizable brands, and of course TV stars who have now become recognizable brands. Many times it's a mixture, 911, The Old Man, The Morning Show, Little Fires Everywhere boasts/boasted current and former movie stars like Angela Bassett, Reese Witherspoon, and Steve Carrell, some of whom like Carrell or Tina Fey (SNL, 30 Rock) had originally started on TV. “Succession” would eventually make recognizable names of its core cast of then mostly unknowns but it's original pull was clearly Brian Cox, a character actor who had long since left behind that “What's his name” component of character acting. This makes a show like “The Bear” refreshing not only in the sense that it was a show that became popular completely off of what it is, rather than who was in it, but also in the sense that it's casting and centering of actors who might be known to some, but we're not yet recognizable brands is vital to that authenticity. John Bernthal was by far the show's most recognizable face and his character wasn't even alive, he was only seen in flashbacks. When the most recognizable regular on your show is Oliver Platt, and that becomes apart of your identity, it makes total sense then that littering your second season with a lot more recognizable faces and brands could end up looking like a betrayal of a lot of what made your show great.

Cameos are one of televisions/films most tightrope-like inventions. On the one hand the whole point of it is for you to go "oh my gosh that's such and such!" On the other it is that very thing that could be your undoing if the element of this surprise visit from a very recognizable face outsizes the audience's ability to see them as a functioning character or a real definitive part of the tapestry created. One of the most egregiously ornate examples of the latter is Ed Sheeran's appearance in HBO's mega hit “Game of Thrones”. In one of the more recognizable signposts of the dwindling quality of that show during its eight season run, Sheeran was not only a poor performer, but he didn't at all seem to fit into any of the realities of that world. It was a pointless appearance that didn't add anything to the show, didn't contextualize anything, and because of the former two, actually hurt the overall production. There was no rhyme or reason to why Sheeran appeared in the episode besides the fact that somebody (maybe Sheeran, maybe the writers themselves) wanted him to be in an episode. There seemed to be no consideration as to whether or not he had skill as an actor, because he did not. There seemed to be no consideration for whether or not his music was a good fit for that world, because frankly it was not, and when you center him in a show that had by that time built it's reputation on having seemingly small and/or minor events play a significant role in the past or the future of the series, you are calling attention to his significance, which at the end we all know was only that it was Ed Sheeran on Game of Thrones. Stunt casting is a very close cousin of a cameo. Both of them are often meant to garner some form of publicity. Both (especially in TV) are often employed, or appear when the product is struggling with staying true to what it is, or seems to be losing ground from its original popularity. Which wouldn't be a problem in and of itself except that often it seems that is the only impetus for a particular casting. The effects of a casting like this aren't always so readily apparent, or ruinous. Sometimes they are only a minor hit on the show overall. Sometimes they can be subtle and based in something that seems ultimately positive like Meryl Streep's performance in season 2 of “Big Little Lies”. When I originally watched the season I loved watching all the little details that Streep had added. The intricacies of who this woman was, and what she stood for, but upon a revisit later I found it to be ill-fitting and aberrant within the tapestry of this show. A lot of it called attention to the fact that Meryl Streep was on this show rather than allowing her to disappear within the interwoven threads of this community as all of the other big names in the show had done. The extremely memorable scene at the dinner table with Nicole Kidman's children is a great example of this. The performance in and of itself if you're just watching Meryl Streep for the sake of Meryl Streep is good, brilliant in fact, but understanding it within the context of the show it's akin to watching picture in picture on your TV. It felt like you were watching something else, while watching this show. It takes you out of that out of body experience Roger Ebert once spoke of as it relates to watching great films and television, and plants you firmly in the space of recognition that you are watching a production. Once she screams that's it, the last remnants of the bubble pop, because it is all too recognizable this doesn't bring anything together, it illuminates little, means even less, and ultimately disrupts the shows integrity and dedication to its own world and characters. Even while to some extent that is the purpose of her character, it doesn't do so in such a way that fits, but rather becomes disruptive outside the context of the show as well. I say all this because when you're going to spend so much time talking about why something is working then you want to talk about what it looks like when it doesn't.

Enter episode 6 of Season 2 of The Bear titled “Fishes”. As directed by creator Christopher Storer, The episode is a flashback to one particular Christmas party in which many of Carmy's extended family appear for the first time. The episode is shot vibrantly and with a specific intention and attention to details and tension that mirror the way horror is shot to create anticipation, even while cheery Christmas music and conversation can be heard in its opening, something feels off. It's not long into the episode though that we end up going inside the house and once there, there is a procession of recognizable faces one after another playing family members. Much of these introductory family members buck the trend of the Bear's mostly understated casting. Besides Bernthal's Michael, there is Bob Odenkirk's Uncle Lee, Sarah Paulson's cousin Michelle, John Mulaney as her partner Stevie, and Jamie Lee Curtis as mother Donna Berzatto, and this is where a friction in my mind began that could've easily become a fire before it was put out by the steadfast integrity of these characters, their characterizations, and the context they added to the story. It was not only the fact that hiring such recognizable actors in and of itself was a departure from what had previously been a part of the shows charm, but it was also so many being bunched into one episode that sent klaxons going off in my head, but as the episode went on it became more and more apparent how thoughtful this casting was, most especially Jamie Lee Curtis. The nature of Curtis's performance, the size of it makes it easily the most standout performance, ( by using the word standout I don't necessarily mean the best) but that same size, that same theatricality, that forcefulness, also makes it a handy target for the idea that it is maybe the most obvious example of a case of stunt casting even if only on the lower levels of the spectrum. It's a real and valid temptation, but it is nonetheless a temptation that must be battled with a contextual understanding of what the performance means to the episode, to the character and to the characters at the center of this show. Her theatricality is not just for the sake of showing off or displaying her range, or for the overall prestige of this show. Her theatricality is central to understanding who Donna Berzatto is and the damage her illness and her own flaws have done to her children. When the episode opens Bernthal's “Michael” is speaking to his sister “Natalie” (A very good Abby Elliott) about their mother. Before they even begin their conversation the first thing we hear as an audience is Jamie Lee Curtis yelling in the background, we just don't know yet that that it's Jamie's voice, and that that voice is the very mother that they are speaking of, but it lays a subliminal foundation. It's not just what they're saying about who they're discussing that matters, it is also how they are saying it. Natalie and Mikey are outside with no one around yet their voices are low, and they are very close to each other, almost huddling and speaking into each other, and it is telling as to just how much reach this woman has and just how much she's present even when she's not ( a recurring theme). This is the text and the context Jamie Lee must make come alive, the table has been set, she must provide the meal, she does. Curtis's kinetic, emphatic gesturing is directly related to the amount of space she takes up, which is directly related to her moods, which is directly related to the children, and as a more specific example, Carmy's anxiety around “the other shoe dropping”. When we first see her the kitchen is a mess, there doesn't appear to be any organization to it but in her head, and no one is privy to it but her. This in and of istelf is sad both in how it's affected Donna and how it affects her children. Later in the episode when she cries “I make everything beautiful, but no one makes things beautiful for me” it's a gut wrenching example of how alone Donna must feel despite being surrounded. Jamie moves through space like she's making her way though a dense jungle. The movement of even a cigarette from her mouth extends far enough from her body to qualify as throw or a hack. She actually doesnt move very fast, she doesn't try and match the hurried nature of the camera with her body, that she does with her voice, which is modulated ever so slightly to a certain pitch that ossilates between sweet and vexing. Go back and listen to her voice in “Everything, Everywhere All at Once” you'll notice the subtle difference. It will be through Jamie's inflated performance we will see just how her children were affected over time. How all her kids learned to both clean up after her and/or be preventive care. Curtis for her part plays it like one of those anime explosions that start out as a very noticeable but small bubble that eventually swallows everything in its path. The movements, and line deliveries need to be big, they need to be forceful, they need to be charming, they need to be alluring, and all in a big way, because this is how the kids shrunk until one of them literally disappeared.

When we first meet Donna she seems very warm, very big on personality, very funny, your average Italian matriarch, but there is something about the intensity of that warmth as well as the intensity of the intimacy implied by Storer's camera that sets you on edge immediately. We then start to see the cracks and the fissures that show something isn't right and it starts with Carmen. Tiny little needles about how we never comes home and implications as to the reasons he came home. Multiple hurried commands that contradict each other, constant movement and constant alarms both real and imagined. Something Storer and the writers do well is draw these little pricks and pinches in such a way that “who” or “what” is the matter is a bit ambiguous. We can't immediately take sides, we can't immediately tell whether it is true that Carmen is too big for his family and doesn't like how small they seem, or even if it's true that he doesn't come back home alot,(though the guilt Jeremy Allen White allows to creep up on his face at least implies she's not too far off about it) after all we are all guests in the Berzatto home. Later it starts to become more apparent, like when she tells Carmen to go and grab a specific ingredient and he does, and then almost immediately goes into a fit about the fact that he didn't move a pot that she definitely did not ask him to move, but believes emphatically that she has. “WHY IS NOBODY LISTENING TO ME!” she exclaims. Curtis is all hands and face as she embeds in the plea a certain patheticness, a desperation, and most importantly a sense of recognition of what she's doing. If the performance rings false, it is because Donna is “performing”, not Jamie Lee Curtis. Many of us will probably recognize this particular brand of guilt tripping from our parents, but fewer of us recognize it in this particular kind of space and this particular intensity. What is even more telling is the way Carmen and Richie immediately move and the way in which they move. There's a delicate weightiness to the way they move around Donna similar to the way one might move if they were on the moon or in actual space, but also similar to the way a thief might try to procure a very precious item without touching any of the exterior elements that surrounded it so as not to trigger alarms. It's not just Carmen and Richie using what could be viewed as completely normal and ambiguous interactions, Storer and crew show just how everyone has to move around Donna in this way. Oliver Platt's “Uncle Jimmy” enters the kitchen and immediately starts raising his hands and letting Donna know he's not going to mess anything up, it's light-hearted and again very normal for anyone who has a mother who lords over her kitchen like a King would over his manor, but it is also indicative of the way that people who aren't even constantly around her are aware of her presence and her fire. Throughout the episode you notice that everyone is constantly paying attention to what Donna is doing even when they're pretending they're not. She interrupts scenes of silence, violence or comraderie with her flare ups or her luminosity. Her kids float around her like moons providing balance, and walking on eggshells so as not to set off a bomb that might lead to her loudly holding space for suicidal thoughts. They check on her when she's loud and mean-spirited and when she's funny and just spirited. Even then they can do no more to stop the explosions than she can.

In one of the best bits of acting in the episode, Curtis is alone in the kitchen after exploding on poor Natalie with a large dose of suicidal ideation and guilt. She screams gutterally and with a surgical fury that if she blew her brains out they wouldn't even care. John Mulaney's Steven enters and instantaneously, the fallout hits him. Curtis stands up erect with an immediacy that carries years of hyper-attunement to her surroundings, and unleashes a visceral beating upon him. Natalie, already damaged from taking direct shrapnel leaves and Curtis is left alone, radiating from her face, the wake of the explosion still pushing into the corners of her face and lips causing them to quiver as she silently repeats “They won't fuckin miss me”. Actors studio legend Stella Adler always talked about the actors job as not being to relay facts but to experience them and give us the audience that experience back through them. This may not be a factual event, but it is a truthful experience, and it's one that allows us to feel the tragedy of Donna Berzatto and her family, as well as the deep love. The proverbial exhaustion of both being Donna and being around her, and how it sucks the air out of you, epecially Natalie, who as a woman socialized into maternal instincts is far more hands on than her two brothers and subsequently far more susceptible, knowledgeable, empathetic, vulnerable, and sensitive to her mother's violent swings in mood and ideations of self harm. When she walks out of the kitchen after the blow up with her mom, Steven is there to ask her if she is okay. Natalie asks for a hug, and after a bit of holding in her own large emotions, Abby Elliott has Natalie blow it all out as if she has consumed all that her mother had thrown at her. All of her children including our main protagonist Carmen have been deeply affected by growing up and around not only her illness but the parts of her that either negatively or even positively impact her illness. Because the good parts, the good times, the intensity of those good moments may be largely affected by the intensity of the downside or the downswing. Those good times are a part of the rollercoaster-like instability that is vital to understand our main characters going both backwards and forwards in the timeline of this show. Mikey lived in constant fear of his own psyche because he saw his mother. Natalie ran directly towards some instances of stability in her husband Pete, (who you can tell provides some sense of a rock) but is also rooted and somewhat stuck in being a support system for others, many times to the detriment of her own care, as when she almost fainted from hunger, before Syd makes her an Omelette. Carmen ran right to the exact same environment where chefs treated him just as his mother did in that kitchen. Everything that we can grasp from the various anecdotes and conversations that were thrown around in the episode tells us that this is normalcy for them, even while they recognize the abnormality of it. In various scenes involving Jamie Lee Curtis and through her performance we are given all the context, imagery, background, that we need to understand exactly why Carmen is so unnerved by stability in his life. We saw it in present with the return of Claire into his life, but this episode wants to take us back to origin points, beyond even his mother. In the closet that same fear is expressed towards his brother Mikey, as Jeremy Allen White endearingly and achingly pleads with his eyes for his brothers love and acceptance, by way of working on the Bear together. Carmen doesn't know what his brother is going through so in his own world his brothers distance is read as personal and directed at him. Through Bernthal's performance we can see Mikey clearly loves him, but is also fighting his own demons, after Carmen leaves from that talk Mikeys feelings almost engorge him he fights back violently with a slap to the face. It is a direct parallel to Donna fighting her own ideations in the kitchen. It's all source coded back to Donna and to the livewire act that is Jamie Lee Curtis's performance. A performance not of mental illness in and of itself but in the ways that mental illness interacts and melds itself to the personalities of those it affects. It is not a stunt cameo, this is not a stunt casting, these are not stunt performances, they are performances that live in service and true understanding of what is needed from the characters and that goes for every single character that was put in that episode. The thought and care put into each character, whether something that was intentional or happened by accident, offers many a lesson on how to cast, how to cameo, and how to thread the needle of procuring that particular excitement the audience may get from seeing people we love in tiny roles and places we don't expect them to be as well as staying true to the spirit of your work. The cameos and the performances, each one of them distinctive specific and outlined with such detail to the minutiae of personality, created a sense of family, of what it really is and what that really means on such a profound level that that episode even with its obvious cultural, ethnic, and other aesthetic differences felt like the most universal representations of family of any episode of television that I've watched, and that is truly saying something.

Favorites: Morgan Freeman in “Seven”

There are two types of great performances; One, is the kind that maps new land outside of the territory of what is in script. These are the type where it can sometimes feel like the actor is in a completely different movie, (think Jack Nicholson in The Departed, or Gary Oldman in a lot of things) then there is the other; the kind where it is in an spiritual alignment with the vision. One so molecularly connected to the script and the vision that it feels the actor, script, and director form a Holy trinity, like Isabelle Adjani in “Possession” or in this case Morgan Freeman's performance on Andrew Kevin Walker and David Fincher's “Seven”. Freeman's performance is a phenomenally understated one in a phenomenally overstated movie lives off of excess in depravity, so in that way he becomes it's anchor, but also it's conscious. The best quote about Freeman's performance that I read was from film critic Desson Thompson, who then remarked that Freeman had given an a “Sensational journeyman's performance”. Yeah, that part. The word journeyman speaks to an aspect of not only Freeman's performance but of the movie itself and their symbiotic relationship. It's a very workmanlike performance in unison with a very workman like character co-created by Andrew Kevin Walker. By that I mean and everything from his sartorial choices to his demeanor the character gives off this sort of unpolished straightforward non-ornate sensibility. Detective Somerset is not a Sherlock Holmes or Hercules Poirot type character, he's not even a Clarice Starling type. He's not presented as particularly academic nor particularly eccentric, and he's not a hot head top cop or a man of his people (cops) like Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon, more so than he is dedicated, principled, well read, and empathetic. That combined with the ways in which Freeman chooses to articulate this is the major appeal of Somerset.

Somerset’s brilliance is not coded to be in his mind as much as in his heart. This is the characteristic that sets Somerset apart especially from his male contemporaries as a character and as a performance; his empathy. It's commonplace to talk about Gwyneth Paltrow as the light of this movie (which she is) because it's so obvious. She represents a sort of innocence lost in a very ugly place and because Freeman with all his morose somber politics and “Debbie Downer” musings seems to be apathetic, but while he's not the type of light that Paltrow is in the film he is nonetheless a light, and alot of that is in the subtleties of Freeman’s performance which bookend the film from beginning to end, alot of which is shown in what he doesn't say as compared to his partner and bosses, how he says things, and how he responds to things. When you look at Somersets characteristics plainly imagining just the script itself, he can come off or could have come off easily as purely clinical, but Freeman sees it another way, many of the first things he says to Brad Pitt's Mills has not only very little disdain or anger, but also the sense that he does have an understanding where Mills is coming from but ultimately for the integrity of the scene needs him to be gone since he is clearly not ready for the needs of this particular crime scene. When they visit the coroner to be briefed on what the autopsy has revealed there are various looks on Freeman's face that work in concert with what Somerset doesn't say (like not joining in to comment derogatorily on the man's body) that imply a sincere since of compassion for the dead that governs his ethics. What Freeman profoundly understands about the character of William Somerset is that he is the one cop on the force who feigns being dispassionate about people who is actually very passionate about people and life when he actually is, whereas all the other cops feign compassion for life and for people but in actuality don't really like them. In the cold open of the film he enters an anonymous murder scene where the first question he asked is “did the kid see it”to the detective briefing him on site. The question by many of actors could easily have been one that was decidedly detached with no sense of warmth just a detective looking for the facts, but Freeman gives it body and a sense of not only sadness but a tinge of pain at the very idea of the possibility of it, the kind only an actor of his ilk could give and even then one specific to the traits carried in his voice and the precise way in which he employs it. The cop that he asked is immediately perturbed at the idea of the question, in his mind it is sick to even think on it, but also not worth thinking about. His reply is swift and viciously callous; “Who gives a f*** he's dead and his wife killed him, anything else has nothing to do with us”, but it is exactly that bit of compassion and hope that opens up Somerset's ability to solve crimes in the way that he does, he's willing to sacrifice his own mental health for the sake of these others and it is the apathy of those around him that really gets to him. Thus though not the luminous bright light that is Gwyneth Paltrow's “Tracy”, Freeman is nonetheless a soft warm light in the film.

The true magic of Freeman's performance lies in his interpretation, and his interpretation in the bevy of amazing line readings he gives throughout this film. As an actor looking at the script there is a pitfall or a trap that I could easily see actors falling in, to cloak the character in threads of detachment and a sort of sterile personality. If it was an actor more prone to overstatement then there might have been certain tics added to imply a sort of eccentricity that is suggested within the script in Somerset’s neatness, his attention to detail, and his inability to play well with others, but Freeman plays it all with such nonchalance as if it was never unique to see a black male character like Somerset on film. The character is not a walking poster boy for respectability politics, he is not overly dignified, he is not a slave , or a magical negro, not a token, or a stereotype of black criminality that occupied the collective fantasies of white people during the 80’s and 90’s, one of which Freeman played to the hilt in his big breakthrough in “Street Smart”, he is simply Detective Somerset and by any metric a still rather rare character. Freeman for his part fills it with all the wondrous pathways of his face and maybe the most skillful use of his voice in his career. Freeman in most of his roles decides on a tonality and for the most part keeps that same with his rhythms. In “Street Smart” as “Fast Black” the aim seems to be ferocity so he mostly talks in a growl. Driving Miss Daisy is a more demure, deferential and stately teacher like intonation, while Glory, Lean on Me, and Shawnshank see him in a similar spectrum but different position as a pulpit occupant. The tone is preacherly and it's consistent, but in “Seven” when you think about his various line readings they have a wide range and variance of tonality, of rhythm, pattern, and pitch adjusted to his various moods and a through line of who he is depending on who he's talking to. The tonality he takes with David (Mills) is not the same he takes with Tracey, nor either of them the same as he takes with his boss the Captain, (IMO a career best R Lee Ermey) or his friends at the Library.

Freeman's face can provide such a diverse range of emotion, he can use it to be an aide in the films levity (“Could you please not do that?”) , it's rage (you stupid son of a b**ch) and it's heart ( “You spoil that kid rotten”) . His eyes light up, and they hunker down, and they stare right into your soul as the lines on his face map out the specificity of the emotion behind them. Pitt and Paltrow are the couple, but it's both Freeman's scenes with Paltrow that are the magic of this movie and the “should've been” clips played as they announced and read off his name for the Oscar nomination ceremony. It's a beautiful dance of empathetic understanding that is undergirded by immense chemistry between the two. That moment where Freeman utters those words in the way ONLY he could say them about spoiling her child, that break into almost an ugly cry by Paltrow is one of the most pristine examples of an emotional alley oop and dunk on screen we've ever seen, the one not nearly as powerful without the other and it's all in perfect alignment with Finchers vision. Fincher and Walker needed an actor who could fit something very specific. Something that I think is embodied in the final line of the movie with the Hemingway quote, the world is a fine place and worth fighting for I agree with the second part”. There's a distinctive nobility, along with that a regality, a bit of romance,some vulnerability, and a courage in that quote. It's the statement of a man who saying that he knows the world can be and is often times a bad place, often times it is very much so like any interpretation of hell, and yet he chooses to fight for it still. Now we all know cops aren't the avatars for justice they've been made to be on TV and film and media at large, but as a man Somerset is exemplary and Freeman is exemplary and specific, abrupt, vulnerable, rude, funny, meticulous, patient, warm, and caring. Freeman oscillates between these things in a way that I really think only he could. When I think about the other actors that were called upon to play this I see them being able to play one side. For instance, I could see Harrison Ford being able to nail down that sort of abrasive lack of tact especially in communication he displays in certain scenes with Pitt’s “Mills Like when he says “It's too soon” speaking to R. Lee Ermey and then when Pitt says “you can say that to my face” turns immediately looks at him and says “it's too soon”,Ford would have the world weariness too. What I don't know is that he or for that matter Robert Duvall (who would be very gifted especially in the parts for levity or the dinner table scene) would have his regality, his very subtle, very poetic sense of command over his deep profound sorrow and melancholy. I think the edges would be rougher, more visible, less soft and with less of this weighty but quiet gravitas. We got the best we could ask for in Morgan, an iconic performance as a sort of sadder, black Columbo best up after years of seeing the absolute worst without any of the hope on Columbos still rather seedy Los Angeles setting, in an iconic film that would mark his last of a hell of a run before a bad run of movies for most of the rest of the 90s and sinking into more of a trope of himself in the next coming decades. An actor , a director, a writer, in a holy Trinity for a movie about the unholy.

John Wick Chapter 3 “Yeah Consequences”

“You are bound and I am Owed” growls John Wick in a scene opposite the lavishly ornate “Director” (a wonderfully overstated Anjelica Huston) in my favorite entry into the John Wick lore Chapter 3: Parabellum. In his book “The Christian Religion: An Inquiry” humanist philosopher Robert Ingersoll wrote “There are in nature neither rewards nor punishments — there are consequences”. The aspects I love so much in this franchise; are the way it discusses consequences and attaches them to most important aspects of our humanity. It's not just that he's saying the Director is bound to him, it's the “why”. Chapter 3 is the culmination of these powers in collaboration with a punctuation on the religious imagery and allegory that had been set up in the previous installments. Ingersoll wrote his words ultimately in repudiation of the moral high ground of the church and John Wick even with all it's Catholic musings and paraphernalia is the story of a man in repudiation of his church. The church in this case being “The High Table” and it's congregations of faithful cutthroats. Ingersoll in discourse with those who sought to make christianity the chief source of human morality argued at length against the belief that without the church man would simply not be able to function ethically, and he goes on through a list of folks who suggested and practiced the same exact ethical and moral ideals as the bible long before it existed as a counter. In John Wick the high table too likes to suggest that all of its rules and rituals are all “that keep us from living with the animals”. Yet time and time again in Chapter 3, it is implied if not explicitly said that our human bonds are inherent and stronger than any fealty to a power hungry enterprise meant to create a host of servants to enlarge its influence. Just before Wick let's those words “You are bound and I am owed” radiate from his mouth Anjelica Huston says “You forget that the Ruska Roma (the familial crime syndicate she and John belong to ) is bound by the high table and the high table sits above all!”. This after she announced that that “ticket” he is holding is worth nothing. She's telling him and us about the commandments, reiterating the possibility of damnation for breaking them, ( it won't be the last time) and yet when John explains before all of this he is family, and she is actually bound to that, she helps him anyway knowing full well the consequences. Damnation is what they fear not because of what it means to them, but what it could do to them, a hold religion and the church have over many of its practitioners, but when up against the things that actually mean something to them like John or ethical compassion, the people in Chapter 3 often fold. John hurtles towards damnation despite the fact that he fears it because his very nature is in direct contradiction with the essence of the church's /High Tables appeals to blind loyalty. The rest of what we see unfold are the consequences and sometimes they are good and sometimes bad, but they are always consequences of this fracture. Chapter 3 is also where “Choices” becomes a very pronounced theme. It's always been there, but in this movie you start to see a difference between cognitive decision making and involuntary reactions. Any version of the John Wick backstory doesn't give much room to believe John had much choice in where he ended up. His one choice was leaving it behind to be with his wife and this is reinforced explicitly by exposition, scenes, and by Keanu Reeves performance in 3. Parabellum marks a turn in the focus of the Wick lore. It is no longer about revenge or more accurately justice. John Wick has by the end of Chapter 2 gotten back what he wanted and paid all debtors while collecting his debts. Chapter 3 is about what happened when 2 ended…Choice (voluntary) and consequences. Up until that point it was only consequences as John Wicks actions weren't so much choices as pure consequences. You invaded my home and killed my dog, I am the consequence. You take my car I am the consequence. As a consequence of chapter one he is seen and drawn back into chapter 2, and then becomes the consequences of the decision to draw him out and double cross him. It’s the difference between a force of nature and the personification of that force. In Parabellum John Wick is actively making the choice to shoot a man on consecrated grounds and that the closing of the loop of justice is more important to him than the High Table's willingness to harbor and aid evil people. He does not arrive at this suddenly and Keanu doesn't play it as wild eyed blind fury. He makes it look controlled, thought out, and angry.

Wick brings damnation on himself by way of this decision to “finish it” which is a continuation of the theme that the high table is not so much governed by code as by power. Wanting to be be finished with the High Table is an affront to them, and truly, so is choice. All that John was put through and made to do just to get out of the entire business is a tell, the response by the High Table once he's back in is a tell, but 3 is a confirmation further reinforced by how the table reacts to the others making choices that go against their wishes. Like the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne) refusing to abdicate his throne (Seven cuts ) and Ian McShane's Manager refusing to give up his position and die (deconsecrating the hotel so they could be killed ). The High Table is not about giving choices, it's about giving out commands and commandments and demanding blind fealty from it's congregations. Anyone who has lived in service to it, is constantly made aware of this and of their lack of choices all while they pretend to give them a choice. Reeves performance is key to understanding this. Reeves first “choice” to kill Santino D'Antonio was played with a ferocity and anger that indicated that of course on some level he knew what he was doing but was so strongly motivated by his very humane passion (I.E. he saw red) that for a moment the red prevents him from seeing the full bore of consequences. This is also a crisis of his faith in the institution, but by the finale of 3 he has seen the light again and comes back, ready once again to serve. He states to Winston “Rules and Consequences” in reference to how they have arrived 180 degrees at him being there to kill Winston. Winston replies “No I've made my CHOICE it's up to you to make yours” John replies “What choice?”. Reeves plays this as if John still doesn't really understand the concept, in considering what we had seen from these criminal oligarchs in the previous chapters and John's backstory it is likely he didn't really understand what Winston is talking about bringing up choice. This is what Keanu Reeves does best. What has underscored some of his best roles and work in his career is a sense of innocence, a person still capable of being surprised in a world full of people who “know”. Hell in “Speed” he quite literally is asking questions for most of the movie! Wick is not an exception, a great percentage of this series is someone asking Wick “what he thought would happen?” because John seems to move not understanding fully consequences or even his choices..until 3. What Winston says to him next is where you see that Chapter 3 is being affirmed as maybe the first time in John's life that he's making the conscious decision to do something that is purely for himself and beneficial to himself. In Ingersoll's book he quotes Confucius to counter the idea that our ethics extend from Christianity, but the quote works here as well as "For benefits return benefits; for injuries return justice without any admixture of revenge"?. John Wick is no longer seen as a tool for revenge he is a rendering of justice and that exists because of a choice that Keanu wears perfectly.

Keanu's John Wick is not the only character who is extremely instructional as a character to the existence of these themes but also exceptionally functional as an expression of them. Halle Berry’s “Sophia” is my favorite character outside of John in the series for this very reason. To understand the power of Sophia and John's frenemy relationship (which is really just friends) you have to pay attention what happens before John even meets her face to face. It is in the very fact that John is allowed to meet her face to face that one can see a further expression of the power of their bond as a challenge to the ubiquitous power of the high table. John is excommunicado with a price on his head and nearly anyone who has helped him is punished rather severely, yet in the alley when two men try to kill John they are stopped by her concierge who then kills another man for trying, stating that the manager (Sophia) has given John amnesty. There is nothing in script given, nothing implied that Sophia has to do this, in fact quite the opposite and yet she does it anyway. Everything that happens once they come face to face including her shooting him in a bulletproof coat is her being angry at the fact that she couldn't help but give this to him because she loves John. Up to this point we had only seen people that really respect John. John Leguizamo's Aurelio deeply respects John. Ian McShanes Winston deeply respects John, The Bowery King deeply respects John, but Sophia loves him , not romantic love, but love born of someone really sticking their neck out for you in your time of need. Sophia's daughter is safe because of John we are told, and Berry for her part portrays it wonderfully. There is a very well cooked defeat in her body language that follows Wick saying “This is your blood, this is your bond, when you needed me I was there” That body language is also representative of yet another choice by Sophia to deny what she should do “shoot him in the head right now” for the table because of what's in her heart. A love she betrays in the explanation of why she has to keep her daughter a secret and what she does to keep her longing at bay, which is deny it. She denies John for the very same reason she says she doesn't want to find her child. She is trying to “Kill that love” to keep them alive. But that is also why she says she is “fucked” because in John she sees herself and she can't help herself and so yet again there she is helping John for what is now a third time for a marker that by rule of law is forfeit by the table, but very much alive through their bond. Again Berry crystallizes what is in word with a vividly restrained body language and vocality that indicates years of fear, memory, and hurt all coming to fruition. There is no other actor in this series that gives this emotionally explicit a performance and it undergirds what Halle Berry herself says about what the draw to John Wick is…it's emotionality. Her refrain of John Wick's statement “Consequences” is all about emotionality steeped in regret, shame, and yes Love all of which anyone who spends anytime in church is well acquainted with, and all of which would then be further elaborated upon in the next Chapter of Wick's journey.

Chapter 4 expounds upon these themes and the story is essentially the high table sparing no expense to try and stop the spreading of an idea that has been formulated by John's desire to be out from under it and then consequently his willingness to make the choice to go against the high tables wishes. All of it connected to the idea that there is inate value in things like peace, in things like love, and things like the social bonds that tie us, that do not require social institutions to tell us what they are. Winston does this because of what he sees happen to his friend Charon (The dearly departed Lance Reddick). Hiroyuki Sanada's “Shimizu” and the tension at the core of his problem is yet another reiteration of this new theme the seeds of which were sewn in the first Wick. That leaves Chapter 3 as the transition from a series about the man rules that govern the world in the high table, to the natural laws that govern us as people. Cain will do the same in Chapter Four, but Parabellum is my favorite because it most adeptly and poignantly illustrates the heart of this series through a refreshing way to interpret consequences. The ending in 3 in which Winston betrays Wick just to earn a place back in the light of what we see happen in Chapter 4 is one of the more realistic and intelligent narrative choices I've seen in a franchise such as this. A statement as to Stahelski and the writers fealty to the unfolding and strange nature of consequences as it involves humans. John Wick: Parabellum is the cumulative peak of the journey through Dante's inferno in reverse through John's devotion and dedication to the memory of his wife in the first to his dedication to his friends and now their dedication to either he himself or their respect for him. It is because of what happens in Chapter 3, including the consequences of the Tables actions that many of our favorite players in this underworld in 4 are in outright war with the High Table. In that way Chapter 3 is the beginning of a revelation and revolution of the heart not only in the series but in action movies. There are other joys where Parabellum stands out; like the fact that it is by far the best acted of the series, or its eye popping visuals and the strategic audacity of its sequences which are arguably the most “how did they do that” of the series and definitely the most consistent in that regard. From the knife fight in the antique store to the horse stables. From Sophia and her dogs to motorcycle ninjas on a bridge to the grand finale at he “Continental”, Stahelski and co. refuse to give an inch to latency in its structure, narrative, performances or choreography. Where others see narrative drop off, I see narrative bonds and that is where I fell in love with 3. A return to a love for breaking the rules that really don't mean much to reiterate the importance of the ones that do, and in so doing this franchise (pick your own favorite it doesn't really matter) has helped restore our faith in the genre.

Tom Sizemore: The Big Bad Presence.

Sizemore…It's like the universe knew that he was coming down that genealogical line at some point in time and that name was going to mean something because that's exactly what Tom Sizemore did in his career, he gave you more size; as an actor, as a director, as a writer whatever you were doing got bigger when he embodied it. Each role, each film, each minute he was trying to give you a little bit more size it seemed than the last. He was a live wire actor, a high-flying trapeze act where there was always a sense of danger in his performance, like “maybe you shouldn't be walking this line?”, and then he'd show up on the other side for his next role. There was also a great deal of menace associated in his work. That menace though was more about the fact that he was so extremely unpredictable rather than mean, he wasn't Lee Marvin. You just never knew what the hell Sizemore was gonna do next. The moment he walks up on the boardwalk in “Devil in a Blue Dress” in a frightening show of power you know it. You sense it in just his walk “What is this guy gonna do?”. Later on he's in Easy's (Denzel Washington) house and he's casually making a sandwich and again you know something is coming, but predicting when Sizemore is gonna pop is no easy thing. He might go early, he might go in the middle, maybe somewhere just left or right of that, maybe just before late, you just never knew, and if you want an example, watch him scare the bejesus out of Keanu Reeves in “Point Break” with a very sudden and quick launch of a kilo of cocaine right into Reeves chest. This is Keanu Reeves! The man is ice water cosplaying as a human being. He has made almost an entire career out of being somebody who seems to be utterly cool even under extreme duress and yet you can see Reeves jump is organic, Sizemore caught him slippin.

But Sizemore also had a tender underpinning. A sense that he was a man always on the verge of emotional collapse. If you watch a lot of his performances closely it always looks like he's two seconds from having a cry. A man holding his life together with string , duct tape and well chewed bubblegum, and maybe that's because in real life he was. He brought this high wire balancing Act to just about every role and it made him incredibly fascinating to watch on a level that just doesn't have many peers. A lot is made of range it's always been the darling attribute of actors especially by their audience. Range many times seems to be the separator between the classes of actors and the more of it you have the more prestigious you are as an actor. I've always found range to be overrated in my mind. Limited by the act of transferance, the actor has to hope the thing they've changed into carries with it some power, if it it doesn't, it's too late you've already given up some of your essence to it, which is your power and you now have to live in it. Take Steve CarrelI in 2014’s “Foxcatcher”. He showed he has range, but it costs him his own natural essence. His own standing power, in which case I think most folks would rather watch Steve CarrelI just be silly, because at least the he can be vastly interesting to those who like what he brings. This of course isn't everyone, but I wouldn't want to bet on being able to be Daniel Day-Lewis or Cate Blanchett, and truly even they have had a couple roles where I felt they lost their innate magnetic powers of attraction in the transfer. I don't choose between two great qualities of actors, but I do fight for the quality of presence. The profound kind, the kind that makes movie stars movie stars and character actors like Sizemore feel like one. What's range mean to me when I've watched someone like Sizemore stand toe to toe with every single heavy weight who has it, just about every single maestro you can name and not just hold his own but throw haymakers at them. Very few actors can transform into so many different people, but no one could be Sizemore and when he was on? No one could outsize him either.

Sizemore belonged to a long line of rare breeds that went back to Judith Anderson’s and Agnes Moorhead’s, Martin Landau's, and more recent names like Joan Cusack and Juliette Lewis, Jeff Goldbum, and Charles S Dutton's of the world. Folks that not only invigorated movies but also made them better from the sidelines. As much as every Denzel movie is good because of his presence, so too did it become hard to call a movie bad which had Sizemore in it when he was on his run. Harley Davidson and the “Marlboro Man”, sure. “Striking Distance”…yup. “The Relic”..Hell yeah. He's in Kathryn Bigelow's “Blue Steel” for less than five minutes it's the scene I most remember in the movie. All the great directors got it, they knew. That's why the man had a run like no actor of his quality since Joseph Cotton. For a time Sizemore was passed around to great directors like a party favor. Bigelow (twice) Oliver Stone, Tony Scott (twice), Ridley Scott, Carl Franklin, Steven Spielberg, Michael Bay, and of course Martin Scorcese. This is incredibly lucky as a character actor on Sizemore's part but it is also incredibly indicative of the fact that the brightest talents behind the camera we knew understood what it was that Sizemore could bring to any movie. He's part of a HUGE ensemble that included absolute GIANTS like Walken, Hopper, Gandolfini, and Samuel L Jackson I'm Tony Scott’s “True Romance” and I can't forget “OHHH MAN I LIKE THIS CLARENCE KID THIS KID IS CRAZY!”. He's in Michael Manns crime classic “Heat” right across from DeNiro looking him square in the eyes and he doesn't disappear in the slightest. Scores on Denzel in “Devil in a Blue Dress” by stalking him almost growling. All of that was Sizemore's presence not his range, and that presence was like the big bad wolf and for a brief , but magical window in his career when he huffed and he puffed he blew us all away.

Everyone is Wrong about The Rock, including The Rock.

The Rock has spent the last decade forming himself into something, something everyone can understand. Something accessible to all. A prepackaged enlarged mass of “hard work” and the “right” moral attitude which in America means racial vagueness. A strongman with the personality of a Bogart x an ancestor of Cary Grant if Cary Grant intermarried about 19 or 20 times and it came in a can. A dependable, trustworthy, avatar of America, something akin to John Wayne, who has become the latest and frankly saddest iteration of a Box office king. His being a Box office superstar is indisputable, what is disputable is how good this run has been. What is the quality of the Rock's dominance over the box office? Because while the numbers speak for themselves if one starts comparing him to those who have had more or similar success at the Box office the differences in the kinds of movies they made and ultimately what motivated them to do these movies becomes apparent and subsequently we find a multitude of variables playing out in things in Johnson's control and alot more outside of it.

I would start with the movie that would jump start the Rock’s current run as an international superstar and change the shape and direction of his career; “The Fast and the Furious”. I find it interesting that the Rock movie with the most cultural cache and significance to date is the one movie he wasn't really the star of when he joined it and thus had to leave it because the other guy knew his value and wasn't budging. Vin Diesel and co. had by that time had begun the successful transition of this garage band movie into a box office juggernaut that acted more like a Bond film. One that just won't quit no matter how much some of us may want them to. Very few of the F&F films if any are well made films, but they're a boat load of fun, and they know what they are. They found an audience and then rode it. If it sounds similar it's probably not by accident and it may be (at least subconsciously) what attracted The Rock to the franchise, but that also tells you a lot about the Rock's philosophical leanings as it pertains to art and business. Everything post F&F for the Rock captures almost none of what makes Fast and the Furious magical; that it walks that line between B-movie and A-actioneer so well the only thing suggesting it isn’t is the budget, and that every installment is very committed and very earnest work, whereas that can be said of the Rock, but not his films after F&F. Most of which aren't very fun, are rather cynical, and worse still predictable because they’re cynical. They’re drained of any of the sense of compass the fast and furious have because they lack personality. The movies are ad vehicles for selling the dead to us. Retro video games, a well remembered Robin Williams starrer, the nostalgia of old Disney, The Rock as a stand in for Arnold Schwarzenegger, all of which are gone and are definitely in no way present in the novelty cups as movies that he keeps pushing out on an assembly line. That is what a brand is supposed to be it seems; predictable by way of reliability and most importantly aversion from risk, but it's the exact wrong lesson to take from the F&F franchise. As dumb as the Fast and Furious movies are they are anything but predictable, unless you mean the only predictable thing about them; that each installment will be wilder than the next. They took a risk changing the entire mood, tone, feel of the first few installments, into something so massive in scope and still small in feel. The Rock’s efforts outside that franchise are tame, tepid, sexless, and boring, they don't even have the good sense to be schlock. The promise with each installment is that one will be more forgettable than the other.

Johnson's other acting cohorts with Box office Crown's and Kingdoms like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Stallone, or even Tom Cruise were all known to take risk in their career choices and/or their type. In Cruise’s case it was “Born on the 4th of July”, “Interview with a Vampire”, or “Eyes Wide Shut” all of which strayed from the image Tom Cruise had worked hard to create about what kind of actor he was. This latest Rock; bigger, stronger, more physically imposing in almost every sense of the word will take no such risk, be they physical or in the context of his filmography. In fact when looking at the Rock's Box office compatriots, There's only one that looks a lot like him and that is Will Smith and that is because both of them have been extremely risk averse in their choices and hyper concerned with the quality and sanctity of their image and that is what holds them back as actors. Being that acting is about creating which to some extent involves destruction and deconstruction of perception and celebrity is about curating and to some extent involves constant maintaining of perception.

The Rock has through design earned just about all of the criticism he’s gotten over the past few months, as his popularity has seemed to hit it's first major snag leaving him open to critiques that have always been just beneath the surface, if not on it. I have outlined thus far exactly why, but my issue with a lot of the criticism as it has concerned the Rock lately is that collectively they seem to suggest an inherent lacking in Dwayne Johnson. Not his choices, or the quality of projects afforded him early on, and furthermore they ignore the obstacles and variables that played into the choices. It must first be understood that what Dave Bautista gets to do is because of what The Rock did. If Dwayne Johnson doesn't exist, if he doesn't become a formidable actor, no one takes wrestler-turned actors serious enough to even think about casting a Dave Bautista in the roles he's gotten. Before Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, wrestlers were mostly side shows in movies that were metaphorically a carnival barker screaming at us to observe these hulking oddities in their “habitat”. Even in the delightful “Princess Bride” Andre the Giant is well a Giant, and fundamentally the draw there is in the currency of an oddity with the only difference being he lives in an odd world. It's far kinder, but nonetheless based in not as much a character as a fit. No one ever took wrestlers seriously enough to believe in them as actors unless they were a counter culture maverick like John Carpenter. It would take someone to know the difference between how a John Carpenter movie was regarded then as compared to now to know how “They Live” wasn't exactly a game changer, and unfortunately we never really saw Roddy Piper do much after. The movie quality, or quality of characters of a Bautista or Cena may be far better on their part but any cursory look at the issue concedes that was part of the difficulty for the Rock. He had to be the forebearer for all of these guys. No one near the sphere of artistic influence of a Denis Villanueve, a Sam Mendes or a James Gunn even, were running up to give wrestlers pictures then, they started doing that after Dwayne proved time and time again in role after role that he was a talented actor in all kinds of roles, and thus that there may be some gold buried in the hills of these giants.

The fair question to ask right alongside how the Rock ultimately become so bland a action star, is why no one believes in his talent? Maybe because so often how good you are is confused with the overall quality of your projects. The Rock had to start off with journeyman directors like Chuck Russell, Kevin Bray, Andrzej Bartkowiak, and Phil Joanou. The scripts were usually solid, usually written by just above journeyman writers like Jeff Maguire, or William Osborne, but they also betrayed a lack of understanding of where action was headed and what they had in the Rock rather than the past heroes they seemed tailor-made for. This was the level of risk Hollywood was willing to take with wrestlers up until this point because they were not proven commodities as bankable leads or actors. The two highest profile collaborations of the Rock's career up to the Fast and Furious were films by respectively; Peter Berg (The Rundown) and F. Gary Gray, (Be Cool ) neither set the world on fire. Yet and still Hollywood saw it on display clear as day, and these were no worse projects than “The Scorpion King 3”, “The Man with the Iron Fist” or Riddick”- the movies Dave Bautista started in before he got “Guardians of the Galaxy”. Still, there were to be no offers out there courting the Rock to higher quality directors, writers, or projects. Some insight may be gleamed from an action star peer of his Jason Statham. While doing press for “The Bank Job” one of the movies considered at the top of Stathams filmography, he himself expressed some frustration with Hollywood's unwillingness to see him in any other light than the last thing that made money and the impoverished nature of the scripts and yes the unproven directors he kept getting. The truth is being an “action star" has always been mired in a subtle bias that automatically insists your work is less than and gives little credit to the work behind them. It's warranted to some degree given the tendency for these films to lean on archetypes, but the aughts era that folks like The Rock and Jason Statham were born into were particularly lean times for the genre, because no one of unusual talent seemingly wanted to direct them anymore. Nonetheless despite being inhibited by a lack of creative influence or anybody to test or challenge his acting prowess, never mind not having the budgets of some of the films that have been of late given to Dave Bautista or John Cena, he still found a way to carve out a number of really good performances that betrayed a range he's still not being given. For all it's shoddy goofiness the Scorpion King is not the same kind of hero characteristically as “Walking Tall”. He's having much more fun, and he's much more in the vein of Arnold Schwarzenegger's one liner melee in “Total Recall” than let's say Sylvester Stallone's somber hard body in First Blood. “Elliott Wilhelm” the kind hearted, but misguided Bodyguard in “Be Cool” is truly a piece of art. A joyous bright eyed departure from anything we'd ever seen the Rock do before and still the farthest any of the wrestler turned actors crew have gone from who they’re seen or perceived as. A probably gay bodyguard with a naive but warm dream to be an actor and a country singer. Dwayne never talks down to the role. He plays Elliot with a wide eyed sincerity that showed a security in his own version of manhood not only in the character but in the Rock as a person, before he retreated right back to the safer version. His performance of the “Bring it On” scene would be cringe if it weren't for the fact that he approaches it with such child-like glee. There are some brilliant choices made as well. Everything he does once Chili tells him he's being rude is such deft understanding of character it feels lived in and true despite how cartoonish a person Elliott is. The mulling over in his head, the look over to Uma Thurman, the little dance he does before he gives in. It's total commitment not to the gag but to why its funny. Which is not because he's effeminate, which would be low and homophobic, but because he's dedicated to his dream in a way very few of us can be. He's so unafraid to be him and that kind of daring can make us laugh too if for no other reason than it makes us uncomfortable to be in the presence of someone so almost embarrassingly affirmed in who they are. It's sort of the same feeling that comes from watching someone like a William Hung. There's something sweet and a bit inspiring about someone so endearingly connected to something impossible. Pushing right through the boundaries of not only what's expected, but what they can do to the point that what is clearly bad somehow becomes an overall good. The Rock's performance built it's foundation on this.

The Rock's ability to make a cunning deconstruction of what we think of him is his art, and when storytellers have engaged with him in this play it has worked out to some truly fascinating feats of acting. There's a flashback scene in Michael Bay's “Pain and Gain” where he gets caught robbing someones house high off coke and extremely emotional, his freeze frame reaction when the men arrive upon him is absolute gold! Everything he does as Paul Doyle in Bay's kinetic tale of crash dummies as bank robbers is tied not only to an astute understanding of the needs of the script but a concurrent takedown of audience expectations for him and those like him. He plays Doyle as a complex network of reactions to any given environment triggered by his ideas of manhood, and his constant confusion about what that makes him, which makes him malleable, and alternatively he uses many of the same expressions he's known for in a context foreign to us until this role. The eyebrows no longer stand for assuredness and misplaced confidence, they are indicative of rabid confusion, and ignorance. Paul spends most of the movie pretending (badly) that reacting to whatever is going on is the same as knowing what's going on. Same goes for his work in Richard Kelly's Southland Tales, save it's softer less ferocious. It's a Richard Kelly film so nothing is really going to go the way you would expect and Johnson rides those storytelling waves as if he's an all pro surfer. With roles like these under his belt, with what he did in roles like “Snitch” and “Faster”, If you don't think The Rock could play what Bautista did in Blade Runner (which frankly is vastly overstated) you're kidding yourself about what was needed for that role and what the Rock can do.

It may in part be due to the fact that we so heavily dismiss the role editors and directors play in an actor's performance that we don't understand what a world of difference it makes to have world-class talent working with you behind the camera. Co-authors that really push you to get a certain kind of performance out, rather than let you get away with the first of second cut. What it means when you have a director who knows how to give you that right motivation to get somewhere to find your character. Who helps you in any number of ways see what they have in vision and collaborate with you to help create and mold that by activating even your own imagination, sometimes in places that you didn't think you had the ability to imagine. What the power of a really great editor who's really trying to make something that reaches well beyond your own significant abilities and brings it to that place outside the context of your talents, your limitations, so that it may live on and find life in the collective imaginations of a mass of people means. The importance of a Sally Menke to not only Quentin Tarantino, but the massive consistency he gets out of his actors, or a Thelma Schoonmaker to the legendary performances we've gotten from Scorcese's films. Denis Villeneuve, and Ridley Scott, Rian Johnson, and James Gunn are mostly well thought of and two of them are considered among the best at what they do and that's because they work with the best as well, that's what Bautista benefits from and he benefits from that because the Rock proved it possible from a far less privileged position. He was then a bi-racial African -Somoan man not the ambiguous brand he's turned himself into, but those DECISIONS were made at least somewhat implicitly by force. Hollywood and audiences rejected this actor version of The Rock (who was always hyper concerned with his audience ) responded by regressing that part of his career that crafted and played with his image in a myriad of ways from his race to his attitude, to a more acceptable, far more simple-minded caricature of all possibilities you see now. Those same audience members look a little bit silly going so hard at what they didn't stand for then or even now as they tout performances by Bautista and Cena that actually are not as good as, and definitely not better than what The Rock did then, but appear so because of what they have around them.

Under that lens and in that context I think the Rock deserves a lot more respect and a little more empathy for what has happened to his career because while I do not think it was the correct decision, it is clearly an understandable one. I wish The Rock would have stayed in the trenches a little longer and waited for it to pop because eventually it was going to pop. It was inevitable because his talents were that large. They’ were on display in films like “Snitch” and “Gridiron gang”, and they're on display in his films that were greater risk like “Be Cool”. They're on display in even his more hapless movies like “Skyscraper” and recently in “Black Adam” where many have let their bias miss what he actually brought and brings. A quote from Matthew Zolller-Seitz recent review of The Rock's performance in “Black Adam” brilliantly makes an observation that connects the Rock to a lineage of former silver screen hard men like Humphrey Bogart, Anthony Quinn in “La Strada” and of course Schwarzenegger and Stallone. Seitz is absolutely right, the Rock has always been more aware of his place in the line of cinematic leads, especially as it pertains to the hard men of action. He has creatively tried to mold his own place in that rigid valley where he could make his own mark, and to some extent he has, but he has also given in to the cynicality of one of the most unforgiving eras in Hollywood. A craven world of content and algorithms, and one that stifles opportunities for many, and inexplicably gives others multiple chances. I have no idea why out of all of these athletes turned actors whether wrestler Jon Cena or MMA star Rampage Jackson, straight-to-DVD actioneer Scott Adkins, or Ronda Rousey, it's Bautista who gets choice roles, but I promise it's not merely because he “wanted to be an actor”. A bevy of opportunities and meetings outside the studio probably came together to allow Bautista to be in rooms where people could recommend him to others based on want they saw. Friends of friends of friends and all that, but Hollywood is not a meritocracy and in no way is your desire in direct corrollation to your career. It's rather disingenuous to pretend anything other than randominty, luck, and yes race play into the differences especially when it's clear that when the Rock leaned more into his race he struggled and as soon as he left it behind he was able to become a box office star at the least. What the Rock has become is a combination of variables as well, some named here some we may never know, but what he is as an actor is better than most have given, egregiously underrated and misunderstood, and a by product of one of the weakest eras in movies in general. What he can be? Maybe that's the question Hollywood and The “Rock” Dwayne Johnson should be asking from here on in, because up until this point almost everyone including the Rock has been wrong about the Rock.

What made Tom Cruise such a great Vampire.

The '90s as it pertains to film was a very interesting time for me. By this time a teenager, my taste in film overall was beginning to grow as I started to find the ocean wherein the small rivers and brooks of my taste flowed from. Independent cinema invited me to start listening to the sounds of a conversation that was much deeper, larger, and much more vast than the types of movies I talked with up and unto that point. My tastes for acting were developing as well and beginning to crystallize and harden. A lot of my admittedly bro heavy favorite films, actors, and performances were somewhat born in this era. Goodfellas, Heat, Pam Grier in Jackie Brown, Don Cheadle in Devil in a Blue Dress, Morgan Freeman in Seven, Tupac Shakur in Juice, Gary Oldman (and just about everyone else) in Bram Stoker's Dracula and Kristen Dunst and our man of the hour; Tom Cruise in Interview with a Vampire.

I'm old enough to not just know of, but remember exactly what it felt like when Tom Cruise was cast as Lestat, to remember that sort of silent but emotionally audible collective ”Huh?”. Not having read the book (at that point) I could not take the position from a knowledgeable place of text in the source material. Mines came from the level of emotional repellence I felt the moment I heard Tom Cruise was playing a vampire of any sort. At the time of the release of Interview with a vampire I hadn't yet truly made peace with just how much I enjoyed Tom Cruise and I damn sure didnt really regard him as any type of great actor. Having been raised on a pretty steady diet of performances from actors like Sidney Poitier, James Earl Jones, Lawrence Olivier, and Denzel Washington, (you know.. theater) Tom Cruise was more like his movies, an escape artist, a novelty act to me. Interview with a Vampire was the birthplace of my own conversion to Tom Cruise fandom as an actor. The movie was the first seed of what has become a fully grown philosophy about Cruise’s defining quality as…The Fanatic, as The Believer.

Tom Cruise is a fanatic, he is an obsessive believer. It's his defining trait. It fuels his willingness to put himself and his body on the line for the medium. It's why he aligns himself so purely with a religion so built on the fringe, and why he works in so many of his roles where he sits there wide eyed eating up every word, or preaching the gospel of can do with a frost like rigid insistence on the purity of righteousness in every vowel that emerges from his mouth. Its also why conversely hes so effective as a purveyor of utter nonsense (TJ Mackey in PTA’s Magnolia). His is a work so steely and surgical, so concise, so precise that it rarely truly feels as if it penetrates which makes him available enough to be received by so many, distant enough to project onto, and also leaves him open to the dubious belief that he's not giving the work. That he's actually not already in your head. He can be your best defendant (A Few Good Men) , your most loyal soldier (Minority Report) your most ardent disciple. and when he does it its always with that uncanny laser eyed- focus, or the unjaded innocence of the person who doesn't know enough yet not to know.

Look at Tom Cruise's eyes in that scene. They dote on Tom Berengers every word. They find him wherever he goes, and yet they barely go anywhere. They sit there underneath his arrow brows like hung men. The decision has been made and they are dead set. That intensity, that focus, that delicate balance of child like naivety and curiosity, these are the traits of the believer. Believable as the person looking to follow, or the person you want to follow, opposite sides of the same spectrum of faith- and that's what Cruise brings to just about each and every one of his roles. In “The Outsiders” he works as a believer in the cult of brotherhood. “Risky Business” and Born on the Fourth of July” as a believer in the cult of America via capitalism or the military industrial complex . “A Few Good Men” and “The Firm”- of the law. Search through his filmography you can find this almost throughout with very few detours. It’s what makes the detours (Eyes Wide Shut, The second half of Born on the Fourth of July, War of the Worlds) so interesting; that they explore what Tom Cruise is like when he isn't unflappable, when he doesn't know where he stands, when he is unsure of his belief system and his fleet footing. When it doesn't work or what level it works to - has to do with whether or not Cruise conquers the other aspects of the role, accent, (The Outsiders) physical attributes (Jack Reacher). What Cruise brings to the role of Lestat is something in between both and that's what makes the role far more effective and brilliant than detractors have ever been willing to give it credit. There's two ways to look at the character Lestat, two approaches to be reckoned with; one is the Lestat Louie sees, (Interview) the other is how Lestat sees himself ( The Vampire Lestat). Lestat through all the other books (and certain narrative tells in Interview) makes it clear Louie is not a completely reliable narrator himself . The recent AMC show starring Sam Reid is in my opinion is more like the latter, Neil Jordan’s 1994 film the former, but Cruise's performance is both. To be even more specific 1994s seems to honor most what would later become part of Lestat’s lore which is the idea that he is a bit of a rock star, a bit of a movie star, by honoring the quality, and the way most the way people saw Lestat including Anne Rice. The film loses a lot of the richness of the character Lestat. It loses some of those beautiful intricacies that the TV show so wonderfully picks up and adds to its text, which then adds to Sam Reid's wonderfully empathetic performance that is in turn more sympathetic to Lestat. The 94 film comes down firmly on Brad Pitt's “Louie’s” side, now whatever you may think of that decision that decision in and of itself is not Tom Cruise's . That was Neil Jordan's and it becomes Tom Cruise's job to act in the character of the person that Neil Jordan and the writers envision, and to whatever extent what he can grab from the source material. Our job begins then to ascertain how well Cruise brings this vision across and the answer is exceptionally. Lestat in Louie's eyes is superficial, vicious, certain, arrogant, and passionate and ultimately while he knows there's much more to him, Lestat in many ways is a disappointment to Louie. Tom Cruise plays the vision, his limits are the limits of Louie's insight and of his own inner turmoil as refracted through the lens of his own desire to pretend it doesn't exist. In a promo interview for the film Anne Rice states that she saw Lestat as a very “strident”character. The word stuck with me because it is so accurate and it's precisely what Crusie seems to have zeroed in on. Watching AMC's version; as complex and nuanced as the notes of Reid's performance is I really don't see much of that particular quality and what is is done again in a very nuanced way but there's nothing really nuanced or subtle about being strident. It is what it is, you steamroll, you bowl forward over people's feelings, it's very on the nose, very right there for anyone to see usually because you're so convinced of the nature of your own righteousness. This is where Tom Cruise lives. He's got that “It's true because I said so” thing down pat. Think about the way he delivers the line “Any attempt to prove otherwise is futile 'cause it just ain't true.” in A Few Good Men. He's also got that sense of faux everything, a faux existence. There's a feeling watching Cruise (especially off screen) of an alien figuring out the traits of humanity, an endless curiosity with everything around him, a search for experiences, and a clear objective that makes him seem android like. These traits breathe in service of this role to brilliant, fun, and flat out hilarious results. Wouldn’t an immortal seem alien and android like? What happens when you've tried everything, seen everything, or at least you feel like you have? What would a person originally in search of answers much like Louie look like when they discovered it's all a cruel cosmic joke and yet they live? When your desire to live, to survive, to exist surpasses your actual love for it? Unwilling to die, you might find yourself performing as if you're still alive when in reality and in the case of vampires , both in the physical and the metaphysical sense you are dead. Its a fascinating approach that Cruise conveys intelligently. There's no sense of that quality yet in the performance given by Sam Reid (and that is in no way to say that it is a lacking but to state the difference) whether the idea is that being young there was still a certain verve and a certain lust for life in him even as he struggles with some of his own philosophical questions, or just something entirely different- there's no deadness in him, he's too an emotive actor for that, so he plays something more suited to what he brings. When Reid utters the line “You are a killer Louie” it is a deeply impassioned plea to understand him from a teacher who wants his prized pupil to embrace themselves, when Cruise says “you are a killer Louie” it's a callous dead but forceful command half meant to convince himself and re-cert his own faith in his lack of religion as well as to convince Louie to embrace his own new existence. it means “get over the bullshit because I'm not about to step back into doubting my existence for you”. Cruise imbues Lestat with the same qualities that he imbued his character in the Fourth of July, with the same quality that he imbued his character in “A few Good Men”, with the same quality he imbues his character in “Top Gun”, and in “The Firm”; the quality of the unwavering, unmovable, person who has found a quality of life in giving themselves over to a larger idea, concept, institution. Believers believe because they need something to believe in. For Lestat it's in vampirism, in order to continue going one has to convince himself of the need to exist as he exists. So his rationalization of killing follows. Cruise's delivery of it is that of a person who's rehearsed it for years, centuries maybe, in order to believe it and now that belief is as sturdy as time. It is said matter of factly with no determinable emotion behind it as alot of lines by Cruise are in this film. The great tragedy of the story is that Lestat cannot convince the man he loves of the value of the gift or even if it being a gift the way he has convinced himself and yet Louie's melancholy rejection barely grazes him overall even while the rejection istelf deeply affects Lestat. Cruise's feels alot more low decadent a performance than Reid's high version. It's alot more ornate, the flourishes in comedic tone far surpass anything done on the latest iteration, it's much more fun an interpretation than is the more sober version we get now where Lestat feels nearly as melancholy as Louie. You don't see their complete opposite nature as much because they feel alot more connected to their passions to their ambitions or their lack of and for the show it seems far more interested in the deeper text and world around it as well as the romantic dynamics between the two the writing and the performances …well the cup overfloweth.

But when it comes to honoring Lestats overbearing grandiosity. His ornate arrogance, and amusing cruelty, that's all Cruise's version. It could be argued that as good as he is at being strident and cruel, the best parts of Cruise's performance are the moments of humor, especially when he's being mean spirited. A recent video comparison of Cruise's performance to Reid's has garnered plenty of discourse regarding how much better Reid performs the scene where Lestat admonishes Louie for not accepting who he is. Criminally, no one brings up that the context actually changes not only (as I stated earlier) in what the actors are going for but also in what the scene itself is saying and also some of the things that lead up to Lestat admonishing Louie are different. Criminally, no one notices that the way that the video is edited takes out the power or undercuts Cruises performance by cutting the before and after of it, and maybe most criminal, is that in losing both of these things they missed the best part of Cruises performance in that scene and it's not the “You are a killer” it's the whole “why yes it is a coffin” bit that leads up to it and punctuated it after.

It's the brush across the actresses face in tenderness as he says “You're tired” that transitions so smoothly to viciousness as he says “You want to SLEEP” while he violently kicks the coffin top off. Reid's flourish is the way he holds his hand before the line delivery, Cruise's is in the amusing way in which he flips the coffin top (watch his hands ) and the sacrastic bemusement at the fact that he put her in the coffin. The Woman: “ITS A COFFIN!” …Lestat: ”Well so it is, you must be dead!”. Cruise absolutely nails this. It adds layers to the ways in which Lestat has calcified himself against the pain of this world. The dance with Claudias dead mother is another example of this whimsical cruelty Cruise gets so right, but in general when Claudia enters the picture Cruise finds some of his most profound moments in the performance. The dynamic between Claudia and Lestat is the place where the original mined most of it's power. Lestats deep desire for love and acceptance is revealed here in a collection of smart choices from Cruise that allow us to see the petit flaws and cracks in Lestats armor. He paints Lestat as a man who wants so badly to be accepted on the terms he has accepted himself. He does so through dozens of tiny moments and larger ones where he plays and performs cruelty to stave off deep attachment. It's in the way he admonishes her at the piano. It's his response to her rejection of his doll, and in how he responds to her mea culpa both in the beginning of the scene and to his very “end” when Claudia murders him. It's not in the video below but the last turn to Claudia before he bites into those boys to ask if they are on good terms is extremely revealing as to a part of Lestat he likes to pretend doesn't exist….

In the 1994 version there was not anywhere near as much of an interest in that surrounding world of New Orleans. It's politics, it's culture, nor the queer Dynamics between the two characters. As such that film spends a lot more time on the angle of the master and apprentice, the acolyte and the deacon. Cruise's Lestat is giving the same kind of performance a preacher might to convince his audience of the reality of hell to convince his audience of the reality of there being nothing else and no answers, so that this is as good as it gets - and in that role Cruise is as convincing as it gets because Cruise is always as convincing as it gets when it comes to conviction. In the beginning of the film Louie remarks to a man who threatens him with death and then reneges- “You lack the courage of your convictions”. It's very fitting to have an actor as visibly committed and convicted to whatever ideological beliefs he holds to be in a role opposite this character who is in search of someone or something that seems to understand this world. The pull of Interview lies in this minor faustian tragedy, that Louie so hungry for some rhyme or reason to life gives himself over to something he couldn't possibly fathom to find a man who seems as though he has them because he's so sure of himself and everything it seems, because he doesn't lack for conviction and still ends up finding nothing. Cruises performance in it's moments of fiery assuredness and fragile unsureity provides much of the tragedy and the melancholy even while being its relief as well. It is Cruise’s fanaticism; that vehement belief in whatever he is doing that sells Lestats self satisfaction, his self indulgence, his indirect self destruction. It sees Lestat as he is to Louie but also how Lestat sees himself, A shrewd manipulator, a philosopher, a man of refinement and luxury, and yes quite matter-of-factly a killer. Much of the criticque of Cruise’s performance is really not about whether or not he effectively got Jordans vision across but whether or not he got their vision of Lestat right and this is a common mistake amongst criticism of acting, because many times the two are in alignment and because others its rendered moot by an objective truth (biopics) but it is in the very nature of our jobs as actors that we give ourselves over in service to the script and in service to the directors vision; the director's vision, not our own and if we don't align with that director's vision then we should rightfully be called out for it, but for Neil Jordan’s vision of Lestat in “Interview with a Vampire” Tom Cruise executed it and did it with a certain panache so far missing from any other version of Lestat. Maybe not in complete keeping with what is in the book, or the source material, maybe not in keeping with what others see or found in that material as it pertains to Lestat, but it is clearly in alignment with what Jordan wanted and within the context of what is being asked you can doubt anything and everything else but do not doubt that Cruise was a killer, giving a gleefully killer performance. What Cruise brought was a wild ostentatious sense of grandeur to Lestat, rather than a grounded sense of self that emanates from the latest iteration. He felt like someone who wants to and does stand out in the crowd, someone distanced from humanity, but also still amused by it. Like someone who understand the power of the shadow, but cant help but to seek out the lights, like a larger than life avatar of other peoples dreams which serves the script well when Christian Slater after hearing all this asks for it anyway, the lure is not vampirism , but Lestat. In short what Tom Cruise brought to Lestat was movie stardom and we haven’t seen the like yet and aren’t likely to.

Matt Smith is not ugly, Hollywood is just Facially Boring.

Matt Smith has a face. and I mean a FACE. Im not talking Hollywood glam God, Grant, Brando, Redford face. I’m talking Cagney, Robert Ryan, Richard Widmark face. The kind of face that earns you a different kind of power. That kind that comes with a strange intertanglement of masculine and feminine energy. Faces already in constant communication with the subconscious. Now I don’t think hes as good at those cats but he is on their spectrum of actor. He gives off a “man who hides things” vibes with one wrinkle of his face, and your best friend with another.

Theres a scene in the most recent episode of HBO's Game of Thrones prequel “The House of the Dragon” where Prince Daemon who is played by Matt Smith is making an internal decision on what to do after reading a letter from his brother (whom he loves and hates ) in and at his most frustrating moment. Now a lot of the story preempting this particular killer moment is part of what should inform us as to exactly what's going on in Daemon's head, but without any dialogue the rest of this lies completely on Smith's shoulders, and the look Smith gives upon hearing his brothers assistance is coming, and just before he beats the messenger badly - is a doozy. It's an outstanding example of the way in which certain actors faces can find that perfect valley that sits in between exactitude and ambiguity. None of us knows exactly what motivates Daemon to do what he does, especially to beat the messenger, but it is Smith's face that informs us that hes about to do something rash. There's a tad bit of mischief and a rather large dollop of brooding. So it is exactly enough that before he does it we can see it and therefore its almost all of the tension beyond musical cues. Once he does, it gives us enough to fall upon some objective idea about why Daemon does this, but it also gives us enough to decide for ourselves each one of us what is being reflected back to us through this form of ambiguity.

Due to a number of varying domino's falling forward, Hollywood is no longer interested in original films, and it is no longer interested in original faces. An era that has struggled to produce any real movie stars is also struggling to produce their counter balance; character actors, and more specific to what Im discussing -the combo-lead character actors the 70s produced. It is an era also heavily struggling with ageism, colorism, fatphobia, sexism, gender, and racism all of which exacerbate those problems. It's interesting to note that at times where politically we were even more constrained than now, we still ended up with deeper, more profound representation than this wheat thin plastic we get now. It'd be nice to have both for once. As it is, in this particular world of cinema Matt Smith is near an anomaly, lucky to be where he is, as most men who have his facial complexities are locked in a Hollywood cell awaiting judgement on just what the hell to do with them. Think Miles Teller, Barry Keoghan, Tye Sheridan, Lucas Hedges. Its not that these actors aren’t used, its that they're not used correctly, to their full potential, or in any way imaginatively. Hollywood barely imagines sex and when it does it imagines it with an increasingly limited type of looking people. In that particular world yeah Matt Smith (a weird sort of handsome ) makes them have to do a little more work selling his appeal, and look they're not wrong. If you put him or any actor (who is not hot as hell upon immediate arrival) in the wrong placement in a role that suggests beauty, or extreme sex appeal it can be risky, you may have your audience completely turn on you, and that's probably at least one reason why Smith is more a TV actor than a film actor. On the other hand his contemporaries like Chris Hemsworth and Channing Tatum though largely in far less interesting projects than even his TV work are facial sure bets and we know Hollywood loves its sure bets.

I loved the new Top Gun but I have to be honest, when you look at the crew of the old, and the crew of the new the facial difference is drastic. I mean going from Val Kilmer to Glenn Powell whether people want to acknowledge or not is a notable difference in and of itself for a number of more covert reasons than readily available, and it only gets much deeper and further a divide after that progressively. The faces are bordering on perfect and so are the bodies. After all, the audience like sure bets too, especially in their castings. They don't look for room for interpretation, and they clearly don't care about capturing the soul or essence of a character as much as looking exactly like what they want to see. Remember awhile ago when everyone was so upset that they cast Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher (over basic aesthetics) that the company and lovers of the film spent the next 10 or so years explaining it, with the industry eventually rectifying this “great” wrong finally putting out a fun successful new show this year that everyone promptly praised ? Thing is its debatable that TV show is actually better than the original films ( it isnt I'm sorry) it's different and yes more anatomically correct, but not necessarily better in any way that isnt mostly superficial and I really think that's all folks care about. Think about how everyone responded to Maggie Gyllenhaal being cast as the district attorney that everyone found so beautiful in “The Dark Knight”. Sure it did prompt one of the greatest and funniest Tweets of all time on Twitter but also, that's pretty telling in and of itself, especially when you consider how Maggie's career has shaped out in comparison to her brother when shes at the very least as talented as her brother. I mean sexism always; women have struggled with this dubious ideology longer and harder going back to Bette Davis, but there are I think actually more women in constant lead roles with very very interesting faces. Viola Davis, Tilda Swinton, Noomi Rapace, all have great faces that they employ wonderfully. Its really mostly the leading men that are so bland and homogeneous and thats not the audiences fault its the industry. Think about all the times that folks found out actors known or thought by most to be unconventionally attractive (if at all) were found out to be actually conventionally attractive at some point in their career ( Steve Buscemi). There was alot of loud surprise, but this is the nature of Hollywood it doesn't really hire ugly people. It at best hires people from time to time less conventionally attractive than its hyper conventionally attractive stars and then let's them cos play as “ugly” people which I argue don't exist save for in a collective insistence on some agreement on an objective rendering of beauty, one which Hollywood doles out to us rigidly and many times cruelly.

Once you cripple or hobble the larger aspects of what makes cinema great ( see regulation of monopolies, and encouraging a healthy variety of offerings at the theater as a couple ) there's a domino effect that brings crashing down a lot of the minutiae of what makes cinema great as well. In this particular case one of those minutiae is that not only is there a lack of variety of cinematic offerings in the macro, we are seeing a lack of variety in faces and people in the micro. In this way Hollywood seems to be in the era that most closely resembles the studio era in the Golden Age than maybe the new Hollywood that formed with directors like Coppola and Scorsese and a new type of A-typically hot actors like Pacino, Hackman, Hoffman and Nicholson. Notice I said closely in regards to the era it resembles, because it is not a one for one and it is still just a resemblance. That era still made use of its “otherish” beauties like Bette Davis, Joseph Cotton, Peter Cushing, Vincent Price and Peter Lorre. Also, notice I still place the word hot in there because these actors were in fact good looking actors, but it is not the type that immediately grabs you and arrests you from jump. It is not Cary, or James Mason, or Roc Hudson beauty. It needs spurring on, it needs some underneath qualities to follow to move it into that zone of attraction. Those actors in places brought those qualities, but they also had something the more typically beautiful actors struggled with. The ability to be pathetic, to be absolutely repellent, ugly not as an aesthetic, (almost every actor has some quality of beauty) but as a personality trait. Chris Pine can struggle here though he's actually pretty damn good, Hemsworth will definitely struggle, Tom Holland..forget about it. Chris Evans, even Timothee Chalamet for all his character traits and abilities would and will struggle. The future and standing leading men of today they don't have it. We have homogenized the face. The actors don't look like identical twins, but a great deal of them do look fraternal, and in this is a fraternity. Sometimes it's not even that they don't have the ability it's that we won't let them, or our minds won't let them, because the industry won’t let them. We know that because we have had eras where plenty of these types of “oh I don’t know normal” - looking people were our greatest from Jimmy Stewart to Tom Hanks and the audiences accepted and loved on them as leading men. Nobody batted an eyelash when Jack Nicholson played a man who could woo just about any woman for years.

I am brought back to an article for The Guardian which chose as its subject the career of one Angelina thee Jolie. Reductive in its claims, vicious in its conclusion, and overall dumb, the piece only served to reify the very psychological phenomenon I'm discussing; that sometimes we don't even let egregiously pretty people perform to their best in front of us for a myriad of reasons from misunderstanding them to jealousy. If we won't let them act or be truly ugly without aesthetics, and we then have others who don't possess the ability, then who then shall take up the mantle? But that's the argument around beauty levels and it's important to state as much because it still comes under the umbrella of why the face matters and why we need more interesting pretty faces not just pretty faces. Film theorist Béla Belázs talked about the power of the face as a silent soliloquy or monologue “an association of ideas, a synthesis of consciousness and imagination.” is what he says about what undergirds the power of a close-up. He talks about the importance of a glint in Liv Ullmans eye as Elizabet Vogler in Ingmar Bergmans “Persona” to the “visual anthropomorphism” between the audience and the film. What a really good face can do is make the road map to linking each and every or any one of these ideas together as a whole- a lot more concise so that they don't become totally lost in the details. This is the same to some extent with the close-up. When making a film that doesn't want to spoon feed the audience the pleasure of associating these ideas in a way that allows them to realize what the film says to them and to filmmakers and films want this feeling to be more natural and organic - understanding a good face is good face is vital to that. When you want to speak volumes but your actors face can only mumble sentences? …Well that's definitely Hollywood now. Makes perfect sense when you look at it, Hollywood is more and more averse to the risk of any sort of ambiguity between the story and the audience. More and more movies beat you over the head with their politics, with their themes, with their conclusions. You don't need the great faces of Hollywood to do this kind of work- they can and they should, but you don't need them. Frankly to a lot of Hollywood I think they consider these people risks, which is again why I think Smith is relegated mostly to television and not film, though I do think he works really well there. This is really not about complaining - although I do have complaints. It's not about Matt Smith although I do really enjoy Matt Smith. It’s not me working through the time that we are in wherein somebody like somebody like Matt Smith can make waves like this simply for not having a face that speaks to everyone as the most beautiful thing in the world. It's not about hating on those people who are even acknowledging it, it's about saying that the very fact that it's making waves like it is speaks to the dearth of faces like Smith's in the current industry, how that hurts said industry, how it's shaped its audience, and how that hurts people and the world that we live in which I leave with this..

Ozark's Wendy Byrde: Gangster No. 1

When Ozark premiered I had no idea what to expect. I like most everyone else noted that it bore trite similarities to Breaking Bad, but it looked just interesting enough to make for comfort television..except it never got comfortable and neither did I. Over its four seasons Ozark tightened its screws each time sending us whirling through a labyrinth of interwoven plots, personal traumas, shocking deaths, and seethingly cruel rivalries. The shows quality of ensuring we saw the Byrde's for what they were, and the viciousness of this capitalistic landscape combined with its ability to be extremely creative creating great ticking time bomb scenarios one season after another helped make it one of the few truly great Netflix offerings, BUT, of all the things that truly made Ozark great, the thing or rather persons that most made this show stand out was the characters. Julie Garner's resident smuggling prodigy firecracker Ruth Langmore who touted a ferocious tongue and temper. The even hotter tempered Darlene Snell, the wife of Jacob Snell, THE crime family of Osage beach before the Byrde's arrive and turn everything upside down. The snake like Roy Petty, a bit of an unhinged FBI agent determined to get the upper hand on the Byrdes, and then there is of course the Byrdes ; Marty, Wendy, Charlotte, and Jonah, when we meet them, unlike most shows they are already broken, their marriage is failed, fraught with unspoken of trauma, miscommunications and latent fantasies, they are also already money launderers, it is when they end as full on co-leaders of the cartel we see this family come fully together and that is Ozark's sad, stark genius as a show, its stern look at the actualities of the American dream under capitalism, what it costs, and who it costs, and casts out. In that tapestry of interwoven threads of charismatic corporate and political evil doers the shows standout, the shows center is Wendy Byrde, and that’s saying alot in the Ozarks. The shows most accomplished character was challenging, polarizing, and difficult to watch or hear throughout the run of the show all whole being the hardest to keep your eyes and ears off of her. A captivating anti-hero of sorts just that side of Laura Dern's Renata Klein in “Big Little Lies” she was as vile as she was compelling and funny, the most revelatory aspect of Wendy's character was how she morphed from a limb to the head of the Byrdes ascension into gangsterdom essentially making her the subversive matriarch and gangster no 1 in that family.

Wendy like any other great character is the product of both great writing and acting. As written Wendy Byrde is a complex woman. She philanders, but deeply loves Marty, she values family but like many gangsters before her she values them in many ways as a prop for her own ambition. Like Michael Corleone in Mario Capuzo's gangster saga “The Godfather” she continued as long as she could under the guise that as she once said “We’re not looking for a way into more crime sweetheart, we're trying to get out of it” all while making constant decisions that drove them deeper into it. In Laura Linney's own words she is “Shrewd and smart, but not very mature”. Her reactive nature even while calculated and highly intelligent made her a very dangerous person, a-la folks like Bugsy Siegel, and Al Capone. Though she might not have been the person to do it, she didn’t mind being the person who ordered it, and the self delusion of going straight, well that’s straight out of the book of Michael Corleone.

From an acting standpoint Laura Linney shaped the clay of the script into something so acutely tangible it seemed as if it were based on someone real. The “everyman” as a gangster is not as popular as the more romanticized slick tough type but he has been there in the canon, from Lefty Ruggiero in “Donnie Brasco” to Mike Sullivan in “Road to Perdition” to “Knucky Thompson” (Boardwalk Empire ), “Tony Soprano”, and “Walter White”. If and when they’ve depicted women as gangsters its always as elegant, fierce, vulnerable only in places where it serves them to trick you into getting bit, like Salma Hayek's Elena Sánchez in Oliver Stone's “Savages”. Linney and the writers of Ozark though present Wendy as a highly ambitious, calculating, spiraling, loving, vulnerable, traumatized, but tough woman preening behind “soccer mom” energy. Linney pops,with gleeful satisfaction when shes right, britsles with vulnerability when shes wrong, and slices through her enemies with stillness..especially in the eyes something Linney shares with other great actors, and Wendy shares with great male gangster characters like Jimmy Conway (Goodfellas ) and Michael Corleone. Once again like Michael Corleone regardless of where she started, the actual Wendy (or Mike Corleone) was always this person. They were their least selves before the events that made them into who they are, and they don’t want to ever go back, so for both the idea is always moving forward. Wendy also like Mike, ( or rather Laura Linney like Al Pacino ) had a very particular talent to hide rivers of bile behind a facade of politeness, especially when they're being threatened..pay attention to their visual reactions when being audibly threatened and besmirched by their enemies on the straight side..The movements are slightly, but visceral and brimming with disdain. There is discomfort, but a certifiably stone will to barely let it be seen, and the one tells on the other…

Coiled but composed is what I would name the energy these two actors and subsequently their characters emote. That should say enough about Linney’s acting that she can match Al Pacino like for like in this regard and many occasions this powered Ozarks story of who was actually head of this family ( A fact later reiterated by their children consistently about how Marty just does what Wendy says ). Ozark overall is no Godfather but Linney is for sure one of the best thing we’ve seen since in the genre and I do not say this lightly. When any other element of this show failed, writing, pacing, arc, an uneventful episode I could always just watch Linney. It covered so much of what were or could be this shows warts that I don’t think I’ll ever know how much it was this show I loved or just watching her work. The journey of Wendy Bryde from ill suited mal content role player to Queenpin was a magnificent thing to behold, partially because it came both subtly and obviously, aparrent, and imprecise. The things Linney did with her face furthered this as she could be very forthcoming and genuine, but was also so good when she wasn’t genuine it made it believable as to why it was so hard to deal with Wendy. She never REALLY surprised or hid her emotions or thoughts but she did throw just enough fog around to make you unsure of your footing.

In the end Ozark ended up a fantastic feat. A show that didn’t compromise what it set out to do. Which on my mind is to say that Gangsterism is capitalism, that neither is as glamorous and charismatic as it has constantly portrayed and that there is a reason that Organized crime and gang culture preys on and lives off of the institutionalized idea of family in the same way capitalism does. It did this without showy gimmicks and constantly pointing to and or admonishing fromself righteousness, even while definitely never glorifying it. It all seemed as anxiety inducing as any our lives are under this system, and for all of the Byrde's apparent charm and geneality they and especially Wendy were ruthless and cruel time and time again from threatening pregnant women to having a family member killed. That cruelty was evident in even the chosen hues for the show, the cold blues and greys maintained the shows purposeful distance from warmth and at the heart of that coldness, that cruelty, that gangsterism was Wendy. The history of film and television taught and instructed us that in these families the male patriarch was the one to keep our eye on, and Ozark played upon that, introducing us first to Marty and the subtle joy’s of watching Jason Bateman skiddishly fox his way out of one hellish situation to another, but the show didn’t take long to reveal that Wendy was not only a helpful co-conspirator, but the true heart of this growing operation. She wasn’t just hiding coke or a gun for her husband when needed, (Karen Hill ) or begging for this to “All end” (Kay Corleone/Adam’s) nor was she portrayed as a hindrance like Skyler White or Maggie Pistone ( Anne Heche in Donnie Brasco ) Wendy was only a thorn in Marty’s side because she was an impediment to his fantasy of himself as a good guy that didn’t want any of this. To his insistence on making believe that his burrowing was to a way out rather than further in, and to the realities of their situation. She was a thorn in our side for the same reasons and that’s the brilliance of this show. That it reminded us of what the greed, avarice, and deterioration of empathy inherent in capitalism looks like without much of the gloss. That the whole time it subverted our expectations for this family as a patriarchal institution when in reality it was a matriarchal one. It even ended with both the cartel and the Byrdes being ran by women. The Don's ring unceremoniously and without pomp had been passed by the end of Season 2. Ultimately, if Ozark was a reincarnation of sorts of Breaking Bad be it superficially or deep, our Walter White was not Marty but Wendy Byrde.

There’s Something Insidious about Marvel's “Representation”.

I've been watching Marvel films (as we all have ) awhile now, and movies in general even longer and if there's one thing I've realized about Hollywood is that change comes at the pace of molasses. Im not gonna linger too long on the why's of this particular injustice, but I will say there is a hindering lack of desire to do away with white supremacy because look what it does for these folks. Movies as any art form are an extension of the society that creates them, the stories they want to tell, how they see them, who they see as worthy of this magical simulation of various aspects of existence. A white dominant power structure created ( as the gods they envision themselves as ) a silver screened universe where no matter where you are at in that universe white dominance is assured from Los Angeles to Middle Earth, to Earth 838 to, Westeros, to the heavens there can be no other reality, and usually when there is, well then something is wrong. Planet of the Apes has long been thought of as a thinly veiled expression of this philosophy and fear. In Terminator 2, Miles Dyson was one of the first times we got to see a black male in a powerful position as a highly intelligent scientist and all he did was end up being the architect of the apocalypse who had to die for his sin of unwittingly bringing it about. In Game of Thrones Daenarys went on her own journey of collecting black and brown armies like stamps before going uncharacteristically mad in the end for reasons that really don't make much sense unless you jive with the idea that all women are inherently a little crazy. The lopsided false heirarchy dynamics of our actual country are never imagined to be gone in these so called liberal spaces. White men remain at the top, followed by white women and on down it goes. The point here though is that power structures remain in tact not only through overt and covert violence but by way of a barrage of propaganda including movies and television. Marvel's faux idea of representation does not escape this it in fact thus far has dived into it and Doctor Strange is no exception.

There is something very insidious about the way Marvel positions itself as a paragon of virtue filled representation while back-handing almost every example. They only allude to queerness, barely implying it if anything at all. They de-power marginalized characters whenever it suits them ( Black Panthers abilities have been all over the place) , it makes buddies of the CIA, and it too loves the mad woman trope ( Jessica Jones [mother] S2, Eternals ). What does it mean to get a Mexican American LGBT woman in the canon when she is made up of mostly quips and her relationships or sexuality is still kept at bay with no acknowledgement.? Who cares if Aunt May is hot if that's all she is? Why should we care about Mordo's rightful challenges to Stephen Strange's ego if he is an ambitious ne'er do well as a sorcerer, or Wong as the Sorcerer Supreme if everyone including the Scarlett Witch ignores his actual title and talks/deals with Strange instead, ( very disrespectful ) and most importantly why should we care about the messages of any of these movies even those outside the MCU representation of certain liberal/radical messages if in the end all the folks spouting them are useless, incapacitated, incompetent, impotent, evil, or insane when it really matters? Yeah sure Captain Marvel is insanely powerful…in her own movie, the minute she appears in the mostly male Avengers movies, she being by far the most powerful appears to be the merely the 3rd or fourth, and when the ultimately Thanos is dispatched she's puts a dab of power on it, but can't finish the job, who can? Captain America. Now you have the Scarlett Witch who appeared to have the powers of a Jubilee when she first appeared in the MCU and was at the time a hero, but as her powers grew so too did her evil? What does that say about woman empowerment? Her motherhood thrown around recklessly as a plot device to have her commit cruel vicious deeds with no interesting revelations or conceptulizations around her motherhood or her grief. What does Kilmonger's measage of radical distribution of power mean is he is a raving murdering lunatic misogynistic fiend, or the flagsmahers of “The Falcon and the Winter soldier's messages against social inequities and gross nationalism, when theyre willing to commit atrocities to gain it. Exactly what movies have been saying since D.W. Griffiths violent fantasy of racial hierarchy and degradation flared his message across the silver screen..The marginalized given power would seige the white male hegemony and unleash hell on earth and we must all do everything in collective power to stop that from happening. Rinse..Repeat. True representation should feel organic, natural, and powerful. Marginalized people should not only feel fully realized as characters but in power. Hefty healthy radical social messaging that matters should be delivered by actual good people aa well as the occasional villain not JUST by villains. If Mad Max can have a film where the hero is actually not on the Marquee than why not have Captain Marvel be at the very least part of the big defeat of Thanos?

I don't understand the world we live in. One minute it's in awe and devastating recognition of acting giants like Denzel and Robert Deniro and the committed talents of someone like a Jim Carrey and the next it's telling me that Chris Evans is Robert De Niro and that Channing Tatum is a brilliant comedic talent.

King Richard Doesn't Trust Us.

Movie stars can present a very interesting conundrum. Their special ability to bring presence in a film that materializes in such a very specific, magnetic, and near magical way can not only draw people to your film on their behalf, but in the right light and casting they can elevate and bring transcendence to the work..OR they can capsize a film, disallow you from being able to suspended belief, or over emphasize the lesser aspects of your script. While I don’t think Will Smith as Richard Williams capsizes Reinaldo Marcus Green's “King Richard”, (In many ways the script is in alliance with this aspect of Will ) he is definitely the latter of these two possibilities rather than the former. There is a sense of the same artifice that has made him one of the world’s most likeable actors here on display in this Oscar bait as Richard Williams the father and coach of two of America's most brilliant, successful, and talented athletes ever. There has always been a dichotomy to Will's good-nature, it makes him loveable but keeps us at a distance, and it allows us to trust him when he clearly doesn't ’t trust us with his true vulnerability on the line. So he gives just enough to satisfy but never enough to hurt him and thusly we are rarely hurt by him on screen in that oh so good way that great actors can on screen. That lack of trust seeps it’s way into the story King Richard seems to want to tell, and though it’s hard to tell how much of it is Will and how much is the movie, its clear neither are fully on board with trusting us to hear and see the very worst right along with the very best of Richard.

Watching the film it's pretty clear what King Richard wants to say about Richard Williams. The movie wants to present a flawed man who had a resourceful and willful desire to see his daughters reach places that he himself and others he saw around him never saw. You get the sense that the film would like to present a balance of Richard's ego and harmful self aggrandizing versus the social economic inhibitors and buffers black people face just trying to be anything in an unjust world. In a nuanced way this this film would have been a film I would have loved to death, something of an ode to black fathers and a critique, and in fits and spurts you get pieces of that type of film. The beginning of the film features a sort of montage of Richard's various meetings with various white Tennis coaches that turn him down in various white ways. The scenes properly demonstrate these buffers be they economic or racial, and they play well against Richard's insightful, driven, but also overbearing personality. Later on in the film when there is an argument between Richard and his wife ( played quite wonderfully by Aunjanue Ellis ) about his stubbornness and his unilateral decision making , we really get a taste of where and when his will meets walls that make him a very tough man to live with and morbidly insensitive, but these moments also end up showing the film's scriptural weaknesses every bit as much as they show its strengths, especially as it pertains to Will Smith. Maybe the greatest moment of conflict in the movie comes a full hour and 39 minutes into the film, which is problematic in and of itself but pushing that to the side- we see Richard get into a second confrontation with his wife over yet another unilateral decision made by Richard over whether or not his daughter will attend a tournament. Now it’s important to state that the first time he does this Richard is warned by his wife that he can never again make another decision like this without first consulting her and without really listening to what it is his girls actually want or there will be consequences….and yet he does it again and script wise, there is no real consequence or push back that comes from this, simply more talking. This is in fact realistic and it happens in many marriages and close knit relationships, but this doesn't come in a way that allows or conjures examination about Brandi and her position, how trapped she might feel, or maybe even erased by a man who continues to be wilfully obtuse about his own need for martyrdom and to be the singular figure and role player in these girls lives. Will Smith's compounds this issue because he himself has built such a career off being likable he simply does not pull off in any meaningful way these traits beyond the most basic ask of the writing. I don't even think it's that hes not trying, it’s just that the idea of being able to go to that place where you yourself become ugly to the audience or nasty, mean, vile , or any of the sort is foreign to him.. he doesn't understand the concept. Don't let the words I used fool you into believing that I think that Richard needed to be vile or necessarily nasty I'm just bringing them up as varying possibilities for that I know that Will can't do. For this film I think mean spirited, rude, obnoxious, cold, thoughtless, and condescending, as it pertains to the script depiction of Richard come to mind, but only through the piecing together of exposition and context. Will himself doesn’t give himself over to very much of this. For context and comparison let's take a look at another scene which I think exemplifies even the slightest level of that want or ability to make oneself appear unlikable, I’ll use this scene from Michael Mann's “Heat”. Where DeNiro first meets Amy Brenneman…

What Deniro captures here is a steadfast myopic dedication to one's own protection, Which he is willing to embody because of his philosophical approach as an actor, and subsequently the fact that DeNiro has spent the greater part of his career playing characters that float between the dynamic of being extremely charismatic and extremely deviant and or unlikable. Will Smith too is playing a character dedicated to a steadfast and myopic protection, except for this time it is not only himself but it is also for his daughters and their career. The difference is neither the story, nor the the camera, nor Will Smith are willing to dive all the way into that space in the way that DeNiro and Mann are willing to. Will Smith has made a career of careful curation and meticulous formulation. He has trained every part of him to respond to things in a way that most effectively increases his likeabilty and thus his box office. There is a scene that takes place just before the major conflict scene between Richard and his wife, Where we see that particular argument is initiated by an original conflict between Richard and the girl's new coach Rick Macci played by Jon Bernthal. Richard announces that he is taking the girls out of practice and junior tournament competition, and Director Reinaldo Marcus Green never let’s the camera sit on Will's face for any length of time but it is especially ignored or distanced when he has something nasty or mean-spirited to say. Green shoots from the side when Will all but calls Jenifer Capriati a crackhead. When Will's Richard goes on about how it’s his plan that has guided all this to Macci asserting his dominance -Green goes over the shoulder, and when Richard becomes sarcastic and demeaning about his wife’s role in crafting their Daughters skillset , again he is slightly over Wills shoulder. Now obviously you want to capture the other perosn’s reaction, or in the case of the latter maintain the POV of the character who is speaking (Ellis), but there are ways to do this without losing the impact of what Will is doing that have alot to do with changing some poor blocking for the needs of the scene. Even still the choice is understandable as when the camera is focused on Will he is unable to deliver the proper tonality in his face needed for the emotion within the context of these scenes. When his wife brings up Richard's past its one very clear example of a certain hollowness in Will's skillset, and in he and the movies will to trust us. In any space or context dredging up this past would be something that would probably set someone off. Not necessarily in any way that demonstrates or alludes to violence but just something that would deeply knock them off balance, but Will is always on balance and there is none of what should be registering on his face there even though his words and the things he retorts back to his wife are clearly indicative of the kind of underlying hurt and anger that should appear on Wills face. What this does is take away the full power, impact, and resonance of this particular scene unless you are paying sole attention to the words. So that a scene that should have the impact of Denzel Washington and Viola Davis in Fences where a husband and a wife are clearly confronting past sins and hurt that they have not been communicative to each other about - Instead feels more like a it's a simple disagreement about the direction in which to drive. ..

Extra marital affairs in the case of “Fences” and abandoned children in the case of “King Richard” are not light work, or subjects, these are the kinds of discussions and retorts that would most certainly inspire great disappointment, anger, frustration, hurt and more. Those emotions then as a consequence would inspire and create power through impact - that is what we saw out of the seminal and now classic Denzel/Viola scene in “Fences”. I don't know that anyone believes that fences is one of the greatest films of this era or even that there are that many people who love it in its entirety, but people KNOW that scene and its impact has carried well beyond maybe even the popularity of that film. Where was that scene here? All the trials, from within and without the family, and yet no scene really carries, and with so much time spent with the camera on Will, that’s an indictment. Will is a talented actor who like Tom Cruise has a sitting veneer that when explored could produce fascinating results, ( See Interview, Collateral, Born on the Fourth, Magnolia, Eyes Wide and the beginning of Edge of Tomorrow ) but while Cruise has explored this quite a few times in his filmography, Will hasn’t really explored it since “Six Degreees of Separation” and it shows here because all this belies what is most important to the storytellers involved, especially it's actor. Will Smith as a celebrity now spends abundant amount of times acting like a social media influencer. He scurries about in circles telling the same stories through different funnels about moving beyond obstacles and dismissing real impediments as trifles that can be resolved by nothing more than willpower and fairy dust. This is a movie in service of that kind of story that wants to continually and always be moving towards aspiration and inspiration, and away from anything that may temporarily stop the velocity and progression of that feeling. Even when the direction and script and Will himself desire to push for something greater its as if his own face betrays him, when he says “What you want a thank you” his face doesn’t give the power necessary to push that sentiment that sense of betrayal and anger into the realm of something as mean and discouraging as it needs to be.. Hes still half smiling and it’s not that devilishly slimy smile folks like Denzel and Willem Dafoe have mastered its just a weird stalemate between what he wants to do and what he's trained himself all too well to do over the years…

It doesn't do much for story that wants to be much more nuanced about the egotism and audacity of a black man who wants the best both for himself and his daughters and the hardships of doing that in an extremely white world or space. King Richard, like so many movies today, does not trust us the audience with the ability to handle impactful and crushing turns in the story, it doesn't trust us to be able to handle impactful and crushing turns in a character whom we like. So that unlike 1995's “Jerry Maguire” where we see even a positive decision like Jerry deciding to back Rod Tidwell and take him around a convention in order to boost his contract, - King Richard won't let us see its version of that turn and smack to Jerry in the face from a racist father who viewed that as a shunning. In the case of Will Smith as Richard it won't allow us to see as 1994's “Jason's lyric” did Bokeem Woodbine - the idea that he or even Forrest Whitaker's “Mad Dog” could be both very sweet men and very terrifying men at the same time. This lacking hobbles and impedes any true resonance, and in respect to Richard's personality in story- it fails as we actually never see a consequence to his egotism to his stubbornness or someplace where we would see he wasn't right to make this decision. Script wise almost every single decision he seems to make in this movie goes in his favor so how are we to ever really impactfully see what and how his stubbornness hurts those around him when even they don't really provide any consequence to his behavior. This lack of trust breaks a bond between audience and art. It’s art that ensconces itself from our disappointment in a way that keeps it safe by disallowing us to tie ourselves to that more closely in a way that might allow us to become angered or incensed at the work, especially that part of the audience that is actually apart of its story in the Williams family. Sure we end up liking, maybe even loving it on some superficial level, but ultimately it leaves us at a distance, that same distance that has always been kept between us and its star Will Smith. It doesn't invite us in for any real discovery about Richard Williams or about Will Smith and that is still sad in this time because we don't need biopics that provide such sterile and curated depictions of our heroes in order to protect them or find their power anymore than Richard needed to provide such a sterile, heavily curated environment for his kids to protect them or find their power. What we are left with is a movie that mines nothing except visual confirmation of things we already know, brings no deep emotional discovery or excavation and like its star ends as extremely likable, but mot much else, and also like its star I wager even that will change with time.

Dean Stockwell: The Gate.

When I was young I didnt have much of a grip on reality. I didn't care for it much either, what was there just didnt interest me much. I believed very much in worlds that bordered ours, and in heavens and hells, and dimensions, and that imagination found several confirmations and vessels in various forms. There were bent trees over large fields whose brush touched the ground as the roots knelt in it. There were my pencils and pens which drew on paper and in the air, secret doors like in CS Lewis's definitive childrens Chronicles -to these alternate universes, and then there were actors whom I fixated on as obvious occupants from these various worlds who acted as gateways. One such actor was Dean Stockwell whom I first discovered in David Lynch's fever dream adaptation of Frank Herbert's essential Science fiction text. I didnt care or even know about the movie as a box office failure or whether it hot the text right, I saw it and Stockwell in it as further visual proof of the otherworldly, and fully grown I still think so.

I've seen David Lynch's lynch's “Blue Velvet” probably 4 times, it's possible it's 5 over my life, but like most of lynch's films save for Dune, I could not tell you still what that movie is about and whenever I recall it it comes to me more so as a collection of scenes and images than it does a coherent idea or feeling about the film. Of course one of those images or scenes is iconic and burned into I think most peoples memories. It's the “Roy Orbison” scene in which Dean Stockwell occupies a certain space a certain time that feels disconnected even for Lynch from the rest of the film which felt like a hostage movie on LSD. In a TCM interview avaiable on YouTube, Stockwell tells the story of how his work on Francis Ford Coppola's “Tucker: The Man and His Dream" came to to be. He tells of Coppola giving him 3 pages with 3 varying iterations with varying intensity of the short scene in which he would play fellow dreamer Howard Hughes. Coppola then allowed him something most directors don’t, he told him that he could put together these pages in any way he wished and he said that he basically didn't see him ( Coppola ) again for 3 weeks or so and wrote it himself and in exactly the way he wanted. It plays like a dream, and he plays as if he is already a ghost of himself come to visit Tucker. He speaks in a drawl soaked in Texas and distance, a deliberateness that borders on being android like. Maybe he hails from another world, place, time, dimension, whatever you want to call it, but once again it feels both foreign and at home. Back in the interview Stockwell called Coppola “dreamy” as a director almost immediately followed by naming Lynch as the same. By “same” he means he was again allowed to create his own character through invention with very little to no intervention. In a PIECE on Stockwell's role as “Ben" by the unassailably brilliant Sheila O Malley, she writes : “The script said NOTHING about him. Lynch knew that whatever Stockwell came up with, in terms of inventing Ben, was going to be great – he just trusted him with the character (a rare thing. Most writers and directors OVER explain characters because they’re nervous that the pesky little actors are going to be ruin everything with their interpretation).Stockwell went to work. He created that guy’s look on his own – the makeup, the clothes, the energy … He hasn’t made too many mistakes in his career. He hasn’t over-reached, or missed the mark too much in his 100 plus films, which is quite a record. Who has seen Blue Velvet and doesn’t remember Ben? Not possible. Also – doesn’t it seem as though Ben HAD to have been written that way? The whole character seems completely inevitable … and perfect. Of course he wears makeup, of course he dresses like that, of course he stands around in large groups with his eyes closed – communing with candy-colored clowns in the ether of his brain. But no: none of it was set out in the script. Stockwell MADE that guy. I think that is so hysterical, so wonderful. It must have been such fun.” She was right and Stockwell confirms. I saw blue velvet for the 1st time when I was 19 I concluded that his character was an alien and I see nothing haven't watched a few more times to change my mind, but This was always the space that Stockwell occupied for me it was coded within his acting as it spoke to me. For me Stockwell was kind of born to play with somebody like Lynch because as an actor he always made choices that seemed foreign to any idea of space and time, but not so far that he also never knew how to find some way back to the path, whatever path of whomever was directing him - back to the world in which this character needed to occupy. A prime example exists in the lead up to the Orbison Karaoke, Stockwell stands being a gracious but equally weird host to the very outlandish Frank Booth. While Hopper goes off doing his very best Hopper, each one of the surrounding actors giving different beats he kind of just disappears. Theres this strange minute where he closes his eyes and he keeps them closed as if he just teleported himself somewhere else. It occurs at around the 2:50 second mark here and ends at around 3:15.

Where did he go I wonder? Was he like younger me in commune, and attuned with places that we're outside this particular rental space we call reality? Could he conjure them up at a moments notice? What did he find there? A time limit? The way he comes back is like a stop watch, it’s not just Hopper’s words it’s a suddenness that implies a condition, and that implied to me an alien-ness. Whatever it was, whatever he found is inconsequential to the film, but vitally important to the character of Ben and his place in it . It also displays another important facet of of Stockwell's career and to his own particular magic and that is his peculiar understanding of the importance of a closed and opened eye. Sheila notices it too. I latched onto it instantly as a kid watching what is still one of my ga favorite movies and sequels, Beverly Hills Cop II. Most actors understand the importance of an open line but the widening of the or the closing of especially of a especially as something that I've never seen deployed and quite the way that Stockwell does it. Only one actor I could think of right off top understands this in anyway like Stockwell, though to completely different effects and purpose and that is Samuel L Jackson. In the Blue Velvet scene you'll notice Stockwell likes to widen his eyes upon certain words for effect, or close them on another's and almost a glare like state that underlines his characters mental state, but also his sense of the dramatic. You then watch Beverly Hills Cop II, which is completely different movie and you seem the same thing, despite the fact that you couldn't find two more vastly different characters with vastly different motivations, it totally works. As deployed in several completely different ways distinctive from each other it feels vital to the ideation of Charles Kane.

When he delivers the line “Adrianos was perfect” he opens his eyes, and then closes them not fully, but into a glare in one fluid motion. It suggests a sort of confusion, and an indignance in concert with his enunciation, it evokes ego, but carefulness. Not but a few moments later as Jurgen Prochnow insults him he does it again, but this time it indicates a slight tinge of hurt, propelled forth by his pride, which bades him to listen further rather than immediately go on the defensive. When he does it again at around 1:34 it’s pure delight in his own work. He just knows it was great work, and that pride extends beyond the context of character. Stockwell always came off as an actor who took immense pride in his work and that is not to suggest he was proud of every single one that he did, but that in the actual doing he took a certain pride and it's at least one of the reasons why in his entire career which is a very long, extending from his childhood to the 00's especially as he starts to formulate as an adult I don't find a bit of work that I don't enjoy from him. But more importantly what connected me personally to Stockwell was the distance he maintained from this sort of homogenized idea of not only performance but humanity that provided this consistent and persistent sense of other worldliness. It's at home and and it belongs to everyone of his most memorable characters whether on TV as Al Calavicci in “Quantum Leap”or in a film like Tucker this sense of the fantastic, of pure fantasy. His eyes would act as the window to another world, his mouth as an anchor to this one and he was always able to in any number of roles transport us, transcend us, but never without emotion never without structure and never without power. Stockwell in that same TCM interview talks of the loss in a certain aspect of his childhood in the movies, one that he wouldn't wish upon his own children and I've always had the feeling that when something like that happens it's not really that it is lost, but that it is stunted and then continued along a slower trajectory. In that context it's no wonder the Dean appeals to me on a bone-deep level, me a person who now deels not fully separate, but veiled away from that weirdness I was so in touch with, so in love with when I was a child but I let go of in order to safely fit within the world around me. That same alien alien-ness that is so much apart of who I am, that I only find whenever I'm on stage, or behind a camera when and where I’m given freedom to imagine once again the infinite possibilities of my own humanity. That's what a Stockwell performance is to me, A doorway, an opening, a link to a distant place, but right within your home.

On Crying.

Tom Cruise breaks down in Paul Thomas Anderson's “magnolia”

Brilliant filmmaker and Twitter mind Kyle Alex Brett (@kyalbr on Twitter) and filmmaking genius Abbas Kiarostami are and were ( In Kiarostami's case) the kind of people that stir in other people what they believe they’ve forgotten. You may have noted it, you’ve definitely seen or observed what it is they display in their one-of-a-kind focus, but it’s not until you see it from their own uniquely esoteric angle that you recognize all that you observed but forgotten, simply because they can see it real time in moment, and recognize and relay as much almost as if they’ve frozen the thing in time to observe and analyze, to feel…such is their focus, their gift. It’s an example of one of the foundational aspects of great directors to me to find the universality in the esoteric. This time it this connection was excavated by a small Twitter thread from Kyle where he elaborated amd theorized about our emotive connection to film after reading a passage from Kiarostami's book. The particular passage's subject; editing, kyle’s focus; crying as a primal urge. Kiarostami's and subsequently Kyle's words got me to thinking about crying, and then to some extent about Men crying. About its power, about when, about why, and about whom. In Kiarostami's book “Lessons with Kiarostami”. The passage read “I keep what I think is good and I throw away everything else. Sometimes the best thing is to remove a shot, even one you have worked hard on, because it turns out to be foreign to everything around it. I might discard a moment when an actors performance is too powerful, or a particularly interesting improvised line or interaction between two character emerges. These are the kinds of things that can distract an audience and overwhelm a film.” Skipping forward he goes on to say “The most effective tear doesn't run down the cheek it glistens in the eye”. In its entirety its a powerful statement not only in its simplicity, but in how it speaks to Kiarostami's style and exemplifies how in the most classical sense of the word Kiarostami is an autuer. There are very few filmmakers whose films are quite singularly their own as Kiarostami, very few who in this very collaborative field of work can say their fingerprint is so acutely successful, not so much for dollars and cents as for nailing down the most detailed minutae of the human experience. I then got to thinking about whether or not for me it is more moving to watch people hold back tears, or let them go. That got me to thinking about whom, and that got me to thinking about the “why's", my answer - typical of my median nature was “it depends”, and then it was also that that “depends” has alot to do with socialization, and I suspect I’m not alone. It’s definitely nobody's secret that men are conditioned far than women to repress emotions, especially crying, and even then 0ne would have to take in and assume cultural differences. Me being an African American makes my experience of what effects me different than what effects Kiarostami, even while there are universal aspects that undoubtedly connect and effect all of us. In that spirit I find what makes men cry, and even moreso men crying 9n screen particularly interesting because in my mind it’s is so rare, far too rare indeed to think of men in real life or thusly film as somewhat of a representation of aspects of human life- giving themselves over to and allowing themselves the sort of catharsis that comes from actually crying rather than the usual which is the form of repression that Kyle would allude to later in his thread, and that to some extent represents itself in Kiarostami's words.

When I thought about all the films I could recall where men do some version of crying, even looking up others so I could find more and recall the emotions- the most effective ones had a range of depictions and looks, and rightfully so because the key words in what Kiarostami says are “turns out to be foreign to everything around it". For instance in the seminal scene from “Get Out” when Daniel Kaluuya's Chris Washington is first introduced to Missy Armitage's (Catherine Keener) “Therapy” it would've been absolutely distracting to have him ugly cry, rather than well up, but tears do roll down his cheek even as he tries to hold them back, but as Kiarostami alludes to the power begins at the glistening of the eye. It alludes to the power of this story and the hold it has on Chris. He could very well have cried and cried hard, but that would displace the power and that would be release and release is not about relinquishing power, it’s about letting go to redistribute it somewhere else.. namely back into self rather than the people or things which hold power over us. But there is also the fact that despite his efforts the the tear comes rolling down the cheek anyway, that is powerlessness. The memory of his mother holds power over Chris, and Keener's Missy understands this and being who she is uses it to hold power over him as well. To have him let go would then not only be distracting, but wrong for the scene.

Where it gets interesting is when you change the dynamics around anyone scene regardless of gender. Now, the first thing that popped in my head reading the quote was the power of watching Tom Hanks absolutely lose it over a damn volleyball in “Castaway”. On its face it sounds silly and like the last thing one would expect any man to cry over, but it is the conditions that lead up to it that make it at home with itself as the only and best representation of that primal urge, and it is one of the most timeless scenes in movie history. The loss of “Wilson” would absolutely have been dimmed by merely having Hanks merely well up rather than go full on ugly cry - but I digress… I decided to go elsewhere and revisit a scene I hadn’t seen in forever because the movie (Good Will Hunting ) was a movie I watched way too much when I was younger, and I had some feeling of unnerving dread that if I watched it again it would not age well… I watched the scene on YouTube for research and well, I need to re-watch this movie. While I don’t know about how the rest of the movie will ultimately come off, the “It’s not your fault” scene was intensely effective, and every bit as powerful and arresting as when I first saw it. Re-watching the scene with none of the erected context that led to it, I somehow still ended up legit crying…not a lump in the throat, not a welling up the eyes, a pure unadulterated holding my hand over my mouth ugly cry…

The dynamics of the scene are about the dynamics of interpersonal relationships between men, fathers and sons and friends. It calls forth my own memories of my relationship with my father, even while I did not endure that type of abuse, the artiface of the conditions do not matter simply the emotional underpinnings. The scene is almost a functioning call and response that forces us to look at the space we hold for each other to be each other, to be our most authentic selves. What Robin does for Matt, what Sean does for Will, and the movie for us is provide catharsis by way of a subjective experience that connects objectively. The dynamics of what makes us cry and subsequently (being that we are all built on such unique and yet similar foundations) what might qualify as the most brilliant and useful technique in getting us and let’s face it especially men - to break our generally well guarded fortresses of composure and facade is endlessly fascinating to me, and of course it would be Kiarostami, whose career put human emotion under a cinematic microscope, who would offer such an audaciously concise formulation on the most powerful form of said emotion while still allowing for a complexity of the factors put together to create it, all while outlining a simplicity to his own processes. Mine own most powerful moments align with those stated in Dolf Zillman's “Excitation Transfer Theory”. In it Zillman goes on to provide the pathway to the emotive connective tissue between us and the movies that bring out such strong and intense feelings in us. He explains what sets us up; “At one time or another, everybody seems to have experienced the extraordinary intensity of frustration after rousing efforts, of joy upon the sudden resolution of nagging annoyances, of gaiety after unfounded apprehensions, or for that matter, of sexual pleasures in making up after acute conflict.” What knocks us down; “Excitation in response to particular stimuli…is bound to enter into subsequent experiences…Moreover, depending on the strength of the initial excitatory reaction and the time, separation of emotions elicited at later times, residual excitation may intensify experiences further down the line.” and why it sticks with us after; “Emotions evoked in actuality by personal success or failure are usually allowed to run their course. A person, after achieving an important goal, may be ecstatic for minutes and jubilant for hours. Alternatively, a grievous experience may foster despair or sadness that similarly persists for comparatively long periods of time”.

Anna Karina's tearing up at the sight of Renée Jeanne Falconetti's performance as Joan of Arc in Carl Dreyer's is both a perfect example of the exact power Kiarostami alludes to, and a fascinating Russian Nesting Doll of the factors that exist to create our relationship to emotive catharsis and release through movie going. Does Karina see herself in Joan? Probably not, does she recognize in the aesthetics of Joan’s pain a certain appeal to her own, maybe? Whatever the reason Anna's own release as a response to stimuli that stimulated her own subjective experience, is so near objectively powerful that it itself became as recognizable and powerful a moment as the film it pays homage to and the particular scene that she was watching. The experience so relatable watching it becomes an experience itself. Nonetheless the factors around it that lead up to it , our own collective recognition, be it conscious or not that’s the killer knockdown, that’s the “Love TKO”. Much like a TKO it’s the build up that matters, the set ups, the small build-up of hits to the body, and wear on the mind that setup the knockout. Whether it’s an aggressively ugly cry or a suspended tear in the corner of the eye, it is what the storytelling has set up before that matters most. It’s the “everything around it" that Kiarostami spoke to. When I watch “Castaway” it’s the everything around Hanks endearing relationship with an inanimate object that became the embodiment of Hanks journey, and a security blanket for his feelings of intense isolation and loneliness that created a directline of passage for which the tears could fall down. The sight of watching all that float away when we do not yet know if he's even going to make it, finds it own subjective nesting place in the cradles of our own recognition of feelings of abandonment, loss, loneliness, and fear. The cry itself is in my opinion not so much a choice as it is itself an almost involuntary and intrusive response. The director is after all an audience member as well, and the actor and director are actively, simultaneously conjuring, responding and creating the stimuli by which they will both respond to in a way that I believe provided them with their own sense of catharsis and release consciously or not. The result is Hanks breaking completely down, and Zemeckis recognizing the moment itself as a proper realization of the created moment by way of his response to it, his own version of “Kiarostami's “what he thinks is good” turns out to be a pretty universal experience of good, hell..GREAT.

The socialization of Men to view crying as directly associated with femininity and femininity itself as an state of inferior otherness rather than a natural aspect of our complex and complete humanity leaves men at an interesting interaction of the conversation because any peek into an acting class will demonstrate how much more difficult it seems to be for men to cry on cue, and to properly crest and create within themselves the conditions that will allow them to act in such a way that it feels authentic. That sits parallel to the male audience member who may find repulsion at the sight of the the breakdown of the social barriers that protect them from the social rot of such a gross display of femininity. But the body and mind respond nonetheless, because the body and mind- even the socialized mind -subconsciously recognize what we may choose to repress. That being the case I ask myself how much of Kiarostami's feelings on the superiority of that particular type of display of emotion have to do with his own unique cultural socialization? Even while also being aware many a woman might also find this to be the superior form of emotional display on screen. The Conversation in my head could go on and on deeper and deeper, but ultimately what works on screen, what surpasses the realm of the superficial emotion, and steps beyond the border of profound emotional content as it regards one of the most fascinating and singular aspects of humanity - the ability to cry is endlessly complex and I feel exactly as Kiarostami feels in regards to getting there as an actor, as a director, and as an audience member keep and hold onto what is good and throw away everything else.

Yaphet Kotto: Don't Act, Just Be.

I once remember watching a Turner Classic Movies dedication to Katharine Hepburn in which Anthony Hopkins said that while working on the set of “The Lion in Winter” the great gave him a wonderful piece of advice, she told him “Don't act, read the lines, just be, just speak the lines”. It's a very specific piece of advice for a very specific type of actor of which Katherine Hepburn was, Anthony Hopkins is, and now Yaphet Kotto was. Yaphet Kotto enjoyed one of the greatest careers I think anybody so clearly held back by the industry has ever enjoyed. He got a bevy of unique and varied roles which allowed Kotto to flex his acting muscles in different ways, whether it be using his full 6ft 3 frame, his elegant way of movement, or his effortless way of speaking, and many times all three. Its the speaking part though that is my favorite part or talking point in regards to discussing Yaphet Kotto, because it plays so much into how Kotto's legacy engraved itself into our collective consciousness. Kotto like Hepburn, Hopkins, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, was an extension of that fold of actor where all the lines or the words find their meaning in the throat of the actor. The “heady actor” divines the meaning in the words, the “transformative actor” twists, bends and conforms the words to their will, the “straight shooter” just aims and fires, let’s the words find their target….and yes I made all those terms up. It has been spoken about many times, but far too many people have a disdain for actors who speak plainly, who in essence as Hepburn said don’t” act.” If it's not John Wayne it's Hepburn, or its Bruce Willis, Sam Jackson, or the Rock, but what's missed is in the case of all of these actors (and of course in varying degrees) there is an extreme degree of difficulty in just being. Number one, it must be said that from the moment an actor arrives on stage, or in front of the camera - there is almost instantaneously this need to be someone other than oneself. You realize we're here, that we are watching you, and all of a sudden every fiber of your being is telling you we can see right through you, we can hear you not being an actor and you need to emphasize more, or maybe that last word needs more accompanying face because yours , well that’s just plain silly. People are watching everywhere and all of a sudden all of the lessons that the world has taught you in that you yourself are not enough - arrive fully formed at your doorstep, and a great deal larger than yourself usually. These feelings of immense doubt and self deprecation growl and swipe at you, and you stand there and do what comes natural to do which is to defend yourself, and in comes all these elaborate techniques and ways to hide yourself, make yourself better, to make yourself appear larger, and before you know it you’re acting, just not…well. The most difficult questions for the actor are based in and around building at least a very good edifice of comfort in oneself to the point where you stop looking to be larger than, smaller than, more important than, and you just trust that you already these things. Now as for number the small aspect, this is made all that much more difficult when you add the politics of being black and let me be frank “Ugly” and then the politics of being black and “ugly” in Hollywood in the era in which Yaphet Kotto was to break into Hollywood. I don't use the word ugly lightly, and most definitely not objectively, but I do use it plainly, because it is what many people including black people themselves would call someone who looks like Kotto were he not an actor. The politics and the indoctrination of anti blackness, that hatred for blackness especially overt and explicit blackness in and around the body in America, are well documented. Yet somewhere in his childhood growing up maybe possibly watching the very white idols of a former generation - the Montgomery Clifts, the Marlon Brando's, the Gary Cooper's this child and then man had the audacity to want to join them on screen. Where does such boldness come from? To stand and affirm oneself, to push so boldly against what remains unseen, to place ones strengths and weaknesses bare in front of so many? .. only God knows, but it's extremely affecting when you watch it, and alluring in that Kotto found something beyond the superficial aspects of our underlying desires to be or be with those we watch on screen, he and others liked him forced us to reckon with our attraction to what we disdain, what we are told to dislike. In “Bone”(1972) he plays just this ..the avatar of americas deep obsession with, its fascination and love of all things black and its hatred. He is there to pull on and from what may or may not have ever existed. A white man insist that he sees a rat, his wife does not see a rat, when the camera pans to the pool where the rat supposedly is WE don't see a rat, but when Bone arrives literally out of nowhere he sticks his hand in the water and pulls from the blackness just that a rat. Kotto plays this as a secret only hes in on, even though the white man swore he had seen it too, it’s as if he knows it’s not there but that he can conjure it. There's a quiet sureness to his gaze which he holds that exists squarely in that special place between threat and sensuality. Bone knows, and because he too is a conjured idea of the white man’s fear and hia wifes lust ans this is all in movie, but its lifeless until Kotto erects it. That was his appeal to lean on, to pull us in, to mesmerize us with, and in so doing helped open our eyes to the possibilities for masculinity and desire if only we were so inclined. Whether in “Bone” or “Live and Let Die" he found a “constantly evolving before your eyes” concoction of raw power, sexuality, grace, and confidence that rent asunder many of the standing expectations of a man, a black man such as himself, and its extremely audacious and extremely effective much like his Bond Villian Mister Big…yeah that’s Yaphet ..Mister Big…

I was scrolling my Twitter timeline the other day and I fell on an interesting tweet where someone speaking about Anne Hathaway said “She always understands the assignment”. Once I got off thinking about whether or not it was true, I started to think about that particular usage of words, and how much I really liked it.. “always understands the assignment” - It's a vital integral aspect to acting. Amongst the great separators between the greats and the So So's. There are quite a few actors who I believe are quite good at what they do on paper, they have all the goods, but consistently they misunderstand the assignment, that is - what the role needs with the role calls for, and their interpretation of the role. Many times I've seen performers who are actually not that good become so good in a role that they become somewhat overrated as an actor - as it pertains to their skill level or the skill level involved with the work - simply because they were so good at understanding assignment! Thats the power of that factor. Think recently of Adam Sandler in “Uncut Gems”. In my opinion it's not so much that the man is so great in this role as far as the actual attributes important to acting, it's that he understands the assignment so well, so deeply, thqt it organically melded to everything he already had in him and it functions on a level akin to symbiosis. It's what many refer to as being born for a role in that there just weren't that many people who could cater to that role in the way Adam Sandler could and that's not to take away from him because part of that is that he had an imagination. He saw it so clearly, understood it so clearly and there are a lot of other actors who some might deem more intelligent, better actors who I think would absolutely fumble this because they'd overanalyze it, think it to death, or just dont have what Sandler has that kinetic, nervous energy alwaya coiled rans ready to bute has really been apart of hia entire brand for years, its very specifically his and only his and anything less might’ve ruined it, - With Yaphet though this specific attribute was not a one or two ( If you consider Punch Drunk Love another) time happening, it was his career. I've seen a lot of his films “Live and Let Die” “Alien” “Brubaker” “Across 110th Street” and lesser seen ones like “Bone” and “Friday Foster”. I've never seen one role, one word where it seems the Yaphet Kotto did not understand the assignment. Ridley Scott's Sci-fi horror classic “Alien” is the most ready made example of this, I think it’s why his role in it resonated with so many. There's a quality to the character Parker I think is built into the script. Class wise most of the crew is ambiguous at best, they could come from a wide range of backgrounds but it's Parker, Lambert, ( an under discussed Veronica Cartwright) and his partner in crime “Brett” (Harry Dean Stanton) that come closest to basically putting out a large neon sign that says blue collar.. working class. No one seems to get it more than Yaphet, its what separates him, not only understanding his class, but his blackness, but not forcing it, just letting it breathe it’s own life into the role. Perhaps coming directly off of Paul Scrader's magnificent “Blue Collar” just one year earlier he brought some of what he had there straight into the set here. The artifice is there - in the details; the bandana around the head the open shirt, the lack of any respect for decorum, that's the superficial calls to class, which many times in our collective minds has to do with our indoctrinations around certain behaviors mainly a sort of coded rigidity versus in openness and freeness, on the “Nostromo” you can almost rank their class and rank by just how open their shirts are . The blackness though is deeper, or maybe less noticeable I mean, but still very clear to the initiated, its in the way he checks folks, the seriousness about his money. Its in the fear he shows, how it registers in his body, it could be anybody but it reads as definitely black that's not just represented in the words that he mouths, but the way that he mouths them, and the body language that accompanies it. Its comforting to watch blackness flourish in a mostly white film without being embellished upon. I'm reminded of another role that I love and which a black man is surrounded by white people where his blackness is affirmed while never being overtly expressed to in a way that seems mawkish or exploitive ..Ernie Hudson as Winston Zeddmore in 1984's “Ghostbusters”. In both these roles there is a relaxed authenticity to how these men interact with and stand apart from the world in which they are involved, they understand how the world sees them in this place, they may even nod to it, but never overtly condescending to us the audience or to themselves, they simply let it be …

The politics surrounding the body in regards to Hollywood is important, especially when speaking to or about careers. Hollywood was never completely a safe comfortable space for atypical looks, bodies, minds, for anyone but especially not anyone who wasn’t white and cis male, but if ever a time came as close to being somewhat relaxed in the physiology and ideology as to who and who couldn't be a leading man or matinee idol in the realm of looks it seemed the 70s was that. It was it’s own kind of incubator for counterculture of which cinema of course didnt escape. The strong-jawed Lancaster's, Grant's , Pecks, and Mitchum's had aged out, and different types of men were taking their place with differing types of sex appeal and masculinity. It was now Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Jon Voight, Robert Duvall. These men werent the apex of male bodies, many of them had strange faces, broad and lean, with asymmetrical properties. They could be balding, or fat, or lanky and awkward, they had the everyman quality of a Stewart or Joseph Cotton rather than the reverential beauty of a James Dean, Clift, or Roc Hudson, but as is always the case whatever happens to the white male in this society is not merely or easily transferred over to black men, so while the ideas around what constitutes beauty and masculinity was broadening as it pertained to white males, for black men, and any other group not cis white males it led to a large void if represented at all. The “Blaxploitation” movies provided a lot of would-be suitors for black straight appearing ( because who knows) cis men in Billy Dee Williams, Calvin Lockhart, Richard Roundtree, Glynn Turman, Fred Williams, and of course Yaphet, but Hollywood seemed much more hesitant and apprehensive to crowning any one of these men as a new leading man, and so that void pretty much remained until Denzel Washington arrives nearly a decade later. It says quite a lot for Yaphet that out of all of these men that it's Yaphet, blacker than all of them, somewhat portly, and atypical even while in truth being beautiful man- who arguably had the best career. To watch Kotto was always to watch a sort of mini revolution in my mind, infinitesimal, maybe subatomic, but it was nonetheless a revolution. Every Kotto appearance was a small act of defiance against the standard, the ideal, there were very few actors like him then, and there are still fewer now who look like him now in looks or abilities. I don't know anything about Kotto in firmness, I don't like to make large grand statements about representation or what seeing a black man who looks like Kotto on screen does for all black people, but it implies a lot about HIS survival skills, about HIS abilities, and to some extent about HIS confidence. Kotto was a bit of a conundrum like so many black actors, (especially from his time) in that it is only after they pass you find that all these people knew of them, that they were beloved and their work was deeply appreciated because for so long they live unspoken of. You go to Kotto's Wikipedia and it's almost farcical how small it is. You try to look up information online it's not much there. Homicide life on the street ends its run in 00’ and for 21 years this man has one credit to his name. Did he retire on his own volition? Did he just feel like he had nothing more to say, did Hollywood decide that for him? We don't know because it seemed very few people cared enough to want to ask Mister Kotto, yet on the day he dies, with no political affiliation to speak of or to, only small mentions of a legacy in civil rights work, no celebrity gossip, no books or memoirs no lifetime achievement awards or various ceremonies celebrating his career, there is an outpouring much larger than the man's actual career really would speak to, and you would be a fool to belive this outpouring disingenuous. You can feel it in the size of the words used around his name, and the frequency. That…THAT to me is his legacy.. that he just let things be, that he just existed and yet despite or maybe because of that the respect for him is larger than most actors could hope for being given the same variables and forces working against for them as Kotto. Whether it was his life, or the words that he spoke in film, he just seemed to let them speak for themselves, rather than trying to force some meaning upon either his life or the words, and in that right there is his power to rest in.

ON ACTING.

THE ACTOR - PABLO PICASSO

I have been acting for now 14 years of my life. I've been to various conservatories and repertories and colleges, been destroyed by it and uplifted by it, but I've loved it and I’ve been mesmerized by it even longer, since I was a little boy watching classic movies with my father that featured Bogart, George Saunders, Bette Davis, Cary Grant, the 80s movies with Schwarzenegger, Keanu, and of course my favorite actor growing up Denzel Washington. I knew even then this was my favorite aspect of filmmaking, though I was to scared too even think about wanting to be an actor. Learning the craft though has definitively changed my perspective. It was Sanford Meisner's “On Acting" that first dramatically changed how I view, watch, and entertain actors, and in and on that journey, that sense of discovery, in that time spent being interested and curious about the work I noticed a divide between me and many of my compatriots and peers in criticism- most especially as it pertains to actors. The great and invaluable writer Angelica Jade Bastien has many times tweeted and spoke to the egregious nature of opinions on actors, the problem of which lies not in liking certain actors or disagreeing about performances, but in the constitution and the ideals behind it. The superficial nature of what warrants praise or condemnation for actors coming from those who watch tell us a lot about how little time many of the folk speaking spend making themselves knowledgeable about the craft. How much they depend purely upon their own perspective as an objective arbiter of truth in the work leads me to believe they feel acting is almost completely subjective. The way this continues to show up extends well beyond just critics and into the industry itself. To be honest most directors I hear talking on the subject clearly dont understand what actors do, they just know what they want, and if and when that meets with an unconscious bias around actors, or with the weird tangled ego of actors the tensions in the relationship of these communal groups end up as yet another example of how people that share similarities can be disdainful of each other, and showing how connected the nature of their distorted view of what it is that we do and what constitutes what the parameters and perimeters of good and bad actually are. The likes of the aforementioned Angelica Jade Bastien, Dan Callahan & Sheila O'Malley, Matthew Zoller-Seitz and Danny Bowes are as far and few in-between, as the likes of a De Sica, Chaplin, Scorcese, Tarantino, or Eastwood. Many of the others outside those I can’t name remember or am ignorant of are far too given to putting mustard on performances that overly rely on histrionics, or falling in love with a performance that relies too heavily on quietness or stillness when sometimes you need to go big, or coming down too hard and confusing stylized grandiosity with “hamming it up”. The lack of understanding about what constitutes “death” in acting and what truly reaches out into something beyond just being likeable or aesthetically pleasing shows up this year in the way that it can be tangibly felt that a performance on the scale of what Delroy Lindo did as “Paul" in Spike Lee's “Da five Bloods” seems to be getting smaller instead of growing bigger. In “Da Five Bloods" Lindo gave the best performance not only this year, but it maybe the past 10 years. The best work of any actor not just the past 10 years but it may be amongst the best of the past 50, 60, 70 years. What Lindo does goes deep in the annuls of all-time performances and it goes high, and yet if the conversation around it is any indication.. its just another good performance. For sure this has been a fantastic year for actors and men are finally included ( IMO these have been some down years for male performers). In the Cast of One Night in Miami each and everyone found the essence of their characters and related them back to us following material that found new folds snd creases in the masculinity of some of the most legendary men we've ever come to know publicly. But then I think it's important to understand that while they captured the essence they didn't quite reach the soul. The soul takes another level, and believe you me when it comes to acting there are most definitely levels. There is a reason beyond status, level of celebrity, and nostalgia, that Denzel's version of Malcolm X still reigns untouched by subsequent performances by Nigel Thatcher (The Godfather of Harlem) and Ben adir Kingsley (One Night in Miami). Reasons why though they are every bit Malcolm X's equal in love and recognition as historical figures of the highest order - Martin Luther King and Muhammad Ali still have yet to have that definitive portrayal. I think acknowledging that history, using it as a gauge or rather a bar is vital to discussing actors and their performances. Having that bar allows you not to stumble into the celebration of mediocrity, having that bar allows you to get specific about what it is you’re seeing, ans where exactly it lands on a spectrum rather than rhsi way where the words live in a vacuum and expreess similar excitement for two roles that are not on the same standard. One cannot simply just look at a performance in a vacuum without consideration of what the top tier level of that work looks like, marking in youenhead who and what the greatest form of actung looks like in your head it becomes a curve upon which we can better grade and assess what exactly it is we're saying about actors with their performances. Any and every performance involves several levels and I don't know that I can name them all, I don't know that I could articulate them all, but I will endeavor to explain some here based on what I believe was important and vital to Denzel's performance as Malcolm X. And I'll start with presence, and take it even a step further and go power. To play a transcendent figure you yourself must be transcendent. It is what Stella Adler spoke of when she lamented ; “In our theater the actors often don't raise themselves to the level of the characters, they bring the great characters down to their level. I'm afraid we live in the world that celebrates smallness.” By the time he was cast as Malcolm X Denzel had already displayed a level of talent and grandiosity that called out to the masses in a very similar way to Malcolm X. You watch Glory and you see it, you felt it in him yelling “Tear it Up!” , in his antagonistic behavior towards Andre Braugher and the other characters, and of course in one of the most recognizable and memorable moments in movies, his single tear. He drew and draws your attention right through Morgan Freeman, and despite the fact that the star of the movie is Matthew Broderick. Stella Adler continues: “There was a time when to play Oedipus you had to be an important actor. Until 30 or 40 years ago to play any major role whether it was Hamlet or Willy Loman, you had to have size. Write this down: you have to develop size”. This is something fairly new to on screen actors like Thatcher or Kingsley, but something they can develop by continuing their work and taking work that ask them to take it to Spinal Taps very infamous “11”. As acting teacher Marilyn Fox once told me “You have to be willing and allowed as an actor to take it too far and then there understand that there is no such thing as too far because” she said “It is beyond those boundaries that you find the performance”. Let’s be VERY clear, Thatcher and Adir-Kingsley are extremely talented, and they are both clearly well trained. They had an elite level of understanding of what and who their characters were and their responsibility to them, but they do not yet have that elite level of magnetism of presence and of size, so they depended totally up on training and skill and understanding of the role, a role that is essentially about one of the most charismatic and large figures in American history. Even if you want to make them more vulnerable, make them more approachable, humanize them in a certain way, you cannot afford to lose that grandiosity. Denzel as Malcolm did all of those things, and he was HUGE. Riz Ahmed in “The Sound of Metal, has that magnetism. Ahmed has what I call a natural standing belief, and by standing belief I mean just standing there you believe anything Riz Ahmed has to say . There's a natural built-in sincerity to him that comes out in his acting so that no matter what he's trying to sell you- as long as he understands it, and as long as that understanding is somewhat built into the work - he’s very hard to ignore or disbelieve as a character . He is a vulnerable actor, and he is a great listener, and maybe most importantly he is willing or seems willing to unlearn. In a recent interview with Matthew Zoller-Seitz, Matt asked about Riz Ahmed's walk, Riz immediately went into talking about the forms of non-verbal communication, “So once you come to SURRENDER to the script and to the technical process of preparation you do find that your body is telling you in a different way". “Acting is in the doing” Sanford Meisner ( maybe my favorite of the acting teachers besides Hagen) once said, and Riz is a doer, if I had to pick an actor that was next after Lindo from what I’ve seen this year itd be Ahmed. If I had any advice for Mr. Ahmed it would be go bigger. This doesn't mean I want the man to play in a Scarface film, (though in actuality that might be very interesting) but it does mean I want to see him try on his particular strengths in a suit that calls attention to them in a way that gives him this very size to match his self awareness, and deep earnesty. I'm saying it would be cool interesting to watch him in a Michael Corleone type role. Al Pacino found alot of his size ( and this is long before he started to rely on a few histrionics himself) in that role - in his stillness, proving it’s not all about big things, but the character has to be big, every actor needs a “Hamlet“, a “Virginia Woolf" For Pacino it was Corleone. His size, it's there when he closes the door on Diane Keaton's “Kay", and it’s there when he burns a hole into her with his eyes just before he violently slaps her. Ahmed has this kind of quiet size at the very end of “The Sound of Metal” but to pardon and unintentional play of words- that film and that role are far too muted inherently and purposely to be the kind of role that I’m talking about. If there's anything killing this era of acting, its the style that is being preferred, this fetishization of small subtle acting. I want to be clear - this too can be very powerful and in many cases it's necessary, but when you look back into the wide pantheon of performances that whether a cinephile or not people dont stop talking about, the ones celebrated over and over and over again, I guarantee you, you think about 99% of them and one word you must associate with it is Big. Whether you thought of it or not, it's there. Size isn't just about yelling or exaggeration and the effect it has on the audience, (which I think sometimes gets too much credit becomes a easy way into getting or being celebrated) ultimately at its core it is about purpose and goes back to Greek Theater where these actors had to play to audiences in large amphitheaters. Many of them wore special shoes in order to enlarge themselves, large masks, that they might be better seen, and they spread their bodies and their voices out in very exaggerated motions, and their form of speaking became very exaggerated as well and their delivery very deliberate. When Whoopi Goldberg smiles in The Color Purple it’s a smile that can be seen from a distance. Large, grand, beautiful, her own little rebellion in the onscreen fishbowl. Jimmy Stewart throws his lanky gaunt and lithe frame across the room in a fit and bout of fiery indignation in Mr Smith goes to Washington ans then he collapses and its a seismic as the rest of the performance, its a grand overture a final swing for the fences, THATS what you should always feel when watching a performance. Watch Nicholson in A Few Good Men, or the Last Detail, doesn't matter thw role might be detailed and subtle, but Nicholson is gonna bring it to you with a hammer, go back a ways and everything about Gloria Swanson or Toshiro Mifune is large, impactful in either Sunset Blvd or Rashomon. Jack In One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Meryl Streep in Sophie's Choice, (it's quiet but she still a large) Mae West, Al Pacino,Bette Davis, Robert De Niro, James Earl Jones, Elizabeth Taylor, Angela Bassett, Marcello Mastroianni, Paul Richter, pick any one of these names pick their best role, you'll find something about it that has scope, a sense of gravitas, and most definitely a sense of size. I can bet on Delroy, because performances like this dont come around but so many times in any given time PERIOD. If Yuen, (who I have not seen yet in Minari) Boseman, Ahmed, and Lindo are the best male performances of the year ( they are) and if they are in the same category in the Oscars ( that should be debatable) some of the things that I feel have corrupted and muddied the waters of the decision-making of those who are discussing these performances is worthwhile as a discussion not necessarily for the subjective battle between these actors but for the actor, and for all actors. Acting and or actors as a subject or as people have been discussed terribly. Performance reduced down to it’s most gawdy and banal quality-likeability, personality, these things do matter but thr cache of celebrity has entered the sphere and convoluted any real idea of what actors actually do, what it is, ctaft is rarely discussed and a number of adjectives lonk together to describe the complete and total dominance of the subjective as if there are no defintive waya to look at performances. For quite some time -and I think the advent of social media has really brought to bare in ways that one might not been able to have perceived before - the lack of curiosity about the craft, the lack of care for the work, and the lack of understanding of what it is you’re watching and at times it borders on atrocious. This piece is a labor of love, and respect, because as a movie goer, and as an actor this is important to me, this is special to me.

THE MAGIC ACT

One of the problems of the discourse that continues around actors is that there are very few people who in any real way understand what it is actors have to do. That is most people speak about actor performances in a way that is in the most classical sense of the word - selfish, self centered. It has so much more to do with how “I feel” about your performance, and less to do with the work involved in your performance, or the craft involved in your performance. It makes for the kind of takes that don’t draw the line between things rhe writing is doing and things the actor is bringing. So that we may like an actor like Tom Hardy and see a character that is pretty well defined by what he does, watch Hardy repeat and lean on his skills but also-ran tendencies and not critique that in his role in “The Revenant” which was really a continued repeat of the character he formed in movies like “Lawless” and nowhere near as revelatory or profound in what he found in his more interesting roles like “The Drop” or “Bronson”. More of that mumbling, lack of enunciation and his patent thousand yard stare, and so a slilled actor gives a somewhat distilled version of better work that mixed in with a great character, but unlike Sandler in Uncut Gems its not a discoverybof a new depth, its superficial. Roles like that become known partially because the focus becomes how the performance made “me” feel almost in total, and in that realm acting is completely subjective and thus any and every disagreement can be oversimplified as subjective, but there are as many ways to objectively grade acting as there are any other portion of the craft of filmmaking. The Last Dragon may be your favorite movie of all time, but most people who love that film ( Its ME, I’m most people) would hesitate to call it one of the greatest of all time without a sense of intentional irony or absurdity. This is because people have a sense of the history of filmmaking. They read and study even when they're not directors about the discipline. They go to Q& A's and lean on the words of directors and watch films especiallly to learn the quality of good filmmaking. It gets at and by process of elimination it implies almost directly the underlying problem and difference in how we view acting and especially I think American acting. I think it's at least worth noting culturally that European countries like France, Sweden, and of course England patronize and support the Arts and especially acting schools as a state function. Culturally they see it as a vital aspect of society. I think it's also worth noting that the Brits actually give out Knighthood to their actors! This is not to say that we should mimic this behavior, (personally I feel it’s a bit much) but it does tell us how important they see the art of that specific field. Here in America we've always had a conflicted relationship with actors. On the one hand we have at various occasions in our time bordered on deifying them. We hang on their every word, give them certain cultural and political abilities that they in fact might not and probably don't possess. We magnify their importance as overall people, but this is only when they become celebrities. The working actor does not enjoy this kind of a stage. A actor for the community is a joke, wasting his her or their life, and does not earn or command an iota of respect not even as a job holder. To this day acting as a career field is looked down upon as frivolous and flighty, the kind of pursuit not based in any real work, and that exists because of the divide between working as an amateur and a professional actor. Getting even the smallest paying job as an actor is difficult, because it’s not simply a job here, it’s not work. You are either on TV or on Broadway or your'e impractical and you're a bum Jules. I say that half in jest, using the quote from the diner dialogue in Pulp Fiction, but in many ways it's not that far off. All of this directly contributes to the mystification in an already murky institution, and in some areas the reduction of acting as a pursuit of craft, rather than of capital, which shows itself in all kinds of ways from the aforementioned lack of respect for the job to the erasure of the varying layers a performance. You don't have to be Jeff Bezos in order to be respected as the owner of a business - owning a small bar that does well in the town of the community would be well enough. Craft wise if a singer were to go on nothing but runs that feel exhaustive and overly performative most people can call that out but when an actor does a very similar thing many times in the public eye they're rewarded for it. The Divide between the amateur and professional shows itself in ways that present in the industry as a veteran professional actor being given far more adulation for poor or mid performances than they deserve. Denzel Washington most recently gave what I thought was a particularly lazy if not confused performance in “The Little Things” and still there were people saying that he was doing exceptional work there. If anybody else were acting like Denzel was acting in that movie they would get dragged from here to the amalfi coast and drowned, but its Denzel, and that is part of the problem. How little people know about what acting in a way makes it resemble magic. As a matter of fact many times what actors do is referred to as magic, whether talking about a sort of consequence of the effect, or their abilities. Many times it can be endearing, but I think it's dangerous in this respect; acting is not magic, it is a craft that actually depends upon knowledge, not ignorance for its effect. A craft of coming as close to truth as possible, as my acting coach once told me “acting is what you do out there, here you're here to give truth”. Acting is not (as commonly thought) about creating illusions, and unlike magic I don't think there should be so much of a mystery behind what actors do. Sure some actors believe in keeping some sort of mystery between their lives and their work but the work itself shouldn't be mysterious. Magicians depend upon the mystery of their work if you know what goes on in the act it is immediately ruined, but that's not the case with acting in fact I would argue the more we know about what actors do and what they have to do then the better the act becomes.

BE CURIOUS

This YouTube video of Michael Caine teaching a class specifically on movie acting is an absolute gem and it's one of a few, if not maybe the only thing of its kind available on the internet, and that specifically speaks to, answers, reveals what goes into our understanding of acting, because understand movie acting is (in a number of ways that I can't afford to go into here) decidedly and explicitly different from stage acting (although I do HIGHLY recommend being on the stage at some point during a career). Around 15 minutes into the video he goes on to talk about the difference between movie stardom and movie acting but recommends knowing and understanding what movie stardom is and how it can work for you in movie acting. This is the kind of information a writer of a recent opinion piece on Angelina Jolie could have used before writing a devastatingly bad take on Angelina's career. Too many times in our current era actors celebrity is directly linked to the way that people see, and read their work. This writer was unable to separate how she saw Angelina's celebrity from how she saw Angelina's ability to act, which has for some time now been significantly better than much of the media has been willing to admit. You get the distinct feeling sometimes that to some it can feel as if one person has too much, and to give them yet another thing, to add yet another thing onto their list of abilities or accomplishments just feels like an admission of your own lacking. In other cases we make the mistake of being angry disgusted, repulsed, by the cultivated, curated celebrity of the person (Think Tom Cruise's cringy inauthenticity in his real life) and we let it affect our ability to look at their work objectively, he's a helluva an actor who deserves more respect. Hell, sometimes our viewing, our perception of an actor's celebrity or the being-in-the-public eye portion of their work starts to affect the acting portion of their own work. Johnny Depp and Gary Oldman are two whose troubles behind the scenes (and it's just a theory) have affected in Depp's case and are starting to affect in Oldman's their art. I think for some time in the American coverage and understanding of acting - stargazing has dulled our senses and our perception of acting. We spend much too much time glaring at their brilliance paying attention only to those who burn the brightest within a Hollywood construction of stardom. When if you really want to know what the craft of acting is about its those who are deemed the “Character actors” that maybe have the most to say, that maybe most reliably portray to us what the work is.. the honest work free from the shackles of what Michael Caine discusses here or the base saturated sort of curation that goes on behind trying to make a career. Some of what the all-time great movie stars, (and I mean not just the stars, but the ones who could actually act their asses off man) - some of the most important aspects of what they have/had you can't teach. You can't learn that megawatt, god given you’re born with it “something”, but you can learn how to be such a megawatt born with it version of yourself may you shine just like them. For example, for the most of us, you may not ever be as cool is Paul Newman (just ain't happening I don't know what to tell you) but you can be just as affecting and memorable as a Paul Newman if you just watch and learn from what George Kennedy is doing in “Cool Hand Luke” because thas exactly what he did. John Cazale, Ruth Gordon, Angela Lansbury, Loretta Devine, Debbie Morgan, Joseph Cotton, Ned Beatty, Harry Dean Stanton, Bill Cobbs, Andre Braugher have a lot more to say in the craft, about the work of an actor than many of the superstars we put so much time and attention into. In essence the superstar, the movie star is a construct, and much of what they do is larger example of what Michael Caine advises against in his scene direction when he tells the young man “You were doing that for an audience, you have to do it as if you’re doing it for a friend” The great great stars do or did some of both, but stardom always asks of you, tries to nudge you into some manner of inauthenticity, it’s one reason why so many struggle with it. Acting cannot be about playing for an audience, it can't be about placating an audience and when we write about it I don't think it should be strictly about the audience. There's something disconnected and off about careers spent grading and discussing actors ability to perform with very few questions asked over their history to build a foundational idea of what it is actors are looking to do and looking to accomplish over a wide variety of roles and characters overtime that would aid in an understanding of why actor A or B is falling short. I think we understand because so many people have been so curious in the past about what it is directors do a lot more. It's all those questions, and all those essays, in all those books, and all those interviews strictly talking about directing, about auteur theory, and style over substance that interacts with our own developed tastes that has led us to understand and have a basis for when we decide “this doesn't appeal to me”, “this does appeal to me”. When talking about actors that seems to run purely off of a very subjective sense of feeling and ultimately entitlement that lacks a foundational education. In any case all of this, whether actor or critic- points to two obvious tragedies; a lack of interest in self interrogation and a lack of interest in the work. The latter is my concern. There is a profound lack of interest - or curiosity rather -in what actors do in their process. A valid question to ask is if we don't even know what it was an actor's intention or goals were, or what kinds of intentions are typical to the asks of a given role over a period of time because that has rarely been asked - then how can we really say we know for sure whether actors performances are good or not? What Caine teaches the student about camera acting and the different asks of the stage and the camera, and why the performance becomes gradually better as he warms to the idea that Caine presents is amazing to watch and should pique curiosity about the many other ways actors find ways into character or work, how they arrive at what they do. Too many times when an actor goes on interview or press run the questions lean towards their private lives and praise of the work, but not curiosity about how they came to create the work, or an oral history of the craftsman portion of creation of the work. No one seems to care that much about what actors are doing besides how it makes them feel. The amount and kinds of BTS ( behind the scenes) videos and content about what a director is doing, how special effects are created or recently the boom in curiosity about cinematography as compared to behind the scenes content around actors backs up my assertion. The misconception that Heath Ledger's death was in some way related to his performance in The Dark Knight backs up my assertion. The long-standing demand for memoirs on actors that have very little to do with how they worked each one of the roles that made them the legends, the troubles of finding and making a connection with what kind if actor they want to be with what kind Hollywood sees them as, the fact that there's a video of Christian Bale screaming his head off about below-the-line technician getting in his sight line but very little about why that was important to him backs up my assertion. The far and wide crevice between the mention of autuer theory and who created the framework for direction and those who created the framework for acting the Stella Adler's, the Lee Strasbergs, the Uta Hagan's, and the Sanford Meisner's backs up my assertion.

COLLABORATION IS A VITAL AND YET ALL TOO DISMISSED ASPECT OF PERFORMANCE

COLLABORATION BETTERS ELABORATION

A distinctive and cultural bias that moves towards reductionism, sloppy silly ideas like an A-list, and the nepotistic and political nature of Hollywood has caused us to miss out on so many astounding careers. Even character actors like Brad Pitt, Kevin Bacon, who made it sometimes struggle as Hollywood tries to force them into the role of being superstars. Too often in Hollywood functioning in its role as hand to capitalism - roles are based on what the audience wants or what it perceives the audience wants, or both, rather than building up on the skill set the actor clearly is showing a proclivity towards. Character actors are forced into being secondary and tertiary characters when they are actually well worth being leads. I promise you Katherine Hahn could hold your whole movie, and Don Cheadle outshined even the great Denzel in Carl Frankins noir classic “Devil in a Blue Dress” only to be misused and reduced to being Robert Downey's Roadie…literally. This kind of built-in bias not only harms careers like that of let's say Taylor Kitsch who definitely if any actor is a character actor, but it leaves a gash in our understanding of the collaborative nature of acting. In many ways I look at the way actors are treated by the public as similar to the way that Quarterbacks in American football are treated by the public, ( in this specific aspect of treatment not in role) put simply in some cases they are given far too much credit and in others they're given too little. In both cases this extends from the ways in which the collaborative nature of the discipline and the teamwork involved are ignored in a way that picks and chooses when to be conscious of it. In American football a quarterback is nothing without his offensive line. It matters a great deal what kind of receivers he has to throw to, and of course the NFL running back is integral to the ability of the quarterback to be able to do his work. Everyone knows it, but it tends to tell on bias who they choose to be aware of it for. As actors we aren't much different, directors, editor's and especially writers are vital to our process. Many times we are givien sole credit for our performances when they are the result of this very precious and precarious collaborative process. Just as well many times the performance is blamed solely on us when the direction, editing, or the depth and layers of the writing are ignored. I saw that many critics found Gary oldman's performance in “Mank” to be severely lacking, but rarely did I see a direct connection made between it and the material, I saw no pieces that informed anyone as to hoe if thrnidea of who Mank is is Fincher and his Dads vision, that Oldman bares the brunt of the balme for what came out? What was it about his craft, hia work, that didn't work, his age is such a superficial aspect, it’s not that it doesn't matter its that theres no way thats the most important aspect of what doesn't work, and id it is, thats too small a piece of the pie to even speak on Oldman. This is not to say that Oldman deserved no blame or isn't accountable for the way that performance turned out, but that as a collaborative process at least partially, the lacking in his performance is connected to the people around him just as much as if it were great, the greatness of the performance would be directly tied to those people around him. In the NFL it can be noted (if one wants to pay attention to it) that when the defenders arent defending and the offensive line isn't holding and the receivers aren't catching and the running game can't seem to get off the ground, then the quarterback is left to his own devices, and you may start seeing him forcing instead of letting the game come to him and this can lead to interceptions and fumbles and what is known in the game as Happy Feet. In acting the same thing can happen with actors, when a directors vision isnt clear, or is off, when writers write material that is lacking in places to explore or is incredibly inconsistent about character. When the editor is misreading and misinterpreting what is needed, even what is good, the actor may be left to their own devices and even with the greats this is not a good thing. On the other hand actors can still end up doing this even when all those things are there. Misinterpretation of the source material is one of the most common causes. A lack of interest in the layered, complex nature of human nature can also lead to this. Stella Adler always talked about life experience as being inextricable from good acting, not only in the sense of having no clue about the experience your portraying to pull from, but him the ways that can lead to you characterizing the part through a variety of superficial stimuli or gestures, meant to age you up, or suggest trauma you have no understanding of. - but in the way a lack of experience tends to reduce people down to the most basic motivations. It's very hard for actors who see the world in very limited terms to explore the ways in which a character is acting without relying on obvious stereotypes. In the world judgment can be a necessary component to being able to read people to being able to interact and deal properly with other people. I mean hell, it's evolutionary. If we didn't learn that spots on a four-legged animal means danger, maybe we’re the story of the Leopards digestive tract instead of an apex species. In acting though, quick judgement is a very dangerous component. Actors simply can't afford the luxury of judging, or reducing the characters they're playing to villains like we do many folks in real life ( and righteously many times I might add) the lack of empathy that many exhibit towards people who f*** up or act egregiously in politics and in various other aspects of life is a death to an actor. This is one of the reasons why I think actors don't necessarily make the best political commentators. In some occasions I think it's okay to admit that our judgment is a little bit skewed, leans a little bit too much towards empathy - though there are other occasions where I think those who live outside that fraternity could use a little bit of that particular quality. Knowing this I think it’d be a lot more interesting and we'd learn a lot more as critics and as an audience from some of the bad performances we've seen or some of the performances that fall short in our minds - if we were to ask to interview actors specifically for this reason. What's behind Jared Leto and Rami Malek doing some of the things they were doing in “The little things”, what were their ideas? What was asked of Gary Oldman in “Mank” and how does he see or interpret the character of Herman Mankiewicz, especially concerning their age difference, did he have any concerns? And while we are asking these actors we should be asking ourselves what is it specifically about this I don't care for? How would this scene be better made? What scene like this one contextually makes for better understanding of the text, better insight, and feels more connected, than the one I’m seeing, and how could that be replicated without asking that the actor simply mimick something that lives and exist in a different world under different rules in a different play or film. Bias is the enemy of the actor, but it is the enemy of the critic every bit as much. There needs to be an extraction of this idea at the root of much discourse around acting that what I like or what I feel strongest about is synonymous with what is best. A deconstruction of the centering of celebrities, and leads, and the marring of what actual Movie Stars are, as the only ones worth doing big spreads on. I want critics who interview a Shelley Duvall to ask not about what went on between she and Jack Nicholson, or how she got along with Stanley Kubrick, but I want them to ask her about the work. I want them to go film by film and talk to her about her processes for each one of those films. I want questions like “what was the role she was most terrified of”? “The role that she felt as though she never quite nailed, didn't understand, and why she felt as though she didn't understand the role. Did she maintain acting coaches on a retainer for all of her roles or did after a certain point she feel as though she could go on her own, and which roles did she do by herself and which roles did she do with the aid of an acting coach, and what did they offer, and what stuck with her? What are her fundamental ideas about acting, “Five Rules by Shelley Duvall for actors”. This is what I feel we need more of. Full spread interviews like these for Clifton Collins Jr and Charles S. Dutton, CCH Pounder, Lil Taylor S. Epatha Merkerson and beyond.

My point in all this is not to condescend to anyone, it is to recommend a reframing of the way in which we talk about actors because I believe it is absolutely necessary. Because I believe our obsession with celebrity has tainted and marred our ability to perceive conceptualize who actors are, what they're doing, and grade the work. I read once somewhere that Fred Williamson said there are too many actors who don't deserve to work who are working and too many who do deserve to work who aren't, and as critics I think it's worth it to acknowledge the role we play in heloing to prop that. Too many times I've heard some version of an ideology that says that grading performances is purely subjective and that is the problem. It's not that there isn't portions of the craft (and especially watching it) that absolutely are subjective, it’s that that kind of attitude is not should not be so lazily sat upon when we talk about someone's ability or inability. It's that when we talked about someone's to sing or someone's ability to play an instrument, or weld, we don't leave it as that, and that if we truly respected acting we’d know and act like it is not that much different. Arthur Lessac was adamant that acting is the use of your body, your voice, your mind as an instrument. The better you know about the way that that instrument functions, about the collaborative process of timing and execution, even as a critic- the better you're able to grade the difference between someone who has talent but over perceives it/ uses it, someone who doesn't, someone who does, what is effective and what is not, and more importantly why. Better understanding of the separation between celebrity and acting will get less takes that suggest that Angelina Jolie or that Jared Leto are simply not good actors or talentless, and more what they might be better served using, or why it is we don't like them in certain roles, or how it is they're being deployed. It would lead to more effective interrogation of great actors who turn in work that is actually half done, that feeds and lives purely off of the transcendency of their own talent, and tendencies for a reliance on their own over bearing sense of the actor self, wherein we might call both Joaquin Phoenix's performance in “The Joker” and Denzel Washington's in “The Little Things” dare I say it… bad. More curiosity from those not initiated in the form itself would lead to a lot better of a foundation , a lot more sturdy, solid and less subjective framework of the discourse around acting and actors. No, you're never going to get rid of people's feelings that some people don't do it for them, but I can tell you that the Beatles have never done it for me without saying they weren't great musicians. We need to afford actors that same level understanding, and interrogate our conflicting relationship with the craft. Stop associating it with that that lies almost purely outside the realm of objectivity and start acting as if there are definitive factors that play into good performers. This foundational reframing I believe will lead to a lot better conversations and discourse around performances, so that someone like Delroy Lindo who gave a performance that reaches out beyond decades, eras, generations, and other variables to stand alone as a uniquely definitive piece of classic American acting on a level that touches upon being a supernova will not fall behind in institutional discourse or conversations around the best actors are acting nor in informal conversation or discourse around the best actors or acting this year. We can't afford to push that aside, to reduce that kind of performance and we damn sure can't forget it, because it matters not only in giving actors like Delroy Lindo his proper due, but in giving future actors something to aspire to, to understanding what the craft actually involves so that they too may seek to arrive at that level of craft and talent. I am not among those who believe that there is some inherent superiority of British actors. There are a number of factors that play into that particular form of bias, I dont have the time to get into here, but I do believe there is something to be said about how that foolishness is directly connected to American culture around acting and the way it has devolved into something that is craven and crass and simplistic and almost completely utilitarian, if not for our obsession with beauty. It would do us good to remember that on several occasions when Hollywood has been stuck in a rut of producing unoriginal monotonous properties built around thier capitalistic fever before it has been foreign countries whether France, Italy, Japan, Korea, Iran, or Senegal that had to kick our ass to remind us of what this film s*** is all about. I think of that particular problem or aspect of that particular problem as it pertains to British and American actors as related. What do you say when on a widespread level you are coaching young actors in workshops to focus on developing a social media following to try and get work. When so many hard-working and deserving actors lose good jobs to those who are merely creating another revenue stream from another discipline such as music. When someone such as Common who I am sorry could not act his way out of a paper bag - ends up with what can be defined as a career. When people write thinly veiled hit pieces saying that Angelina Jolie is not completely deserving of her status as a great actor, that at the base of it all she's just beautiful and I guess that's okay is your thesis. When something as silly as the genre you're working in could keep you from getting your proper due for the work you've put in which is phenomenal, ( yes I'm talking about Toni Collette and Lupita Nyong'o and the wide and vast litany of mostly female actors who are ignored in the horror genre for performances that are out of this world) when so many questions in and around the craft are about things that have nothing to do with the craft. When being an actor is still even now a joke of a living. When there is a Royal Academy as a state funded school for actors there, but no State performing of Arts function here. When places that were never supported by the state in any way in the first place, or in very small ways like the Actors Studio and the Beverly Hills Playhouse are deteriorating, cracking, and still other ones almost already gone and when those places are almost only to be found in and by coastal areas and even then truthfully and only two major places Los Angeles and New York. When thousands of years into a very ancient craft, hundreds of years into the form of it that takes place on film-we still have done very little to understand it - well then maybe that's worth taking a look at as possibly a reason as to why so many people use silly logic to go out and draft British actors to take American jobs, because of course they would, this industry and most around conceptualize and characterize the work so poorly it only makes sense they would look to somewhere else where their own blind ineptitude couldn’t convolute their perception save to exaggerate the abilities of foreign bodies. I don't want a bunch of self-important pontificators walking around with pipes in their mouths explaining to everybody the seriousness of acting. I just want us to be more empathetic and understanding to what is actually involved in the work, and do the work of separating all of the things that the various incarnations of oppressive studio systems and the various inner workings and minutiae of trying to be a professional in Hollywood have done to hurt the actual work, and to reduce our ability to interpret it, to read it, to judge it.

Cary Grant: Never Go Full Drunk.

Cary Grant’s performance of the act of being drunk is A1 stuff. He acutely understands the delicate balance of recreating for an audience a feeling that is both familiar and unfamiliar because it is nor only rooted in emotion, but in actual physical impairment, we know the feeling, but we can’t connect to it because this is not emotion, which is a response, but a provoked response, it may be deep seated but it can be reached and voluntarily initiated. Physical impairment is not really as much a response as it is a lack of one, and when it is ( the case of drugs) it’s the bodies involuntary response. In most cases this is exactly why we shouldn’t have able bodied actors playing disabled roles as it not only has the sting of normative audacity, but it flies in the face of what it is actors do. Put more simply, another good reason physical impairment should not be played is because it inherently requires you to “act” in the most derogatory meaning of the word. Put even more simply in the slightly adjusted words of Robert Downeys actor from “Tropic Thunder” “Never go full Drunk”. There is very little truth in these performances for that very reason, but I digress….Grant understands the idea that the trick with drunkenness a different kind of impairment is to try very hard not to appear drunk, but also understands how it relates and applies itself to his character Roger Thornhill. Alchohol affects people differently , its important to understand who you are sober can be in relation to who you are drunk, but it is also an exaggeration of who you are not necessarily the one you want to count on. Grant decides to slow down Thornhill’s attention while speeding up his focus, because sober Thornhill’s focus is sharp and lingers, but in this state his attention is allowed to roam and be on the go. Cary’s dance background is also put to good use in maintaining his balance while being off balance which gives the perception of drunkenness. Watch how he is kind of spun into the direction of the phone from the bench, this is clearly like a dance , but it’s also part of an effort to be so sure about where he is going. .

Now compare that to this scene from Adam Sandler’s  hit movie Billy Madison….

Again while being drunk, often the importance to each person of appearing to be okay causes a hyper focus on some aesthetics, Sandler instead tries to play up the act of being drunk itself. These are comedic instincts, and though I like Sandler it’s one of the reasons I’m not as big as others on his forays into dramatic roles, hebstill has trouble differentiating how the “asks” are different for each discipline and even in his latest works like Uncut Gems it makes itself known. Anywho in Roger Thornhill’s case Grant decided it was his appearance, and his speech he wanted to focus on, because again he is still who he is, but he's now overly attentive to proving it. The easy choice, the one most actors go for immediately -would've been to slur the words, Grant’s choice is to put an emphasis on everything he says over-enunciating a lot of his vowels, and backing the intent up with unnecessary gestures that are clearly aimed at something but never find their way there, which is a much more authentic idea of drunkenness. The act of being strident about where you’re headed when you really have no clue is a much more interesting approach than simply playing up his character’s obnoxiousness (Sandler). I just want to point out how great this is because so many things even great actors do are not appreciated. This is the work.

Grant’s performance works precisely because it is realistic and it is hilarious and it’s hilarious because its realistic. Choices matter, and there are plenty of great ones made by a great one here. It’s the beginning of the film and it continues to tell us to inform us about whst’s important to Thornhill even when hes impaired, he will be further impaired in various ways during this film but this is what he holds onto, and this is what an actor holds onto to find a role. Detail matters in performance, nothing is to small to be played right, and creatively, and you’d be hard pressed to do better than take a lesson on the art of appearing drunk from quite possibly the greatest movie star in history.