Great Actors/Actresses & their Impact on Genre

Yun-Fat is a legend of Hong-Kong cinema, and one of the absolute greats. I mean he's worth 714m, and by all accounts is very generous (he gave most of his money to charity recently). In most of his best roles, he's not doing martial-artists (although he has obviously done classic martial arts type movies like Crouching Tiger), as much as he's a master of gunfights, and fists. A Better Tomorrow in particular features one of the absolute best shoot-out scenes ever, and similarly in Hard Boiled, he's really powerful, without necessarily being 100% intimating, while also showing-off his skills. He and John Woo are truly one of cinema's great director / actor pairing.

The problem with Chow's Hollywood career is the same thing that befell Jackie Chan, and Jet-Li, stereotyping, and getting bad-scripts. Hollywood is infamous for putting certain actors of ethnicity's into particular boxes, and Chow was no different. Aside from Anna and The King, I don't think he ever got English language film that really allowed him to show skills, instead he was mostly regulated to silly action films. Him being wasted in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, is one of that movies many sins. In comparison back in Hong Kong, he did dramatic roles all the time.

Oh yes, he always known as a versatile actor in his home country. He could have absolutely won an Oscar, if Hollywood wasn't so one-sided. I love that quote of his "In the West audiences think I am a stereotyped action star, or that I always play hitmen or killers. But in Hong Kong, I did a lot of comedy, many dramatic films, and most of all, romantic roles, lots of love stories. I was like a romance novel hero." Dude could have starred in a romantic comedy, and it would have been great. 

Wow, it's almost like the producers read this thread or something.  Great news. This would also be Conroy's first-live action role since 1995 too. He started his career as a TV actor, and was on a lot of shows including Cheers, before landing the part of Batman, and has basically done that role for the rest of his career since then. This is like a fanboy's dream come true, and I do watch those CW's shows, which helps. 

I just really enjoyed what I saw, even though to be honest Arrow kinda fell off a cliff for me after Season Three. The Flash is much better however, it's done a good job of embracing its comic-book counterpoint immensely, however Legends of Tomorrow is now currently my favorite of the bunch. So much fun! I can understand why someone wouldn't like them as much however, Flash and especially Arrow constantly follow The CW's melodramatic love-triangle formula to a T, to the point where they can kinda be obnoxious.

This crisis event sounds great though, and if anything I can appreciate that they're bringing in the big-guns this time. I was especially revealed once Warner Brothers decided to lift their ban on Batman / Superman appearances on the small screen. There's nothing wrong with other versions of those characters appearing on TV. 

Imo, you just covered Australia's best actress!!!

I'm aware of that thread. I just posted my personal opinion. Which is, Blanchett is better by far.
I respect other people's preferences but I stick to mine.

Yeah, I got that.

I feel like both Cate Blanchett and Kate Winslet got caught unawares by the shifts in the industry which has seen the top actresses in middle age becoming major producers of their own work to stay ahead in the game. Not only Nicole Kidman, but Reese Witherspoon, Charlize Theron etc. Even the younger ones like Margot Robbie are at it!

I feel like maybe Blanchett and Winslet felt cushioned by having more Oscar nods than their peer group, and sort of waited for the great offers to roll in (Winslet in particular has been in a major rut). And it didn't quite work out that way in the last few years. Hence Blanchett still being attached to the Lucille Ball project, which she probably expected to be made years ago.

Blanchett defintely seems to have learned from watching Kidman, Witherspoon et al advance their careers this way, and is now becoming a very active producer, co-creating a new TV series called Stateless, which she will also act in, and executive producing another TV limited series, Mrs America (her next biopic role actually, as real life conservative campaigner Phylis Schalfly), which she stars in, surrounded by a very talented cast. She's following her peers into major league producing and prestige television. 

Great and inevitable mention of the king of cool. Both, he (a mostly soap opera star) and John Woo (a mostly Wuxia, kung fu comedy director) truly found themselves to become one of the greatest and most iconic duo of the Action genre. But Chow Yun-Fat versatility is amazing, never out of the place whether it is in HK's (sometimes silly) comedy like The Diary of a Big Man or in more serious, dramatic roles, like in the early Johnnie To's All About Ah-Long or An Autumn's Tale (my fav of his non action role).

It's a shame that Hollywood wasted his talents, you understand why HK's finest, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai never worked in Hollywood...until his recent casting as a future Marvel villain..

With Tony Leung ka-Fai in Prison on Fire.

Now that we are done for the day acting as a feeder thread for ideas and content for less original and inspired threads, let's get back to business:



John Candy

Genre: Comedy

A while back, we sort of posited that Eddie Murphy, Steve Martin and Bill Murray might be the trumvirate of comic actors that represented the best of that golden age of film comedy in the 1980's. But you kind of have to consider John Candy, because the man was special.

For me, Candy was one of the few "fat" comic actors, where his weight wasn't the focal source of his humor (unlike say, Chris Farley). Candy was simply a very funny man and a very fine actor who happened to be overweight. Yes his size would sometimes be referenced to sell a joke, but it wasn't usually some lazy sight gag for a fat joke. Candy relied on his superb comic timing and strong acting ability to force his way into an extremely stacked pantheon of among the greatest 80's comic actors.

Candy started out the 80's as a sort of sidekick or second bannana in films like Splash and Brewsters Millions. I feel like his turn as Barf in Spaceballs ( a Chewbacca spoof) kind of got audiences primed to see him in more lead parts, and he started delivering in the late 80's. One cclassic after another. Planes, Trains And Automobiles, The Great Outdoors and my personal favorite, Uncle Buck. It was a very short peak as a lead comic actor, but a terrific one. Unfortunately, Candy passed away in 1994, before he could continue to fulfil that promise. Below, Caindy as Uncle Buck unable to ignore the wart on the face of a teacher he is meeting. It's very funny and Candy sells the humour in his facial expressions and delivery of his lines.

Mel Brooks
Genre: Parody Comedies

Now here’s somebody who could definitely fit into the "Great directors and their impact on a genre" thread, but here I wanted to focus on Mel Brooks as an actor / performer, as the majority of films that Mel acted in were of the parody sorts. Starting his career as a writer for a variety programs, Mel Brooks very soon gained a name for himself after winning the best original screenplay for The Producers, however Brooks did not really gain popularity until the release of two massive movies in the same year, which happened to be among my favorites, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein. The first of course was a classic satire of westerns along with a brilliant parody of race, and the later was a loving homage to old black and white horror movies, it might honestly be the last traditional B&W movie ever made too.

Brooks followed these two massively successful films up with more financially successful parodies, the majority of which I think get a bad rap. Silent Movie was his tribute to (duh), old silent movies, High Anxiety was a fun parody of Hitchcock films, History of The World Part 1 was both a skit movie as well as a homage to biblical epics, and of course Spaceballs was his out of the world take on Star Wars.

Now what I love most about Brooks’s work, is that with his few exceptions, you can really feel his love for the source material. Most directors wouldn’t go out of their way to find the old cameraman and technician, who worked on the old universal horror movies, so they could film a movie the old way, and yet Brooks did that. Similarly only a director like Mel Brooks in his prime, could make a movie that almost entirely devoid of dialogue outside of Marcel Marceau’s “noun!” gag, and have it be released by a major studio, and do it as well as it did.

Of course Brooks’s later movies were not up to snuff. While Spaceballs felt like a common ground between silly Brooks and “hip Brooks”, Robin Hood: Men in Tights took that to its nth degree. I still enjoy this movie to an extent, but I recognize that its comedy is a bit shall we say wobbly, and by that point Brooks seem to parodying films that were recent, as opposed to more “timeless and old”. Similarly while it also has its moments, including a memorably gory climax, Dracula: Dead & Loving It does feel quite stale, and despite featuring the spoofmeister himself Leslie Nielsen in the title role (now there’s a guy I could do write-up of, and it would kinda get depressing), has a feeling of “been there, done that!”

People often give Brooks crap for eventually taking the lead movies in his movies, when he should have stuck to parts like Governor Lepotomane in Blazing Saddles, and while I agree that a different lead (like say if Gene Wilder had not turned the lead in High Anxiety), could have made those movies different, I still think Brooks has an amicable presence to himself, that lent itself well enough to leading roles. He also has wonderful comic timing going for him as well.

Yeah, we should have done this before. It's obvious. 

We could have also covered him in the directors/ genre thread.