VERITAS
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Post by VERITAS on Jan 24, 2023 23:27:18 GMT
Harriet Andersson in Through a Glass Darkly. Again...
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Post by pacinoyes on Jan 26, 2023 11:18:57 GMT
Olivia De Havilland in The Dark Mirror (1946) -
There's a fascinating strand in post-WW II American film where psychology as a movie genre starts to take hold. This intersects with the rise of the Actors Studio too - so you start to see different kinds of roles and ways to go about playing them too. This would really function in movie plots in a more complicated way in the in the 1960s but in the 40s it so garish and extreme: as if the world had just seen what horror the mind was capable of - so the movies now needed more labyrinth conceptual designs to illustrate it. The Dark Mirror is a lot like another like Scarlet Street or My Name is Julia Ross where the idea of a "twin" - either literal (in this case) or in some way evoking an "other" (ie not "the same" person who you thought you knew) and De Havilland here has a role that requites a whole lot of technical prowess couched in carefully delineated characterizations. She's quite superb and she's quite subtle too - which would have been odd for this time and these roles..........how she uses her features - voice, smile, eyes, to suggest things to us - that the script doesn't quite spell out .......it is a very modern-type piece of work. Not to mention the ways she holds a cigarette! One of her best - and started a great run for her too in the next few years......
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Post by Pittsnogle_Goggins on Jan 26, 2023 13:39:21 GMT
Shelly Duvall and Sissy Spacek in 3 Women. So many layers to both performances and so much going on which is expressed and unsaid.
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Post by stabcaesar on Jan 28, 2023 12:01:03 GMT
The misery porn in this film is exhausting, but Javier Barden is simply astonishing. Definitely the best performance directed by Inarritu whose style of filmmaking isn't my cup of tea at all.
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Post by pacinoyes on Feb 2, 2023 11:18:04 GMT
Tilda Swinton - The Eternal Daughter (2022)I am not the biggest Swinton fan - although I think she's really superb. I don't rank her with Blanchett but I rank her above Kidman for the 3 that are often compared (English language Oscar winning risk takers 50+). This movie however is pretty baffling to me - a very slight story imo - that totally depends on Swinton's dual virtuosity.........she is astonishingly good here - in her own way as much as an acting tour de force as Blanchett in Tár (no, I don't think she would have been "better" in that role - but thnx4asking - many have suggested that btw). Why wasn't this in the awards discussion? I dunno but I'd put this only behind Blanchett, Riseborough and Goth (Pearl) and maybe Seydoux (One Fine Morning) - now that's an amazing top 5 .......
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Post by Pittsnogle_Goggins on Feb 2, 2023 15:47:08 GMT
Paul Newman in The Verdict. Newman is superb as a washed up drunk desperate for redemption. Roles like this are really what separated him from Redford, who’d be much to scared to take a risk on such an untypical role. Newman’s performance really drives the film much more than the court case itself.
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VERITAS
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Post by VERITAS on Feb 2, 2023 22:41:47 GMT
Morfydd Clark in Saint Maud. Felt bamboozled after realising she was also Galadriel in Rings of Power...
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Post by stabcaesar on Feb 3, 2023 15:15:30 GMT
Iconic. Fay Bainter was really, really good too.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 3, 2023 15:16:05 GMT
Paul Newman in The Verdict. Newman is superb as a washed up drunk desperate for redemption. Roles like this are really what separated him from Redford, who’d be much to scared to take a risk on such an untypical role. Newman’s performance really drives the film much more than the court case itself. Rampling too was totally deserving of an Oscar nomination, don't you think?
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Post by Pittsnogle_Goggins on Feb 3, 2023 15:57:50 GMT
Paul Newman in The Verdict. Newman is superb as a washed up drunk desperate for redemption. Roles like this are really what separated him from Redford, who’d be much to scared to take a risk on such an untypical role. Newman’s performance really drives the film much more than the court case itself. Rampling too was totally deserving of an Oscar nomination, don't you think? I’m not familiar enough with the other supporting actress competition to speak on if I really think she was deserving of a nom or not, but she was very good with what she had to work with. Especially at the end of the film.
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Post by pacinoyes on Feb 5, 2023 7:23:21 GMT
Ludivine Sagnier and Kristin Scott Thomas in Love Crime (2010) - rewatch The original version of Brian De Palma's rollicking, return to form imo - Passion (2012) - this is equally convoluted and equally well cast - this version's big plus is in having the females be more age disparate and De Palma invents an angle absent here (more than 1 angle actually). In somehow keeping it "more realistic" (ha!) this is somehow less logical but less "guilty pleasure" - it's more illogical AND more legit So this movie plays it more straight - or depending on your level of interest - De Palma plays it more like De Palma. In his version the females are vipers and in the original men are at war with those vipers........ Thomas is aces at playing broad things slyly - when she whispers in Sagnier's ear - it's a mic drop moment - and Sagnier -- never a "great actress" manages to use her awkward on camera thing to fine effect - as on some level this character goes through several stages of awkwardness and pretending.......it plays as an actress in a batshit soap opera in over her head......but she fits here. In neither version did this maze like mystery get good reviews - and in both versions I could watch them over and over again .........because I love this stuff.....and when Americans do this stuff (or in the hands of anybody not named De Palma) - this turns into fun lesser trash like "Malice".........here and in Passion - this turns into something more fun, more trashy - more Pop Art ...........with undertones that make sense (Being Loved vs. Admired) even though the machinations do not.......that's the beauty of the movies........ What perfume do you wear?
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Post by pacinoyes on Feb 6, 2023 10:08:39 GMT
John C. Reilly, Kate Winslet, Jodie Foster, Christoph Waltz in Carnage (2011) - rewatch "Everybody has to save themselves somehow" - that line is absolutely crucial and delivered in an offhand way right after Reilly blames Foster for "pretending" to be (or make him) "liberal"......... Carnage is actually more relevant now than it was (I once rated it a 7.5+, which is about right but "feels" low at the same time tbh) and that is not just socio-politically but also in sexual dynamics too......the stuff where "your friend Jane Fonda" gets brought up at the end is inspired writing, both as social commentary and media / celebrity skewering. This movie has Coppola's team of Milena Canonero and Dean Tavoularis handling costumes and production design - and both are exquisite - and at times you notice a scarf or coat or liquor bottles as so precise in layout it's almost breathtaking. When do you ever notice these elements this much in a one room play? So many things go into the precise musicology and specific rhythm of these 4 performances - the way Polanski frames and positions them too - how Waltz appears both intimidating and later quite small (and emasculated) - it's ingeniously done. When Reilly cuts loose here - you don't get the feeling he's confined in any way......when Winslet (literally) is so sickened by the incremental increasing nastiness she reminds you of every bad day embarrassment you've ever had....... Also, all 4 of these performances are funny - both in a haha way but also even more - in a terrifying way ......
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Post by pacinoyes on Feb 7, 2023 6:53:35 GMT
Sergi López in With a Friend Like Harry (aka Harry He's Here To Help) (2000) rewatch -
Another of those eminently watchable French implausibilities without the filmmaking zeal of Hitchcock or De Palma but that takes from both. Sort of an "unrequested" Strangers On A Train - this movie shows you 2 things about a movie character: It matters how an actor comes into a movie and how he exits it - López memorably does both and both are marvelously offhand........and he also shows how just one element of a performance can weirdly click with you so you remember it: Whenever López is "confronted" by anyone here - he is positively fascinating in his reactions - the guy who smiles way "too much", or is little boy crestfallen when you does something wrong (when really he is doing wrong things all the time ) .......López makes his Harry your overly helpful neighbor that you wish would go away......the movie might be improbable, malicious fun.......but López makes Harry way too recognizable for comfort.....he's "off" right from the start....... A marvelous, imaginative and fun portrayal that straddles the line between darkly comic and matter of fact "But I thought that's what you wanted!" just plain dark .......... and a César winning performance too.... His 1st scene - a mirror - "mirroring" the "twin / double" theme of Strangers on A Train (two suitcases, two pairs of shoes etc)......quite clever:
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Post by pacinoyes on Feb 8, 2023 7:56:25 GMT
Emmanuelle Seigner - Venus in Fur (2013) - RewatchOf all the performances I've reviewed lately - With a Friend Like Harry, Love Crime, Carnage ^ none have the wit of Seigner here and not just wit but conspiratorial delight in conjunction with her director / husband (Roman Polanski). The joy of what these two concoct here is so palpable its off the charts in multi-tiered way......it's not merely the last great performance I've seen......it's by far the most fun too.....
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Post by wilcinema on Feb 8, 2023 13:46:02 GMT
Emmanuelle Seigner - Venus in Fur (2013) - RewatchOf all the performances I've reviewed lately - With a Friend Like Harry, Love Crime, Carnage ^ none have the wit of Seigner here and not just wit but conspiratorial delight in conjunction with her director / husband (Roman Polanski). The joy of what these two concoct here is so palpable its off the charts in multi-tiered way......it's not merely the last great performance I've seen......it's by far the most fun too..... What a phenomenal performance indeed. I've never really rated her highly as an actress but she knocks it out of the park here.
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Post by pacinoyes on Feb 9, 2023 10:49:57 GMT
Marie Gillain in L'Appât aka The Bait (1995) - rewatch
There's much greatness to this movie which addresses something movies often try and never get "quite" right - the intersection of the banality of evil, the movies, youth, and lives gone incrementally off the rails. Bertrand Tavernier - director of at least 1 masterpiece ( Coup De Torchon (1981)) - clinically, with surgical precision - slowly dissects them here. "Slowly" is the key word because you think you know these people and want the movie to get on with it at a pace that would be illogical - these "kids" didn't go from watching De Palma's Scarface (1983) to the moral slippage here just like that, yanno? This movie takes the romantic allure out of violence and what's left is something more disquieting at its core - Marie Gillain is lovely here and also lovely in the way - that allows her to be this way - in that you ache for her choices in its conflicting impulses.......at one time this role would have been played by Huppert or Adjani or Bonnaire.......that's really how good she is here.......it makes you wonder all sorts of things - what's the last thing I saw her in? Why wasn't she a bigger actress? Why don't more people talk about this movie anyway? She breaks your heart ........in several ways........
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Post by Pittsnogle_Goggins on Feb 9, 2023 14:17:47 GMT
Denzel Washington and Viola Davis in Fences. Denzel playing probably his most unlikeable character but still giving enough charisma for you to get why he has close friends or his wife fell in love with him. A man so bitter and angry at life for every bad break and disadvantage he had that he lashes it all out on the people around him, especially his son. And Davis who knows she has to strategically pick and choose when to speak up but mostly has to tip toe around her own feeling which in turn state bottled up until her big blowup scene.
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VERITAS
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Post by VERITAS on Feb 9, 2023 23:11:55 GMT
Elena Fokina in that scene of Suspiria (2018) which I've been obsessed with recently. Her performance/delivery before the moment is actually remarkable considering she's more of a trained dancer than actress...
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Post by pacinoyes on Feb 14, 2023 9:12:39 GMT
Jean Rochefort - Wild Target (1993) - rewatchHysterically funny black comedy movie and performance that will baffle some but send others to something approaching delirium Rochefort gives a kind of fully thought-out comic turn that you can't imagine many American actors giving - they either can't go dark enough or be funny enough.......one of the best examples of acting as a specific type that you can't draw many parallels too....... Wild Target also has Guillaume Depardieu and Marie Trintignant in it - 2 tragic lives in a movie addressing death which gives it a weird and even darker angle...... It also has a very clever visual design that inserts sight gags - some of which you can miss but they make the movie have a full effect too..... The English language remake ( Bill Nighy, Emily Blunt) isn't worth your time....
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Post by pacinoyes on Feb 17, 2023 9:05:35 GMT
Dónall Ó Héalai -Seen him in 2 films where he's the lead - Foscadh (2021) and Arracht (aka Monster) (2019) - Impressive 1-2 punch of movie star character acting and opposite types of performances....... seek him out........he has something big in him.........and Martin McDonagh could make this guy a legend tbh....... youngserling mentioned him in a post about Oscar submissions - copied below - on Sep 22, 2021 at 6:57pm: - which is pretty cool too: Ireland
Ireland has selected its representative film for the next Oscars. Foscadh is about 28-year-old John Cunliffe who has always depended on his overprotective parents making him lonely and friendless. But after the death of his parents, he for the first time has to see how to survive and relate to the people around him. The main actor of Foscadh is Dónall Ó Héalai who for the second year in a row has a film as the leading actor as representative of Ireland at the Oscars. The previous one was Arracht. Also Foscadh is Seán Breathnach's first film as a director. To date Ireland has not been nominated for an Oscar although Viva was close in 2016 when it was placed on the Shortlist.
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Nikan
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Post by Nikan on Feb 17, 2023 18:32:50 GMT
Giulietta Masina in La Strada - Somewhere between a Harpo Marx and a Amelie Poulain, imbued with held-in sadness... Don't remember when was the last time a performance won me over this quickly and effortlessly.
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Post by pacinoyes on Feb 18, 2023 7:31:29 GMT
Su-yeon Cha in Beautiful (2008)This movie is very much like Blind Beast (1969) or The Stendahl Syndrome (1996) - 2 movies that could be argued as feminist films or grossly sexist ones depending on how you read them - or if you choose to read them at all. This isn't as good as those 2 but I love those....... and the premise - based on a story idea by Kim-Ki Duk no less - fascinates even as the movie never quite hits the peak it should and tonally drifts (I think?) to a few unintentional, cruel laughs. This gets very rape-y and then dives headlong into the psychological (and in an exploitation way btw) undercurrents of rape........body image, mental image, trauma, mental health, and from the male POV some real dark ideas about how they "see" the female........ Su-yeon Cha goes all the way here in her self-loathing, alternately hating her body as a penance and as a tool to destroy herself........the movie doesn't build in a way that tops what came before - the ending is too rote - and her co-stars aren't on her level.....but still, she's fearless and memorable........it's a great, horrible idea for a movie....
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Post by michael128 on Feb 19, 2023 7:37:37 GMT
The women in The Girl on the Train!
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Post by stabcaesar on Feb 22, 2023 14:02:52 GMT
Legitimately covers almost all human emotions in two hours. Falling in love, murderous rage, hatred, despair, disgust, pity, jealousy, fatherly love, and simple contentment. It's tremendous.
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Post by pacinoyes on Feb 25, 2023 12:11:57 GMT
Diane Morgan in Cunk on Earth (2022 / 2023 - Netflix) - 5 episodesAn instant cult classic in our time - the first great "new" thing I've seen on TV / Movies this year - it premiered on Netflix in January 2023 but was on BBC Two in 2022 so ....... Much of the Great Art of the last 50 years has treaded the balancing act between the stupidly brilliant and the brilliantly stupid - The early Ramones, Woody Allen's Love and Death, my posts on MAR, This Is Spinal Tap etc. If you want to be taken seriously - act (too) serious (U2, ahem) - if you want to be thoughht of as an idiott - well, misspelll words........ Cunk on Earth is in that pantheon ^ - so on point and up to the minute timely in its satire of a very uninformed person / culture .........it takes on larger implications - in how uninformed we are in our age of "New Enlightenment" (yeah right) and where we get our info from........... and the idiots we get it from ........ It is so breezy and bubbly you may not even notice how cooly precise it is in taking down Dumb Ass Presentism.........the only way to tell people how laughable they are is to make them think they aren't being mocked (they / we / you are)......taking down not merely all things evil (White Men, Patriarchy, Religion - all of them btw) but by snarky asides to all things Really Evil (Woke-ism, Pretension, Humans - in General btw) Diane Morgan - as Philomena Cunk - is absolutely comic acting brilliance here - doing a kind of performance that doesn't seem like acting at all - narration, speaking directly into the camera, strange asides (likely improvised - some of the time), some physical comedy, clueless in the best sense........this is a Nigel Tufnel level mockumentary performance - and some of this is (a little?) non-scripted too ...........but it's hard to know what exactly in her deadpan delivery........it's a one woman tour de force of idiocy. Like Morgan says while looking at the Mona Lisa "Is this really good? ...........or is it just something we are told is good...........like Seafood?"It's really good.......
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