Scarily Classy (and Acting!)
You’ll have to excuse me if I go into weekend blogging mode a little early – I don’t mean to turn the site into some fourteen-year-olds tumblr full of animated Glee images, but check out this fantastic publicity still of Vincent Price and Peter Lorre’s wax head, from Tales Of Terror.
Last night Mac of BIOnighT was mentioning John Wayne’s dislike of Gene Hackman, which seemed, to me, to come out of that odd clash between classical and method actors that reached its peak in the ’60s and ’70s.
I have a lot of love for the personalities that arose out of the earlier style, and the realism that came with the later, but I have a theory that we’ve moved into a third phase – neo-classical.
Green screens, casting looks over talent, the tween market, and an aging Hollywood pantheon, have brought us back to where we began. At the risk of receiving a beating in my own home, let’s use Robert Pattinson as an example. He’s not a bad new-school actor, he’s a bad old-school actor: handsome, wooden, and without the charismatic personality to sell his roles.
(Yes, by this logic Vin Diesel is the new Errol Flynn. Dandy swashbucklers, sure, but let’s keep their dialogue to a minimum.)
Don’t fear, however, as this also means the new Orson Welles is somewhere in the wings, busily producing some under-appreciated bit of work we can all claim we discovered before anyone else.
[youtube_sc url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NMGsRmZTFQ]
Warning: NSFW language, if you can stand to watch the clip to its conclusion.
Working is not that difficult for bad actors nowadays. With the super-fast, anxiety-inducing, cut-cut-cut, fragmented editing of today’s films, you don’t even have the chance to actually see what actors do. Johnny Depp is, from my point of view and among the ones I know, the best actor to hit the screen since the 70’s, but I so regret that he wasn’t working in the 70’s when I would have had the chance to study and enjoy his amazing technique. Now I can barely recognize his face in the subliminal blur that this horrible and fashionable film editing is. Actors have become nothing but products to sell, as actors they do not exist anymore. Sure, good-looking actors were part of the game even before, but they were required to be able to act, too. Now it’s really not necessary. And considering the all time low films are at, it’s not even necessary to watch films anymore.
It’s so sad 🙁
Hmm, I too enjoy the work of Johnny Depp, although I’d never considered placing him in ’70s era film. It’s an interesting idea – I think his style would definitely fit.
I blame Ridley Scott’s Gladiator for the current over-use of blurry, shaky cameras.
I don’t know where it started but shakey-cam made The Rock unwatchable. And with Nic Cage in the film, there was some stiff competition.
Hmm – you’ve got a good point there. I’m trying to think of an earlier example, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear the technique started with Jerry Bruckheimer.
What really bothers me is the hyper-fast editing, no shot lasts more than a second or two…
I picked two scenes from two different films, the first is from Easy Rider. Please note how you are given all the time you need to look into Hopper’s eyes, you can actually see his thoughts, his hazy mind absorbing what Nicholson says, in other words: you can see a very, very nice performance by an actor, because you have the time to do so.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EpvRvaki-E&feature=related
For comparison, I’ve chosen a film I managed to enjoy in spite of its editing (Runaway Jury), but I could kill the editor(s). It’s certainly not one of the fastest paced movies in terms of editing, there’s A LOT worse, still you can see how practically every sentence any actors speaks is interrupted by at least one or two (or more) shots, you never have the chance to look at an actor’s face for more than a couple of seconds. Can anybody tell what Hoffman’s character was thinking and feeling? I can’t. Sure, I can imagine that by extrapolating that from the context, but not because I had a good look at that character, not because I could see the actor showing me. I think I couldn’t even say what color his eyes are. Basically all actors in that film are great, but all their performances are badly, badly damaged by this 24654123-shots-a-second mania.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sYSIfGmVzA&feature=related
Imagine that scene from Easy Rider edited like the one from Runaway Jury: hopper’s and the others’ performances would have been shot to hell.
Editing is no longer something that enhances a movie, it’s become something that tries to hide the directors’ shortcomings and that just makes the film fast-fast-fast so the morons won’t be bored while they stuff their mouths with pop corn.
Cinema is dead…
To your point – when I started watching the Easy Rider scene, I became totally arrested, and, despite having watched it not too long ago, I ended up sitting through the whole thing without realizing it.
The Runaway Jury clip, on the other hand, I stopped about a minute in, because I felt like I was getting whiplash being shunted around that courtroom so quickly.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say cinema is dead, but I do agree that it’s on life support.
Still, there are moments, like Fincher’s arguably over-stylized, but still fantastic, pseudo-one shot from Panic Room (starting at 1:50):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuVWUjHSLV8
I’d also argue that the Coen brothers have managed to avoid the evils of constant cutting.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2PPgcNjols
There’s a lot to chew on though, I’ll be thinking about this for the next while. 🙂