Assignment #4: Dedicated Fans
Posted by Austin Cinephile
Every week, we will be posting a prompt related to cinephilia, and some of our founding members will contribute a short response. Hopefully you, our dear readers, will feel compelled to respond in our comment section as well. This week’s prompt was:
Are there any actors/directors whose new films you will see regardless of any conditions?
Daniel
I chose this question because I think it is provocative and gets at the heart of moviegoing in the 21st century. As anyone interested in film history knows, the experience of cinemagoing is always changing. One of the major changes in the past century is a shift in audience perception from an actor oriented cinema to a director oriented cinema. So, in 1939, It’s A Wonderful Life is a Jimmy Stewart picture. Now, in 2010, it is most likely a Frank Capra film.
So, if I think about what directors’ films I would go to sight-unseen, the list is practically endless:
Woody Allen, Jim Jarmusch, Pedro Almodovar, John Waters, Coen Brothers, David Cronenberg, Steven Soderbergh, Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry, Tim Burton, David Lynch, Larry Charles, Sam Raimi, Brian De Palma, Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, Spike Lee, Noah Baumbach, Jared Hess, Rob Zombie, Caveh Zahedi, Quentin Tarantino, Richard Linklater, Werner Herzog, Jody Hill, Martin Scorsese, and many more Many of these filmmakers (I’m looking at you, Joel and Ethan) make films I don’t even like. I am just interested in seeing the films made by the artists of our time.
Brian De Palma. I miss him.
Actors, on the other hand, represent a very different appeal. As I will hopefully have the venue to explain in more detail later, I generally hate actors and undervalue their contribution to the cinema greatly. Look: if Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson can make the greatest films with nonactors, then I think that actors are not necessary.
That said, are there any actors that would bring me out to the movies? The actors I really admire: Jude Law, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jason Schwartzman, Nicole Kidman, Mark Wahlberg, Ben Affleck, Julianne Moore, James Spader, Michelle Williams, Leonardo DiCaprio, Chris Eigeman, Chloe Sevigny, Bill Murray, the Wilson brothers, Willem Dafoe, etc. I like seeing them, I identify with them. But, and this is an exercise that is going to take more time than it’s worth, allow me to put forward the following arguments:
Breaking and Entering, The Jacket, The Marc Pease Experience, Nine, Max Payne, State of Play, Next, Shadow of Fear, Deception, Body of Lies, Maid in Manhattan, Zodiac, City of Ember, Drillbit Taylor, xXx: State of the Union. That is one movie for each person I put forward that I hope I never have to see.
Yeah, I said Chris Eigeman. So what? I love that guy.
The truth is, good actors make many more bad movies that good directors do. This is especially strange because they get paid more and need to work less. That said, I have grown to not trust actors’ judgments, so I do not attach myself to the actor as I do for the director.
The only exception, and i think it is one we should consider, is the comic actor. The comedy genre is typically one that is separate from the mainstream cinema in style and content. It is also very much an actor’s medium, and the number of good comedy directors is very, very small (Woody Allen, Kevin Smith, Christopher Guest, John Lasseter, John Waters, Jody Hill).
Good comic performers, however, are abundant, and I think they may draw me to the cinema more than any straight actor would. Even thought I was very disappointed with Bruno, I would still see a new Sacha Baron Cohen movie. Seth Rogen, Craig Robinson, Aziz Ansari, Jonah Hill, all the same. If I knew they were in a new movie, I’d schlep down to the cinema to see it.
But what about Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa?
That is basically true. I could point out that I didn’t see Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, Horton Hears a Who!, Miss March, The Rocker, and Strange Wilderness. Oh, this is hard.
I guess the truth is there isn’t really a single actor that I am committed to. This may explain a lot about contemporary cinemagoing.
Stephen
My loyal affinities for directors like Werner Herzog, Woody Allen, and Spike Jonze and actors like Jude Law, Ethan Hawke, and Anne Hathaway have been well-documented on this website, but those filmmakers are easy to like because they so rarely contribute to a bad movie. Perhaps the more interesting answer here would be to point out an actor whose work I will always see even though his films have often disappointed me, and that actor would be Peter O’Toole.
Trying to remember that girl's name from last night.
It may be obvious to say that O’Toole has been in a great many wonderful movies, but I’m willing to bet that you haven’t even seen half of them. He’s known for the two historical epics that shot him to stardom, Lawrence of Arabia and Becket, as well as the sharply witty verbal duels with Katharine Hepburn that sustain the 1968 classic The Lion in Winter. But have you seen him as Dr. Fritz Fassbender in Woody’s What’s New Pussycat? Or as the Errol Flynn-esque washout Alan Swann in My Favorite Year? Or how about his finest performance as Jack Arnold Alexander Tancred Gurney in The Ruling Class, where he plays a man who spends most of the film believing he is Jesus Christ before ultimately deciding that he is, in fact, Jack the Ripper? These are in addition to some of his fine recent films, including his Oscar-nominated role in Roger Michell’s wonderful Venus and the snobby food critic in Ratatouille.
With such great work to his credit, what’s to stop everyone from loving this guy as much as I do? Plenty, as a matter of fact, and here is where the disappointment comes in. There were the two musical train wrecks he inexplicably decided to star in, Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Man of La Mancha. How could we forget his performance as Zaltar in Supergirl: The Movie? And of course, he did participate in two of the worst films ever made about ancient times, Troy and Caligula. One was about Greece, the other about Rome, both equally terrible.
But even when getting himself into a bad movie, as he frequently has, O’Toole brings his familiar wide-eyed spirit to each role. Fueled by booze and loose women, O’Toole and his pal Richard Burton really were living the high life in the 1960s, and you can’t help but notice that glint in O’Toole’s eye in all of his films, as if he’s thinking about what he has planned after the shoot tonight. This vivaciousness obviously serves his What’s, New Pussycat? and My Favorite Year roles, not to mention his King Henry II in both Becket and The Lion in Winter, as these characters are all boozers and womanizers. But the same traits that made his lust for alcohol and dames so palpable in those films informed the lust for life, glory, and revolution that he displays as T.E. Lawrence, his most famous role. Looking into those eyes, both British and Arabic officials alike can see this man is looking to start some trouble.
Still horny after all these years.
As fine as his voice work for Ratatouille was, I hope O’Toole doesn’t retreat to the recording studio in his old age. These cartoons, as lifelike as they have become, cannot hope to match the expressive work of art that is Peter O’Toole’s face, which you’ll know is still in fine, lascivious form if you’ve seen Venus. I noticed on IMDb that, in addition to a few of the usual historical dramas, O’Toole is shooting a futuristic movie called Eager to Die, in which his character Lord Pelican is a politically incorrect television personality who is frequently the target of government assassinations. This probably won’t sell many tickets, but you can certainly count me in.
Michael
Official Selections:
First and foremost, Tim Burton is a must see. I have watched every film he’s put out in theaters since Mars Attacks! (1996) and will continue to do so till the day I die. While his films are not always the best pictures of the year (in fact, they rarely are) they always crack my top ten. Burton just strikes a chord in me that few other directors do, and it is a chord that has been ringing since I was but a wee lad. As a result, I attach a great deal of nostalgia to his films, even his new ones. It should come as no surprise then that I am eagerly awaiting this year’s Alice in Wonderland, a director-narrative pairing that is not made in heaven exactly, but rather some more twisted, darker, black and white striped re-imagination of it.
It should also come as no surprise, then, that Johnny Depp is one of those actors that puts me in the theater seats every time. While I have talked with some that are at their ends with his eccentric mannerisms, I really can’t get enough. Similar to my relationship with Burton’s filmmaking, my Johnny jonesing also started at a young age with the horribly wonderful, after school special-esque, undercover cop television program 21 Jump Street. So by the time I saw Johnny get splattered all over his ceiling by a puss-ridden Robert Englund, I was sold.
While I don’t want to spend too much time going into these next two selections, I’ll say that I never miss a Tarantino or Coen Bros. film. These three filmmakers take up a whole shelf on my DVD rack (well, maybe not a whole shelf—I use a pretty big bookshelf—, but throw in Burton and it definitely spans the board). And, while Burton’s films are rarely my top selection for the year Tarantino and the Coens frequently vie for number one.
And, finally, I haven’t missed a Scorsese picture in years (at least not his narrative works). Daniel asked me once whom I considered to be the biggest living legend working today. Immediately I answered Scorsese. Despite his 5’4” stature, he’s as big as they come in my eyes.
Some rising interests or right on the cusps:
Woody Allen: While I am willing and eager to watch anything he puts out, I don’t always catch them in the theater. Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), definitely! Scoop (2006), I’ll wait for home video.
Danny Boyle and David Fincher – These two are right up there, and most likely should be on the list, but because I missed Sunshine (2007) and Panic Room (2002) some years back, I’m hesitant to put them on the list just yet.
Rian Johnson – The writer/director of Brick (2005) and The Brothers Bloom (2008) is a relative newbie to my radar, but my interests are peaked and I’m keeping my eyes locked on his in development picture Looper, supposedly due out this year.
