Crying that makes me cry

I wrote a couple days ago about how Michelle Pfeiffer's performance at the end of The Story of Us kills me. I didn't mention that it is also funny. 

Spoilers for Story of Us, I guess, plus necessarily some further spoilers about other movies, but mostly things you probably already know. 

In a tear-strewn, rambling monologue that lasts the better part of two minutes, Pfeiffer's Katie has a sudden realization of what it would mean to give up her husband Ben (Bruce Willis), in the parking lot of the camp where they have just picked up their kids. At first you can't tell if he is unmoved by her display, but if he doesn't appear to be, it's only because Ben had already been through the emotional ringer himself, and at this point is trying to stick to his own dispassionate resolve.

And what a display. We don't get a lot of scenes in movies where a character is crying as fast as she is talking, which is what Pfeiffer does as she goes through a stream-of-consciousness listing of things she loves about Ben, then undercutting them with inadvertent jabs, then explaining that she didn't mean the jabs, then questioning the semantic logic of something she's just said, before returning to the original stream of praise and love that is highlighted by specific examples and anecdotes from their personal history. That Pfeiffer could do this scene in essentially an unbroken take -- there are a few cutaways to Ben just to see what impact it is having on him, though I'm willing to bet her audio was uninterrupted -- then not only is she a great dramatic actress, able to produce tears and memorize lines that she regurgitates basically without taking a breath, but she is also an incredibly nimble comic one, which this movie has also already shown us in spades.

Whew. I think maybe I need to take my own breath.

The point is, even as this scene is funny, I'm crying throughout it like a total jerk, because it is so sweet and so vulnerable and the examples of the things she gives that she would miss if they were divorced are just so fricking on point. (I always think, when trying to be a better dad, how she praises Ben for always doing the voice of a storybook character in a book he reads their kids, even when he's bone tired.) In fact, there's one particular moment after she's been spinning out in reversals and other general babbling, where she starts forward again like she's shifted into a new gear of her crying, and that really gets me the most. 

So that alone made me want to write a post called "Crying that makes me cry."

It may be an obvious observation that a really good actor can set off a good contagious crying jag if we have become invested in the character they've created. However, I'm not even sure that the majority of times we cry in movies is because an actor is crying. In fact, sometimes this makes us cringe. 

In fact, it's rare enough that I am going to try to list my very best memories of this in my own viewing career, which as I'm writing this, I do not expect to exceed ten. (And yes, I've cried more than ten times at the movies.)

With Pfeiffer's feat taking #1 for the purposes of this list -- which I am not ranking from best to worst, but just in the order I think of them -- let's look at the others that came to mind:

2) Toni Colette in The Sixth Sense. I know I've talked about this before, but Colette's reaction to her son telling her that her mother was always watching her performances from the back of the theater? Which is mixed with the realization that her son must be telling the truth and is actually seeing ghosts? Simply lacerating. Perhaps one of my best ugly cries ever, though it's interesting, it did not happen for me the first time I saw the movie, only subsequent times. (What is it with Bruce Willis in movies that make me cry? Who would have thought?)

3) Liam Neeson in Schindler's List. I have a little "comedy" bit I do where I joke about not having done something -- usually something minor, because to joke about something major would not work -- and I use the dialogue of Oskar Schindler: "But I didn't." This, as you will remember, is Schindler's self-recrimination for not doing more, even more than the many things he had already done, to save as many Jews from the concentration camps as he could. And though I'm sort of mocking the performance with this joke, there's no doubt that him breaking down into tears absolutely tore me asunder when I first saw it. 

4) Tovah Feldshuh in Kissing Jessica Stein. Unlike the last two, this is a moment most of you will not know about at all. I'll set the stage. Feldshuh plays the title character's mother, who is having a heart-to-heart with her daughter about why her daughter is currently miserable. The text of her mother's perspective is that Jessica always expects too much from other people, though this is said in a gentle, loving way. Near the end, she finally reveals the subtext, which is that she knows Jessica has been seeing a woman, even though Jessica hasn't copped to it. Feldshuh says "I think--" and then her voice catches in her throat, just for a second, as she chokes back a tear we didn't even see there. "I think she seems like a very nice girl." Jennifer Westfeldt's Jessica has been crying throughout this scene, but that little hitch gets me more than anything Westfeldt is doing, because it's also the reveal that she loves and supports Jessica, even if she might be a lesbian, and Jessica should never have thought otherwise. The accepting of gay kids by their parents always gets me.

5) Isabella Kai and Violet McGraw in Our Friend. There is something about how Casey Affleck says "Your mom is going to die" -- straightforward but with almost a mechanical loss of his ability to get the words out normally -- to his kids in this movie that starts me on the path. But I think the real waterworks begin when I see how these two kids, who should not be able to do this convincingly at such a young age, react to the news that their mother's cancer is terminal. (This isn't the exact photo, since the only version of the exact scene I could find had watermarks on it.) But in that moment, I feel what it is to realize the enormity and finality of death among children who are too young to properly process it, especially when it is the woman who has cared for you all your lives, but soon will no longer be able to do that, or even be around.  

6) Brendan Fraser in The Whale. I know I'm supposed to feel some sort of shame that this was my #1 movie of 2022 and by now I'm supposed to realize the ways I was wrong to love it, but I'm sorry, I haven't gotten there yet. I broke down a couple times during this movie, and though it was actually a moment that didn't involve crying from Samantha Morton that hit me hardest, I can't deny that Fraser's deep emotional breakdowns in this film got me going again. The sort of big, defiant crying-arguing that he does here is actually so desperate, in the way that it utterly scrapes him out from the inside, that it just wrecked me. I'll leave the discussions of the movie's alleged fatphobia to others.

7) Ricky Schroeder in The Champ. This is a movie I really need to rewatch because it would be more than 40 years since I saw it, and possibly closer to 45. I remember this movie being watched at the house I grew up in, so long ago that the TV was in what was my dad's office for at least the last 20 years he lived there. I think my mom put it on. And when (spoiler alert) the boxer dies at the end of the movie, his son's tears are so real that it confronted me with a sensation I'd never had in a movie before, not to mention the idea of how I would feel if one of my parents died. Did I actually cry? Do I remember it because my mother was crying and I thought that was weird? Not sure, but it had a powerful enough impact that I remember Schroeder's acting all these years later. 

8) Kaitlyn Dias in Inside Out. You don't even have to be able to see the actor's face for realistic crying to work. Dias' vocal performance at the end of Inside Out is phenomenal, and it just so happens that she has brilliant animators to help translate it to us completely. There's no doubt that seeing Riley's face slouch into the tears of missing Minnesota is key to our reaction to this scene, but it's the little crying sounds made by Dias, before she even starts getting her words out, that really start us on our path to the inevitable. Then her words just get us there at hyperspeed. 

9) Marceline Rofit in Tanna. When I started watching a movie about a star-crossed romance between indigenous peoples of Vanuatu, I anticipated experiencing the distance of being a westerner who might not otherwise relate to them perfectly well. Fortunately, great filmmaking bridges that empathy gap, and rarely do I remember it better bridged than in watching my #2 of 2016. Rofit plays a child who ends up having an unfortunate role in this star-crossed romance, and at one point we see her weeping while in hiding, ashamed of what she has brought about and overwhelmed with grief. I say "overwhelmed" not because Rofit overplays the scene, and for a non-professional actress, it's rather amazing that she does not (a credit to co-directors Martin Butler and Bentley Dean). Her snuffling technique, otherwise wordless, hit me hard. (Again this is not exactly the right image, but the right image had the aforementioned watermark.)

10) Adele Haenel in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. I am having trouble remembering when exactly the waterworks came in my #2 of 2019, whether there was an earlier episode or not until the climactic scene depicted here. But Haenel's quiet crying while watching a performance, at the remembrance of the relationship she did not quite have, is the accumulation of all the emotions that have been welling up in us over the past two hours, and it had this release effect on me. This image was actually on the banner of The Audient for a time, since it is also an audience member watching a performance, though not a movie in this case. (They hadn't been invented yet.)

That's a good place to stop I think. I got to my ten.

As I was scrolling through my top 500 movies on Flickchart, figuring that would give me a good reminder of the movies that had most gotten to me emotionally (even if not all the movies in that top ten are in my top 500), I noted a decent number of examples where I cried, but not because of someone else crying. These were moments of emotional generosity, a reconciliation, a sudden awareness of something unexpected and emotionally devastating, a farewell, things like that. So my idea that there has to be crying involved for me to cry was, thankfully, disproven.

I do feel that if an actor's primary goal is to translate what they are experiencing to the viewer, crying that makes the audience cry is one of the best indicators of success at their craft. I wrote a post on this blog, which I won't bother to link to now, about "yawn acting," and how you know an actor is good at their job if they can yawn in a movie and it makes the viewer yawn in real life. The idea being that only a genuine yawn is contagious, and so these actors are good enough to make their yawns look genuine.

I think yawning specifically may be a bad example, as yawning is suggestible enough that even as I am writing about it, I feel myself inclined to yawn. But that doesn't change my point, which is: crying is the hardest thing for an actor to do well. Some people can cry on cue, but they do it too demonstrably, making a show of it rather than giving us something emotionally relatable. Some people can't cry on cue, and a PA has to come with an eye dropper and simulate a tear sliding down the actor's face.

It's the actors who not only can cry on cue, but make the crying contagious -- who make us cry -- who are really doing God's work in bringing us the emotional fullness of the cinematic experience. And I've just discussed ten of them here. 

Bad acting in a movie poster

It should not possible to tell just from a single frame of any film that someone is not a good actor. Any emotion on an actor's face that is captured in a single moment could, in theory, be a correct response to whatever is happening in the film at that moment. We tend to judge acting as a failure to perform over several seconds of moving images, which establish the context of the acting. And rightly so. 

However, on a recent trip to the cinema, I decided that it might actually be possible.

I don't mind the actress Haley Bennett, who I have written about before because of her similarity in appearance to Jennifer Lawrence. There was something about her craft I initially didn't like, and I haven't loved a lot of the movies I've seen her in, but she is not a distraction, and I have liked her work at times.

However, in this movie -- which has a 2023 date on IMDB, so has really taken a long time to get here -- the expression on her face in this poster puts me back in the "nay" camp for Haley Bennett.

Here, I took a picture, I'll give you a closer look:

It's not much of an expression, but I would argue it tells us a lot.

It tells us that Bennett thinks the pursing her lips together and looking into the middle distance is her idea of how to play a prim and proper woman in the 18th century. Even though we don't know what she's looking at, from the context of the rest of the poster, it looks like she's not looking at anything, especially since her hands are involved in something else entirely.

I have since learned that "something else" has to do with the production of champagne, as that's what the real version of the title character actually did. She appears to have her hands in a basket of grapes, which is not something you would ordinarily be doing while staring off profoundly and contemplating your life. 

It's hard for me to know if this is an actual shot from the movie -- posters often aren't -- but if it is, maybe I should be calling it bad directing in a movie poster. Maybe then it is Thomas Napper I should blame, not Haley Bennett.

And maybe this was a stupid reason to write a post at all. This one image is probably not indicative of Bennett's performance in the slightest. 

But the fact that a reasonable person, such as myself, should even get a vibe that an actor might not be great at their job, from just a single image, means that someone, somewhere, is not doing something right. 

Acting is reacting

I have appreciated the merits of Ayo Edebiri as a performer before, though it was largely in the context of the unique comedic sensibility she brought to movies like Bottoms. (I was going to say "Bottoms and [another movie title], but going back through her IMDB, I'm surprised at how few movies I've actually seen her in. I feel like she's been everywhere lately, and rightly so. To be fair, I have not yet watched any of The Bear.) 

Bernardo Britto's Omni Loop, yet another movie where characters experience the same events over and over again throughout the narrative, showed me definitively what she can do as a dramatic actress, even though it is not a traditional "dramatic" role. 

Of course, dramatic interpretations are possible in movies with heavy genre associations, like the time travel/time loop movie. What I really mean, though, is that her role supporting another good lead turn from Mary-Louise Parker could have been just a cypher who existed purely for plot function. Instead, Edebiri injects it with ten times more nuance than the part requires. Because she is such a good actress, that nuance doesn't call attention to itself. Nuance shouldn't, if accurately described as such.

I suppose there's something of an irony that Edebiri's work did call attention to itself in some way, in that I have chosen to write a post about her during an extremely busy time of my movie watching year, where the posts are stacking up on each other as they await their turn to be my one single post for the day. But we should take notice when a practitioner of the craft does it as well as Edebiri does here, the same way we should notice when a minor league baseball player gets a cup of coffee with the big league team at the end of the season and makes the most of his dozen at-bats. Of course, Edebiri is no minor leaguer -- or won't be for much longer if she ever was.

I started to notice the effectiveness of her technique during a scene that's probably more than halfway through the movie, where Parker's character gets a faraway look in her eyes after something Edebiri's character has said. The director prevents Parker's faraway look from resolving into dialogue for something on the order of five to ten seconds, and during that time, Edebiri changes the micro expressions on her face about a dozen times. Just through her eyes, her eyebrows and some slight scrunching of the facial muscles, Edebiri's Paula indicates multiple things simultaneously: 1) "What the hell is this look in your eyes?" 2) "I'm waiting to receive your next comment." 3) "This is weird, even for you." You'd have to see the scene to fully appreciate it, and I hope you do -- though I suspect you aren't likely to pick this out from the standard level of her technique in all the other scenes, which I was not specifically noticing before this one. 

You better bet I was noticing it from there. There's one moment when Paula gives more of her back story -- this has largely been the story of Parker's Zoya to this point -- and it's a long, unbroken take held on Edebiri's face. Because the things she's telling Zoya are so hard for her, involving admissions she's never made out loud and the dredging up of traumatizing childhood memories, Paula only gets going in fits and starts, her face squinting into little frowns as she has to push the words out of her mouth through sheer force of will. In even describing this the way I am, I probably make it sound like the mechanics of her performance are way too visible. Really, I just want to describe the best I can the instincts that come so easily and so naturally to this actress.

I see lots of good performances in lots of good movies, and Edebiri's is probably not so exceptional in that regard. The reason I'm writing about it is that good movies and good performances remind us of things we already knew but sometimes take for granted. Because of her function in the film, Edebiri's role as an actor is to play off the lead, and that requires a lot of reacting. And once I started noticing the choices Edebiri was making in her reactions, I couldn't take my eyes off her, even when she was not the focal point of the scene -- in fact, especially then.

Maybe it's time for me to finally watch The Bear.

Has Jon Cena surpassed the other wrestlers?

There have been professional wrestlers-turned-actors as long as there has been professional wrestling. We all remember how Rowdy Roddy Piper starred in the cult classic They Live, and that Hulk Hogan tried his hand at acting there for a while, with terrible results. There would be other examples I'm sure.

But we are now living in a golden age of actors who were once wrestlers, and in fact, who found acting to be such a better way to pay the bills that they stopped wrestling entirely. (Of course, their age, and a desire for a less strenuous activity for their bodies, were likely also factors in this.)

The one who paved the way for this new generation was Dwayne Johnson, and I'll mention his stage name because we're talking about wrestling here: The Rock. He was the one who made us realize that ringside charisma could really carry over to movie star charisma, and that if he didn't naturally have the performance instincts to become a decent actor, he had the building blocks to learn them. And despite some obvious examples of on-screen struggles, he has become a genuinely capable actor able to play a variety of different modes, even comedy quite effectively, as well as one of the biggest movie stars and highest paid actors.

Then came Dave Bautista, who we would still likely consider the most technically skilled actor to emerge from wrestling. Bautista let us know early on through his role in Guardians of the Galaxy that he was an adept comedian, but he has also become a go-to guy for a big director like Denis Villeneuve, who doesn't have much of an instinct for comedy at all. Everyone who watches Dave Bautista on screen knows he has "it."

The johnny-come-lately, whom I have taken a long time to really accept, has been Jon Cena. I'm not sure what my primary hesitation was regarding Cena, except for the "Okay, prove it" mentality I have toward any wrestler who tries to transfer over to mainstream acting. I think some of the earliest movies he appeared in were not personal favorites of mine, such as Trainwreck, and then I think his face reminded me a bit too much of steroid heads I considered bullies back in high school.

Now, though, I'm wonder if Cena isn't close to becoming the standard bearer for wrestlers-turned-actors.

My Friday night viewing of Argylle is not really the appropriate occasion to write this post, both because his role in it is quite small and because I didn't like the movie at all. However, I'm writing it now because Argylle made me realize how much I'm seeing Cena, how interested casting directors are in casting him. And with good reason. When I saw Cena pop up in Argylle, I got an immediate jolt of optimism -- one that was unwarranted, unfortunately.

Cena did have more than seven minutes of screen time in another movie I saw recently, Ricky Stanicky, the latest from Peter Farrelly, and likely the best we could hope for from a latter-day Farrelly brothers movie. Although I opted for a 3.5-star rating on Letterboxd, I flirted with four stars, as the film reminded me of that mix of heart and gross-out comedy those brothers were capable of producing at their height. 

And a lot of that was thanks to Cena, who plays the title character -- a fictitious creation by a trio of friends on whom they blame everything from a Halloween prank gone wrong (in their youth) to the reason they have to miss a baby shower (now, as adults). Cena's character is actually an aspiring actor who does porno music parodies -- in other words, he sings a familiar pop song on stage in costume, but changes its lyrics to be X-rated -- in Atlantic City, but he agrees to play the role of this fictitious friend when their wives begin wondering why they've never met him. 

Anyway, this role could have been played very broadly, as a disaster with a heart of gold who only stumbles into not constantly ruining everything. Surely in part thanks to Farrelly, Cena gives this character a lot more than the traits the role calls for, and this comparative restraint was one of the things I liked best about the movie.

So to get back on track, how it is that I now view Cena as possibly the equal or even the better of Johnson and Bautista?

Well for one, those guys seem to be scaling back ever so slightly. If you take away his appearances as Drax the Destroyer -- which should be over now -- Bautista has only been appearing in about one film per year the last couple years. That seems to be by choice, and to be fair, he does currently have ten projects of all shapes and sizes that are scheduled for future release, according to IMDB. Johnson seems to be stepping back even more than Bautista. Since he had two high-profile movies in 2021 -- Jungle Cruise and Red Notice -- Johnson has had only one movie he's starred in, that being 2022's Black Adam. He had an uncredited appearance in the end credits of the last Fast and Furious movie, but that hardly counts.

Cena is only too happy to fill this void. Perhaps with the energy of being five years younger than Johnson and eight years younger than Bautista, Cena had five movie credits in 2023 and already the aforementioned two in 2024. Like the others, his IMDB credits are also littered with various WWE things, but I suspect many of them are running series that are listed near the top of their most recent activities simply because that's how TV shows are handled on IMDB.

But more than the quantitative advantages Cena currently has, he's got some qualitative advantages too. Cena seems a bit more committed to comedy than either of the other two, Johnson because he can't do it as well and Bautista because he seems eager not to be defined by Drax the Destroyer. Cena will gleefully show up and be funny, and in fact, now we kind of expect him to do that. And he doesn't disappoint. 

His work seems to have gone from "wait and see approach" to "possible comedy gold" with his involvement in The Suicide Squad and the series that has spun off it, which I still have not seen, but which I feel I can make positive assumptions about, that being Peacemaker. He understands how to be on tone in movies featuring almost a gleeful level of violence, where the comedy has to be just right in order to keep our stomachs from turning.

I've called Jon Cena the johnny-come-lately, but you know what? His first movie was 18 years ago, in 2006, when he was not even 30. It was called The Marine, and I watched it primarily because a guy I know had a significant supporting role in it. I didn't like that movie and I didn't like Cena in it, because 2006 was not a time when big muscle heads realized they needed to be self aware and not take themselves too seriously. But that's only a few years after Johnson started making movies, and a whole eight years before I first identified Bautista in the original Guardians. So by any reasonable assessment of things, these three are all contemporaries, with Bautista the johnny-come-lately of the three if any of them are -- which is also true because he started when he was a lot older than they were.

But I liked Dave Bautista instantly, and Cena had to earn it. Now that he's earned it, though, I am always pleased as punch to see him appear in a new film -- and his face doesn't even remind me of the chemically enhanced bullies who used to punch me on the shoulder in the hallways.

An actress is a person, an actor is an aspiration

I have never been a big fan of female-specific variations on common words. One of the dumbest words in the English language has got to be aviatrix, which is a female aviator. No. Just no.

But there are some I don’t mind, some where the gendering of the word gives an additional qualitative meaning to it. For some reason, I think of “actress” as one of those words.

It’s not that there’s a huge difference in the day-to-day job description for men and women who make their living acting. There’s usually a gender performative aspect to their job, but not always, as men sometimes play women, women sometimes play men, and both sometimes play transgender people. But I do think there is something of historical interest in the term “actress,” as I assume it was once created to immediately clarify that it’s a woman doing the job rather than a man, which had historically been the case regardless of the gender of the character being portrayed.

“What makes that different than aviatrix, Vance?”

I don’t know. Just shut up.

It could just be that the history of giving awards to people who act has made the term useful. It’s much easier to say that Meryl Streep was nominated for “best actress,” for example, than “best female actor.” Whether all actors should be judged in a single category is a discussion for another time.

Anyway, I find myself bristling a little whenever someone is too particular about calling an actress an actor. I don’t have a problem with calling a woman an actor, but I have a problem with the viewpoint that it is in some way demeaning to use the term “actress.” It’s so nothing like aviatrix, which is a blatantly complicated change to make. Actress flows naturally and nicely. It is entrenched via common usage.

I’m to my point now.

I know I’ve been picking on Slate podcaster Dana Stevens a bit lately, which is not my intent, as I’m a big fan and actually got my picture taken with her when The Slate Culture Gabfest toured Australia. And in this case, it’s something anyone could have said, and seems to be illustrative of a larger point.

I was listening to an episode of the Culture Gabfest yesterday that actually posted back in February. I dug it back out because I had skipped their spoiler-filled discussion of Abducted in Plain Sight, which I obviously have now seen as I wrote about it yesterday on this blog. I figured, having aired some fairly strong opinions about the movie, I thought I’d see how their opinions matched up with mine.

In the segment at the end of the show where they endorse something they are enjoying in the pop culture world, Dana endorsed a YouTube series in which a woman who functions as a speech coach critiques acting performances for how well they nailed the accents. In the course of this endorsement, Dana said something like this: “The series is run by this actress who gets a lot of work, and it interested me because my daughter aspires to be an actor.”

As you can see, Dana used both the terms “actress” and “actor” in the very same breath, and both when referring to a woman: this professional running this series, and her daughter. It was likely just a slip of the tongue and not something she intended, but that may make it all the more telling.

If we are to parse what Dana said, it suggests that “actress” is what you call a woman when she already has a job, and that job is acting. However, it’s not something you aspire to. You aspire to be an actor.

If these are the subconscious meanings some people are carrying around with them, I can see why female thespians find it a bit demeaning to be referred to as an actress, whether they “should” or not.

It could also be that Dana recognized she used a term she didn’t intend to use and corrected herself mid-thought, something she is particularly good at doing, as her thoughts on the podcast tend to be extremely well articulated yet also seem spontaneous. If I asked Dana whether she preferred the term actor or actress, she’d probably say the former. Or it could be that she unconsciously observes a distinction between someone she doesn’t know, who can get the more “dismissive” term actress, and her own daughter, who deserves to complete equally in the world by virtue of a non-gender-specific term.

But I think it’s also incorrect to assume that “actor” is most commonly perceived as non-gender-specific. Most people, I would argue, think of an actor as a man. Instead of striving for a certain gender equality, then, the opposite result might be achieved in using the word “actor” for a woman. It might make it look like that woman wants to be recognized via a bit of male terminology, which makes it seem like she wants to be like a man, rather than just being like herself.

I don’t know what any of this means, nor is it very likely to change how I use the word. If I had a daughter and she was into acting, I’d probably say she wants to be an actress.

However, if Dana Stevens’ daughter wants to be an actor, more power to her.

You watch your mouth, Andy Bailey!

Typecasting is a pernicious thing. According to the very principles by which their profession is defined, actors pride themselves on being able to assume a multitude of shapes and sizes, personalities and proclivities. It's death to the actor -- or it feels that way to them, anyway -- to get pigeonholed as just one thing. Sure, that might allow you to get plenty of work from producers looking for exactly that one thing. But in the long term it's a recipe for career disappointment and early retirement. And not the good kind of early retirement.

As fervently as I believe this, I still can't watch the trailers for Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, which releases today in the U.S., and think anything other than "Andy Bailey, you watch your mouth!"

Andy Bailey is the cheerfully named character played by Adam DeVine on the show Modern Family. At least, I assume he's still playing that character, as we are at least a full season behind on the show. It's very possible they've moved Hayley on from that subplot.

Nonetheless, this is how I know Adam DeVine. He plays (or played) the nanny to Joe, the child of Jay and Gloria, and he's as squeaky clean as they come. He's so squeaky that his voice almost even squeaks when he talks. He's every parent's dream of the guy their daughter will fall for, though no daughter's dream of the guy they actually want -- until they get older, anyway, and nice guys actually start finishing first. He would volunteer with old people and probably sing in a chorus and dress like he's just walked out of a Banana Republic. He's that kind of guy.

And DeVine plays that character incredibly well. He's clean cut. He has an honesty about him. He doesn't look like he could hurt a fly. In fact, if he found an injured fly he'd probably try to take it to an insect hospital.

Enter Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates.

That's the raunchy new comedy starring Zac Efron, Anna Kendrick, Aubrey Plaza and DeVine. I'm guessing it's a raunchy comedy with heart -- you can't get away with the raunch without the heart these days -- but it's raunchy nonetheless.

And DeVine is burdened with the lion's share of that raunch, if the trailers are to be believed. He's still clean cut, but any politeness has gone out the window. In fact, he tells a bride-to-be who has just received a facial contusion from the wheel of an all-terrain vehicle that she looks like the burnt waffle they throw out at the pancake house.

That stuff doesn't exactly conform to the definition of "raunchy." But how about this? At least in the trailer they've been showing here in Australia, he's talking about a sexual move that involves inserting an entire arm up a rectum and "pumping the pop," or something like that. (I'm at work so I'm not reviewing the trailer right now.)

And all I'm thinking is, "Oh, what happened to that nice young man who cares for that baby?"

I like raunch just as much as the next guy -- when it's done right -- but I guess I just like my raunch delivered by the people I expect to deliver it. Seth Rogen can serve me up as much raunch as he likes, the raunchier the better. Adam DeVine should keep the halo over his head.

Of course, if I were just a bit more familiar with DeVine's career I might not associate him primarily with Modern Family. DeVine also appeared in Pitch Perfect (and its sequel, though I haven't seen that). In that movie, which takes advantage of his singing abilities (you can just tell this guy is a singer), I believe he's a bit of a douche. If memory serves, he's the frontman of a rival singing group that thinks they're the shit. And DeVine personifies the team's arrogance.

So maybe Andy Bailey is the exception for Adam DeVine, rather than the rule. Maybe Mike and Dave's Mike Stangle is the typecasting of Adam DeVine, not the deviation. Maybe Adam DeVine was happy to get cast as Andy Bailey because he wanted to prove he could be a nice guy also.

Well, he's got one thing going for him that may just lead me to see Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates: he's an appealing presence.

Even when he's pantomiming sticking his hand up somebody's ass.

The actor's modesty

I was listening to an interview with Tom Hiddleston about his Hank Williams biopic I Saw the Light, which is now in theaters, and he made an innocuous comment that struck me.

Talking about his experience on another film, Hiddleston said, "I made a film with Guillermo del Toro called Crimson Peak," and then continued on with whatever his point was.

It struck me as incredibly modest, even though in the wrong hands it could have seemed like false modesty.

Two things about that comment showed charming modesty, I thought. For starters, he was reporting it as news, that he had made a film with this well-known director, like almost everyone listening to the interview wouldn't already be aware of the latest film by the director of Pan's Labyrinth and Hellboy II: The Golden Army, and Hiddleston's involvement in it. The second charming part was that he revealed the name as though that in itself were a piece of information that needed to be divulged, never once taking for granted that the listener might already know of the movie.

But it occurred to me that this type of thing doesn't always work. There comes a point where a movie is well known enough that to pretend your audience doesn't know it would just be insulting them.

Like if Harrison Ford said, "I made a film with George Lucas called Star Wars," you'd say, "Duh, Harrison -- we know what Star Wars is." And you'd be a little bit annoyed because you'd know Harrison knew you knew. It wouldn't help much to switch it up to, "I made a little film with George Lucas called Star Wars," because even though the word "little" changes the inflection of the comment -- now we know he's joking, because everyone knows Star Wars is not "little" -- it still has the effect of kind of big-upping himself. The very acknowledgement of its size indicates that you are overly proud of that size.

So in that case, to seem normal, Ford would just have to say, "On Star Wars we ..." and get on with the comment or anecdote. There that would be okay. It wouldn't be modest per se, but it wouldn't insult our intelligence either, and when you've appeared in four Star Wars movies and four Indiana Jones movies, excess modesty probably doesn't fit very well anyway.

But Crimson Peak is about the perfect sized film to maintain that modesty, and Hiddleston about the perfect level of star. He's not a household name yet, and with his underlying eccentricity, may never become one. But he did play Loki in The Avengers, one of the highest grossing films of all time, so it's not like he's Mr. Anonymous either.

Hiddleston continued to charm me with his lack of pretension about himself and his genuine humility. Later on the interviewer made a comparison between his character in I Saw the Light and his character in Only Lovers Left Alive, and Hiddleston was so chuffed by the comparison (even though it didn't take any particular display of cleverness by the interviewer to make it) that he revealed an anecdote from the set -- an anecdote he would have held back if the interviewer hadn't prompted him by mentioning the Jim Jarmusch movie from 2014. It was an interesting anecdote that had a lot of relevance to the discussion, but he would have kept it tucked away if the interviewer hadn't given him a clear opening. Why? Modesty. You don't tell war stories about other movies during an interview unless given a darn good reason -- it's kind of the equivalent of name dropping. (And lest you consider his original mention of Crimson Peak to have been a case of telling war stories/name dropping, I can assure you it did not come across that way -- though neither do I remember the point he was actually making.)

Another time he seemed genuinely flattered by the interviewer's praise of his performance, like he might have been receiving such praise for the first time in his career -- like he had never before considered the idea that someone might consider what he does to be good.

There was an interesting secondary display of modesty in this interview, this time by the director, Marc Abraham, who did the interview alongside his star. Rather than modesty, it was actually a way to display your pride over your own work without seeming in the slightest like that's what you're doing -- and in fact seeming quite magnanimous in the process.

Abraham said that both Hiddleston and co-star Elizabeth Olsen were "so great" in the film, or something along those lines. To be clear, this didn't strike me at all as bragging about the quality of the film, because the praise was clearly directed at the stars, as if he himself bore no responsibility for extracting good performances from them. However, if you unpack the comment, it is a suggestion that something about the film itself is "great," so as the de facto author of the film, he is indeed sort of praising himself. It's funny that creative types can get away with this, heaping praise on one another without implicitly also praising themselves. Just to reinforce his own sense of personal modesty, Abraham, while describing certain directing luminaries whose styles were an influence on him, explained, "I'm not saying at all that I am that quality of filmmaker" -- not those exact words, but something more succinctly self-deprecating. And indeed, it honestly didn't feel like he was saying that.

The interesting thing is that both these genuinely refreshing personas must be an act on some level, even as genuine as they seem. If not Abraham, a guy I've never heard of before, then certainly Hiddleston, who has been through numerous press junkets already in his five or so years of high visibility as an actor. You do so many interviews and get so many questions from interviewers who are each trying to find something profound and unexpected to ask, but are invariably covering much of the same territory. It can't really be possible to be genuinely charmed by and appreciative of each interviewer, though Hiddleston did it masterfully, and his director followed his lead.

And now I really would like to see I Saw the Light, a biopic of a person who otherwise wouldn't interest me (and seems like a strange fit indeed for the effete Hiddleston), just to see how good of a job these two guys really did do in their respective roles.

Justifiable immodesty

In researching a piece I'm writing for another blog, I learned just now that Daniel Day-Lewis is officially on an acting hiatus.

It's hard to know with someone like Day-Lewis, who might go five years between projects just because he's spending those five years trying to learn his next character. He cares about it that much and is that good at it. (If he's that good at it, he should be able to do it in three, har har.)

But wikipedia ensures me that this is a scheduled break. Not a permanent one, you'd hope -- but after winning three Oscars, what more does Day-Lewis have to prove?

Officially, nothing. And I say "officially" because he appears to have said so himself.

I was a bit alarmed to read that Day-Lewis -- who, despite his greatness, strikes me as a modest person -- gave the reason for his hiatus as the fact that it would be difficult to top his last performance as Abraham Lincoln.

Not only does that make it seem like he's in love with his own performance -- any truly humble actor should say something like "Aw shucks, was I really that good?" -- but also that the only reason to keep working is to improve on what you've done before.

Certainly, a failure to heed at least the logic of that second notion has led some great public personalities to continue doing what they do long past the point that it remained dignified. Your average professional athlete will typically need to be a shell of his former self for a good three to five seasons before the idea of hanging it up even occurs to him. And with actors, you have greats who become laughingstocks as they try to extend their careers into questionable roles after their 70th birthday. (I'm looking at you, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino.)

But by going in the opposite direction -- by going into a short-term retirement of sorts at only age 56 (the age he was during the 2013 Oscars) -- Day-Lewis has seemed to commit an opposite sort of sin. It may be more dignified, but it's also less gracious. He may not be craving the spotlight, but it's almost as though the spotlight is beneath him. He's mastered acting.

Justified or not, I'd be lying if I said it didn't annoy me a little bit. It's not exactly biting the hand that feeds him, but it is saying that he doesn't care if the hand stops feeding him. Since his audience is kind of that hand, and since I'm a member of that audience, I kind of care that he doesn't care.

But maybe it's more that I just don't think the world should be deprived of someone of Day-Lewis' staggering talents for long periods of time. Who does he think he is to deny us?

Oh yeah -- he's the guy who understands the phrase "leave them wanting more." That phrase is completely foreign to most public figures.

And even if he isn't officially working right now, I'm half inclined to believe he's applying method acting to whatever it is he's doing, so he'll be in the best possible shape to play an acclaimed actor coming out of semi-retirement for his next role.

The correct verb tense for acting performances

My wife was going to Sydney for the night on Friday night, so for a cinephile like me, that meant one thing: a Friday night double feature. (It also meant taking care of my children by myself for nearly 24 hours. Details.)

As I was perusing the films on the Hoyts kiosk rental site, I came across this poster for a film I'd heard praised by a person whose opinion I do not necessarily trust: The Inevitable Defeat of Mister & Pete. A title like that caused me to question whether I should truly dismiss it just because he liked it, so I lingered on the poster long enough to notice this critical rave:

"Jennifer Hudson was fantastic!"

See if you can tell me what's wrong with that quotation.

A movie performance, I would argue, is not a thing of the past, as implied by the word "was." It is not something that occurred at that one moment, when the DP was shooting the actor and the director was yelling "Action!" and "Cut!" As movies are an ongoing art form that can be accessed and experienced from now until all existing copies of the movie are destroyed, a movie performance is forever in the present tense.

So to say that Hudson was fantastic just seems incorrect. That's the kind of terminology you reserve for a play, a concert. Those performances occur once and are over. I suppose if Hudson were appearing in a show on Broadway that goes on for several months or years, you might say she "is" fantastic in the show, since it's still going on. You'd be less likely to use that term for a band on tour, since bands are more susceptible to having a bad night, whereas actors tend to achieve a certain consistency to their performance that's easier to repeat.

However, I now wonder if movies don't, in fact, age out of the appropriateness of the term "is" to describe a performance. If you're talking about Broken Blossoms, which was released in 1919, do you really say that Lillian Gish "is" great in it? Or do you say "was"? Does it have to do with whether the actor is alive or not?

I don't know. I'm just throwing it all out there.

For the record, I settled on Cuban Fury and Vampire Academy. No one was or is fantastic in either film, though I did like Cuban Fury quite a bit. Vampire Academy? For some reason I thought it was going to be a pointed satire of vampire movies that also functioned as a teen coming-of-age story. Instead, it was the bastard child of Twilight and Harry Potter, but, like, a really dumb bastard child.

... and a Duplass new year

Last year on New Year's Day, we watched movies according to an inadvertent theme: Step Brothers and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, our two favorite comedies from 2008 that both happened to be movies I was seeing for the fourth time. (We'll ignore the fact that we closed the day with probably the worst comedy of 2011, The Hangover Part II.)

This year's theme was no more advertent, but it was more objective. This year, we watched Mark Duplass movies.

We probably could have seen this coming for a couple days if we'd looked. We'd postponed watching The Do-Deca-Pentathlon, which Duplass directed with his brother Jay and which had been a candidate for last Friday night's viewing, when we decided that its 76-minute length made it perfect for one of our son's naps. And since I may be working both days this weekend, yesterday could have been our last nap before I need to finalize my list next Thursday. In fact, it ended up being more than perfect -- not only did we watch the whole movie, but I got in an hour nap before my son awoke from his. Score.

We didn't discuss our second viewing, Your Sister's Sister, until right before we popped it in. Duplass only acts in this one, though I wouldn't be surprised if he had plenty of informal roles advising director Lynn Shelton since they are both founding parents of the mumblecore movement. Since it was the only disc I had at home from Netflix and there's a premium placed on turning around movies quickly this time of year, I was rooting for that choice, and my wife jumped at it.

And since Duplass appeared in the last movie she'd seen before that, Zero Dark Thirty, that made three straight Duplass movies for my wife. Crazy person that I am, I squeezed in two non-Duplass movies on the 31st (Sparkle and Amour) that she did not see.

I'd love to tell you what I thought of these movies, but remember: cone of silence.

So instead let me take this opportunity to praise an unusual part of the Duplass brothers' movie-making technique that pays untold dividends in the final film.

It was probably in conjunction with the release of Jeff, Who Lives at Home that I heard Mark Duplass being interviewed. (Mark seems to do pretty much all the public stuff -- in fact, I don't even know what Jay looks like.) In that interview, Mark talked about an approach they favor that would not be possible on a larger film with a bigger budget and more locations. With the films they make, though, they can afford to do it: film the scenes in the same order as they appear in the script.

There are all kinds of reasons this is not possible with most movies. The process of making movies is so dependent on maximizing your opportunities to get your cast in place according to their schedules, or shoot at a particular location when it's available, that there's almost no way you can film the scenes in sequence. In fact, I doubt that this is even something filmmakers subconsciously shoot for. Logistics are first and foremost, and it's probably not that unusual to shoot the last scene of the film first.

The sequence the scenes are shot shouldn't matter one iota to the audience, because they will be edited together in the correct order. Yet I think on some level, the sequence does matter to the audience -- because on some level it matters to the actors.

Even though these guys are professionals (though that's not necessarily the case with mumblecore movies), I think an actor can't help but have a slightly better grasp on his/her character's emotional state if he/she has already acted out the scenes that brought his/her character to this point in the story. And I think this is why almost every Duplass movie I've seen has a satisfying emotional payoff in the final five or ten minutes. Consistent with these movies' naturalism, the actors themselves have lived in these characters' shoes. When they have the big final reconciliation, or whatever occurs in the final act, the actors have already experienced the arguments (there's always an argument) that have gotten them to this point. They don't need to ask what their character's motivation is -- they've lived through it.

It only stands to reason that an actor who shoots the film's climax first has to do a lot more work to get him/herself into that character's head space. Even if the actor has read the script five or six times, he/she can't help but be at some kind of disadvantage over actors who have already done the emotional processing of those scenes in front of the camera.

This unusual though completely understandable technique also has the benefit of the Duplass brothers already working through script problems that may come up in earlier scenes. If something just isn't working and they have to change it up -- this interview also revealed that the brothers will just wander off together to discuss a scene, leaving the cast and crew waiting for them to return -- those changes will already be incorporated before they have to shoot the finale. There'll be no going back to reshoot or make adjustments based on problems that came up along the way.

What's funny is that this seemingly revolutionary method may have been born out of sheer laziness, a sheer unwillingness to conform to the hard conventions of making movies. Clearly, the "harder" thing to do is to shoot a movie out of sequence. It involves juggling all sorts of logistics based on availability and schedules, and is perhaps a skill that's better suited to an efficiency expert than a creative talent like a writer or director. And indeed, I'm quite sure that someone other than the director handles this on most films, though I couldn't tell you exactly who (the producer or someone on the producer's team, most likely). With the Duplasses, who have a huge amount of creative control, they may have just said "Eff that. That's not how we can understand this process or thrive within it." And it may have just been because the other way seemed "too hard."

But the proof is in the pudding. When a Duplass character experiences his/her third-act catharsis -- a catharsis that always has plenty of heart -- I always buy it, and I always find that it's coming from somewhere. Now I know where.

It also helps that the Duplasses have a knack for casting actors (such as mumblecore regular Steve Zissis, who starred in The Do-Deca Pentathlon) who have an innate understanding of the human condition. Remember, adding to the amazing work these actors are doing is the fact that they are frequently improvising their dialogue. You can only improvise dialogue if you truly understand a character and what he/she would do in any situation. Another benefit of already having "lived their lives" chronologically.

And now that I believe I've seen every 2012 project that involved Mark Duplass, I'll tackle the remaining field of non-Duplass movies. Just eight more days before I close my 2012 list.

Ha, IMDB tells me that I haven't seen two Duplass movies from 2012, Darling Companion and People Like Us. That's with already seeing the other movie he directed (Jeff, Who Lives at Home) and the other one he starred in (Safety Not Guaranteed). That's in addition to his regular work on the TV show The League, which we also watch.

If he keeps up this busy pace, then 2013 really will be a Duplass New Year.

Everybody works ... sometimes

You hear the phrase "working actor" thrown around in Hollywood, but it's almost never used in a strictly complimentary sense.

Oh, if you were a nobody and had forged your way to the point that you could pay all your bills on acting gigs alone, the term "working actor" would certainly be a badge of honor. But if you're already famous and someone calls you that, it means that you probably can't afford to be selective, maybe because you've made bad financial choices that have left you working paycheck to paycheck, or you can be selective but simply choose not to be. It means that you're an actor for hire, either out of necessity (that guy in the first sentence of this paragraph) or indifference to how you're perceived (Nicolas Cage). You'll appear in anything, regardless of whether it dovetails with your sensibilities or represents you in a way consistent with the persona you're cultivating.

"I just like to work" is the phrase you imagine being put forth by people like Nicolas Cage, Samuel L. Jackson and Eugene Levy, to name three guys whose choices have always told me that they aren't too snooty about which jobs they'll accept. And while the first two are genuine stars, someone like Levy probably would be a much poorer man today if he weren't gleefully appearing in every straight-to-video American Pie sequel ever made, of which there are currently 37.

Either way, it's still "work" -- the thing you have to do, rather than the thing you want to do. At least that's the connotation of the word "work" in most contexts.

But the ones that always seem the most puzzling are not the movie stars, who you might think are addicted to the spotlight, or the character actors, who need to eat. The puzzling ones are the ones you might think of as "thespians," as actors who are always making good choices and clearly always thinking about whether their choices reflect who they see themselves to be. Sometimes even they appear just to be taking work because it's their job and they need to keep on doing it.

The reason I'm writing about this is I saw two movies on Friday night that featured actors I would describe in that way -- conveniently enough, one of them in a Nicolas Cage movie. The first movie I saw in the double feature was James McTeigue's The Raven, which featured acclaimed Irish actor Brendan Gleeson as the prospective father-in-law to John Cusack's Edgar Allan Poe. The second was the aforementioned Cage movie, Stolen, directed by eternal hack Simon West. The cast includes none other than John Huston's son, Danny, an actor who always seems so damn regal that you might confuse him for a Brit.

Both movies were terrible, immediately sinking to the lower depths of my 2012 rankings. And both films certainly seemed beneath those two actors. Gleeson can probably be forgiven a little more readily than Huston, because at least The Raven seemed like a possible prestige movie. Huston couldn't have had any illusions about the quality of Stolen. Nicolas Cage's name alone should have tipped him off to the likelihood that it was a soulless enterprise.

But actors like to act, and Brendan Gleeson and Danny Huston are both actors.

Which got me thinking about other very good actors who have appeared in very bad films -- and not just films that should have been good, but went bad in the execution. Of course, when just looking at the script, it can be hard to tell the difference.

So I decided to go through the lower third of my Flickchart and see the great actors who stick out of those bad movies like sore thumbs. Which produced the following, in no particular order:

Anthony Hopkins in Bad Company (2002, Joel Schumacher). The same way that Cage's involvement in Stolen should have been a tipoff to Huston, whipping boy Shumacher's involvement in this film should have steered Hopkins far away from it. There's a strange incongruity between Hopkins and Chris Rock as well, but it was fair to hope that Rock's success on stage and TV would finally translate to film for once. Didn't happen.

Helen Mirren in Shadowboxer (2005, Lee Daniels). Speaking of incongruous casts, how about Mirren starring alongside Cuba Cooding Jr., Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Mo'Nique? This was of course well after Gooding was somebody, but well before the other two were. It's also before Daniels proved he was somebody with Precious. You'd think Mirren would have done a double-take if someone asked her to appear as a hitwoman involved in an interracial, intergenerational romance with Gooding, but she apparently didn't.

Kenneth Branagh in Wild Wild West (1999, Barry Sonnenfeld). Branagh hasn't always made Shakespeare, and he's definitely shown some impulses toward crossing over at different times in his career (as a director as well, if you consider last year's Thor). But this was as little like the Bard in quality and subject matter as you can possibly imagine. Of course, the quality problem wouldn't have been known when Branagh was cast.

Martin Landau in B.A.P.S. (1997, Robert Townsend). Considering that he was only three years removed from winning an Oscar for Ed Wood, there seems to be no explanation why Landau would lower himself to appear in this "comedy" (it's not funny at all) about two vulgar black women whose every aspect of their personal appearance is ghetto fabulous-outrageous. I do like the open-mindedness Landau's choice displays -- a sense of fairness that the movie does not remotely mirror in its portrayal of these two awful stereotypes.

Malcolm McDowell, Peter O'Toole and John Gielgud in Caligula (1979, Tinto Brass). The fact that this epic disaster was co-financed by Penthouse magazine should have given some indication what its pretensions toward artistry truly were. Yet all three of these esteemed thespians came on board for one of the most pornographic (not to mention shockingly violent) mainstream movies ever made. I could have chosen to give Mirren her second whammy of this list by including her name with the others above, but I don't think she was established enough yet for us to have expected selectivity from her.

Ben Kingsley in Bloodrayne (2006, Uwe Boll). A rather famous example, at least in the sense that every single negative review of the movie (and almost all of them were negative, many extremely negative) finds space enough to mention Kingsley's inexplicable involvement. Boll is considered just about the least reputable hack making legitimate movies today, so Kingsley's involvement indeed makes one wonder. If he were going to take this, he really should have taken Christopher's slasher movie on The Sopranos.

Nicole Kidman in Just Go With It (2011, Dennis Dugan). I don't know if this really works, because Kidman has made plenty of bad career choices. But at least many of her bad choices have been in genres that at least made sense for her. Her appearance in an Adam Sandler movie simply left me gobsmacked. (Also, I don't know that I think of her as really a "thespian." The terms "great actor" and "thespian" are not quite interchangeable, the latter term indicating more of a tendency to gravitate toward classical subject matter.)

Gary Oldman in The Unborn (2009, David S. Goyer). All of these interchangeable supernatural horror flicks have some kind of legit actor in the role of the priest. I just never expected it to be Gary Oldman in any of them.

Frances McDormand in Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011, Michael Bay). Oh Frances. Frances Frances Frances Frances Frances. (Again, maybe not a "thespian," but FOR SURE someone who should have known better. I wonder if the Coen brothers have some kind of relationship with Micheal Bay, because Coen regular John Turturro also appears in these movies and might reasonably have been listed alongside Frances, except that she should know better more than he should. John Malkovich is also in it, so maybe these three made a pact to collectively surrender their souls.)

William H. Macy in Cellular (2004, David R. Ellis). And another Fargo cast member shows up in a decidedly odd place. I actually thought Cellular was approaching halfway decent, one of those films that manages to get slightly better as it goes along. In fact, it may have just been the arrival of Macy later in the story that gave it its halfway legitimacy.

Since that's exactly ten movies and since I am now starting to approach "halfway decent," that's probably a good place to stop.

I'm sure there are plenty of other examples, though. Keep in mind that I limited myself to movies I've actually seen, as well as movies that I thought were definitely failures. I'd love to hear some of the other examples you have to add.

The next Casey Affleck

When I saw the name Scoot McNairy in the closing credits for Killing Them Softly on Saturday, I thought "Okay, maybe I did know that actor who played Frankie." Except just because I could identify the name (it's a pretty unforgettable one) didn't mean I could identify the face. I still didn't remember how I knew him, only that I remembered reading his name recently.

It was only on the drive home that I realized that Scoot McNairy was also in Argo, in quite a different role. No wonder I wouldn't have recognized him, beyond a vague sense that he looked familiar.

In Softly, McNairy plays a lowest-guy-on-the-totem-pole hood who is hired to rob an illegal card game. The Dallas-born actor gives us one of those Boston accents that's authentic enough that only people from Boston (see: Affleck family) can usually produce them. In Argo, however, he's one of the state department employees stranded in the Canadian ambassador's Tehran home, a bit of a pipsqueak actually, though he ultimately asserts his will more than any of the other characters in his position. Still, it's a huge difference in overall physicality between the two roles.

But it's not just his physical appearance and range that cause me to compare him to Casey Affleck. In fact, these two roles suggest McNairy may exceed Affleck in terms of range.

What causes me to compare him to Affleck is that it's kind of a surprise Affleck himself was not cast in these two roles.

Killing Them Softly was directed by Australian director Andrew Dominik (hence the casting of the terrific Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn, whom you may remember from his unforgettable role in Animal Kingdom). Dominik also directed The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which starred his Softly leading man Brad Pitt ... and Casey Affleck.

Argo was directed by Ben Affleck ... Casey's brother.

The fact that McNairy was cast in films directed by two people who have a history with Casey seems to suggest that both directors were going for "a Casey Affleck type" in those roles, since for one reason or another they were not able to hire the genuine article. Or perhaps both directors didn't want to be so predictable or on-the-nose, Dominik feeling like he didn't want to return both leads from his previous film, and Affleck feeling he'd already made too many movies featuring his brother (though older brother only directed younger in Gone Baby Gone).

And though I once thought otherwise, being "a Casey Affleck type" is most certainly a good thing.

When Casey first emerged as a person I was aware of, a couple years after Ben became famous, I thought he seemed like a bit of a piss ant, a smirking, substance-free beneficiary of all that nepotism has to offer.

This was not based on any of his film work, mind you. It was an impression born almost entirely of my limited perception of his public persona, and I must assume it was based on something very irrational. I still didn't particularly like him in the small roles in which I saw him, but that's probably because they didn't provide him enough screen time to overcome my petty impression of what he brought to the table. Sometimes you just have an instinctive negative response to someone, you know?

But by the time he commanded the screen in the aforementioned (Affleckmentioned?) Gone Baby Gone, I decided that Ben's little brother had some serious chops. And I decided that maybe the thing I hadn't liked about him was what made him so different from his brother, whom I did initially like and like again now (let's forget about those intervening "dark years"). While Ben had classic leading man good looks and was on the path toward becoming a genuine movie star, Casey had the squirrelly appearance you usually associate with a character actor.

Traditionally, which of these two archetypes is the better actor? You guessed it -- the character actor, who isn't handsome enough to skate by on his looks, and therefore has to bring it every time. Which Casey basically does.

There's a place in this world for both Bens and Caseys, but if you appreciate the craft of acting, you are usually better off with the Caseys. To take it out of the Affleck family -- George Clooney is incredibly fun to watch, but if you want an award-worthy performance, you're probably better off seeing a Paul Giamatti movie. (I say this, of course, knowing that the current Oscar tally for these two actors is Clooney 1, Giamatti 0. Clooney also has more nominations and has also been nominated as a director and screenwriter. Okay, maybe I picked bad examples here.)

If McNairy's 2012 work is any indication, he could easily become the next type of actor producers would die to have in their movie.

"Get me the next Scoot McNairy!"

Why can't Nicole Kidman always be awesome?

Tom Cruise got his post yesterday, and among the settlements from their divorce many years ago is that Nicole must be given equivalent coverage whenever Tom is mentioned in the public domain.*

(*not really)

Well, I don't know if Nicole will be too happy with this one.

But let me start by buttering her up. Nicole Kidman is, for my money, quite possibly the most talented actress working today. Oh sure, you could offer plenty of other compelling choices and you'd probably be right. But when Nicole is on, she's on. And in those times (Rabbit Hole, Birth, etc.), no one does it better.

Unfortunately, Kidman is showing about as much selectivity when it comes to scripts as her famously undiscriminating Trespass co-star, Nicolas Cage.

I watched Trespass Tuesday night, knowing full well that it was a generally reviled film. It barely had a theatrical release and was on DVD almost immediately, even with the names Kidman, Cage and Schumacher all attached. (Say what you want about Joel Schumacher, but his films at least get theatrical releases.) I didn't see much promise in the names Cage and Schumacher, but Kidman had me interested.

So I watched.

Ugh.

Trespass is one of the most poorly conceived, poorly written, indifferently acted and just plain cliched home invasion movies you will ever see. It doesn't contain the slightest bit of nuance, and for large periods of time it doesn't make any sense, either.

What's worst is that Kidman is bad. She doesn't elevate the material, not even a little bit. She acts down to it, almost like she's got an on-off switch and it's currently switched off. She's still the same actress -- she still does those little facial twitches and other expressions that remind me who she is. But the movie is still absolutely terrible.

Part of what should make an actress good is her willingness to hold out for the roles she wants. Clearly, Kidman isn't doing that. You could list a number of her famous duds (Bewitched, The Stepford Wives, etc.), but you really don't need to go outside the year 2011 to wonder what the hell she's doing. Her most mysterious appearance this year -- which originally gave me the idea to write a post about her choices -- was the awful Adam Sandler-Jennifer Aniston comedy Just Go With It. Didn't think she was in that? Yeah, neither did anybody. She's some kind of rival to Aniston's character, and it's a thankless role that involves embarrassing dance sequences and other pratfalls. What were you thinking, Nicole? (I'm guessing she's friends with Sandler or something.)

We have to pause now to regrettably acknowledge the reality that Hollywood is not brimming with satisfying roles for actresses. For every grieving mother of a deceased child (Rabbit Hole), there are ten roles for bad romantic rivals (Just Go With It).

Still, this is Nicole Kidman. She's been nominated for three Oscars and won one. And should have been nominated for an Oscar for Birth. Here's a quick scene from Birth that summarizes everything of which she is capable. Unfortunately, embedding is disabled on youtube, so you'll just have to follow the hyperlink above. The blow-your-mind acting begins at about 1:20, but the first 1:20 is useful for establishing Kidman's emotional state during the ensuing scene.

But the problem is, if you want to work -- and it appears that Kidman does -- there's pretty much no way to keep your record totally unblemished. There are very few actors or actresses who don't have at least a couple duds to their credit.

Here's hoping that Kidman has gotten her couple duds out of her system in 2011, and her 2012 will be more like her 2010.

Tom Cruise can run

You know what a lot of actors can't do very well?

Run.

Lately I've been noticing it a lot. Scenes in movies or TV shows that are supposed to be tense, that feature the main characters running. Except most of the time, they look like they're more worried about tripping on a loose object and stumbling face first -- the kind of fall that would risk scratching up their money-makers. I can't believe the number of directors who let actors get away with these slack-faced, controlled trots, which are all the more ridiculous because you can't look intense while running cautiously.

But not Tom Cruise.

Tom Cruise can run.

In fact, Tom Cruise running is one of the main reasons I look forward to a Tom Cruise movie. That guy runs like a bat out of hell. He runs like he's being chased by a pack of wolves that haven't eaten in two weeks. He runs like there's a finish line and he needs to blow past a hundred other runners before he can get there. He runs like he's running away from a bomb. (Which in movies, he usually is.)

If you don't believe me, just check it out. I'd hoped to find a single still that perfectly encapsulated the Tom Cruise Run. Fortunately, Youtube has got me covered. (Which also means that "Tom Cruise can run" is not a particularly original observation).

Here:



Even still this does not capture the quintessential Tom Cruise Run in my mind's eye.

Where other actors hesitate, Cruise commits. Where other actors demonstrate a me-first attitude, he puts the drama first. And you know it's not a double, because they usually shoot him head on. How else to capture that slightly crazed, slightly desperate, slightly shocked look in his eyes?

Anyway, it's one of the reasons I'm now looking forward to Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol. (Damn, that's too much punctuation for one title). Which opens wide today after raking in the dough while opening on just a couple hundred screens last Friday.

I mean, I knew Cruise could run and I knew he would run in Ghost Protocol. The difference is that I have seen a lot of bad running recently in movies and TV, so it has whetted my appetite for an actor who can actually do it effectively.

I'm also looking forward to it because the critical raves are in. Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly, one of the critics I read most, even put it in his top ten of the year. (At #10, but still.) And unlike such series as The Fast and the Furious, where Fast Five has gotten a lot of positive word of mouth, I'm actually caught up with the M:Is. So I can watch this one without wondering if I'm missing some of the story (he says while stifling a bit of laughter at his own ridiculous rules).

The problem is, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Adventures of Tintin also release today, and the list of movies I'd like to see before January 24th, when I close my 2011 list, is currently 40 titles long. (Exactly 40 -- I just checked on my blackberry.)

If I want to see all these movies, I'd better run.