"Great" actors that just aren't very good - Page 2

Bryan Brown

I'm sorry!

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Originally Posted by Bailey 

Bryan Brown

 

I'm sorry!

Hey, hey, hey, hey, HEY there tiger.You need to see him in some local aussie fare if you haven't already, watch Brown in his natural habitat.

I recommend Dead Heart from 1996 as a starter for ten...

Ernie Dingo! YES! 

Oh, Bryan.  Were you not aware of one of the foremost axioms of British thespians?  "Never act with children, Denholm Elliot, or dingoes named Ernie."

Ernie Dingo has worked with both Paul Hogan AND Wim Wenders, thus exempting him from this thread wholesale.

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Originally Posted by SeanCE 

Ernie Dingo has worked with both Paul Hogan AND Wim Wenders, thus exempting him from this thread wholesale.

Utterly. Plus he was "Robert Gottliebson"...

...he's a bit of a national treasure these days.

Hopkins is bad? Lion in Winter, Elephant Man, War and Peace, A Bridge too Far,   The Road to Wellville is hilarious.

Aaanyway, I do find I have trouble with many of those supposed "great actors" of the old royal Shakespeare days.  Sir John Gielgud is one.  I mean I didn't dislike the guy.  He did a lot of solid work in good films.  But great actor?  Don't see it myself.  Seemed like he was mostly trapped in that mannered past, which admittedly some people love.

(Was Brown ever considered great?  Maybe that's the joke)

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Originally Posted by Muzman 

 

(Was Brown ever considered great?  Maybe that's the joke)

He's messy, but he's fun at parties.

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Originally Posted by Cylon Baby 

As my post indicates, I don't think being a bad actor is necessarily a bad thing if you are a movie star.

Yeah, they're very different disciplines in a lot of ways. It's similar to how I've always thought the term 'Character Actor' is kind of silly, because it's the very nature of an actor to play characters. What people call 'character actors', I call actors who simply aren't pretty enough and/or don't easily marketable enough personalities to be 'stars'. That's not to knock the big starts, as most of them are genuinely talented; they just have a personality that can be successfully marketed, and that people enjoy watching. That's why you see a lot of talented actors become massive, and slowly regress into playing themselves (Or at least, characters who are essential versions of them) again and again.

As for the thread, I think we can take this several ways. Basically, we're talking about actors whose output doesn't always live up to how they're promoted or how they're commonly perceived. So that can be actors who've declined over the years,  actors who we think were never as good as they're believed to be, actors who or lazy, or can resort to schtick under poor direction... anything really, I don't see why we need to pick one.

Maybe we should rename this thing 'The Flava Flav Memorial Thread of Not Believing the Hype'.  

Sean Connery is kind of a bad actor that just happens to possess massive and undeniable charisma, to the point where his acting ability doesn't even really matter. He also rarely picks parts that require much more than movie star charm. 

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Originally Posted by Arjen Rudd 

Sean Connery is kind of a bad actor that just happens to possess massive and undeniable charisma, to the point where his acting ability doesn't even really matter. He also rarely picks parts that require much more than movie star charm. 

The man knew how to play to his strengths no doubt.

God, Pacino? Seriously? When he's in shit, he's shit. That doesn't mke him a bad actor. Watch him in INSOMNIA - he carries that film on his back.

Craig is the first Bond to be a bona fide great actor on the side.

I feel like this might end up being Hugh Jackman's lot in life, but if he stretches himself over the next few years he may prove me wrong.

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Originally Posted by Andrew Merriweather 

God, Pacino? Seriously? When he's in shit, he's shit. That doesn't mke him a bad actor. Watch him in INSOMNIA - he carries that film on his back.

 

Nobody's saying Pacino is bad, or that all of his modern performances are shit. Don't take the thread title literally, because nobody else here is. There's a wider discussion going on.

There's an interview on the "Heat"-DVD where Pacino seems a bit embarrassed by his performance. Pacino's idea was that Vincent Hanna would use cocaine and other drugs while on duty and that would explain his shouting and tics. 

Has Harrison Ford been mentioned yet? Just a super-charismatic goofball who got lucky like no one ever has in the history of film and created a decades long career with awards nominations, box-office success, pop culture domination and eventually becoming something close to an institution while being essentially on auto-pilot.

And as for Pacino, seeing how his god-like run in the seventies excludes him from this quite emphatically, I have to say that his presence has become a major detraction in movies for me. Even when he's supposed to be toning things down you can just feel his soul eating the scenery. 

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Originally Posted by Workyticket 

Nobody's saying Pacino is bad, or that all of his modern performances are shit. Don't take the thread title literally, because nobody else here is. There's a wider discussion going on.

Yeah, but that wider discussion is one that's been had hundreds of times before. We all know Pacino/DeNiro/et cetera ain't what they used to be.

Al Pacino went from Dog Day Afternoon to fucking Jack & Jill. I can't think of someone falling from grace further. Satan ending up being the king of hell and Orson Welles' commercial work was done with bile in his throat. 

DeNiro. ROCK & BULWINKLE.

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Originally Posted by Andrew Merriweather 

Yeah, but that wider discussion is one that's been had hundreds of times before. We all know Pacino/DeNiro/et cetera ain't what they used to be.

Well if you're so familiar with the discussion, why assume that everyone was calling Pacino a bad actor? Shouldn't you know already that 'ain't what he used to be' is exactly what everyone was saying all along, seeing as you've heard this so many times? Y'know, if you don't enjoy the conversation in a thread no-one's forcing you to post in it.  

Because Gabe's original discussion topic is far more interesting than the 10,000th round of "Al Pacino isn't as good as he once was".

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Originally Posted by Andrew Merriweather 

Because Gabe's original discussion topic is far more interesting than the 10,000th round of "Al Pacino isn't as good as he once was".

OK, well instead of nitpicking other people's suggestions and complaining about how bored you are, why not actually be constructive about it and give us some suggestions of your own based on Gabe's original post? We'd be glad to run with it. That's all you had to do in the first place.

I did. I named every actor to play Bond except Craig and Hugh Jackman. And holy Hell why do you have such a stick up your ass about this?

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Originally Posted by Arjen Rudd 

Sean Connery is kind of a bad actor that just happens to possess massive and undeniable charisma, to the point where his acting ability doesn't even really matter. He also rarely picks parts that require much more than movie star charm. 

See Schwarzenegger, Arnold.  Not that anyone ever considered him an even good actor, but he knew his strengths and knew better than to wander too far away from them.

I think the inherent problem in this discussion is that any "Great" actors, have been that, because you don't get there without being able to deliver. Anyone who wasn't, was just a movie star, mistakenly labeled as an actor, because their power to charm convinced us all. Either way it's a dead end, because both those options produced incredible results. I think it's going to be really hard to find someone who' considered great, but isn't actually all that. Any that we do come up with, for instance, I'd say Richard Burton, is going to be controversial because it boils down to personal taste.

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Originally Posted by Andrew Merriweather 

I did. I named every actor to play Bond except Craig and Hugh Jackman. And holy Hell why do you have such a stick up your ass about this?

So you did. OK, fair do's on that one, my mistake. As for the other stuff, I don't have a stick up my arse, it's just that there are a lot of newer people on this board who maybe do want to talk about Pacino et al. I mean, I'm still fairly new myself and I don't remember Pacino coming up in this context in past threads, which is why I mentioned him in the first place. OK, so it's old ground but the focus will shift eventually. I'm sure people here wouldn't dwell on a topic if they didn't feel there was still some meat on it, and we're generally pretty good around these parts about moving on once we've felt we've talked something out. Like I was saying before, there's room in this topic for Gabe's particular tack and a lot of other permutations on the idea, and it's less fun if we're putting limits on what should be talked about - well, Gabe has the prerogative, being the thread starter and all. That's basically where I've been coming from, and getting into fights has not been my intention.

And by the way, now that I've remembered your Bond theory I mostly agree, with the exception of Timothy Dalton. The guy was trained at RADA and had some serious stage chops before he crossed over into film; and he was pretty friggin' great in Hot Fuzz. Generally though, I agree: The average standard of acting talent among the Bonds is fairly low. Craig and Dalton are great, Connery has been great but still limited, and.... I don't know. I'm sure someone out there will bat for Roger Moore, but I can't think of a defence for him.

Forest Whitaker. Barring Last King of Scotland I haven't seen him in anything where I thought his performance stood out. He's just boring to watch...

No.

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Originally Posted by Workyticket 

And by the way, now that I've remembered your Bond theory I mostly agree, with the exception of Timothy Dalton. The guy was trained at RADA and had some serious stage chops before he crossed over into film; and he was pretty friggin' great in Hot Fuzz. Generally though, I agree: The average standard of acting talent among the Bonds is fairly low. Craig and Dalton are great, Connery has been great but still limited, and.... I don't know. I'm sure someone out there will bat for Roger Moore, but I can't think of a defence for him.

Dalton can be very good, but stage training often fails to translate to the screen. He's the scond best guy to play Bond, no doubt, but I still wouldn't classify him as a genuine "great". I just wish Lazenby didn't exist, because then we could kick off the epic nerdfight about whether Connery or Moore is a worse actor (Moore is, obviously).

James McAvoy. I have absolutely no idea why people like him. I see no talent or charisma.

Is Mark Wahlberg too obvious?

No one is seriously considering Wahlberg as anything close to a "great" actor. Are they? 

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Originally Posted by Andrew Merriweather 

No.

I know I deserve to get ripped for that but I can't help it.  I don't know what it is but his performances just get nothing out of me and that's just what I took the tread title to mean.

Edit: Double Post

David O. Russell used to. USED TO.

Complete derail: What the Hell is this?!

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Originally Posted by stelios 

No one is seriously considering Wahlberg as anything close to a "great" actor. Are they? 

Not around here I hope, but I know people who think he's great and he definately seems like a "respected" actor in the public's eye.

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Originally Posted by Gabe T 

Hopkins told a story about chatting with Branagh about Thor while holding the script, hearing what he had to say, and writing a great big N.A.R. in red pen on the script.

 

No. Acting. Required.

 

On how many scripts do you think Hopkins has written N.A.R.?

Tommy Lee Jones said pretty much the same for Under Siege - you're not there to be an artist, but to entertain and be "big". I think people should keep that in mind when calling out "great" actors on parts that require the latter sort of performance. ie: Jack Sparrow is a "big" performance, it's not Depp going for an Oscar Worthy performance. The only thing you can judge those sorts of parts on is whether they became Iconic or not, and whether Iconic can = "Great".

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Originally Posted by Nardo 
 Jack Sparrow is a "big" performance, it's not Depp going for an Oscar Worthy performance.

 

 

Irony!

When people say that Cary Grant or Jack Nicholson aren't good actors, I think they're trying to say that they don't have a wide range, that they primarily play "Cary Grant" or "Jack Nicholson."  I kinda see the complaint (Jack's "Jack-Ness" in The Departed was unbearable at times), but if you've created an iconic personality that people still recognize decades later, you're probably pretty good at your job.

I've never found Steve McQueen to be a particularly good actor, and thought that his "feud" with Paul Newman, who is a good actor, was ridiculous. Certainly Steve McQueen is cool and iconic, and I love many of his films, but I haven't seen any movies where he exhibits any range. All of the roles I've seen him in can be summed up, at best, as "stoic", and at worst as "acting like wood and looking like leather."

In the Paul Newman debate, Newman trumps McQueen, every time:

Cool Hand Luke > Papillon
The Hustler > The Cincinatti Kid
The Towering Inferon > Uh...The Towering Inferno?
 

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Originally Posted by Andrew Merriweather 

Dalton can be very good, but stage training often fails to translate to the screen. He's the scond best guy to play Bond, no doubt, but I still wouldn't classify him as a genuine "great". I just wish Lazenby didn't exist, because then we could kick off the epic nerdfight about whether Connery or Moore is a worse actor (Moore is, obviously).

I'd struggle to call Connery a bad actor after watching The Hill, Marnie, The Offence, The Man Who Would Be King, and The Russia House - to name just a few. I think like with a lot of suggestions in this thread you have the cliche in operation that anyone who trains and excels at something is going to perform with a lot more freedom, intensity and sensitivity as a younger person than in later life. It's part of the psychology of growing older, isn't it, that you revert to habits and behaviours whtin an increasingly natrrow spectrum because you understand what works and discard what doesn't? Wihtin a creative business, clearly the very great artists are those who keep challenging themselves to do things differently with care and energy, but they are few and far between. That's why they are great.

Also there is a straw man here, which I don't mean to criticise in itself, which is the thesis that the actors so far cited are regarded as "great". I am not sure Connery, Dalton, Depp and many others would be defined that way, although then you hit the problem of defining what your sample is for arriving at that definition.

As for the old British stage trained actors cited above, people like Gielgud and Olivier, and to a lesser extent Burton, O'Toole and Hopkins, they sit on the cusp of the development of cinema within the English acting scene as the principal medium. These guys weren't trained for the screen. Some of them adapted better than others - and goddamn but Burton, Hopkins and O'Toole (although no-one did the latter but I've heard it said) have from time to time and some might argue more often than not, fucking burned up the screen and been utterly convincing as they did it.

One piece of commentary I remember really well is Michael Caine's advice to young actors about screen acting. I can't remember where it came from, either a documentary, audience with or interview, but he emphasised that his view of the "secret" to great film acting was to do as little as possible. To be reserved, inhabit the role and not be overly expressive. He differentiated this from stage acting and argued that if you perform in the same way on stage and screen, to a cinema audience you come over as a caricature. I personally thinkn a lot of the examples given so far in this thread are in substance identifying those perfomances where, frankly, pretty damn good actors for one reason or another don't adhere to that advice.

And to avoid a charge of being a critic without my own suggestion, I'd nominate Brando. I know, I know, he's the poster boy for Method, an icon of the 20th century and an acting legend, but every single performance of his comes over as mannered, exaggerated and off-key to me. I guess it's pretty easy to hit me with the "no taste" accusation and I think I understand a lot of it was to do with his acting method, but I am genuinely struggling to think of an example of one of his roles where I wasn't dragged out of the film by his performance. He has iconic roles in many of my favourite films, and I like him in a lot of them, but I have never felt what I am watching adds up to great acting.

Flame away...!

I've always run hot and cold on Pitt, more impressed by his choice of projects than his actual talent. I usually love his movies, but like his performances in them a little less so, if that makes sense...and it doesn't.

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Originally Posted by Gabe T 

I was just hoping someone would give a well-written case against Ryan Gosling. Because I sure as shit ain't doing it.

Meaning you believe he's good or you don't want to take the time or the brunt of hate over it? Because I don't want to take the time right now, not to think about Gosling's acting. It only aggravates me to remember how excited I was for Drive... and then I watched him in it.

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Originally Posted by SeanCE 

I think there's a difference between 'Bad Taste' and finding a particular performers rhythm off.

But is it the rhythm of the performer, or of the editor? Is it due to the actor's choices, or the director in regards to the script. Now, I can understand when it comes to an aggregate collection of an actor as opposed to disliking one film or performance, i.e. Johnny Depp. (Who, in my opinion, has become one of the most boring actors to watch today because he makes so many... ahem... interesting choices) With Hopkins, though, you'd have to deny The Lion in Winter, which I cannot do.

 

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Originally Posted by jhp1608 

 

And to avoid a charge of being a critic without my own suggestion, I'd nominate Brando. I know, I know, he's the poster boy for Method, an icon of the 20th century and an acting legend, but every single performance of his comes over as mannered, exaggerated and off-key to me. I guess it's pretty easy to hit me with the "no taste" accusation and I think I understand a lot of it was to do with his acting method, but I am genuinely struggling to think of an example of one of his roles where I wasn't dragged out of the film by his performance. He has iconic roles in many of my favourite films, and I like him in a lot of them, but I have never felt what I am watching adds up to great acting.

No flames, but really? Mannered and exaggerated? Watching Brando in Streetcar it is anything but mannered, anything but exaggerated, to a degree that could be considered frustratingly so. I feel as if it is consistent through his work. And the fact he is able to make Stanley both a presence of immense sexual ferocity and power (innately) and yet still vulnerable and sympathetic is incredibly telling of his ability as an actor. 

Most of this conversation is making me want to link to FilmCrit Hulk's excellent piece on acting. If you haven't read it, you should.

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Originally Posted by stelios 

Has Harrison Ford been mentioned yet? Just a super-charismatic goofball who got lucky like no one ever has in the history of film and created a decades long career with awards nominations, box-office success, pop culture domination and eventually becoming something close to an institution while being essentially on auto-pilot.

That doesn't mean he's not a great actor. The writer of BLADE RUNNER was speaking about FORD on the DANGEROUS DAYS documentary, and said of his HAN SOLO work that he did it "better than Errol Flynn", and that it's the hardest thing in the world to make that swashbuckling swagger look so effortless. I think Ford's INDIANA JONES is one of the great screen characters of all time, and he certainly deserved an Oscar for his work. It just blows away just about every star turn from the second half of the 20th century, if not from the entire history of film as a medium of entertainment

When he cares, he can be truly impressive (MOSQUITO, WITNESS, REGARDING HENRY), and even on "auto pilot", his cruise control is more entertaining than most other stars when they're acting their hearts out (at least up through the 90s)

David Tennant.

The guy won acting awards for Dr Who.

That's right. Dr Who.

YES. Tennant is a massive ham and really not very good.

Wrong. Tennant's Doctor is all about ham. That was his job & he delivered. He demonstrated great subdued depth & intensity in the Series 4 episode "Midnight".

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Originally Posted by jhp1608 

 

And to avoid a charge of being a critic without my own suggestion, I'd nominate Brando. I know, I know, he's the poster boy for Method, an icon of the 20th century and an acting legend, but every single performance of his comes over as mannered, exaggerated and off-key to me. I guess it's pretty easy to hit me with the "no taste" accusation and I think I understand a lot of it was to do with his acting method, but I am genuinely struggling to think of an example of one of his roles where I wasn't dragged out of the film by his performance. He has iconic roles in many of my favourite films, and I like him in a lot of them, but I have never felt what I am watching adds up to great acting.

 

Flame away...!

Even in Streetcar Named Desire? I got used to the voice after a couple of minutes and for the rest of the film I thought he was Stanley Kowalski. It was Vivian Leigh who dragged me out of that film with mannered, exaggerated performance.

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Originally Posted by Art Decade 

Wrong. Tennant's Doctor is all about ham. That was his job & he delivered. He demonstrated great subdued depth & intensity in the Series 4 episode "Midnight".

He had his moments, but he slides into overacting in almost every episode. And in most of his other work, too - his stuff in HARRY POTTER is almost embarrassing. He's not a walking disaster, but I think "not very good" is a fair summation of his abilities.

Again, though, he's bloody brilliant onstage. That skillset doesn't translate very well, it seems.

Fair enough. Speaking of not translating:

This fucker.