Posted on 05/04/2025 1:03:40 PM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
There are many ways an actor can surprise. Jack Nicholson surprises by being … surprising. Even though he’s not a chameleon like Oldman or Depp, you never know what he’s going to do next. But whatever he does, it’s grounded in psychological reality. It never seems fake. Christopher Walken, Glenn Close, Al Pacino, and many others have a surprising danger in them… you feel they might jump you or blow up at you at any time. They are ticking time bombs. And, many comedic actors (e.g., Julia Louis-Dreyfus) surprise us in all sorts of quirky, zany ways…
Some people think acting is good if they like the movie. Keanu Reeves, in my mind, is a horrible actor—it often seems as if he’s reading from cue cards rather than saying words that are his. There is a difference between playing an undemonstrative person and being a wooden actor. In fact, playing someone who is reserved is very difficult…But some people like Reeves because they think the Matrix films are cool.
Lots of people think an actor is great if they like his or her character…Or they think she’s good if she pulls off some impressive effect, such as gaining or losing a lot of weight or pretending to be handicapped… If you forced me to rank Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man versus Dustin Hoffman in Kramer vs. Kramer, I’d say he did more exciting work in the latter. In Rain Man he was able to hide behind some stunts. In Kramer vs. Kramer, he just had to be truthful.
Tom Cruise… rarely surprises me, and he doesn’t seem to dig deep into a anything raw or vulnerable inside him. He seems guarded. The must vulnerable I’ve seen him is in Eyes Wide Shut…but it’s not the norm.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
Yes, many did; it was a time when Americans were very patriotic! And don’t forget that unlike WWI, we actually were attacked on our own land; though Hawaii was not then a state, it was still ours!
I heard about it. A young Robert Duvall creeping around - that works. You are fortunate to have seen that.
Some of the really good actors stay away from Hollywood and consequently (or maybe because they are conservative) are shunned by the awards industry. My all-time favorite actor does this, lives on a horse farm in the Virginia countryside: Robert Duvall. He is stunning in every role.
He is. From playing a mentally challenged guy (Sling Blade) to a well-groomed, well-spoken U.S. President (Love Actually) to an oil field macho man on a current tv series, he is amazing to watch.
Agree to both, especially DDL. On the comedy end, Stephen Root—brilliant. You don't even realize it's him until a few scenes along.
I am perhaps the only person on earth who loved everything about Godfather III except whomever did Diane Keaton's hair and wardrobe -- just awful. But loved all the cast, including Sofia Coppola as Michael's daughter. I really can't see Winona Ryder in that role.
That said, I've traveled extensively in southern Italy and Sicily, speak the language, and also lived among Italian-Americans for decades; so it all "fit" well for me, except Keaton's styling. And she was the "Meddican."
I found the plot of Godfather III to suffer from the same problem as most other sequels past II. [Spoiler alert]
Godfather II successfully showed Michael Corleone trying to recreate and update Vito’s approach, with it going sideways, and because he couldn’t successfully keep the Sicilian ways and embrace (on the surface) American modernity simultaneously. Everyone would be joyous at Connie’s wedding in the original. The First Communion Party in Godfather II is both lavish and pathetic at the same time. That sets the tone.
By the time of Godfather III. It is just a crazy expansion of the same themes.
In Godfather, you get a hail of bullets on the Don.
In Godfather II, you get the new Don’s bedroom strafed by machine gunfire.
In Godfather III, you get an entire penthouse taken out by an attack helicopter.
What will be in Godfather IV . . . nukes?
In Godfather I, the fight is to maintain dominance, while expanding the operation to go to Vegas.
In GF 2, expand legitimate operations from Vegas, while maintaining leverage over the NY operation, and making a run at Cuba.
In GF 3, Michael still feels like he has to accumulate more power, making more enemies and false friends along the way, but is making a play with international European bankers and the Vatican for a Worldwide Empire. What’s next, in GF IV, Michael Corleone vs. Thanos?
In Godfather, you take out competing families, plus traitors Tessie and Paulie, and also Carlo a family member, but also a traitor. An innocent horse also gets slaughtered.
In GF II, you get some more of all of the above, except the family members get to the actual bloodlines (Fredo), and you get the feeling that a softer touch might have prevented the events that led to Fredo’s and Pentangeli’s deaths. The prostitute taking the place of the horse head to control the Senator is again, a repeat of an earlier trope, significantly showing that non-players can get killed for political ends.
In GF III, Michael’s at the opera while family business is taken care of, but now he’s taking out Cardinals as well mob guys.
To much, and not enough.
But kept him there because a lot of people consider him an upper echelon actor. I'm just not one of them.
Jack Nicholson one of the better actors he gets into to the role all the way not many do.
But do any of these actors display the range of a Charles Bronson in his prime?
LOL - while so many "artists" learned from Strasberg, Meisner and such our tough guys saved a fortune at the 84 Brand Lumber Yard. Steven Seagal, when caught in the right mood, does one hell of a White Pine.
Duvall was amazing and Lee Remick was AMAZING; so VERY much better than Hepburn!
And because it was in a theatre, very much more creepier/scary than the movie! How so, you might ask? Well, when the lights get shut off, the entire theatre went BLACK and then, there was a light ( when she opens the icebox door ) and we, right along with Lee. were terrified! Yes, there were very audible gasps and so muffled screams from the audience.
The ONLY movie to sort of recreate that kind of audience reaction, that I can think of, is in PSYCHO, when the mummified body of the mother is seen and then with Tony Perkins as his own dead mother!
So incredibly brilliant.
Gangs of New YorkHe almost brought me to tears in that last one, as a somewhat threadbare English aristocrat dweeb trying to navigate his socially favorable engagement to a beautiful, vivacious young woman. His character was almost comical but ultimately pitiable and clueless, whereupon another, passionate young man swept her away.
The Last of the Mohicans
My Left Foot
A Room with a View
The other films on my list, wow! He was stunning. They say he was so intense in his preparations to inhabit a role that he would not break character even during the lunch or dinner breaks, and all the rest of the cast and crew had to cope with it.
He has announced that he has quit acting several times because of what it takes out of him; but this last time seems to have stuck—nothing on IMDB for him since 2017. The one before that was Lincoln in 2012, which I have never seen, but I imagine was fantastic—he won the Best Actor Oscar for it.
You overlook the conclusion of the trilogy — the summing up of the moral arc of Michael's troubled character. His father had wanted Michael to be able to become a congressman or a senator; he had sent Michael to college, he took pride in Michael's service in WW2. But when Vito was shot, and the reckless Sonny was taken out, Michael coldly determined not to leave the life he was raised in, but to take over Vito's life where Vito had left off. Michael's own life then became a constant struggle between the Italian ways (both good and bad) and the inescapable tumult of a very dynamic period in America.
When it all propelled him to the apex of Italianism, Sicilianism and Catholicism (both good and bad), he was at that point coping with his guilty conscience and the overwhelming inescapability of the life he had early on assumed with such a vengeance, even while trying to work his way towards his father's vision for him — a legitimate man of honor. Yet “just when he thought he was out of it, they pulled him back in.”
His own body was betraying him; he had a diabetic attack during what many Catholics would walk on broken glass for — a private audience/confession with the Pope — indeed, it had all become too much dolce vita (the sweet life) and not enough insulin (the governing balance of conscience), and “the only prescription is more cowbell” sugar — the Pope hurriedly calls for juice and candy, which Michael gobbles cravenly to avoid falling into a diabetic coma on what should have been an exquisitely reverent and dignified occasion.
The many murders Michael had ordered are not bothering him nearly so much as having killed his own brother, whom during his confession he termed "my father's son" — his awareness of a gaping vacancy where a righteous purpose should have been is acute; but it would soon weigh little compared to what lay just ahead: tender emotions with the ex-wife he had abused as they swell with pride amid the emotionalism, passion and spectacle of an operatic performance featuring the son they share — only to experience the most unthinkably passionate emotion within an hour. Their daughter is shot through the heart on the opera house stairs in vendetta stemming from Michael's Sicilian bad deeds.
Michael Corleone had reached the very pinnacle of his particular Italian-American imagination; yet even grace and absolution from a Pope could not now relieve his guilt. We see him fall to his death, a wealthy man of repute, alone, a failure, a disgrace, with only a dog as witness. Crime did not pay.
Crime did not pay.
And that is what the Hays Code was all about. (Not sex, which is all anyone talks about nowadays when the subject comes up.) Bad conduct and even outright evil can be portrayed onscreen. But movies should not glorify or normalize it. In a morally coherent universe — and we do live in a morally coherent universe — there are always consequences.
The Picture of Dorian Gray may have been written by Oscar Wilde, but it is ultimately a highly moral allegory.
You are a very good writer. You should become a movie critic!
I ran out of time to finish the recapitulation. I don’t particularly mind the reinforcement of the idea that Michael learned nothing from Godfather Part II. No issue with the very end where he dies nearly alone. The incomplete Sacramental Confession that would have either been a turning point or completely rejected was a realistic outcome.
Vito wouldn’t be “somebody’s puppet”, and neither would Michael . . . except that events make them puppets after all . . . Vito paid with the life of his son, and still eventually capitulated on the sale of narcotics. Michael made himself enough powerful enemies that he put his family members in harm’s way in order to “protect them”.
I don’t have a problem with the outcome of the movie, including the shooting at the opera. I do agree that Sophia Coppola wasn’t a good enough actress for the part. Diane Keaton’s acting was fine. When she is with Michael, you can see that she wished it could all have been different, and that both were emotionally exhausted.
I just felt that the flow, pacing, and especially the recycling and insane expansion of Godfather tropes made it a lesser movie that clashes with the artistry of the first two. I wanted to like it, and give it a chance on its own terms, but the script and directing were not up to expectations.
Way back in GF I, Vito swore on the souls of his grandchildren that he would not be the one to break the Truce. His cooperating with Michael to settle scores later condemned Michael and two of his grandchildren at least (Mary, and the aborted son) to the consequences of his oath.
I strongly disagree.
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