I've seen some older movies with G. Oldman here lately. Can't believe what a great range he has. Freaking awesome as a good guy or the villain.
Honestly, I don't think there's one greatest actor. If you look some were the best of their day because they truly lived in the character and conveyed the ideas that meshed with the audience of the day. Some of the acting from older films is "over the top" at times in comparison to some of what you might see now, but it is amazing none-the-less.
Take someone like Samuel L. that people downplay because he is in so many movies; find a film where his presence doesn't lend weight to every scene that he's in. Not saying he's the best ever, but he gives you your money's worth and then some.
There is no best, but I'm thankful there are so many greats.
Registered: Aug 2004
Location: McClane's Right one
A) Matthew McConaughey.
His multi layered portrayal of Denton Van Zan in Reign of Fire was brillaintly played out. The way he plays Van Zan as a man whom is alittle girl inside and has to grunt chestbeat and speak in a batman voice to cover over for his total lack of fighting ability in the savage post apocalyptic world is expertly betrayed in the pre-suicide scene where the character temporarily lets his softer side show itself, indicating that he has progressed as an individual and has completed his arc in becoming comfortable with his feminine side and small genitalia (brilliantly played with subtley in the implied source of his exterior rage, and big over compensatory gun barrels and the way symbolically he mounts a man in quasi sexual fashion in a playfight, deliberately causing his symbolised other half no damage whatsoever with masterfully exaggerated 'caricatured man assault' that deftly communicates to the audience that this is how Van Zan sees the real manly men around him)
He delights in Quinn finally engaging him in reciprocated symbolised love/similar expressions of anger at the end of the enchange as Quinn threatens to "kill" him..
The way he exposes his softer/lighter side to a lady in a scene simultaneously showing mastery of his internal struggle with his demons AND informing the audience that they were right to see Van Zan as a multi-layered self tortured man previously unable to see that he was infact both man and woman, before throwing himself into the jaws of the beast angrily brandishing a axe whilst literally throwing the persona that was was the symbol of his inner pain LITERALLY into the 'demons' mouth forcing it to become like an Spiritual Ourobos, reflected and reinforced his subtley nuanced performance throughout. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. This of course went over the heads of 75% of the mainstream who gave him no credit and just wrote Van Zan off as a badly acted, cliche of chestbeating and batman voice theft
and read Van Zan's final winning of his struggle and completion of his internal spiritual journey as a dumbass pointless waste of a character who could have benefitted his team.. more fool them.
Well played McConaughey....well played.
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B) Alec Guinness..? An anagram of "Genuine class" and rightly so.
C) Brando?
D) Christopher Reeve?
E) Ben Kingsley?
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"Van Zan is the Pinocchio of feces." - Lestov16
Last edited by Sadako of Girth on Mar 3rd, 2013 at 03:11 PM
__________________ "Your Lord knows very well what is in your heart. Your soul suffices this day as a reckoner against you. I need no witnesses. You do not listen to your soul, but listen instead to your anger and your rage."
Jun 27th, 2012 07:16 PM
