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Archive for the ‘Guy Pearce: ACTING GOD’ Category

Results

12 Jun

Results – directed by Andrew Bujalski. Oddball Comedy. 105 minutes Color 2015.

★★★★★

The Story: A colliding romantic trio circles around a physical fitness gym, until two of them bump the other one off and realize the inevitable.

~

Four great actors working today give me the cue for adoration. They are Allison Janney, Lee Pace, Joan Allen, and Guy Pearce. I eagerly trace them to their latest. I am predisposed to rave them. I am prepared to sit back and allow them to prove me happy.

Guy Pearce is the most essential of these, in the sense that his presence in supporting roles always turns the key to the dynamic of the story. What he brings that no one else can bring is a conservation of energy through which the role as written can make its mark on the story for the audience. But sometimes he is give a great big dolloping leading role, and such a role we have here, and I pray you do not miss it.

He plays the completely brain-empty proprietor of a physical fitness gym. He spouts nothing but the most steadfast clichés. It is quite wonderful to hear him vocalize the human potential babble which is the vision of his firm. As an actor he never relents. He never falls back on a roll of the eyes or a pitch for empathy. He is ruthlessly the character itself.

Backed by three wonderful actors I have never heard of, we get Pearce in full force of his gift for give and take. It is an actors’ jubilee.

Cobie Smulders plays his star trainer and sometime squeeze. She is absolutely marvelous. And so is Kevin Corrigan as an orphaned nouveau riche, and Giovanni Ribisi as the slime bag lawyer. They are all backed by a fully written script with characters so fleshed out you simply never know what they are going to do or say next.

The writer staged and directed them, and while it is my usual caveat to speak against the possible success of such a pairing, here it works like gangbusters. The direction and filming and color and cutting look patchwork – but that is the basic ground of alliance for these characters. None of them fit together. As romantic couples you could not possibly suppose any of them would get along for two minutes.

But the richness is: what the hell are most married couples doing together anyhow? Can you really understand why two people are so joined? What do they possibly have in common? What keeps them together all these years?

You’ll sort it out for yourself in the coffee shop afterwards. I so enjoyed it. I wish I could be there to hear you did too.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: INTERNATIONAL REALISTIC, Cobie Smulders, Giovanni Ribisi, Guy Pearce: ACTING GOD, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, Kevin Corrigan, ODDBALL COMEDY

 

The Rover

22 Jun

The Rover – directed by David Michôd. Crime Chase Drama. 142 minutes Color 2014.

★★★★

The Story: 10 years into dystopia and world chaos, a man seeks justice, and justice seeks him.

~ ~ ~

One of my two favorite actors in the world, Guy Pearce holds the screen with a focus so intense, you stay with him through thick and thin, although you have no idea what, if anything, is at stake. If you want to know what it takes to carry a movie, watch Pearce here. He scarcely moves a muscle, he scarcely shows a feeling, because what he has in mind must be – mustn’t it? – more precious than his life. With Pearce it is not, and never has been, that less is more. It is a question of him somehow having subtlely mainlined a character, and then honored the essential.

In saying this I am speaking of a talent that cannot be learned. I don’t know how it is done. Perhaps he doesn’t know either. It is probably inborn. But he does know how to do it. As you can see as you watch him be Houdini, or Edward, Prince Of Wales, or the detonation expert of The Hurt Locker, or Andy Warhol, or the cad husband in Mildred Pierce, what you see is a character brought into being with a minute shift. Pearce may appear as he appears, he may sound as he sounds, but the soul-flavor of the other person is in him, and that is what is being given. He knows how to do this, naturally, as some people know how to sing – which he happens also to know how to do, if you have ever seen him in The Slipping-Down Life. He is the one modern actor I suggest you watch and study and enjoy. He is not often cast in comedy, although he did not long ago play the petty villain in a Walt Disney Dog Movie. As with any good and interesting actor, I would love to see him in one of those Restoration Farce roles Olivier took such delectation in.

While the story here focuses on him, you are willing to put up with your own ignorance as to what is at stake – but as soon as he is joined by Robert Pattinson, an artistic wreck takes place. You get a consummate master faced with a consummate ham. The story drains as soon as this actor appears playing the backward brother of the fleeing antagonist.

Pattinson, like bad TV actors, makes much play with his mouth. Will it never stop thrashing about? He makes much play with his body, which flies flaccidly in all directions. He makes much play with his eyes, which never stop roaming except when they do long enough for you to wonder when they will start roaming once more. He withdraws focus from his eyes. He slurs his speech – which is never forgivable because never necessary – so you cannot understand what he is saying. What’s more – and this is the quandary beyond all quandaries – he plays an Australian low-life with an accent from Lil’ Abner (although Pattinson himself is from England.). All this with heavy makeup on his teeth and a half beard and you have?  You have a pitch for pathos, that’s what you have.

The excess of effects is just galling. And the result is that attention is distracted from the story – for you cannot feel compassion for him as a human being – and that is the actor’s job in this part, because the story is exactly the same as the story of Maleficent; that is to say, it is the story of a person who hates someone eventually coming to care for them. You’ve got to see how someone can come to care for him, and you can’t. The startling and beautiful ending to this movie is lost in the anarchy of Robert Pattinson’s show. All an actor needs do is one thing. For this part all Pattinson needed to do was play: To survive I Don’t Need To Know Right From Wrong; I Just Need To Believe What You’re Telling Me — Is That Right? Instead he does nine things, none of them available to the audience because none of them entertainable by them.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: ENGLISH REALISTIC, Filmed in Australia, GANGSTER DRAMA, Guy Pearce: ACTING GOD, MANHUNT

 

The Guy Pearce Papers No 6 — Seeking Justice

01 Dec

The Guy Pearce Papers No 6

Seeking Justice – directed by Roger Donaldson. Action Thriller. A man’s wife is raped and justice is not about to be done, so he takes an offer from a stranger who will take care of the matter – and later he finds out that things are not so simple. 105 minutes Color 2012.
★★★★
How considerate to my dislike of Nicholas Cage that he has made so many movies I would not wish to see anyhow. He’d become The Whisperer. Every speech was uttered sub rosa as though to draw us forward in our seats toward the actor and his material. It’s a TV trick and I object to be thought so easily seduced. Having justly won the Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas, all one saw was a decline in talent and involvement in films of violence. Up until his Oscar he was super. After it, I avoided him. But now, because I had to watch Guy Pearce, I had to watch Nicholas Cage again.

And I must say he is really quite good. He is not whispering at all. He is giving a stand-up performance in a leading role. What he can bring to a role is mad devotion. This trait, both humorous and charming, is not so common as you might think in an actor, and in this role, as in Raising Phoenix and Moonstruck, it is the essential ingredient, and he has it in spades. We believe it completely and we believe that it is also his fatal flaw.

One of the common features action/thrillers, is that halfway through acting ceases and perspiration begins, as the hero rushes toward and away from peril. There is nothing an actor can do but run and sweat. But up until that time, Cage gives a very honorable demonstration of his craft, and it’s good to see.

His nemesis in the piece is a private vindicator played by the masterful Guy Pearce. From the moment he approaches our hero we know something is wrong. What is it though? Is there something wrong with that perfect suit? Is there something wrong with that Teutonicly shaved head? Is there something wrong in that he approaches Cage at all?

All that is good, but just listen to what the actor does. He does not drool. He does not flash a Vincent Pricey eye. In fact, he does not give away a thing. He’s just a normal even high-minded businessman, isn’t he?

All Pearce does is play it a half a stop lower than middle C.

There’s nothing wrong with this guy at all, right?

Well. if there isn’t, why are we asking this question in the first place?

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, ACTION ADVENTURE, CRIME DRAMA, Guy Pearce: ACTING GOD, January Jones, Nicholas Cage

 

The Guy Pearce Papers 5 — Prometheus

26 Oct

The Guy Pearce Papers 5: Prometheus – directed by Ridley Scott. SciFi. Explorers on a spaceship search for the answers to The Big Questions on a planet out there. 124 minutes Color 2012.
★★★★
It cost 130 million and it earned 420 million, and I had never heard of it until I tracked it down at the library to see what Guy Pearce was up to in it. I don’t go to SciFi films, Action/Adventure films, Animation films, Gangster films, unless there is someone in it to draw me to watch it. So I am not fit to review this picture except to say that its remarkable spectacle should be even more remarkable on the big screen instead of my TV. The color scheme of the picture is earthy and slimy, for in the huge dome of the tomb-like structure on the planet are found no pastels. Only worms. Octopi. Sarcophagi the color of Brittaniawear. The spaceship exploration has been financed by an ancient and perhaps dead or perhaps virtual plutocrat so old he looks like a mummy – but he may be a zombie – but he also may be both. He’s English anyhow, and with a UC accent I cannot ascribe to any actor I know. I wait for Guy Pearce to appear. Well, all right, he must have some sort significant role later. The ship is in the command of Charlize Theron who moves her impressive beauty rather uncertainly through the early scenes – unusual for this actor, yes? The problem with SciFi is to find an acting style suited to the taciturnity of SciFi scripts, and, with two exceptions, this style is no more stumbled on than the answers to The Big Questions. That is partly because the male and female playing the leads opt for sloppy realism, which does not jibe with the intent of the exploration, with their jobs as scientists, and with the setting, which, as with all SciFi I have ever seen, is Big Machine. SciFi has not progressed beyond Modern Times with Chaplin caught in the machinations of an assembly line. SciFi is all Big Fancy Machines. And it’s fun, of course, to see these monstrous machines come to life and collide. It is also true that neither actor has the substance necessary to carry such an immense film. At each exploration of the slime-dome, I expect Pearce to appear and I wonder what day they are saving him for to save. But no. No, the ancient plutocrat comes alive, and Theron proves to be his daughter, and she’s awfully mean, and she wields a wicked flame-thrower. As an actor she never really finds her voice for the role. But Michael Fassbender and Idris Elba do. Fassbender plays a Peter O’Toole knock-off robot, and what he does to find the style is nothing at all, except to stay infinitely still internally, and say his lines in the ordinary way. Idris Elba is the best thing in the show. He plays the captain, and I believe his every move, each one of which is casual, grounded, and masterly. He brings every scene he is in to complete life! But where is Pearce? Then I take a second look at that parchment faced trillionaire. Oh my word: there he is: playing a man of a hundred and four who is already dead, and he has been in front of me all this time! The great disguise here is not the make-up but the accent – and where he got that from, I could not say – but he is completely someone else, someone else in posture, gait, voice, and energy. Yes, energy. That old bastard tycoon was never in his life Guy Pearce. But still Guy Pearce is that old bastard tycoon.

A Supporting Lead. Sized just right.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: INTERNATIONAL REALISTIC, Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce: ACTING GOD, Idris Elba, Michael Fassbender, Sci-Fi

 

Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark — The Guy Pearce Papers 4

18 Oct

Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark – directed by Troy Nixey. Horror. Refurbishing an old mansion, the designer fails to pay attention to his little girl who has opened a Pandora’s Box in the basement. 99 minutes Color 2012.
★★★
When a horror movie drags you know it does so because, from a paucity of imagination, it must pad out its plot by repeating itself in Act III. This the screenwriters have done here, inflicting their fault on Guy Pearce. He is the interior designer who so wants his house to appear on the cover of Architectural Digest that he pays no attention to his little girl’s horror stories about the little creatures she has released from their primordial well in the basement. But this is all that he does, until he witnesses them himself and takes steps. Katie Holmes plays his live-in girlfriend who actually does believe the little girl’s story, but is brushed aside by Pearce. Except that his “Not now” never develops further; it never develops, for example, into a rage and impatience and frenzy more frightening than the creatures emitting from the heating ducts in the skirtingboard. He is given neither the lines nor the scenes. So his redemption when it comes comes as small beer. The sad thing is that the production is absolutely first class. The house is marvelous, the music is too. The tiny, vicious, wingless bat gnomes will scare the liver out of you. Pearce is at his best here. Watch the way he goes up the stairs, so swift and confident you know he has done it a hundred times before. He turns on his heterosexuality like a light bulb, with the ease of an eager grin. His American accent, once again, is right on the money. But the failure of the script to support his gifts tries one’s interest. Here’s how a horror film works: you take a little girl who is a horror and you allow her to come in contact with a second horror. That’s how it starts. Where it needs to go from there is that a third and greater horror still, in the human form of her negligent father, appears to imperil her mortally at the infected claws of the second horror. Can he save himself from himself and so save her? That is the question. It is never asked. Because Pearce is never allowed to become the greater horror still.

Guy Perce plays a Leading Role here. The little girl is the “star” because the story is about her danger and because she is given the most screen time. I use the term “star” in quotes because a star must shine like a diamond into which one must wish to dive. It is not a matter of beauty, it is a matter of being. For Elizabeth Taylor was a great beauty but also had this quality.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, Guy Pearce: ACTING GOD, HORROR

 

Mildred Pierce — 2012 version — The Guy Pearce Papers — 3

13 Oct

Mildred Peirce – directed by Todd Haynes. Drama. A single mother in the Depression struggles to support herself, and turns to baking, which leads to great success with the business and great failure with her daughter and her lover. 5 part mini series. Color 2012.
★★★★★
He enters our field of vision with exactly the right hair, as a sort of male Veronica Lake. Peering from beneath the springy, pendulant twin locks his center-dividing part grants it, his hair is so much of the period of the ‘30s, that one is stunned to remember that that is so. Stunned also by this choice of hair, which is always a leading choice for an actor, and which supports what he makes of the character of this louche playboy: Dan Duryea and George Plimpton rolled up into one, with a dash of impatience and a soupcon of charm. He is fully embodied. Guy Pierce is so at ease inside this smarmy prince that one cannot but admire his style at the same time that one deplores its effects. He is an actor of great phsyical dispatch, with a neck feathered for mating dance at all times. The accent is perfect, as usual with this actor. It never gets misplaced; it never is exaggerated; he is never lost behind it. This is true of the accents of all the players in this perfectly cast piece. Morgan Turner as a young miss putting on airs makes her character so infuriating, one can only send her flowers of congratulations, since that is exactly what the character, and with no holds barred, should be. The range of casting is a cake rich throughout. Evan Rachel Wood is exactly right as the musician the young Veda Pierce grows into. Yes, one thinks, that unusual little girl could have become this raving beauty, and Wood must have copied the younger actor’s performance to get the character so right. Bryan F. O’Byme has this great moving mug; another face of the period; he keeps the story of Mildred’s husband covert and easy, until the very end. A wonderful actor, as, of course, is Melissa Leo as Mildred’s crony and another one, James Le Gros as Mildred’s aid and abettor. Mare Winningham, a waitress, is a creature entirely out of the ‘30s. She existed never after. Remarkable in this picture, in fact, are all the ‘30s production values – music by Carter Burwell, set and art decoration by Peter Rogness and Ellen Christiansen, and all the cars correct. I lived through that time, so I know. But what is most remarkable of all are the costumes by Ann Roth. They are exactly right at every turn. And they are particularly suited to our belovèd Kate Winslet who is not an elegant woman or a fashion plate like Evan Rachel Wood, and who is dressed perfectly for her type, in every scene, as is everyone else, male and female. Winslet brings to the character a determined mother-love, a love which hangs onto her daughter and blinds her to what she is. Winslet is earthy. You believe she can make pies and quarter fowl. Joan Crawford in the part you never believe could do either, but Crawford brought a trait inherent in her, the desire to pull herself up by her bootstraps (or ankle straps) and better herself. Crawford was like that in person, and you believed her drive towards that end. It worked for the role. What Winslet brings to the role is the temperament of a woman who is uneducated and ignorant, a woman who never had a single ambition; had many feelings but no thoughts; lived from day to day, pie to pie. Winslet is always lovable; Crawford never is. Crawford was always special; Winslet never is, and it serves her well. When you see her at the concert leaning forward to understand an aria, you see that, try as she might, she is aesthetically cut off from understanding or appreciation or even enjoyment. She tries too hard for her ever to get it – a human being like that. The director and his cronies give a silly, because unprepared commentary, unworthy of the film they have made. But one thing they do say is that, unlike the Crawford version, they have stayed close to James M. Caine’s novel. Of it they have made an interesting and commanding rendition. A remarkable achievement by all.

 
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Posted in 1930s, ACTING STYLE: INTERNATIONAL REALISTIC, Bryan O'Byme, Evan Rachel Wood, Guy Pearce: ACTING GOD, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, James Le Gros, Kate Winslet, MAGNIFICENT FEAT DRAMA, Melissa Leo, WOMEN'S PULP DRAMA

 

Lockout

26 Apr

Lockout — written and directed by James Mather and Stephen St. Leger. Sci-Fi Action. A prison breakout in space. 95 minutes Color 2012.

★★★★★

Why is he one of the great film actors of our time? Well, for one, there is his application – complete application to the key he has chosen in which to play a role. (And for another there is his discernment of what the right key is. Back to application:) Not every good or great actor has it; it’s an ingredient in the work or it isn’t. What application means is that before the first note struck there is no doubt, there is no seeking out the way; there is complete commitment and forward movement. The actor asks nothing from the audience. But what he gives to them is a character for them to trust. He is selling apples, not grapefruit. He has thrown himself into it. He is there. Proactive. Among a variety of positive ingredients of his talent, it is a characteristic of the craft of Guy Pearce. So it is easy to see why a producer would want him to tell a tale. It is why the entire film of The Hurt Locker depended upon how by-the-rules Guy Pearce lightly played the opening sequence: the entire film streams out of that performance and was unthinkable without it. In the case of Lockout he is the principal player, the hero. Here he plays a jocular Buck Rogers in a comic book in film form, a superhero with a witty mouth for a cape. Pearce’s understanding how to deliver these jokes as throwaways is the critical counterpoint to the heavy, head-on, non-joke situation of The President’s daughter held hostage by creepy Scottish escapees in an outer space prison where inmates are injected to sleep their sentences out, but are actually used for dastardly experiments. You know the sort of thing. Is there another actor alive who could play it so well? Yes. Robert Downey Junior, but Pearce has better diction; he is more audible. At his most sub-rosa he doesn’t murmur. Because this is the case, he and the girl can remain dialoguing and not get swallowed up by the special effects. The writer/directors let Pearce keep the comebacks coming, and thus the characters are not lost, as they so often are when such films bear down on their finales and the rocket ships start zooming. His fine physical shape and prowess authenticate the role as well. So what is he? He is perfectly cast, that’s what he is. He is so perfectly cast you don’t even think about it. He is so perfectly cast you go along for the ride through to the end and beyond, even though without him in it you would not watch such a movie at all, and without him in it, you would have movie at all.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, Guy Pearce: ACTING GOD, Sci-Fi

 

In Her Skin [I AM You]

17 Jul

In Her Skin [I Am You] – Written and directed by Simone North. Family Drama. A lovely 15-year-old girl goes missing, and her family refuses to give up on finding her, while a neighbor girl knows where she is all along. 108 minutes Color 2009.

* * * * *

Guy Pearce is the finest male actor his age, meaning 42. Essentially he is a character lead, remarkable in The Hurt Locker, The Factory, Priscilla Queen Of The Desert, rather than a leading man or matinee idol, and he is not usually cast as a pater familias, but here he is. The role is essentially a silent one, and one wonders why he took it. The noisy part is given to Miranda Otto who is very capable as the mother of the daughter who disappears. It is a true story, and all the originals, but one, are alive, and all but two were available for Otto and Pearce to meet and learn from. Sam Neill is first class as the father of the neighbor girl. He makes the man as understanding and forbearing as anyone could be. For no human being could put up with this girl or know how to treat her or wish to be with her: she is a creature of murderous self-indulgence. Ruth Bradley, at 21, plays this remarkable human, the 19-yar-old Caroline, the neighbor girl, and the company was lucky to have this actress, and by what miracle they secured her I cannot imagine, for she is Irish, and the film was shot in Australia. She bares herself to the role above and beyond the call of duty. The remarkable family to whom this catastrophe happened appears in the extras, which offer interviews with Sam Neill, Miranda Otto, and an extensive one with Guy Pearce. You will cease to wonder why he took the role when you come to the scene of hyperventilation on the bed. There are moments in films which penetrate me; such a moment occurs later on the same bed as he slowly places a kiss on Miranda Otto’s temple. You may not find it so. But for me a great actor is one who in the odd moment always finds exactly the right thing to do.

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Posted in ACTING STYLE: INTERNATIONAL REALISTIC, DOCUDRAMA, Filmed in Australia, Guy Pearce: ACTING GOD, MURDER MYSTERY, Sam Neill

 

Traitor

11 Mar

Traitor – Directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff – Spy Action. A CIA agent tracks down a Muslim demolition expert. 117 minutes Color 2008

What makes makes an actor excellent – sometimes without our even knowing it? Why does the appearance of Guy Pearce on the screen of this picture elevate the level of everything going on in it? Judy Garland had this ability and so does Alice in Alice In Wonderland. I do not know the answer, but certain qualities are worth considering and watching for. Let’s set aside his technique. Technique, it has been said, is the ability to make things right when they are going wrong – but this does not apply to film acting, because if an actor of the level of stardom of Pearce goes wrong, they just reshoot, so you never even begin to see the crash. There are other aspects of technique besides the ability to adjust in an emergency. For instance, Guy Pearce is a master of vocal disguise. It’s a gift, meaning he has a bent for it and it’s easy for him, once he has husbanded a particular accent, to sound natural in it. In this case, listen for President Jimmy Carter, softened. Also listen to his voice production; he doesn’t whisper; he’s fully audible; he is playing a balanced, soft-spoken, even-tempered character. You never have this played out for you; Pearce arrives with it, before he gets to the door. So you are given a certain character tuning, and a certain Southern accent, and a certain vocal volume. So much present are these that they fall by us unnoticed, as they should. For Pearce does not present himself as a virtuoso performer – as Frederic March does. He is not here for his craft to be noticed. He is here to do an honest job and play the role. One wonders how he can sustain a performance of this tactical moderation opposite the over-acting of the other actors, all of whom conventionalize their parts. The film is quite bad, bad direction, bad music, and bad script by the director who should have not done this to us. An absurd film, unconvincing at every point. An action-adventure spy story which is meant to whitewash Muslim devotion, and does the opposite because its hero is basically fanatic; one wonders why Don Cheadle engaged in it. Cheadle seems to have elected himself the heir of Morgan Freeman in the moral black male role model line. It is ruinous for an actor to be “good”. Pearce, although he is out to get the bad guys never strikes that note. There’s honesty in the gaze of his rectangular eyes that skirts all pretense. It looks, it searches, it responds. It allows us to be there. Watch for him, whenever he appears, and see him.

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Posted in ACTING STYLE: INTERNATIONAL REALISTIC, ACTION ADVENTURE, Don Cheadle, ESCAPE STORY, Guy Pearce: ACTING GOD, SPY STORY

 

Animal Kingdom

11 Mar

Animal Kingdom – directed by David Michod – Gangster Drama. A family of bank robbers and their mother welcome their nephew into the den. 113 minutes Color 2010.

* * * *

The inexcusably bumbling director on the Extra Features explains that this picture was meant to be large in scope and also austere. I could crown him. If the film were as phony as he is, I would, but the picture holds one’s attention because it does not spell out what it can let the audience gather on its own, and because of the Michod’s excellent writing and direction and because of the players who support the lead. Alas, the lead is played by an actor histrionically inert. He is means to be a David Copperfield character, a fill-in-the-blank person whom we are supposed to supply with ourselves. But the actor is too sleepy, too withdrawn, too dull for us to be or to want to be in the character’s shoes at any time. But this does gives one a chance to observe the various levels of performance around him, which range as they range in experience, the more experienced being the more telling. Every level is a high: level 1: Ben Mendelsohn, Sullivan Stapleton, Joel Edgerton as the gangsters. Level 2: Jacki Weaver as the Ma Barker of this group. Level 3: Guy Pearce. All Guy Pearce has to do is to quietly appear on screen for the entire artistic purpose of the film to take shape before one’s eyes. Here he has a scruffy and therefore un-menacing moustache in the role of the detective, which is a role within a role, since the profession of detective requires one already to play a role. Pearce’s task is largely one of inquiry, and nothing more needs be said about his performance but the fact, clear and simple, that as you watch him ask questions you can see that the character does not know the answers to them even though the actor does. This draws one into the situation, it produces suspense, it provides story. We, the audience, know the answers and the truth. And so we must wait out the issue of all of this until the end. This is an example of the enormous contribution this actor makes in movies in which he appears. The opening scenes of The Hurt Locker are a prime example of it. The rest of that film could not take place if he had not played those scenes the way he does. Fascinating.

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Posted in bank robbers, CRIME, Filmed in Australia, Guy Pearce: ACTING GOD, Jacki Weaver

 

The King’s Speech

06 Jan

The King’s Speech – directed by Tom Hooper – drama about a man who needs to speak properly and his conflict with the man who is hired to help him. Color 2010.

* * * * *

I wept. Helena Bonham Carter, playing the Duchess Elizabeth of Kent, a lady of high good spirits, deep wifely devotion, and a taste for sweets, Geoffrey Rush playing the Australian speech therapist, who without leaving his chair, wrestles her husband to the ground, and Colin Firth playing the to-be and then King George VI of England, who can’t address his people without a stammer, make this a splendid pudding of a picture. The long road to partial mastery of his life-long impediment brought tears to my eyes, and when he finally gives his speech I wept again. The picture is like a horse-picture in which the unlikely mare wins through. And it’s true to life, just as horses are true to life. It takes great heart to overcome a genetic defect or to win a race; both are temporary triumphs and all the more poignant for that. But like horse-pictures, this film bids to be inspiring to us all. I don’t like Colin Firth; I find him technically immature as an actor; I don’t like to look at him; and I don’t think he has much to offer to his roles. Maybe he has always been miscast as leading man, but I sat through this film and watched him here, and he was bearable. Geoffrey Rush is exquisitely funny as the pirate therapist, and Helena Bonham Carter won my heart as the witty dear lady helping her husband to freedom. The great Guy Pearce is probably miscast in the role of King Edward, for he plays it with an intensity incongruent with the louche, diffident, spoiled, pretty, sensual, and stupid David. People like the Prince of Wales who have been given everything do not need to be intense about anything. They are waited upon hand and foot, and all other protuberances besides. He has the right suits, though, and they are a pleasure to see, for The Duke Of Windsor was always spiffy, and Pearce has the part in his hair exactly perfect. But this is a small matter in a small role. You will love it. It’s a picture for hopeless and debauched teenagers. And for folks like me. For anyone who wants a lift in the limousine of  the hopes of couple of odd role models. See it and weep too.

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Posted in 1930s, BIO-PIC, ENGLISH ROYALS, Filmed in England, Geoffrey Rush, Guy Pearce: ACTING GOD, Helena Bonham Carter, PERSONAL DRAMA

 
 
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