Nicole Kidman's accent in Big Little Lies is similarly comic, but for different reasons: Where Franco goes full Jersey Shore, Kidman often wanders between continents within the space of a single sentence. Handed - inexplicably, despite a hint of gemini tension in the final episode - the opportunity to literally laugh at every one of his own jokes over 10 hours of scripted cable TV drama, Franco, arms spread wide, a what-me-worry smirk on his face, has a single, season-long response: "Ay-o!" The same could not be said of Gyllenhaal's co-star James Franco, who as The Deuce's mustachioed twins Vincent and Frankie Martino pulls out every fuhgeddaboudit stereotype in the actor's guide to playing a Bay Ridge Italian. Is she a crusader against the exploitation of women or an amoral capitalist? From Brooklyn or Queens? It's never entirely clear.Īs bad acting goes, this at least has the merit of nuance. In the end, the accent ends up placing Eileen nowhere - both literally and figuratively. Gyllenhaal speaks the thoughts of Eileen, her ambitious middle-career prostitute, with the kind of sleepy high pitch and mishmash of phonetic cliches designed to mark the character as a resident of New York's outer-borough lower class. ![]() The problem comes when she starts talking. Each slouch of the shoulders, each shuffle of the feet embodies the sagged and addled decadence of 1970s New York. In The Deuce, another current darling of the critics, Maggie Gyllenhaal offers an expert demonstration in the use of physicality to convey mood and place. Remove the dialogue and Ryder's scenes could easily pass as stock patient footage in an ad for medicine to fix opioid-induced constipation. Winona Ryder's crazy facial contortions - eyes dilating, nose pinched, mouth aquiver - gave the first season of Stranger Things much of its emotional vibrancy, but she returns to the gimmick so often in the second season it's as if she's permanently one frame away from dissolving into the "melting Nazi" gif from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Gestural gimmicks and silly voices are all present in equal, if not greater, number. But in Ozark, all we ever see is Jason Butler Harner busting a gut to convince us he's something other than a paid performer.Įmotional inauthenticity of this variety is not the only sin committed in the new golden age of bad acting. Acting is the opposite of a high school math problem: you should never show your work. Every one of his scenes bears the strain of a great effort to emote. Whether darkly muttering, eyes closed, through a motel room blowjob or yelling "FAAAAHK!" after dragging his addict mother from her dealer's house, Harner delivers the most self-consciously actorly of bad acting jobs. Sharon Blackwood's performance as the overbearing mother of a gormless local real estate agent is equal in ridiculousness to the manner of her character's death - mid-argument with her son, she sticks her fingers into her ears, walks onto the road shouting, "La la la," then gets cleaned up by a passing garbage truck - but it's Jason Butler Harner in the role of a gay FBI officer with sociopathic tendencies who goes most entertainingly off-piste. Jason Bateman and Laura Linney decorate Ozark with their dry mastery of the actor's craft, but they're badly let down by a couple of their colleagues. Thanks to our unflagging thirst for new shows, more shows, better shows, any shows, the so-called golden age of TV is dissolving into a new golden age of bad acting. Bad actors have never had it better never before have so many received so much for performing their jobs so poorly. As demand for acting grows, so do opportunities for people who are not very good at it. But it's also been good for actors - and bad actors in particular. This explosion in content has, we're often told, been a major boon for consumers. FX president John Landgraf claims we're approaching "Peak TV" - but he first made the argument two years ago. Much of this growth has been driven by Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and the other online services, which are on track to surpass the 93 series they collectively produced last year. ![]() Last year there were 455 original series on TV this year there are likely to be more than 500. ![]() The number of scripted original series on TV - across all platforms, from broadcast to cable and streaming - has nearly doubled in six years, according to FX Research, with no equalizing drop in the number of wide release feature films. The rise of the streaming giants has changed all that.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |