The Three Greatest Movie Performances Ever

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Also, when can I expect my Tropico 3 review.

[bruce]

I thought you were making a joke about Italian-Americans, Pinner.

It was either that or the Safeway Brand Vodka from Safeway finally ate his last remaining neuron. Either way best not to call too much attention to it.

Bruce

[Tdarcos]

2. There have been hundreds, maybe millions of great performances in movies over the past thousand years, and this list is not to discount any of them.

We've had recorded video for about 140 years, Ben, if we go back to the Dagerotype still images from the Civil War circa 1860. If you want to count moving video, it goes back about 120 years to 1890.

To seriously have millions of great performances in movies you'd best cut your time frame to "the last hundred years" and include basically every video ever made, or to have "the last thousand years" you need to change "movies" to "stage and screen."

----
Bluto: Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?
Otter: Germans?
Boon: Forget it, he's rolling.
-- Animal House

[pinback]

To seriously have millions of great performances in movies you'd best cut your time frame to "the last hundred years" and include basically every video ever made, or to have "the last thousand years" you need to change "movies" to "stage and screen."

So you're saying you would not count "irony" as one of your strengths?

[ICJ]

#4: William H. Macy, Fargo

I forgot about this one. The perfect picture of desperation as the screws slowly tighten from beginning to end.

Pinback and I have determined that the fifth entry on the list is Philip Seymour Hoffman for "The Master."

#5: Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Master

And it is not because he was sitting there ACTING so you can see it. In my opinion, it was the subtle things:

When he says, "Well, you might as well tell me one more time"

(All quotes are mangled.)

When he gives that look of disdain when they try to arrest him.

When he wrestles with Freddy. I don't think you'd see Denzel wrestle with someone at 46 or whatever he was.

And then the part where he's all, no-one likes you EXCEPT FOR ME. So iconic I am quoting it in real life.

His body of work qualifies, but I feel this role gets him on the list. He also broke acting.

[pinback]

PIG FUCK!

(The guy who played Pig Fuck is also dead, btw!)

[loafergirl]

The chick in The Never Ending Story because you will NEVER, EVER, EVER, forget her voice saying "'BAstiAN, PLllEEAAASE!" and the tear in her little blue eyes, and her quivering lip.

[Tdarcos]

Pacino was fantastic in Taxi Driver

It is the ultimate condemnation of this sickhole of an internet forum that nobody, nobody called me on this.

It even ended up on the front page, which means my drunken idiocy is, once again, inscribed into history.

Christ.

I need help.

"It took you this long to figure this out? You're not as bright as I thought you were."

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I think it is safe to say that I have virulently disagreed with Kent and Pinback, as it pertains to Paul Thomas Anderson No The Other One movies, up to this point. With the exception with Hoffman as The Master. I re-watch that m-- here is how much I like that movie: I have it on my remote Linux server. I )))remote))) into that server to watch Hoffman (and Phoenix, but mostly Hoffman)'s performance.

I APT-GETTED VNC SERVER FOR THIS.

ANYWay, everyone shut up, because I have #6:

#6 MATTHEW McCONAUGHEY, TRUE DETECTIVE

Here is how I want to start this. From Wikipedia, the site that thought that Old Man Murray isn't notable:

He first gained notice for his breakout role in the coming of age comedy Dazed and Confused (1993), and went on to appear in films such as the slasher Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1994), the legal thriller A Time to Kill (1996), Steven Spielberg's historical drama Amistad (1997), the science fiction drama Contact (1997), the comedy EDtv (1999) and the war film U-571 (2000).

In the 2000s, he became best known for starring in romantic comedies,[2] including The Wedding Planner (2001), How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003), Failure to Launch (2006) and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009).

Matthew McConaughey was, before True Detective started, a fucking joke. He was a punchline. OK, not in Dazed and Confused, but let me put it this way: the titles, just the TITLES to the movies that he was in for that stretch, those titles were worse than any writing any human has done since the first batch of cave paintings and between the third and fourth commercial breaks of Beowulf. Real adults named movies things like "How To Lose A Guy In (etc)" and people showed up to work every day on it. People would go home and have their spouse, their adoring spouse say to them things like, "So, how did Failure to Launch go today?" and real adults who had mortgage payments and an electric billl were forced to answer questions like that.

McConaughey was pretty much the prince of garbage culture, laughing underneath King Sandler's sceptre's wave.

And then True Detective happened.

If Google still allowed you to post chats, instead of putting them in separate messages, I would post what I chatted towards Pinback when I downloaded the first episode. I made fun of it. McConaughey's roles were so terrible that you can't even reference them in making fun of him. Like, if you want to make fun of Ben Affleck you can say, to Pinback, "Wow, Phantoms is the new Batman!"

You can't do that with McConaughey. That's how terrible the movies he was in were. Are.

But he broke acting.

Because God Christ, I want to be as good in my career as this fucking guy is in True Detective.

There isn't a minute he isn't holding court over the entirety of western civilization in this fucking thing. I want to write the following so that scholars a hundred years from now can see it and understand the impact: Rust Cohle had the attention of the ENTIRETY of America, Canada and every other place that got HBO for 8 weeks. 8 weeks, the only things that mattered on the planet were watching what Rust said next and Putin invading the Ukraine.

I wanted to hear him speak. I want to listen to him talk. True Detective coincided with the 8 weeks my girl and I restored my house so we can list it and the only pleasure we had in those weeks was from Cohle. I wanted to immerse myself in his crazy, batshit-insane theories. He didn't say a single thing in the entire series that I agreed with until the last five minutes of the last episode, and yet I would empty out my savings account if it meant we could get another season with him.

I wanted to hear Woody react to what he said (who almost broke acting with his own performance) but mostly I wanted Rust Cohle to never, ever stop talking, to never being a prick and being a man and being a lunatic and being a hero. I envied his bedroom. As someone moving into his girl's place, ohhhhhhhhhh how I envied how he kept his place, haha. I wanted to know everything and nothing about him. I loved it when he showed up to his co-worker's house drunk because his addictions were ballsier than my explicit intents.

Rust Cohle is Sam Spade plus Marid Audran plus James Bond, plus a quality that only McConaughey can bring. I shouldn't even form a sentence like that last one, because Rust Cohle is the new awesome. We got to see him ten or whatever years apart, something no show has ever done. Is he the best "southern" born character in fiction? Not just tv, but all of fiction? The performance is so good it makes me wonder. It's either him or Atticus Finch, right? Look, in ten years nobody is going to believe that the Saints won the Super Bowl, so that honor will go to Drew Brees. HA! HA HA!

But I have OCD when it comes to ranking things. I really want to explore this, because that's how great his performance was. Look, Dave Lister is always going to be my guy. He's the best character in television, with Rimmer a close second. I feel bad that one show got the #1 and #2 guys, but I always... always thought Walter White was going to forever be #3. And then I watched this goofball show. It's the show that Richard Goodness called "THE TRUE DETECTIVES." Anytime you can add an "s" like Richard did and make me momentarily stop taking your show seriously, you're in a bit of trouble. Hey, "The Wires" is not funny. I love shows that aren't afraid to go crazy at the very end, but Richard is right. I never thought we'd see someone become the third best character in television, and really, the best character in a drama, but Matthew McConaughey did it, and I was alive to see it. I don't care that the last episode was goofy, and I don't care that that one episode before the single cut shoot-out kind of dragged a little. Rust Cohle and Matthew McConaughey made me wish for a second season that we're never, ever going to get and I wish we did.

He broke acting, and is the sixth such person to do so.

REACTIOn?!

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

By the way, if you read this thread, if you read the first post of this thread... and your reply is WHAT ABOUT JACK IN BATMAN, then yes you probably take your family to the mountains in Upstate New York and shoot all of them in the head with a rifle, yes. We can forgive him for that now.

[nessman]

In no particular order:

R. Lee Ermey - Full Metal Jacket (well OK - this is #1)
Jackson Nicoll - Bad Grandpa
Robin Williams - Awakenings
Russell Crowe - Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
Graham Chapman - Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Billy Bob Thorton - Sling Blade
Faye Dunaway - Mommie Dearest
Jeff Bridges - The Big Lebowski
Reese Witherspoon - Freeway
Peter Fonda - Ulee's Gold

[RetroR]

Screw all of your preferences! The best actors ever were...

Anyone with more than five seconds of on screen time in True Detectives[/b]

Seriously.

[pinback]

Jonsey is completely correct. AND he was literally the punchline to jokes. As in:

[youtube][/youtube]

And the reason it was funny was, it was true! He sucked! He ruined Contact other than the writing! Bleahh!!

And so my wife says, "new McConaughey show" and I was like PAAAAASS. But then someone said it was good so I sighed DEEPLY and said, okay, whatever, I'll watch one episode.

And that was it. Somehow the worst actor ever became the best actor ever. Good for him. It feels weird to hear "Matthrew McConaughey" and instantly get moist for his fucking work, but he earned it.

He wins.

(Also kinda the same for Woody Harrelson, but whatever, I think people already knew he could sometimes not suck.)

[pinback]

I'm not going to fix that youtube link, just cut/paste it if you want to.

[pinback]

In no particular order:

R. Lee Ermey - Full Metal Jacket (well OK - this is #1)

Not really acting, disqualified.

Robin Williams - Awakenings

Robin Williams should be #7 on this list for Good Will Hunting. That is all.

Russell Crowe - Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

Oh, I thought we were taking this seriously. Okay, sure! Woohoo! Also Paul Reiser in Aliens was totes awesome!!

Billy Bob Thorton - Sling Blade

Disqualified immediately are all one-note retard performances. This means you too, Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. "Act like a retard for two hours" no longer gets you the best actor award, bitches. Inexcusable that you would even mention this.

Jeff Bridges - The Big Lebowski

Well... I mean... sure.

[pinback]

I had been considering this for a couple years. Given recent news, it seems appropriate to go ahead with it:

#7: Robin Williams, Good Will Hunting



GWH is something of a flawed masterpiece. I would not count it among the Great Movies, but I would count it among the Very Very Good, And Also Most Rewatchable movies.

A lot of that is due to Damon and Driver's naturalistic-as-hell performances. But most of it is due to Robin Williams, whose patient but broken psychologist sees pain and guilt in others because he knows it all too well in himself.

His performance is a FLAWLESS masterpiece, and definitely belongs on this list.

[Billy Mays]

Peter Sellers - Dr. Strangelove

Gene Wilder - Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Bruce Lee - Enter the Dragon

Jimmy Stewart - Vertigo

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Ah. Once again, I see that we are not taking the list seriously. Are we?

Actually, maybe your ideas are not so bad.

[pinback]

Peter Sellers was a good choice. None of the three individual characters would be worthy of this list, but taken as a whole, I mean, damn.

[Tdarcos]

In no particular order:

R. Lee Ermey - Full Metal Jacket (well OK - this is #1)

Not really acting, disqualified.

Bullshit. Some people are the type that they are naturals, they're so good at what they do that they make it look effortless by comparison. If you've ever watched him in other contexts, like the History Channel's Lock and Load, or the police captain in Se7en, when he's not doing his schtick of the persona of a bastard on wheels, he's normally what appears to be a quiet and mild-mannered person. But when he starts his holy terror act, look out!

As a different example, any good boss will tell you it's not pleasant when you have to fire people, sometimes they just don't work out and it's a shame you have to let them go. But there are some men/women who are like bastards, that they enjoy firing people. (See Up the Organization by Robert Townsend, for more on this.) In some companies, the people who enjoy firing people end up getting the job, and they get very good at it during bad times, they're so well known and feared within the company they're called "the killers," because they enjoy terminating people. Harold Geneen, who ran ITT back in the 1960s was one. So is, obviously, Donald Trump from his work on The Apprentice.

Don't think that just because someone is effortlessly good at what they're doing that they aren't talented at it. Talented enough that they make it look easy. Does not mean for other people it wouldn't be very difficult.

Let's not forget that for a lot of occupations being good at acting works well in making you good at your occupation. A professional attorney arguing to save their client ib open court is, among other thing, doing a performance.