Premiere's 50 Greatest Movie Stars

Started by meatball, April 02, 2005, 11:26:15 PM

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pete

the article was a riff on something Chris Rock said a few years ago - "if you can't get a star, just wait" and talked about how jude law is not a star.
"Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot."
- Buster Keaton

cronopio 2

will smith , tom cruise, and leonardo dicaprio all found their respective ways to control the movie they star in, their 'vehicles' . in this sense they're as successful as the hollywood mantra can get, because they're in total control of their movies.
i mean , tom cruise picked his role in valkyrie just because he saw a profile picture of Stauffenberg and thought his nose was similar, for fuck's sake. christopher mcquarrie gave an awesome interview once , where he said that a screenplay, in that sense, ends up being an afterthought of an idea for a movie. if any of these actors happen to read a book about aliens in the sixties and they express interest,  somebody fetches them a screenplay that's based on that, and it becomes a thing.

tom cruise is the hero who always runs. no matter what. he's been shifting towards the family man figure lately.
will smith is the hero who gives his own life.
dicaprio's the man deceived by treacherous women who wants to make it right.

i don't mind them. the world needs these types of actors. i think will smith is charming but his ambitions are loud and dumb, and he's not aging in a cool fashion.


in a classic sense, my favorite movie star is george clooney probably, because he's never been interested in becoming an insipid character actor. i also think hugh jackman's cool, but he chooses to star in a lot of shit, like that amores perros with fighting robots movie.

a favorite actor is a different matter.  

Jeremy Blackman

Are we lucky that some of them, like Cruise, are actually very good actors and are capable of great things (Magnolia/EWS/etc.), or is that not a coincidence?

I think DiCaprio has yet to do something "great" in that sense. When he tries, he tries too hard, and you end up with an abomination like his performance in The Aviator.

cronopio 2

i hate it when people just brand them as idiots. whenever somebody badmouths cruise, just remind them that he was in magnolia, then they'll realize that they haven't seen it -and if they have they'll retract their comments- and you will be victorious.

Pubrick

Quote from: cronopio 2 on July 01, 2011, 06:50:43 PM
-and if they have they'll retract their comments- and you will be victorious.

no they won't., they will remember that they saw it but forgot about it instantly cos they didn't understand a second of it, came away with the impression that this thomas anderson dude is a pretentious idiot who's working out his psychosis at everyone else's 8.50.

i think to the average person the movie star is still as real as ever.. when they go to the movies they just look for that face they recognise and hope that for the next couple of hours they'll get to see it and marvel at it and buy any bullshit it's selling. that's how people have been fooled into going to Tree of Life.. that's why the world hated Punch Drunk Love.. all the people who saw these films were confronted with an unveiling of their most treasured false beliefs. it's a phenomenon that operates explicitly in eyes wide shut.. much to its own detriment unfortunately since the world turned on that as well.

so if there are no movie stars now then there has never been any movie stars. bogart flopped majorly with Beat the Devil only a couple of years after winning his only oscar in African Queen.. so does that mean he stopped being a movie star? gtfo with that shit.
under the paving stones.

Stefen

Every person who I've ever been courageous enough to talk to about movies hated Magnolia or didn't see it or even heard of it. They don't even mention Tom Cruise. They're just like, "It was boring!" or mostly, "neva even heard of it!" and they're always yelling because we're at a club.
Falling in love is the greatest joy in life. Followed closely by sneaking into a gated community late at night and firing a gun into the air.

Jeremy Blackman

Agree with the above... I've rarely spoken to anyone who has seen Magnolia, and if they've seen it, usually they didn't like it or liked it but have forgotten about it. Surprising to us fans, but true.

I'm surprised Brad Pitt wasn't mentioned until Pubrick's post (indirectly). And the original list put him at 50 out of 50. He actually seems like a bigger star than Tom Cruise, and certainly Will Smith. And it's a win/win with Pitt, because not only is he more relevant than Cruise or Smith, I'm pretty sure he's been in more legitimately good/great movies than any other current "movie star." In fact, he's almost an unlikely movie star because of the sheer number of oddball films he's consistently done, which makes his status all the more impressive.