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Best Male Performance: Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler
THE NOMINEES
Phillip Seymour Hoffman - Doubt
Richard Jenkins - The Visitor
Heath Ledger - The Dark Knight
Sean Penn - Milk
Mickey Rourke - The Wrestler
I'm on a fucking roll and posting a lot like private_witt...
I'm very impressed with our collective taste this year.
amen.
yeaaahhh ! I would've shit my pants if fucking Sean Penn won here too
I'm still chuffed Richard Jenkins was nominated, but knew he wouldn't have a chance to win overall. Got to be honest, I'm absolutely shocked Heath didn't win. I knew his inclusion here instead of supporting would throw a spanner in the works, but wow.
Wow. Upset.
I voted for Mickey but Heath really deserved it too, although I still think he shoulda been supporting...
The more time passes, the more I kind of feel Mickey Rourke is being overrated for this role. When I first saw the flick, I thought it was the best performance of the year, but now I feel it's almost Rourke just playing himself. There's a lot of nuances that he nailed (particularly most of his scenes with his daughter) but as a whole, I don't think the performance was as impressive as what Heath was able to do with Joker.
I think of Heath in Brokeback Mountain and then I think of Heath in Dark Knight and it really pains me that we'll never get to see him perform again. He really was something special.
I agree with Stefen. We all got soft with The Wrestler but what Ledger did was just out of fucking nowhere. His performance has made the movie a classic. The Wrestler will be forgotten pretty soon.
Quote from: Alexandro on April 07, 2009, 01:33:27 PM
I agree with Stefen. We all got soft with The Wrestler but what Ledger did was just out of fucking nowhere. His performance has made the movie a classic. The Wrestler will be forgotten pretty soon.
To the contrary I think TDK has less importance than The Wrestler.
The Wrestler has very human themes and has a great insight on the world of wrestling but also on about growing old etc. Mickey's character is a fuck up not because of circumstances or bad luck, but because he himself is fucked up. Like when he's so happy to get his daughter back but forgets about their dinner etc.
TDK is just another superhero movie. What themes does it have, how can I relate to such characters ? Heath's performance is good, but the psycho-clown type of character has been done and done again. It's nothing fucking special. I remember talking with my gf about a guy on TV doing the psycho and we were like : ''yeah this is as good as the joker''
I just think Heath gave a performance that will go down in history as an all-time great performance. Mickey's performance was good, but it wasn't ICONIC the way Ledger's was.
As a movie, you can take the Dark Knight or leave it, but Ledgers performance stands not only above Mickey's performance, but above both the Dark Knight and the Wrestler as a whole.
Ledger's performance will go down as iconic, but mainly because he died shortly thereafter. James Dean didn't have an ounce of talent but yet is still able to mentioned with Marlon Brando way too often. I think Ledger's performance is good, but I don't compare it to great performances.
He's essentially playing a monster role. Give him the credit for imagining the Joker that way, but that majority of the role is based on his interpretation of terror. Ledger abandons all of his personal qualities to pull off the role, but in doing so, he makes the role very open to easy mimicry from other actors. Nicholson didn't have the writing to back him up in the original Batman, but he did a perfect blending of his essential qualities as an actor with a fightful interpretation of the Joker. People complain that Nicholson is playing himself, but that's not true. They are just mad that they see any of his personality in the role, but that's what he had to do. I think actors have to transform roles to the strengths of their talent. Nicholson puts enough of himself in the role to make it an acting job. To study Ledger is to apply the right amount of make up, copy the physical gestures and get the voice just right. I thought a lot of Ledger's performance hinged on the right ingrediants that Ledger decided were scary, but he kept the role very simple. I can see more actors pulling off Ledger's interpretation than Nicholson's.
^in that case, you could say the same thing for every great performance.
A good actor could mimic Brando's performance as Don Corleone as long as they slicked their hair back and perfected his mannerisms.
Robert Deniro as Jake LaMotta would be the easiest to mimic. All you need to do is gain some weight and talk like an Italian from NYC.
To me, what makes Ledgers performance to amazing is that fact that it's Heath Ledger. I always thought of him as the guy from 10 Things I Hate About You, then the gay cowboy and now as Joker.
Quote from: Stefen on April 07, 2009, 05:35:56 PM
^in that case, you could say the same thing for every great performance.
A good actor could mimic Brando's performance as Don Corleone as long as they slicked their hair back and perfected his mannerisms.
Robert Deniro as Jake LaMotta would be the easiest to mimic. All you need to do is gain some weight and talk like an Italian from NYC.
To me, what makes Ledgers performance to amazing is that fact that it's Heath Ledger. I always thought of him as the guy from 10 Things I Hate About You, then the gay cowboy and now as Joker.
First off, I don't think Brando was very good as Don Corleone. I thought it was pretty caricature and have said that before. But, to get to your point...
Of course someone can mimic anyone's performance, but the point is that all that goes into Ledger's performance is qualities that relate to mimicy. The one moment in the Dark Knight where Joker struck a different tone is when he disagreed with the mobsters on whether he was crazy. I think it was a sincere moment on his part, but the rest of the film is his interpretation of the Joker is wild and inventive, but all on a level of gestures and expressions. It's the fact that a villian like him hasn't been seen in movies before is what makes all of it so inviting, but it didn't strike me as the most thorough job with acting.
The point is to round off the character with qualities that go beyond the most basic gestures. It doesn't mean to make him sympathetic, but to give him dimension. There has to be aspects to him that are inviting and alluring in ways that aren't just easily frightful. There needs to be different levels to the layers of his psychosis. There needs to be a curiosity fact that there is something going on beyond the evil antics. Nicholson puts enough of himself in the role where those qualities come out more than in Ledger's performance. Yes, someone can mimic Nicholson still, but they will not to get to the heart of his performance. A good mimicry job could get to the heart of Ledger's performance.
wasnt that the point of ledger's joker? to be detached from human emotions? to not have heart? nicholson's joker started off as your average criminal and then had the transformation. heath's joker is a mystery, and that makes him a much more terrifying villian than nicholson's joker. i dont see the point in bringing mimicry into the conversation, but in ledger's defence take the first scene where he's describing how he got the scares and how impassioned he gets, or in his final scene where neither of the boats detonate and you see true dissapointment on his face. if a good mimicry job can nail those moments then i'm sure it's possible to get to the heart of nicholson's performance as well. what makes ledger's performance number 1 for me is simply the fact that it had the strongest impact on me which no doubt has a lot to do with the fact that, as stefen said, ledger is virtually unrecognisable in the role.
i don't want to say bad things about the wrestler because i liked it, but the moment arronofsky makes a truly original film the wrestler will just fade away to be remembered for rourke's performance.
I think both performances (ledger and rourke) are the best things about each film, but i do believe dark knight will have iconic status while the wrestler will be more of an obscure film even in arronofsky's career.
Quote from: brockly on April 07, 2009, 08:41:12 PM
wasnt that the point of ledger's joker? to be detached from human emotions? to not have heart? nicholson's joker started off as your average criminal and then had the transformation. heath's joker is a mystery, and that makes him a much more terrifying villian than nicholson's joker. i dont see the point in bringing mimicry into the conversation, but in ledger's defence take the first scene where he's describing how he got the scares and how impassioned he gets, or in his final scene where neither of the boats detonate and you see true dissapointment on his face. if a good mimicry job can nail those moments then i'm sure it's possible to get to the heart of nicholson's performance as well. what makes ledger's performance number 1 for me is simply the fact that it had the strongest impact on me which no doubt has a lot to do with the fact that, as stefen said, ledger is virtually unrecognisable in the role.
Again, you don't just need the evil doers to be sympathetic or have heart. What I'm asking for is a roundness of character that isn't found in him at all. The writing didn't allow much room for Nicholson, but his venerable skills as an actor gave the character some girth. There were dimensions to his madness. Yes, it helped that his character had a chance to transition from criminal to psycho, but the way Nicholson commands even the pyschosis itself has a lot of flexibility to it. I call up Anthony Hopkins original performance as Hannibal Lector to show example. The character is meant to become sympathetic because of his relationship to Starling, but exclude her and you see a character that is solely evil but has different dimensions to him because of Hopkins skills.
Ledger does a fine job with Joker, but he puts so much emphasis on the easy scare factors of his jokers that the antics, gestures and voice are the most memorable thing about the character. The heavy handed focus on these characteristics keep the performance out of greatness category. The performance is wonderful in its own way, but all I'm saying is that Ledger played the performance to such an artificial monster-like quality that he also made it easy for other actors to copy, which isn't a good commodation. His performance is different than Hopkins so I understand the idea they are incomparable, but I think that Ledger's performance is below Hopkins for reasons already stated.
I also didn't see true dissapointment in Ledger's face with the foiled bombing. I saw a quick shot of confusion close up on the face, but then it was immediately to frustation because the Joker immediately did a violent act to Batman right after. There the camera was pointed at him from the side and at an odd angle. It wasn't in the best place for revelatory expressions from Joker. I think the camera was in the best place to gage Joker's reaction on a general level, but mainly it was a good stationery place for the camera to cut to the action immediately coming after it. But even if you were right I think that one point isn't much evidence anyways.
its as if ledger purposely died so this could happen.