Post by sgev1977 on Dec 8, 2021 10:55:33 GMT
Probably!
The piece is called “Long Live Hollywood! By A.O. Scott” but if you click it goes to a “Page not found. Please report the broken link” page. I guess it will work later!
Hollywood Still Matters. This Year’s Best Actors Showed Why.
Even as theaters suffer, cinema has been thriving during the pandemic — thanks to the intimacy movies create between performer and audience.
www.nytimes.com/2021/12/07/magazine/great-performers.html?
For now I'll just copy paste the paragraph mentioning BC, the piece itself is really long:
What is the matter of performance, and why do some performances matter? The first part is to some extent objective. It’s possible, and can be a lot of fun, to analyze the particulars of technique that make the work work. Will Smith’s Louisiana drawl, thigh-hugging shorts and rounded shoulders in “King Richard,” details of an impersonation of Venus and Serena Williams’s father that relies on and repurposes Smith’s own familiar and durable charm. Gaby Hoffmann’s sparrowish quickness and hawklike focus in “C’mon C’mon.” Joaquin Phoenix’s shambling, loose-hipped movement in the same film. The menacing stillness and disarmingly graceful brutality of Benedict Cumberbatch in “The Power of the Dog.” The vocal, facial and gestural counterpoint of Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson in “Passing.” The heartbreaking naturalness of Joséphine and Gabrielle Sanz in “Petite Maman,” twin sisters using their resemblance and rapport to play, of all things, a daughter and her mother.
www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/07/magazine/best-actors.html
If you're having trouble reading it on desktop, using the spacebar worked for me. I hate these things.
The process of choosing — of gleaning, from the universe of performances, 10 or a dozen great ones — has felt to me more personal this year than it has before. Less governed by the intellectual procedures of criticism, more fully influenced by mysteries of taste and affection. This year’s Great Performers is devoted to 14 actors whose presence I couldn’t shake, who would not quit me.
One thing they have in common — maybe the only thing, beyond their effect on me — is that they appear in stand-alone, feature-length narratives. In the olden days (which ended around 2017), it would have been clear that we were talking about movies rather than television, but thanks to streaming that distinction is now fully obsolete. “The Power of the Dog,” Jane Campion’s epic, wide-screen western, is a Netflix thing. So is the exquisitely silver-toned period psychodrama of Rebecca Hall’s “Passing.” So is Bo Burnham’s one-man stand-up-special-cum-video-diary, “Inside.” Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” with its light-and-shadow cinematography and expressionist set design — and with a haggard, volcanic Denzel Washington in the title role — will appear on Apple TV+.
One thing they have in common — maybe the only thing, beyond their effect on me — is that they appear in stand-alone, feature-length narratives. In the olden days (which ended around 2017), it would have been clear that we were talking about movies rather than television, but thanks to streaming that distinction is now fully obsolete. “The Power of the Dog,” Jane Campion’s epic, wide-screen western, is a Netflix thing. So is the exquisitely silver-toned period psychodrama of Rebecca Hall’s “Passing.” So is Bo Burnham’s one-man stand-up-special-cum-video-diary, “Inside.” Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” with its light-and-shadow cinematography and expressionist set design — and with a haggard, volcanic Denzel Washington in the title role — will appear on Apple TV+.
By the way, he does an indirect allusion to BC and other pseudo “Method” actors, too. Again, he recommends the books of his friend and explains the Method just to said that actors who go to extreme: not bathing, lose and gain weight, etc. aren’t Method but the opposite of what Method was created for. The whole thing is a wonderful meditation on acting but I wish he were equally critical about his own profession because clearly a lot of those stories behind actors doing Method “wrong” are much bad reporting and sensationalist headlines.