Quote: (11-28-2016 09:39 PM)Suits Wrote:
Quote: (11-28-2016 09:18 PM)Paracelsus Wrote:
Oh, right, Natalie Portman. Handed the greatest acting opportunity any young attention whore could want -- the female lead in a Star Wars movie -- an opportunity sufficient to keep nerds fapping to pictures of her for the next thirty years -- and blew it, in not one, not two, but three separate films.
Could you go into detail about how Natalie Portman blew it in these not one, not two, but three films?
Obviously, Star Wars I-III (much like IV-VI) sucked donkey balls, but I never really thought Portman was to blame.
Carrie Fisher's choice of drug throughout her Star Wars movies seems to have been alcohol and maybe some forms of cocaine. She nonetheless had the good grace to sexually tilt at least
some of her lines, or demonstrate
some semblance of credible emotion in her scenes. She actually managed to look vaguely fuckable in some scenes, especially early on.
By contrast, the only drug I can think of that Portman might have been ingesting throughout I-III was a near-lethal dose of Valium. At least I
hope it was Valium that was responsible for her acting. Her face would have
more expressiveness if you
injected Botox. Her acting throughout the series is less "wooden" than it is "coffin".
And no, it's not (just) because George Lucas is a shit director. Consider the state of her "craft" well after Star Wars, after close on 10-15 years in Hollywood, in
Thor:
This is all the expression she can muster in extreme closeup, where the most intensity, the most raw emotion is essential. This is the limit of her range when being directed by Kenneth "Henry V" Branagh, while her character is witnessing the literal rebirth of a god.
And now my appeal to authority:
http://www.avclub.com/article/the-can-na...drum-52236
Quote:Quote:
With only a few days left until this year’s Academy Awards, Natalie Portman is the presumptive favorite to take home the Oscar for Best Actress, for her harrowing, exhaustingly physical performance in Darren Aronofsky’s hyperbolic ballet melodrama Black Swan. It’s Portman’s second Oscar nomination, and if she wins she’ll be beating out impressive newcomer Jennifer Lawrence, veteran nominees Annette Bening and Michelle Williams, and former winner Nicole Kidman. That isn’t bad at all for an actress that a surprising number of critics think isn’t very good at her job.
The recurring knocks against Portman are expressed best by Time Out New York’s Lisa Rosman, who says of Portman in a review of the recently released The Other Woman that the actress “seems unlikely to ever achieve a tone between histrionic and affectless.” Even some critics who profess to like Portman’s performance in Black Swan have credited Aronofsky first and foremost for making good use of Portman’s limited range. Slate has run two pieces over the past month that chalk up the Portman’s recent success to factors other than her acting: In one, Nathan Heller takes an overarching approach to Portman’s career, describing her as an exemplar of a generation of “overdriven dilettantes” who do a little of everything, but fail to become virtuosos at anything; in the other, Tom Shone suggests that Portman’s performance in Black Swan is little more than a stunt, a geek show, an invitation to audiences to watch her punish her own body. And over the past week, a “supercut” video of Portman crying in movies has been making the rounds, predicated on the joke that the more Portman emotes, the phonier she looks.
The rest of it pumps up Portman's good characteristics, so please go ahead and read it.
I'm in the camp that thinks Aronofsky was a miracle worker in that he actually managed to get something raw and possibly real out of Portman at all.
Black Swan is a masterpiece of casting because it matches the fucked-up character to a fucked-up actress. And even then -- like pretty well all of Aronofsky's films, including
Noah -- it's a harrowing third act to watch.
Remissas, discite, vivet.
God save us from people who mean well. -storm