David Edelstein took a moment out from staging his own long farewell to the year-capping Slate Movie Club to actually address a few movies, and mentioned at one point:
Serious film criticism—which I don’t write but do read—rarely devotes much space to acting, which is why I want to mention some of my favorite performances
I don’t consider myself a serious film critic, nor do I recommend anyone read what I write, but either Edelstein’s challenge or my lack of actual exposure to the films of 2005 (at last count I was sitting at just over 50) compelled me to jot a couple completely cuff-offed top fives: favorite leading performances, favorite actors in minor/ensemble roles, and great one-shot scene-stealers. I actually drafted the lists a couple weeks ago, and now feel like E! Television’s The Soup year end round-up has stolen some of my thunder (especially in the last of the three categories), but great pop culture junkie minds think alike.
LEAD PERFORMANCES
5. Timmy Treadwell, Grizzly Man — For sticking his hands in mounds of grizzly dung, for talking to full grown bears like they were two years old, for being able to successfully camouflage his thinning hairline, for working at a jousting restaurant, and most of all for realizing that, if you’re going to stage your own personal one-man show, you’d better have the foresight to surround yourself with a cast of terrible actors who couldn’t possibly steal your thunder. (I’m not referring to the bears, but rather all of Herzog’s interview subjects.) Grizzly man, nothing. T-squared was a Renaissance man.
4. Dina Korzun, Forty Shades of Blue — My compadre at Slant Keith Uhlich (i.e. the single biggest fan of Forty Shades of Blue in the critical community… i.e. the only people who apparently saw Forty Shades of Blue) compares Korzun’s resolutely ocular presence, and the fact that she can’t not lead with her cheekbones, to the bondage feminism of Marlene Dietrich. I’ll take it. But did Dietrich ever look at herself in the mirror so often?
3. Luigi Lo Cascio, The Best of Youth — Sure he ages three or four decades over the course of the film, but that’s only the beginning of his achievement. I can’t think of much more forboding a challenge to an actor than Lo Cascio’s role here. The task: to represent generosity, kindness and decency in the face of an entire generation’s communal and political history. And to do so for six hours. On endurance alone, Lo Cascio’s performance gets tagged “all time.”
2. Mathieu Almaric, Kings & Queen — Looking a little bit like Luigi Lo Cascio on the days not shown during the duration of The Best of Youth (i.e. the days where he was not decent, not kind and frequently an insufferable hipster ass), Mathieu Almaric is the devilish yang to his sister Emmanuelle Devos’s ying (who is, again like Lo Cascio, a prime example of self-serving Sirkian morality, and it’s destroying her from within). Almaric is the personification of Kings and Queen’s tonal fragmentation, and I’m hardly surprised when people who don’t like the film itself in turn dislike Almaric.
1.
“I laaah-ve this baaaaah-sss!”
SUPPORTING PERFORMANCES
5. Jean-Marc Barr, Cote d’Azur — The screwball sexcapades of Cote d’Azur are mostly so much froth, and so I was riveted when Jean-Marc Barr showed up to pour some straight up, no-latte espresso into the bowl. Playing the horny family’s patriarch’s secret gay lover from years back, Barr’s chrome-domed sensuality turns Dad, the film’s most prominent hold-out, into a quivering puddle of post-coital gush. The unfortunate pair of tight orange vinyl slacks Ducastel and Martineau force him to wear in the dancing and prancing finale aside, Barr is all man. And when he unfastens Gilbert Melki from his bedpost handcuffs, flexes his bulging, throbbing thighs and purrs “I’m not letting you leave without a cup of coffee,” it puts Heath Ledger to shame.
4. Eric Bogosian, King of the Corner — A tactless Rabbi with a soft spot for discussing impending funeral plans by taking the bereaved to the race track, Bogosian is in great form and terrible function, providing the earnest but microscopic King of the Corner (the press materials of which, by the way, started me out on my burgeoning career as a blurb whore by taking “a Yiddish Sideways” only slightly out of context) its catalyst. Apparently, there’s such a thing as being too Jewish.
3. Sharon Wilkins, Palindromes — Until Sharon Wilkins emerges from the toy boat that takes the multi-faceted, multi-faced Aviva down the river towards righteousness, I wasn’t really sure whether or not I was supposed to want to abort Aviva and her desperate, infantile obsession over giving birth. And then Wilkins appears on screen, portending a sea change towards large and in charge independence. How typical of me. Almost as though Solandz was targeting me personally with the expectations of appearance, Aviva as embodied by Wilkins is (if anything) more vulnerable than before, tugging at the bottom of that ill-fitting tube top as though hoping she can disappear within it and reacting to a pile of aborted fetuses with the weight of a shattered dream.
2. Robin Wright Penn, Nine Lives — I’d say at least five or six of Rodrigo García’s one-take vignettes in Nine Lives merit euthanasia, but I have to concur with the hyperventilating majority who were blown away by Robin Wright Penn’s ten-minute tour through the gauntlet of repressed emotions and deferred attraction (the same crew who curiously left her relatively high and dry on the Village Voice critics’ poll — what, I ask, what was so fantastic about Catherine Keener in Capote? or, for that matter, what wasn’t completely embarrassing about William Hurt in A History of Violence?). Even buoyed by her full-term stomach and her squeaking grocery cart, Penn unleashes a decade’s worth of regret in a performance that is nudity itself.
1. Sid Haig, The Devil’s Rejects — “Tutti-fucking-fruity!” If it weren’t for Sid Haig… well, The Devil’s Rejects would still be a wonderland of dust devilry, a remake of Capote only starring Charles Manson as Sam Peckinpah and directed by Tobe Hooper channeling Monte Hellman. But it would be missing its Warren Oates… its Dub Taylor… its Jack Elam. And what would be the point of that?
CAMEOS, WALK-ONS and ONE-SHOTS
5. The stagehand who uses Sarah’s animated tear as lube for jacking off backstage, Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic — The stagehand now has no hand to assist with the staging. OMGWTFLOL!
4. Elsa Woliaston, Kings and Queen — The only psychoanalyst I can picture being able to get my shit straight, and I do mean straight.
3. Lil’ Kim on the VMAs — On the eve of her incarceration for not being a snitch bitch ho, Kim faced an even more daunting challenge: pretending not to be pissed off by the anti-comedy of Jeremy Piven, who thought it would be chivalrous to put our heroine in the MTV blockbuster equivalent of the public square stockade. From the first digression away from the safety of the TelePrompt script, Kim’s eyes spoke the wrath she wisely kept in check.
Lame jokes about Martha Stewart were followed with even lamer jokes about Hollywood executives, and the Queen Bee (whose attire suggested she was gearing up for a cut on her term for good behavior) let her façade drop away and the incredulity surface.
“I think I’ve suffered enough!” she finally snapped, halting Piven’s psychosexual white boy power trip in Celebrity Roast clothing and sending his cock of the walk upstage to peck up his scattered ego.
The fans reacted with approval befitting a sitting Queen. As though her triumph weren’t tasty enough, she capped it by giving Ludacris’s moonman win a cute personal spin that quickly became one of my catchphrases of the year.
2. Nile Rogers and his ventriloquist’s dummy, TV Party — I said a hip hop the hippie the hippie to the hip hip a hop and ya don’t stop a rock on baby bubba to the boogety bang bang the boogie to the boogety beat. [/helium]
1. Marguerite, Trading Spouses — Marguerite, a fat, self-righteous, intolerant Christian with an axe to grind, took the final minutes of a heady set of Spouses episodes by the throat. This is the moment the show has been waiting for ever since the first-season switch between a rural Pentecostal housewife and a modern, urban Jewish yenta. Not since Cleo King in Magnolia have I been blessed with so bounteous a cornucopia of enraged catchphrases, spilling forth like cellulite.
“She’s tampered in dawrk-sahded stuh-fff! She’s NOT A CRISH-CHEN!!!”
“This is mah house, I want no money! I want mah Gawd and mah family! I’m a God warrior!”
“I’ve been educated. I’ve been educated on… stuh-fff! I’m the one who asks. Why am I the only one who asks? Why am I the only warrior?”
“I want these crew members out of mah house. Gawr-guyles! Psychics! Everything’s un-Godly! Get the hell out of my house in Jesus’ name I pray!” (note: the non-punctuation in that last sentence is verbatim)
“I spoke that into existence, every one of them. I planted that seed and I will see the harvest — GET OUT OF MAH HOUSE! Every dark-sided person get out of my house! If you believe in Jesus, you can stay here.”
Everyone loves to take note of the bitchiness of the producers’ last title card swipe at their own pudgy Frankenstein’s monster: “Upon further reflection, Margaret decided to keep the money.” But anyone who still gets tickled by the hypocrisy of the moral majority hasn’t seen the winning end of a feather lately. I prefer what, exactly, the other mother decided to delineate a significant portion of the reward money towards. Talk about below the belt:
