Life in My Years

I love movies: the way a shot is framed on the screen, a brief picture of a moment, captured as it’s still living; the carefully-prepared details of a movie-set in all its eclectic clutter or precise neatness; all the wonderful sounds – the music, sighs, whispers, clicks, rustles, crunchings, ticks, whooshings; the way light falls, filtering through a scene, glowing, flickering, illuminating, and shading. I love great directors and what they can do with all of these things — how they make it all work together as they show us a story, an idea, or a mood.

But above all else, I think I love great acting the most, because I love, love, love, great characters  –  and there can’t be great characters in a movie without great actors. I know a good director is probably more important to the quality of a movie overall, but where would the the joy be in watching a beautifully-directed movie if you don’t feel love for its characters? Or if not love, at least empathy, compassion, hate.

Actors make movies human, and when an actor is great, he or she can create a real, whole person out of flat words and stage instructions. You can hear the character’s voice, their speech, watch their mannerisms, their faces, and it all comes alive: their pains, their triumphs, their pettiness, their vulnerabilities: their entire life. It’s a pretty magical thing. And because film is artistic in nature, these characters are usually placed in heightened realities, where emotional stakes, and pains are elevated to pivotal, life-changing moments most regular people experience only once in a rare while. Actors, therefore, embody life in its most distilled state — its essence. Great characters and great actors strip down the trivial fluff of the quotidian and get to the meat of the matter — and all within the lengths of a feature film. Amazing, is it not?

With all that said, I’m going to start writing about movies I watch, or have watched (something I’ve always wanted to do!), and this post is a warning that I will be writing an awful lot of how horrible or wonderful an actor is, and that the horrible or wonderful actor will end up significantly influencing my opinion of the movie overall, even if the directing was good.  I hope I don’t come across as mean, and I’d like to make the point that, obviously, it’s only my opinion and I’m only talking about their acting, not them as a human being. Someone thought I was being mean about Dianna Agron in my Glee post when I wrote that I thought she was terrible actress. Well, I’m not being mean. How can I help the fact that she’s the acting equivalent of a rock.