The main reason I would insist that Breaking Bad, which makes its glorious final return to our televisions Sunday, is perpetually underrated is that it’s virtually impossible to overstate just how good this show is. We’re in an era where there are few singular pinnacles of achievement that are universally accepted as great. There are Breaking Bad fans, but there are also Game of Thrones fans, Mad Men peeps, Walking Dead enthusiasts, all claiming their favorites are the greatest TV shows of all time. The sad passing of James Gandolfini brought out many voices reasserting that The Sopranos is the best or at least the most important TV drama of all time. The default choices for numbers two and three on that podium are Deadwood and The Wire. The debate over the best and the pluralistic nature of modern cultural opinion—generally positive aspects of the current climate—might as well fall by the wayside for the time being.
My dad loves Matt Damon. This is particularly noteworthy to me because he is a man who expresses little to no enthusiasm for contemporary movies or television. He enjoys things like Law and Order reruns and televised sports and playing Bejeweled while listening to country music. He doesn’t even say outright that he likes, I mean loves, Matt Damon, but any time Matt Damon shows up in a trailer for something, he will say “Hmm, that looks pretty good.” I was recently at the movies with him and he saw the poster for Elysium and asked me what it was about. I don’t remember my dad ever asking me what a movie was about before in my life. Maybe The Informant.
Few actors lend a movie instant credibility the way Denzel Washington does. I don’t know how you decide what movies you end up watching, but for me, it’s usually a question of first and foremost who the director is. Sandra Bullock and George Clooney aside, I want to see Gravity crazy badly because of Alfonso Cuaron. That said, there are some actors whose presence can sway me entirely on their own to see something they’re starring in. Daniel Day-Lewis is the most obvious example, since he tends to have such selective and keen discretion when it comes to picking roles, and he’s the most exciting actor to watch in movies right now, except for maybe Matthew McConaughey.
When you watch a lot of movies, every once in a while you’ll come across one that baffles you, and the range of reactions to this encounter are pretty fascinating. These types of movies aren’t simply the mindtrip types of movies like Inception or Memento that are labyrinthine in terms of their plot progression but are fairly clear by the end in what they’re about. Truly confusing movies, the type where you’re left wondering what the hell you just watched and what the point of it even being made could have been, can create responses anywhere from anger and resentment towards seemingly pretentious filmmakers to delight in the abstract, personal meaning a viewer can derive from something deliberately vague or opaque.
The 1970s are typically regarded as a period of Renaissance for the American movie industry. Financially, Hollywood was struggling, unable to match the heyday of the previous decades of the 40s and 50s, with television on the rise and new restrictions on the major studios. This resulted in a greater willingness for those with the big bucks to take chances on young filmmakers, many who had been studying film for their entire lives, and had been influenced by the evolving styles seen in Europe, France in particular.
Alright. You don’t have to reach too far back in the memory bank to recall a time when Matthew McConaughey was synonymous with male bimbo. It’s a testament to the quality of work he’s been churning out for the past couple of years that most people who have been following his recent career shift are rethinking that earlier characterization. It’s never entirely clear whether an actor is getting crappy roles because those are the ones they think they’re most suited to, the casting folks think they’re most suited to, or because they’re bad at discerning what’s going to be a non-terrible project or whether it’s impossible to actually determine something that’s going to be good before it’s ever made.
Like Wolverine, Hugh Jackman is himself a bit of a strange animal. At times it seems like he’s been fashioned in a laboratory, designed by engineers looking to make the most perfect modern-day star performer possible. He sings, dances, acts, is funny and presumably a nice guy. Oh, and he can also can kick ass. He’s routinely tremendous in pretty much everything he does these days. It’s as if he’s so seemingly perfect that part of us want to see him really mess something up to reassure ourselves that he is human and fallible like the rest of us. He’s almost so perfect that it’s boring. You know? The person who does everything right can get dull.
You may have seen the infographic above posted in a number of places some time last year, lamenting the fact that high-grossing movies in today’s cinematic landscape tend to be attached to stories already in the public consciousness—that there is less quality, original filmmaking coming out for audiences to consume. The only way that may be true is of course if we eliminate the entire independent film system which thrives on the original screenplay and low budget production of original and often off-the-wall material. By that metric, there are more original stories being told on film than ever. The movies making the most money, however, are the tentpole pictures usually tied to a successful introductory film like Iron Man or Pirates of the Caribbean. Building on the success of a hit is obvious less work for a bigger payoff, aka the American Dream.
Very rarely does Johnny Depp take on a role that is bland. His latest bit of work, playing Tonto in The Lone Ranger, is yet another instance of Depp taking on a character with the potential for really interesting (and yes, eccentric) interpretation. And even though the strangeness he’ll display through his range of character portrayals has almost become the norm, he has a way of making this predictable weirdness interesting nonetheless, often through sheer physicality.
Virtually every publication’s list of the rising new generation of hot young actors (or whatever variation of this designation is used) includes the seeming juggernaut of stardom that is Armie Hammer. It’s almost hard to believe how few titles he has to his name at this stage of his career, given the amount of press he gets, but the attention has been earned through first a breakthrough performance as the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network, followed by a fairly well received role opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in J. Edgar.
