The Beauty of Purely Physical Acting

Martin Freeman exhibits, possibly better than any current actor, the ability to convey ordinary, everyday emotion through physical gestures and expressions.

See posts here and here and here.

Another type of physical acting is the actor who knows how to move. Keanu Reeves, for all the criticisms he receives regarding his inability to "emote," is a beautiful creature to watch.

Aldis Hodge exudes the same spare elegance in Leverage. 

Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings runs about and occasionally gives speeches, but he uses his body exactly right in places, including at the end of the first movie.

Aragorn answers Boromir's horn. He strides down the hill towards the rampaging orcs. He appears almost eager, amused, ready to finally stop skulking about and put his abilities to the test. 

It's a beautiful moment. 

And bad guy Bolg is even more enchanting to watch than Azog from the Hobbit trilogy. 

Bolg is Azog's second-in-command (and his son). Played by Lawrence Makoare at 6'4" he moves with engaging fluidity. Azog, Manu Bennett, tends to stomp around (in a good way), but Bolg actually saunters. When he strides into a fortress to greet Azog or faces off with Legolas, he moves with impressive quickness. There's a litheness to his movements, which conveys personality as well as confidence. 

This type of acting deserves major kudos. Kudos!

Culture Comes From Individuals

Graphs I created for my thesis--I argue

against the middle view.

Despite some current political thought, culture is the product of individuals. That isn't a political position. It is reality. Whether we like it or not, we are born into individual bodies with individual minds (in fact, in a perfect world with lots of funding, every individual would receive an individual health work-up since even our bacteria is not all the same).

Shows, genres, movies, franchises attract particular and specific writers and directors, crew members and cast members. Together, they create a work with a certain aura/theme/look. 

Interestingly enough, sometimes those writers, directors, etc. move on to other shows but rarely en masse; no matter how many of them move together, the new arrangement of people will result in a show with a different aura/theme/look than the previous show.

As Hollywood has discovered, you can't simply recreate an aura/theme/look by pulling together all the supposedly similar elements. Recent Star Trek will never be able to recreate original Star Trek, no matter how many of the same elements are slotted into place. A group of individuals did something: it can never be done quite the same way again. 

I'm not going to argue here whether one is better than the other--merely, it is not the same.

Genres and shows and franchises gain auras, which extends to the types of scripts that get submitted, the actors who get hired, the ideas that get encouraged. Some of this can be deliberate--the sort of top-down determinations that get social alarmists all alarmed (mostly, as far as I can tell, because they aren't in charge of the top-down determinations)--but a lot of these decisions come from everyday decisions made by individuals involved in an artistic enterprise.

I saw this version of Corialanus live. Still don't 

get the plot but wow! these scenes were amazing.

Judi Dench famously dislikes watching herself on film (though she went to see herself in the Bond films since her husband and daughter were fans). The reason: film is static; it's one performance kept forever. On stage, every performance every night is different. The theater experience is not just the actors and crew but the audience: a unique experience each time.

I can attest to this: one of the best theater experiences I've ever had was seeing an off-Broadway production of Into the Woods as a college student. The audience was perfect. Everyone was excited but respectful. The energy was fantastic. People cheered, sighed, applauded, laughed... Afterwards, even the cast said, rather wonderingly--it was Utah--"This is one of the best audiences we've ever had."

The right people came together in the right way:

perfection!

Even though film productions don't create the same individuals-joined-together experience as the theater--for one, film scenes are rarely filmed in order--it is useful to remember that the experience of filming a scene is also carried out by individuals. There's a reason that Christian Bale (inappropriately though understandably) lost his cool when a crew member traipsed across the set during filming. And there's a reason that Hugh Jackman stopped in the middle of a stage performance and instructed an audience member to shut off his or her cell phone. Over-the-top reactions maybe but they get to the heart of the matter:

Culture is about individuals. I am doing something here.

 

Acting is a Job: When To Speak

The Closer Season 3's blooper reel includes a scene from "The Round File." Kyra Sedgwick, the actress, sits on a couch across from an elderly woman. Sedgwick is waiting patiently. As the seconds tick by, she breaks the silence to inform the older woman, actress Nina Foch, "I'm waiting for the airplane to pass by overhead."

The sharp-witted older woman retorts dryly, "I know, dear. I've been acting for many years." Kyra Sedgwick laughs delightedly.

Why do they wait? Because acting is a job, and actors dislike having to do extra takes.

A separate commentary mentions

how these actors rehearsed their scenes

together before filming, mostly to

get the blocking down.

Michael Weatherly's commentaries on NCIS episodes are worth listening to since he addresses these types of issues. That is, he actually talks about directing and camera work (he doesn't retell the episode's plot, which type of commentaries drive me crazy--I'm watching the episode! I know what happens!). In one such commentary, he propounds on a scene with David McCallum (Ducky):

"Watch this," he tells viewers as McCallum, as Ducky, delivers a piece of dialog, then slides shut a metal door in Autopsy to punctuate his point before he continues to speak. "He did that to avoid having to come in and record his dialog over the sound," Weatherly informs us, obviously proud of McCallum's seamless performance.

I love these glimpses into TV shows because they remind us, This is a job (and actors don't want to stay late any more than the rest of us).*

*Presumably, Bellisario retired in part because he was driving the NCIS cast crazy; he kept doing rewrites on episodes through the last hours of shooting, forcing the actors to stay longer and longer on set. Mark Harmon finally put his foot down. Harmon won. Bellisario was a master in the field, and the later seasons of NCIS don't have nearly the same cohesion as early seasons or Bellisario's other shows. Still, I understand the actors' frustrations. To them, truly, really, however much viewers romanticize them, every gig is a job.