Word: actor
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Little-known actor Rui Ricardo Dias does a fine job portraying Lula from young man to adult, but the film glosses over Lula's frailties, depicting him as a man who can do no wrong. "The director omitted episodes in Lula's life that suggest the President has weaknesses or defects," said Veja, a popular right-wing newsmagazine. "Basically, it's a terrible film," wrote critic Ricardo Calil...
...those dreary take-over-the-world routines. (Blackwood has "set his sights on America." Don't they all?) Even more surprising is that Robert Downey Jr. doesn't manage to overcome all that. In theory, he seems like such a good casting choice for a new Holmes; no actor of the appropriate age working today seems more quick-witted or verbally agile. Holmes was a late-19th-century bad boy, known for dipping into the cocaine here and there, and Downey Jr., reformed though he may be, is still our favorite bad boy. To imagine him in a different Sherlock...
Javier Bardem, the Spanish hunk who won an Oscar as the killer in No Country for Old Men, was originally to play Guido. When he dropped out, the role went to Day-Lewis, an actor nearly the opposite of Bardem. He's coiled, wary, and has a spirit that's not even slightly Mediterranean. In 8-1/2, Mastroianni was such a natural charmer - so, we have to say, Italian - that he made indolence attractive; in that film, a perpetual sexual adolescence was not a flaw but a goal (especially because women kept throwing themselves at him, and what woman...
...professional movie-watcher, I try to concentrate on what an actor does on the screen. Murphy produced a lot of fine work in the 18 years since she successfully petitioned her mother to move with her to Hollywood. She made an appealing early impression in the 1995 Clueless, Amy Heckerling's update of the Jane Austen novel Emma. Murphy played the tough, gauche kid - the title character, so to speak - who is given mentoring and a makeover by Alicia Silverstone. I liked Murphy as Eminem's girlfriend in 8 Mile and in the starring role in Uptown Girls...
Looking back at the awards season of 1998-99, it's hard not to feel some chagrin. That was the year Roberto Benigni did his clown's leap to the stage to pick up his Best Actor Oscar, but in retrospect, the issue isn't that Benigni beat out Nick Nolte, Edward Norton, Ian McKellen and Tom Hanks for the award; it's that Jeff Bridges wasn't even nominated. His deft, hilarious, thrillingly perfect performance as Jeffrey Lebowski, a.k.a. the Dude, in the Coen brothers' genius film The Big Lebowski should have been showered with prizes. Instead, the only...