I really enjoyed The Pianist, Adrien Brody is great and the movie was very well done...3.5/4

Click on op's link for part 1 of this thread. Lots of great recommendations/reviews/discussion on hundreds of films, often lesser known gems. Or you could start by cherry picking the IMDB top 250 or AFI top 100. or pick a filmmaker/actor you like and run em all down. You liked clockwork orange, well Kubrick is a f'n legend, watch his stuff.

Grosse Point Blank -- Fun because John Cusack has some sort of an interesting charm that I'm not sure I see anything very much like in any other actor. A surprisingly decent action scene or two, a lot of fun bits of conversation thrown back and forth between people, some slightly annoyingly unlikely events here and there, but hey, how else are you going to have a romantic comedy involving a hitman? All in all not great, but fun and worth a rental.

The Great Man, Benny Urquidez, makes an appearance as an especially homicidal hitman. He's very familiar to old school martial arts fans, and he has a fight scene with Jackie Chan in one of his movies (either Wheels on Meals or Dragons Forever, I forget) that some aficionados say is the best fight scene ever filmed. You do get to see him move a bit, which is nice. Everything isn't chopped up into a close up of an anonymous foot and such.

I think its just that he seems normal. That he could be your friend?

I like Joan Cusack a lot. She is extremely underrated.

I looked like John Cusack when I was young. I can't stand Say Anything, ugho, cloying claptrap, unripened Cameron Crowe.

He seems thoughtful and sometimes like he's really discovering his part in real time instead of playing it back. I don't know, I'm sure there are a lot of elements there I couldn't pin down and that don't show up in every performance. The normal part seems on track, too -- he does seem to usually let you in. I dunno, I just find him easy to relate to in some way, so I tend to get behind his characters a lot. Sometimes there's something off about him so I don't always follow him all the way, but he seems to let a lot through, without mediation, successfully. And he can do it without being a dick. There's an essential likability there.

Compare to DeNiro, who can let you in very deeply, but almost always maintains a feeling of otherness and indecipherability to me. I can feel astonished at how good DeNiro is at what he's doing, and how true it is, but it feels more like a particular than universal truth, and a particular rather than general connection. I can see myself as a John Cusack character here and there. I can hardly ever see myself as fully understanding the mysteries and strangeness of a DeNiro character.

Wow, Blarg, there's a lot in that post.

Very nicely done. Very insightful, seriously.

I don't feel like I know too terribly much about the art of acting or what goes into it, but I like what you've written here. I think it can be applied to any art, and is a worthwhile meditation on aesthetics in general.

Sorry to get all heavy.

As you were. Nothing to see here.

To Live and Die in L.A. - pretty cool movie, I had seen it before, but only parts. Gil Grissom was actually a good actor before CSI.

But more important: Reservoir Dogs.

If you watch that, it becomes immediately clear why Tarantino will never get actors like Al Pacino - it would simply be a waste of talent, since his characters are all so darn one-dimensional. Even Mr. White. Which is a shame, Harvey Keitel is a great actor.
But it is a good popcorn movie.

So DeNiro in Jackie Brown was what?

One of my favourite ever performances?

Im not sure what it is about this moive but I can watch this over and over again. This only happens with a very small amount of movies. Cusack seems to always deliver at the very least decent movies and I like to watch all of his.

wow, I though this movie was ****, no offense

to be fair though I saw it a long time ago and I was prolly 15 or so when I saw it

No, you were right. It was ****.

I really hated it, then I revisited it in an effort to find what value I might have missed.

I suppose my Bridget Fonda fetish was satisfied, but that's about it.

I watched A Bridge Too Far as it was on TV the other day - what an epic movie with an amazing cast. Great story too.

Deadgirl
Pretty meh movie, it's ok to watch but it could've been sooo much better. I was really dissapointed how this one ended, the idea is interesting though. 7/10.