Viggo Mortensen, before he became a Blue Chip player, gave the greatest "Devil" performance in any film I've ever seen. Unlike Pacino's smooth talking lawyer or Nicholson's suave lady's man, Mortensen shucked charisma and cranked out a sinister, snarling, hateful, whispering and endlessly intimidating Lucifer in The Prophecy, a forgettable horror film with Chris Walken as Gabriel. The film is a potboiler, but Mortensen chews up the scenery like none other in the last 10 minutes. My favourite line: "I remember when you'd say your prayers as a boy, then you'd jump into bed...afraid I was underneath...and I was!" He alone makes this movie fucking awesome. If the devil actually did exist, I would picture him this way. Watch and learn: Kevin Spacey in Swimming with Sharks. The movie is one-note and repellent, but Spacey's galvanizing turn as the modern-day monster boss from Hell is the finest of his entire career. You will be shaking your head in the amazement of his performance. Peter Greene in Clean, Shaven. Greene is an instantly recognizable character actor (Zed, the cop who raped Ving Rhames in Pulp Fiction) that shows he not only has the star power nobody ever gave him, but he delivers an award-caliber performance as a schizo freshly released from the Booby Hatch and starved for human contact. Green gives an astonishingly believeable performance, and the film is haunting and engrossing.
Viggo as the russian in "Eastern Promises" was absolutely amazing. I can even take the nude fight scene he was so good in that movie. Although the movie sucked I liked Gabriel Byrne as the devil in "End of Days" with Aaaahhhnnoolld.
You would be making that exact same joke about Michael Clarke Duncan if "The Green Mile" wasn't his first role. Think of all the absolutely shitty action films and family comedies he has done since then, and his awful performance in each one. How about his awesome role as "Balrog" in one of the worst films ever made, "Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li"? I remember MisterMiracle linked to a hilarious video of Chris Klein being an idiot in that film on this board. Well, Klein was a master thespian in "Legend of Chun-Li" compared to Michael Clarke Duncan's miserable effort. Actually, speaking of black actors... Focus- Ray Allen in He Got Game. It's not just that Ray Allen is an excellent basketball player who does a very good playing "Jesus Shuttlesworth", a believable, realistic kid in that film. It's the fact that Allen was NOT playing himself in real life; even the way Allen talks and interacts in interviews is completely different than the character he portrayed on screen. Pretty damn impressive for a "non-actor".
Whattabout Shaquille O'neal, esquire, in Ka-Zam? Compared to this performance, Cary Grant rolls over and takes it in the corn hole. Probably the best debut performance was Edward Norton's in Primal Fear. He recieved a well-deserved Oscar nomination as a seemingly innocent and painfully shy church kid accused of butchering a priest. And FUCK does his character bring out the inner demons in this movie, for your viewing pleasure to be sure.
I can remember watching Into the Wild and saying to my friend, "Well, that was the Oscar winner this year." Not that the movie was so fantastic, but what Emile Hirsch had to put himself through for the role and the fact that he's essentially in every minute of the movie made for a phenomenal performance. Proving how political the Oscars are, he didn't even get nominated. Unreal.
Perhaps he didn't get nominated for a different reason. If the movie is anything like the book, he didn't get nominated because he portrayed a stupid fucking idiot so moronic that he didn't take things as basic as a compass and a map into the Alaskan wilderness, despite never having been there before, or having any experience surviving off the land. According to the author of the book, he didn't take a map because he wanted to experience "being the first to explore a blank spot on the map". Since there were no blank spots left in 1992, "he simply got rid of the map. In his own mind, if nowhere else, the terra would thereby remain incognita". Roughly a 1/4 of a mile upstream from where he tried to cross the river, there was a hand-operated tram that would have allowed him to cross and make it back to civilization. Had he packed a map like anyone with a brain would have done, he would have lived. Read more about this dipshit here.
Oh, I know the character he portrayed was stupid. It's why, as an audience member, I couldn't feel any sympathy for his death. However, that in now way detracts from the difficulty (especially physically) of playing the role.
Y'all are forgetting Wilt Chamberlain. Remember his standout performance in Conan the Destroyer? Focus: Paul Newman. Right role, wrong movie.
I know she gets plenty of hate for being a psycho who wears birds and sounds like a cheese-grater, but Björk was absolutely robbed for Dancer In The Dark. Yeah, it was a hard movie to watch, but the fact that she didn't even get nominated for an Oscar and that Julia fucking Roberts won that year for Erin Brokovich is all kinds of wrong.
Because you never did anything reckless in your youth? I'm not defending the stupidity of his decision but the time before he died was lived better, and more fully than most ever will. And why are you even commenting when you haven't seen the movie? Especially when the vast majority of the movie has nothing to do with his death.
My pick goes to Joseph Gordon-Levitt in The Lookout. The movie takes places after a horrible car crash on prom night in a small town in the Midwest leaves Gordon-Levitt with brain damage. Not hurr hurr hurr drooling brain damage, but awesome brain damage like weeping for no reason and a mild version of Tourette's. He's befriended by a guy that was a year older than him in high school for the sole purpose of using him as an extra hand in a bank robbery. It happens to be the bank that Gordon-Levitt works at as a janitor. It's a great movie with a great story. Jeff Daniels kicks ass as Gordon-Levitt's blind roommate, and you get to see a scantily clad Isla Fisher. It was released with little fanfare and played in indie theaters for the most part. Sad, considering what a great movie it is. Aside from his craptacular performance in GI-Joe, I will see any movie with Joseph Gordon-Levitt in it.
As long as you bring it up, I think Joseph Gordon-Levitt deserved a nomination for "Stop/Loss". As a troubled soldier who turns to alcoholism upon completion of his war time duty, I think he gave a stellar, nuanced, and above all, realistic performance of what those of us in the service would out of hand consider a shit-bag soldier. He gave it depth and compassion. I was surprised no one picked him out of that awful movie for a great performance.
That truly was one of the best movies of it's year. Levitt leads the future of great young actors and almost always is an award-caliber actor and this is his best performance, no doubt Oscar-worthy. He was totally and completely convincing (I suffered a near identical fate as him in real life, but not as damaging) and the script was air-tight. However, like any and every thriller that takes place in a snowy setting, it bombed in theatres for some reason. People just don't know good movies when they see it. Instead, they go see Hotel For Dogs.
Speaking of out-of-place performances, I always think of Louis Gossett playing Frank Castle's former partner in the original 1989 version of The Punisher. While it was a good action film, acting clearly wasn't a priority; Dolph Lundgren was woefully miscast as the title hero, and everyone else ranged from passable to awful. The lone exception was Louis Gossett, who played the hell out of his character, giving him real intensity, purpose, and vividness. It's completely jarring, considering how mailed in the other performances are. I had never heard of him back then, but looking it up, Gossett was apparently a respected actor who won an Oscar in the early eighties. And who apparently accepted every role offered to him since then. Makes sense. I mentioned it on here before, but William Marshall in Blacula was also striking. Marshall was a handsome 6' 5" classically trained Shakespearen actor, with a deep, rich bass voice. He was one of the greatest actors to play Othello in the entire 20th century. He had an amazing screen/stage presence and genuine believability. And there he was playing the title role of "Blacula" in a cheesy blaxploitation film, which ended up being the most memorable role of his career. He was the best actor in that movie by light years; it would be like putting Al Pacino in his prime opposite the cast of Twilight.