Most Annoying Actors.

[Sir Terrence the Terrible]

Worf looks up, looks down whistles quietly to himself and tries mightly to hold it in but can't....

Mwa ha ha ha ha!!!!!! You are a good friend, I'd go to war with you any day of the week, you've given me more audio information than anyone I know and you're a nice guy to boot BUT (you knew there was one comin din'tcha?) some of your tastes in actors and movies SUCKS!!!!!! SUCK SUCK SUCK SUCK SCUKS!!!!!!

Could you spare my feeling just a little?

I know you love ole horseface, but this Whoopi fetish is just plain sad... and the Tyler Perry comment Ye Gads man put the crack pipe down!!!! LOL, in all seriousness, we like what we like. This post certainly made me laugh and I've had one crappy week thus far... Thanks.

Worf

I don't know if I like Sarah all that much, I like watching her movies because they take me to places in the city that I am familiar with. I used to be a model in my young years, so I understand her mentality, even if I think it is a bit much. I think I miss my city a bit, and this brings back a bit of home when I can't get there.

I do like Whoopi for the reasons I mention. She also makes me laugh.

I like Perry because he created a character that reminds me so much of my mother that it is scary. I guess watching him do Medea reminds me so much of the things I liked so much about my mother, the craziness, the boldness, and the respect. She was always saying that if we didn't do what she says, she was going to punch us in the throat(she did have seven boys to deal with). She did pack on occasion, but most of all she was just plain funny as hell. She gone, but he does fondly remind me of her. I like the messages he delivers through his movies, and I like the fact he went from homelessness to a millionaire which does speak to the fact that it is hard to do so these days, but he made it. Being tenacious can pay off, I know that from personal experience.

[bobsticks]

I am amazed at how many folks hate the actors that I like, and how many actually hate the ones I hate as well. Quite interesting for sure......

Yeah, it gets difficult when one speaks in absolutes.

For instance, I'm not a really big fan of either Jennifer Anniston or Will Farrell but they both have a movie or two in which I think they've excelled...and a many more in which they've sucked...

[PeruvianSkies]

This is why I love when an actor/actress does a role that is redeeming for them. I can think of several great examples where I hated a particular actor, but then they landed the right role to fit their "type" and began liking them for it. One that sticks out really well is Ben Stiller....

I was so annoyed by this guy many years ago in roles like REALITY BITES or similar roles around that era, even MEET THE PARENTS. Then he did ZOOLANDER, which is a horrible movie, but he started to figure out that he needs to play those types of roles and hit it on the money with DODGEBALL. Of course, now he pretty much plays that same character in variations ever since, same can be said for Will Farrell, but wow....when he gets the right role, like STEP BROTHERS, it works beautiful. It goes quite south though when it doesn't all tie together, like SEMI-PRO or even large parts of ANCHORMAN, which basically feels like one long SNL skit that loses it's "funny" more often than not.

[ForeverAutumn]

Nicholas Cage is another lifeless, one act droog but I did like the movie Ghost Rider.

Cage has certainly filmed some real duds, but man when he is good I just LOVE him! He's great in more offbeat roles, like in Wild at Heart, Bringing Out the Dead, Adaptation, or Matchstick Men. But then he does crap like City Of Angels or Family Man and it's really hard for me to like him.

I have a serious love/hate relationship with him.

[Auricauricle]

I just can't get my head wrapped around Ben Affected....

[bobsticks]

Cage has certainly filmed some real duds, but man when he is good I just LOVE him! He's great in more offbeat roles, like in Wild at Heart, Bringing Out the Dead, Adaptation, or Matchstick Men. But then he does crap like City Of Angels or Family Man and it's really hard for me to like him.

I have a serious love/hate relationship with him.

Watch Vampire's Kiss and you'll realize he has not grown in his craft. He needs to do something artistically inspiring like running a missionary in the Sudan for a year or developing a heroin addiction.

[bobsticks]

I just can't get my head wrapped around Ben Affected....

So, if it was discovered that Skank-Lo gave him the clap he'd be Ben Afflicted?

[PeruvianSkies]

Watch Vampire's Kiss and you'll realize he has not grown in his craft. He needs to do something artistically inspiring like running a missionary in the Sudan for a year or developing a heroin addiction.

Yeah, I mean......I guess I just have accepted the Cage is just not a great actor....he has moments. Ever see WILD AT HEART? To me though, I am not so much annoyed by him as I just tolerate him... there are far worse.

[bobsticks]

Wild At Heart is another good one. Frankly my annoyance comes from disillusionment. I always figured if he could summon that knd of quirkiness he'd have potential to do truly great things. Nowadays I'm of the opinion that he just may be a crazy bastard.

[PeruvianSkies]

Wild At Heart is another good one. Frankly my annoyance comes from disillusionment. I always figured if he could summon that knd of quirkiness he'd have potential to do truly great things. Nowadays I'm of the opinion that he just may be a crazy bastard.

Yeah, especially when that quirkiness is just a bit too much, like in THE ROCK or most especially in CON AIR and FACE/OFF. Those were borderline annoying, I'll give ya that!

[ForeverAutumn]

Wild At Heart is another good one. Frankly my annoyance comes from disillusionment. I always figured if he could summon that knd of quirkiness he'd have potential to do truly great things. Nowadays I'm of the opinion that he just may be a crazy bastard.

I see exactly where you're coming from. Up until Leaving Las Vegas, he could do little wrong IMO. I think that once he won his Oscar, people started to take more notice of him. He turned in the really good, quirky roles, for the big money Hollywood schlock. I don't blame him for wanting the big money...who doesn't. But I think that Oscar win was his demise. At least in my mind.

There was a time when I saw every movie he made. That ended after Con Air and The Rock. Nicolas Cage as "action hero" just didn't do it for me.

[theaudiohobby]

Cage has certainly filmed some real duds, but man when he is good I just LOVE him! He's great in more offbeat roles, like in Wild at Heart, Bringing Out the Dead, Adaptation, or Matchstick Men. But then he does crap like City Of Angels or Family Man and it's really hard for me to like him.

I have a serious love/hate relationship with him.

I gotta disagree on Family Man, great concept, great movie. The reflective theme of the movie gels with me, I supposed I also loved Truman Show(Jim Carey,this time), which was cut from the same cloth. I happen think Cage is a great actor.

[bobsticks]

I gotta disagree on Family Man, great concept, great movie. The reflective theme of the movie gels with me, I supposed I also loved Truman Show(Jim Carey,this time), which was cut from the same cloth. I happen think Cage is a great actor.

...OTOH, I think Nick Cage has been playing Nick Cage playing a quirky guy for 15 years

Different strokes for different folks...

[Auricauricle]

Sticks and FA got it right, with their comments about "Nick Cage playing Nick Cage" and the sense that Cage "could do little wrong"....Cage is a very competent actor, sometimes a darn good one. Unfortunately, he has a penchant for putting himself in roles where the Incredibility Factor (IF) is off the charts. This, IMO, diminishes Cage's ability to pull off what he is most capable of: acting. Seeing him in movies like The Rock, Face-Off, and National Treasure have turned Cage into an animatron for adolescents and armchair adventurers. Still, the guy can act, and when he's good, he's really something to watch. See him in Birdy or Red Rock West. He'll show you that, in spite of his damned, quirky ways, he can still pull off a good lick or two.

[ForeverAutumn]

I forgot about Birdy. An excellent film!

[RGA]

it's rare that an actor ruins a movie - it's almost always the writing or direction that makes or breaks a film.

Nicolas Cage has made some bad movies he's made some good ones. You can always question the choice an actor makes - sometimes it looks better on the page and it gets ruined by the direction.

One of my favorite actors is Ralph Fiennes and I like Uma Thurman and I like Sean Connery. I grew up in Wales for a time and one of my favorite shows was called the Avengers. This show was a kindof James Bond series with a male lead John Steed and female partner Emma Peel who was his equal in crime fighting. Good crisp dialogue interesting and unusual stories a little off beat and some lovely double entendre dialog. Really there is more substance and meat to this than a Bond story.

So they get Raph Fiennes and Uma Thurman in the catsuit and Connery playing against type as the villain. Big budget - I was so excited to see it and it turned out to be one of if not the worst movies of the year - maybe one of the worst of the decade.

There wasn't anything the actors could really do - the lines were just so dispicably vapid and the plot was as dimwitted as most of the Batman movies (without Michael Caine).

Actors like Jennifer Aniston and before her Meg Ryan become famous at playing a certain character. Aniston play Rachel on Friends the bubbly firend and pretty much every role she is offered will be the same general character. She does the bubbly thing so well that it is a bankable commodity. Film makers look at the bottom line - she is a kind of guarantee. It's very difficult for her to break away against type. There is a whole media engine that will try and stop her if she tries. The actress that played Phebe gets almost the identical role all the time as well.

We really don't get to see their true acting chops and I would say it's harder for women to get those juicy roles. Aniston is the new Meg Ryan - romantic comedy lead she does it well.

Kevin Costner gets beat up as well - the argument against him is "he doesn't seem to act" which I always thought was the point of a decent actor. Costner will never make a mediocre film into a good film like perhaps a Jack Nicholson or Dustin Hoffman can - but Costner is capable enough not to really detract from movies. He said it himself that he can't make a movie great so he chooses movies that are good and rides them. I think he has done a fine job of selecting some good films to be in like Field of Dreams, JFK, No Way Out, Bull Durham, Dances with Wolves and a few others. He also made Waterworld so no one is perfect.

It's probably not that Aniston or Costner are bad so much as people feel other actors who are barely known are just as good if not better and live in relative obscurity. I think one of the best actresses I have watched is Jennifer Carpenter who plays Deborah Morgan on the HBO Showtime Dexter. She has a tremendous amount of versatility in this show and it's a rich role to play. But it's a TV series - to me she's a better actress than Aniston but she doesn't look like Aniston or Jolie or have the famous roles behind her.

Lastly, I liked Cage in the Rock - I liked the Rock. Cage was playing the wimpy sidekick so I would not really compare his performance to the muscle action hero in Con Air. The Rock was a big action spectacle with some good one liners, special effects and Sean Connery playing a retired version of his James Bond. It was a hoot.

[bobsticks]

stuff.

RGA this was a great post. I tried to give you Greenies despite the fact that I disagree with a few of your points and, really, my gun was jammed...

Point by point:
~I love Ralph Fiennes and Sean Connery and Uma is tops too...yes, a bad movie but almost watchable just to see such skilled craftspeople struggle within a clearly broken system.

~Yes, Lisa Kudrow gets typecast all the time

~Aniston v Meg Ryan...maybe if you're a girl...

~Kevin Costner is a complete douchebag...in fact I'm ashamed of myself for not having thought of him earlier. I'd rather watch ten Tom Cruise movies than anything he's done...

~It is that they're that bad...and it's nothing against character actors like Carpenter who cut their chops for a living...there are plenty of unsung heroes out there.

~I liked The Rock too...but that doesn't mean that a dozen other actors couldn't have pulled it off as well. The whole, "Let's cut the chit-chat (winces; points) A-HOLE(nods head from side to side)...dealio was an unnecessary contrivance...so was all that bullshyte about a peach in CON-AIR...just another reason to use an affected accent...

[RGA]

You are certainly correct that there is a lot of that wink wink to the camera and "traits" that certain actors bring like the Cage drolling voice and head tilts and even Mel Gibson had such "mannerism" back in his hey day Letha Weapon days.

A film like the Rock in better hands could have been something but they dumb it down. It still starts and ends with the director and the writers though. A good director controls the performance of the actors. Brukheimmer and Bay productions are usually shlock. Everything is over the top including the acting. But I think despite the over acting Cage and Connery managed to get above it with the tongue in cheek mannerisms. Though the movie the Rock divided a lot of people including critics.

I think Cage is a fine actor but he needs to choose films directed by talented people like Figgis. A Director that is making a film about actual people not cartoon characters like his character in the Rock. I like the Rock but it could have been a GREAT film in the hands of a better director. I liked the storytline - I liked the Ed Harris Character and the fact that the "bad guy" was not so one dimensional because he had a legitimate cause. They even had the acting talent to pull it off but Bay turned it into a cartoon action film. I still gave it ***/***** (3 stars to be recommended).

The only well known actor that doesn't do much for me is Keanu Reeves. He's never really brought anything to any movie I have seen him in.

One Actor I really wish had done more is James Spader. He was so good on Boston Legal and the Practice and he often chose strange characters in his film career.

As for Ralph Fiennes - it was interesting that when he was making the Cronenberg movie Spider that they could not complete the film due to budget. Fiennes took two movies to help finance Spider and for his directorial debut which is coming out soon (Coriolanus). He did Maid in Manhatten and Red Dragon and the Potter movies. Sometimes they do movies they don't really want to do in order to pay for something they do want to do. Michael Caine did Jaws 4 because he needed to buy a house LOL.

The sad part is the great actors sometimes have to sell out a bit in order to get the "star" appeal so that they can do the projects dear to their heart. Fiennes strikes me as that sort of actor. You can't keep doing small independants that no one sees if you want to ask a studio to give you 50 million for something you want. Obviously Coriolanus will have virtually no appeal with the North American Audiences and looks like it is costly to make. Clearly Fiennes is doing it because he wants to make it because he loves Shakespeare.

[PeruvianSkies]

Yeah.... he's a real tool. However, he sometimes manages to be in movies that would or could be good regardless of who is in them. But, for the most part he manages to pull of some of the worst things to hit celluloid time and time again, so let's simply list the films he was in that were actually worth seeing:

THE UNTOUCHABLES - brilliant little DePalma gem that has one of the best gunfight scenes of all time, of course it steals the "steps" scene from Battleship Potemkin in true homage fashion.

FIELD OF DREAMS - despite his woodenness, the essence of baseball is portrayed wonderfully in true Americana fashion.

DANCES WITH WOLVES - somehow he even directed this film and no matter how hard I try to forget about that fact, it's still a really well-done film on all levels. Dang it.

JFK - insanely well-done film by Oliver Stone.

THIRTEEN DAYS - an overlooked film, but solid and worth a viewing.

OPEN RANGE - spectacular modern Western. Robert Duvall saves the film.

I've often said that Kevin Costner's greatest acting role was in THE BIG CHILL....hopefully everyone gets the joke.

[Hyfi]

DANCES WITH WOLVES - somehow he even directed this film and no matter how hard I try to forget about that fact, it's still a really well-done film on all levels. Dang it.

I love the movie for what it is and what it's about. However, it could have been at least an hour shorter if he didn't do so many shots of just staring at himself.

[RGA]

I love the movie for what it is and what it's about. However, it could have been at least an hour shorter if he didn't do so many shots of just staring at himself.

Yeah Directing is one skill but editing is something else.

of course I felt the LOTR movies could have been edited down to one 2 hour movie. It's not like there was a significant intricate plot.

[Feanor]

There is quite few of them on my list, but my top three have to be Tom Green, Jack Black and Julia Roberts. And Brad Pitt is on the borderline

Anyone top your list?

Adam Sandler

[Auricauricle]

RGA: Although I like your argument, I dont't entirely agree with your point that a movie "starts and ends with the director and the writers". While certainly they exert much influence on the overall production, I would posit that the actors are equally acountable for how their characters present themselves. I have read accounts of the work of Harrison Ford, i.e., who is known to collaborate with the crew, and offers suggestions for dialogue and delivery. Saying this, I would think that if Cage was equally assertive, he would exert himself in a similar way. Instead, it appears that he was either mute or indifferent, leaving behind a performance that is lazy and banal.

[Dual-500]

The actors are absolutely responsible.

HOWEVER:

Film/video/CD/CACD/DVD any storage tool thats used is the Directors medium. What you see is a final product that was under their exclusive control.

Live performancs is the actor/musician/performers medium. You see what the performer does - period. The performer controls what you see and hear - the real deal.

[PeruvianSkies]

The actors are absolutely responsible.

HOWEVER:

Film/video/CD/CACD/DVD any storage tool thats used is the Directors medium. What you see is a final product that was under their exclusive control.

Live performancs is the actor/musician/performers medium. You see what the performer does - period. The performer controls what you see and hear - the real deal.

The director is more often than not just a Studio Exec. Biyotch. There are some directors who get creative license, but usually only after they make commercially successful films, Martin Scorsese is known for saying "I make 2 for them, then 1 for me", which quite simply means that he makes 2 films that are box office draws and then uses that money to make something that is more artsy.

Stanley Kubrick is one of the last directors to truly have 100% artistic license with his films and the results are incredible, although not always big money-makers, their legacy lives on. Of course, we have Indie Filmmakers out there who do things like Kevin Smith and make their first film on credit cards and hope that it works out, CLERKS paid off for him, but it was a risk that doesn't always work out. Of course, years later he still has yet to make a film as good as CLERKS, even with the big budgets he has had since.