In praise of the Character Actor
The actor who appears in my ever-burgeoning DVD collection more frequently than any other is Samuel L. Jackson. According to my inventory database at Guzzlefish, I own nine DVDs with Samuel L. Jackson in them. Though it might seem otherwise, I don't make it a point to shop specifically for DVDs in which Sam appears. It just happens that he appears often in the sorts of films I enjoy. When I purchase those films, there's old Sam with that wicked grin and that little chuckle he does.
My favorite Sam Jackson film of all time has to be The Long Kiss Goodnight, costarring Geena Davis and directed by one-time Mr. Geena Davis, Finnish film director Renny Harlin, of whose films I am not generally fond. (The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, anyone? Cutthroat Island? That's what I thought, you cowards.) In Long Kiss Goodnight, Sam utters one of the greatest lines in the history of film: "I'm always frank and earnest with women. In New York, I'm Frank; in Chicago, I'm Ernest." Then he throws in that famous Sam Jackson chuckle, as though he's just spoken the wittiest line ever written. It's not the line so much as it's Sam's too-cool-for-school delivery.
There are several actors who each make eight appearances in my DVD collection: Steve Buscemi, Sir Ian McKellen, Hugo Weaving, and Danny Trejo. Yes, that last one shocked me too. I am 100% positive that I have never strolled into Best Buy thinking, "Man, I hope they have that new Danny Trejo picture in stock. He's The Man." (For those of you who remain baffled by this reference, Danny Trejo was (a) the sinister uncle named Machete in the Spy Kids movies; (b) the prisoner in Con Air who boasted about the number of women he had assaulted; (c) the unfortunate guy who gets eaten by the giant snake at the very beginning of Anaconda. If that doesn't help you, you need to watch more movies.)
McKellen and Weaving get a leg up in my collection because they both appear in film series of which I own several installments. McKellen is Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and Magneto in the X-Men films; Weaving is the omnipresent Agent Smith in the Matrix trilogy — a perfect example of a series that should have quit with one film while the concept was still innovative, instead of beating a dying horse with a superfluous pair of sequels that offered beaucoup sound and fury but signified nothing — and the wise elf Elrond in Lord of the Rings. Both are fine actors -- Weaving's Agent Smith is one of the all-time great movie villains -- but again, I'm not dashing out to buy films just because Ian McKellen and Hugo Weaving are in them.
Steve Buscemi is still another story. Like Danny Trejo, Buscemi turns up in a lot of films that you didn't even know he was in. I'd completely forgotten that he was in two of the three Spy Kids movies, or that he voiced animated characters in Monsters Inc. and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. And, like Trejo, he's a fascinating actor in that his physical appearance -- sleepy-eyed and weaselly, with a wide, full-lipped mouth harboring a fearsome array of crooked teeth -- limits the sort of roles he's going to be invited to play. So he makes the most of what he gets, transforming small character roles into memorable pieces of thespian craft.
The point of this discussion -- and yes, I do have one -- is that character actors make films work, whether they are character actors who have transcended the boundaries of that confining label to get their names over the title, as Samuel L. Jackson often does, or are simply the people who play those supporting characters that provide a film with richness and depth. You may forget their specific contributions to a particular movie, but you can be certain that without them, the movie would not have been what it was. It should be no surprise, then, to note how many excellent films are populated by these hardworking journeymen, and many others I could list: Laurence Fishburne, Kevin Bacon, Don Cheadle, Joe Pantoliano, Eric Stoltz, Robbie Coltrane, and dozens more. As a lover of cinema, I salute them.
My favorite Sam Jackson film of all time has to be The Long Kiss Goodnight, costarring Geena Davis and directed by one-time Mr. Geena Davis, Finnish film director Renny Harlin, of whose films I am not generally fond. (The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, anyone? Cutthroat Island? That's what I thought, you cowards.) In Long Kiss Goodnight, Sam utters one of the greatest lines in the history of film: "I'm always frank and earnest with women. In New York, I'm Frank; in Chicago, I'm Ernest." Then he throws in that famous Sam Jackson chuckle, as though he's just spoken the wittiest line ever written. It's not the line so much as it's Sam's too-cool-for-school delivery.
There are several actors who each make eight appearances in my DVD collection: Steve Buscemi, Sir Ian McKellen, Hugo Weaving, and Danny Trejo. Yes, that last one shocked me too. I am 100% positive that I have never strolled into Best Buy thinking, "Man, I hope they have that new Danny Trejo picture in stock. He's The Man." (For those of you who remain baffled by this reference, Danny Trejo was (a) the sinister uncle named Machete in the Spy Kids movies; (b) the prisoner in Con Air who boasted about the number of women he had assaulted; (c) the unfortunate guy who gets eaten by the giant snake at the very beginning of Anaconda. If that doesn't help you, you need to watch more movies.)
McKellen and Weaving get a leg up in my collection because they both appear in film series of which I own several installments. McKellen is Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and Magneto in the X-Men films; Weaving is the omnipresent Agent Smith in the Matrix trilogy — a perfect example of a series that should have quit with one film while the concept was still innovative, instead of beating a dying horse with a superfluous pair of sequels that offered beaucoup sound and fury but signified nothing — and the wise elf Elrond in Lord of the Rings. Both are fine actors -- Weaving's Agent Smith is one of the all-time great movie villains -- but again, I'm not dashing out to buy films just because Ian McKellen and Hugo Weaving are in them.
Steve Buscemi is still another story. Like Danny Trejo, Buscemi turns up in a lot of films that you didn't even know he was in. I'd completely forgotten that he was in two of the three Spy Kids movies, or that he voiced animated characters in Monsters Inc. and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. And, like Trejo, he's a fascinating actor in that his physical appearance -- sleepy-eyed and weaselly, with a wide, full-lipped mouth harboring a fearsome array of crooked teeth -- limits the sort of roles he's going to be invited to play. So he makes the most of what he gets, transforming small character roles into memorable pieces of thespian craft.
The point of this discussion -- and yes, I do have one -- is that character actors make films work, whether they are character actors who have transcended the boundaries of that confining label to get their names over the title, as Samuel L. Jackson often does, or are simply the people who play those supporting characters that provide a film with richness and depth. You may forget their specific contributions to a particular movie, but you can be certain that without them, the movie would not have been what it was. It should be no surprise, then, to note how many excellent films are populated by these hardworking journeymen, and many others I could list: Laurence Fishburne, Kevin Bacon, Don Cheadle, Joe Pantoliano, Eric Stoltz, Robbie Coltrane, and dozens more. As a lover of cinema, I salute them.
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