Post by jeffan on Aug 24, 2010 14:22:16 GMT -5
An Ode to Jeff Goldblum, a character for the ages
Let us now praise Jeff Goldblum. Even in "The Switch."
To be clear, the new comedy starring Jennifer Aniston and Jason Bateman has some interesting wrinkles lifting it out of the romantic-comedy norm. One of them is the tall, eagle-eyed Goldblum who, as the male protagonist's work colleague and sounding board, does the best he can to make "Are you trying to tell me…" exposition worth hearing.
Goldblum's amused (and amusing; it's hard to be both at once) way with his lines, his rhythmic change-ups and — my favorite pointless bit — his comically challenging Thelonious Monk-like intro at the keyboard, just before he leads a group of kids and adults in "Happy Birthday": All these flourishes, mostly vocal, add up in small ways. Midway through the picture you realize you're really looking forward to the next time he comes back on screen.
We all have our favorite character actors. Many of them, such as Goldblum, have also taken leading roles in blockbusters, seemingly by chance or accident. His biggest were "Jurassic Park" and "Independence Day," and having an idiosyncratic performer lighten those big-budget loads amounted to very astute casting. If it were up to me, every bombastic summer picture would co-star Goldblum, J.K. Simmons, Kristen Wiig, Craig Robinson, Armin Mueller-Stahl and, in a surprise cameo, Bill Murray. "Transformers 4," right here!
Oftentimes our relationship to a character actor is a matter of where we are in our lives at the time of introduction. In director Joan Micklin Silver's "Between the Lines" (1977), which is hard to find but worth the trouble, Goldblum played the lazy, generally stoned music writer of an alternative Boston weekly threatened by corporate takeover. (If they only knew.)I saw that movie on a date in high school, and it's sort of remarkable that this loosely plotted, bittersweet ensemble piece even played a theater in Racine, Wis. That film probably had a lot to do with solidifying my romantic impression of journalism and its discontents and slackers and dreamers. Six years later, the first film I reviewed for the Twin Cities weekly was "The Big Chill," which I didn't really get (still don't; still don't know what it's about, or what it's trying to say about anything except that it's fun to listen to Motown and shop for ice cream). But there was Goldblum, cutting through the nonsense in every scene, getting laugh after laugh with very little evident effort, once again playing a journalist tipping around the edges of the action.
This matter of character actors we appreciate is a recurring theme in all our film-going conversations. Tell me some of your favorites. The movie-savers. The scene-stealers. The craftsmen and craftswomen who do the job, every time.
articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-08-20/entertainment/ct-mov-0820-talking-pictures-20100820_1_character-ode-armin-mueller-stahl
Let us now praise Jeff Goldblum. Even in "The Switch."
To be clear, the new comedy starring Jennifer Aniston and Jason Bateman has some interesting wrinkles lifting it out of the romantic-comedy norm. One of them is the tall, eagle-eyed Goldblum who, as the male protagonist's work colleague and sounding board, does the best he can to make "Are you trying to tell me…" exposition worth hearing.
Goldblum's amused (and amusing; it's hard to be both at once) way with his lines, his rhythmic change-ups and — my favorite pointless bit — his comically challenging Thelonious Monk-like intro at the keyboard, just before he leads a group of kids and adults in "Happy Birthday": All these flourishes, mostly vocal, add up in small ways. Midway through the picture you realize you're really looking forward to the next time he comes back on screen.
We all have our favorite character actors. Many of them, such as Goldblum, have also taken leading roles in blockbusters, seemingly by chance or accident. His biggest were "Jurassic Park" and "Independence Day," and having an idiosyncratic performer lighten those big-budget loads amounted to very astute casting. If it were up to me, every bombastic summer picture would co-star Goldblum, J.K. Simmons, Kristen Wiig, Craig Robinson, Armin Mueller-Stahl and, in a surprise cameo, Bill Murray. "Transformers 4," right here!
Oftentimes our relationship to a character actor is a matter of where we are in our lives at the time of introduction. In director Joan Micklin Silver's "Between the Lines" (1977), which is hard to find but worth the trouble, Goldblum played the lazy, generally stoned music writer of an alternative Boston weekly threatened by corporate takeover. (If they only knew.)I saw that movie on a date in high school, and it's sort of remarkable that this loosely plotted, bittersweet ensemble piece even played a theater in Racine, Wis. That film probably had a lot to do with solidifying my romantic impression of journalism and its discontents and slackers and dreamers. Six years later, the first film I reviewed for the Twin Cities weekly was "The Big Chill," which I didn't really get (still don't; still don't know what it's about, or what it's trying to say about anything except that it's fun to listen to Motown and shop for ice cream). But there was Goldblum, cutting through the nonsense in every scene, getting laugh after laugh with very little evident effort, once again playing a journalist tipping around the edges of the action.
This matter of character actors we appreciate is a recurring theme in all our film-going conversations. Tell me some of your favorites. The movie-savers. The scene-stealers. The craftsmen and craftswomen who do the job, every time.
articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-08-20/entertainment/ct-mov-0820-talking-pictures-20100820_1_character-ode-armin-mueller-stahl