Archive for Jesse Eisenberg

Let’s fight: The best actors under 40

Posted in Celebrities with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 17, 2011 by Sarah

I few months ago I realized that everyone I thought of as the best actors working today are over 40. This startled me and got me to thinking about who are the top actors under 40, since they’re the ones who will take over, in a sense. I wrote out a list of nearly thirty names (over sixty when I included actresses, whom we’ll deal with next week), and started Netflixing away. Over the next couple of months, I began winnowing down my list. For example, I realized that while I like Shia LaBeouf and think he’s talented, he tends to make crap movies. The last few years have shown a dearth of good taste, a kind of lowest-common-denominator thinking that concerns me. Sure, Shia will deliver quality to your crappy blockbuster, but the result for him, as an actor, is a kind of stagnation I can’t admire. So he was removed from the list.

There are other criteria at play—I tried to be scientific about this. This isn’t just a taste call (although certainly my taste can’t be divorced entirely from it); I tried to use a set of objective standards in my judging process. My basic criteria are three things: body of work, diversity of work and recognition received. I was looking for, essentially, consistency—actors who deliver at the highest level again and again. Take Ben Foster. My taste dictates that he’s an amazing talent and should be on the list, but the formula I derived said otherwise (he’s made one too many bad movies). So I had to remove him in the name of objectivity.

You might be asking, Why did you only consider actors aged 25-39? I could never do this kind of thing for actors under 25 for the simple reason that they’re still unformed at that age. Still finding their feet. You don’t know how that’s going to translate into a mature career. What’s precocious at 17 might not work at 27. By 25, though, they’ve had time to amass a significant body of work, to diversify, to explore other media. Certainly we can point to certain people and say that they’re very talented and are bright prospects. But there’s a reason a lot of child actors fail to transition into adult careers. You have to be capable of making that leap in the first place.

Yesterday I asked the Twitter who were the best actors under 40. I wanted to input popular opinion into the final equation, though I’m sure we’ll be fighting over this anyway. When I got down to 20 actors I had to start making some tough calls and while Jake Gyllenhaal, Diego Luna, Anthony Mackie, James McAvoy and Elijah Wood didn’t make the final cut they were really close and deserve some recognition anyway. And now, on to the best actors.

Christian Bale

Where you’ve seen him: Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies, American Psycho

Don’t miss him in: Velvet Goldmine

Where do you even start with Christian Bale? Do you know how hard it was to pick just ONE movie everyone should see him in? It’s debatable, because we all have different taste, but to me, Bale is the single best actor working under 40 today. To me great acting is the ability to convince me of anything and Bale can convince me of anything. It’s so cliché to say an actor is “chameleonic”, but that’s exactly what Bale is. He inhabits each character completely, often transforming his body to do so, but the real mark of Bale’s talent is his ability to crush everyone around him (I call this being a “screen tyrant”). Check him out in The Fighter, obliterating Mark Wahlberg in every scene. When Bale is on screen, you can’t look away. The only actor who’s come close to stealing his spotlight is Heath Ledger. The only other actor I can think of with that same tyrannical bent is Daniel Day-Lewis. Yeah, I said it. Christian Bale = Daniel Day-Lewis.

Benedict Cumberbatch

Where you’ve seen him: Sherlock, Atonement

Don’t miss him in: Hawking

I crush on talented guys. To me, being good at something is sexy. I don’t care if you’re a plumber, an athlete, or a lawyer—if you’re good at what you do you gain a unique confidence that is like crack to me. It’s not about being arrogant, it’s just being assured that you’re doing exactly the right thing for you and you’re doing it well. That’s Benedict Cumberbatch all over. Cumberbatch is just beginning to make his mark across the pond, but in the UK he’s widely regarded as one of their brightest talents. I’d have to agree. Film, television, theater—Cumberbatch lights it up wherever he goes. He even does radio! There is nothing he can’t do and he makes it all look so ridiculously easy. He’s getting the best work in film, television and theater so it’s only a matter of time before everyone stops making fun of his name (myself included) and starts taking him seriously.

Paul Dano

Where you’ve seen him: There Will Be Blood, Little Miss Sunshine

Don’t miss him in: Meek’s Cutoff

While everyone was watching Daniel Day-Lewis destroy the scenery in There Will Be Blood, Paul Dano quietly delivered one of the most impressive performances in the first decade of the 2000s. When I connected him to the morose, near-silent teenage son in Little Miss Sunshine, I was shocked. Same guy! But totally different! Dano is impossible to get a read on—you can’t extrapolate his real personality from his performances like you can with some actors. He’s an intensely focused performer who is a weird mix of choosy and accessible. He works in some of the most out-of-the-way movies being made yet pops up with small parts in stuff like Knight & Day and Cowboys and Aliens. Dano ducks the limelight, too, so his career will likely continue as a slow burn for years to come, but one day I promise we’ll all look around go, “You know that Paul Dano? He’s like, our best actor.”

Leonardo DiCaprio

Where you’ve seen him: Inception, The Aviator

Don’t miss him in: What’s Eating Gilbert Grape

Has anyone transitioned from child actor to Serious Adult Actor better than Leonardo DiCaprio? Here’s how good an actor DiCaprio is: Going into The Departed I told myself, “Don’t get attached to anyone—everyone is going to die.” As the movie unfolded I kept chanting to myself, “Don’t care, don’t care, don’t care,” and still I got my hopes up. I was rooting for DiCaprio’s character, Costigan. I even started to think he was going to make it out okay. Leonardo DiCaprio, the man who’s made a career out of dying on screen, managed to convince me that he wasn’t going to die in a Martin Scorsese movie—the director who’s made a career out of killing characters. He made me care AGAINST MY WILL. Once a teen heartthrob, DiCaprio has had to fight to get taken seriously and short of Johnny Depp, I don’t think anyone has done a better job of making that leap.

Jesse Eisenberg

Where you’ve seen him: The Social Network, Adventureland

Don’t miss him in: Rodger Dodger

Of course Jesse Eisenberg would be on here, because he always makes the list. Eisenberg is the geek chic choice of the week for a lot of people, but to assign him only nerd status is to ignore that he’s got a face made for cold calculation. What made him so impressive in The Social Network wasn’t that he was believable as a socially awkward computer genius, but that he was believable as a stone-cold ruthless businessman. He’s an odd combination of vulnerable and unpredictable on screen. Eisenberg balances film work with off-Broadway plays and he sometimes writes (he has a play in development off-Broadway), and he’s a bit reclusive, which keeps him intriguing. Some people build careers on their face or their abs, others on an ability to tell a good joke. Eisenberg is building his on mystery.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

Where you’ve seen him: Children of Men, Love Actually

Don’t miss him in: Kinky Boots

The man with the most impossible name to pronounce, Chiwetel Ejiofor, is also the most under-served actor on this list. Like Cumberbatch, Ejiofor is a popular guy in the UK, but stateside he’s best known for supporting roles in stuff like American Gangster, 2012 and Salt. I first noticed Ejiofor in 2005’s Serenity, in which he played the unflappable Operative. It’s a chilling example how sometimes the scariest bad guys are the ones who never raise their voices. And his performance as Othello in London’s West End was equally chilling, though for different reasons, even in blurry bootleg form (he won an Olivier Award for it). Ejiofor has the ability to electrify at will—if he wants you to feel it, you’re going to feel it. But it was the dominance he displayed in Othello that really won my admiration. He’s got some Laurence Olivier voodoo working for him.

Michael Fassbender

Where you’ve seen him: X-Men: First Class, Inglorious Basterds

Don’t miss him in: Fish Tank

The Fassbender needs little introduction—this is his year with Jane Eyre, X-Men, David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method and Shame all opening in 2011. The Fassbender is what I like to call a “scene dictator”—a performer who dictates moods. He doesn’t dominate his scene partners like Bale and he’s not emotionally manipulative like DiCaprio and Ejiofor, but what The Fassbender does so well is control how a scene is going to go (Heath Ledger was also a scene dictator). This is why he stood out in Inglorious Basterds and it’s why everyone sat up and noticed him in 2008’s Hunger. The Fassbender doesn’t need grandiloquent speeches or gestures to get his point across. By thinning his lips he can make everything dark and scary. It made him a particularly effective Rochester in Jane Eyre. Directors love scene dictators because they add so much atmosphere to a movie just by showing up. The Fassbender is going to be highly in demand for many years to come.

James Franco

Where you’ve seen him: Pineapple Express, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man

Don’t miss him in: 127 Hours

I know, I know—you’re rolling your eyes. No one has worn out their welcome more than James Franco, but just because he’s more concerned with being an artiste right now doesn’t mean he stopped being an actor. 127 Hours was a master class of acting and it reminded me that Franco can throw down when he’s engaged with the material. Among American actors, Franco comes closest to being a screen tyrant, but he doesn’t do it all the time. He did it in 127 Hours but that was his movie start to finish. Franco is actually an underrated character actor—The Dead Girl, The Company, In the Valley of Elah and Milk all demonstrate his capabilities in a supporting role. Some actors are leading men and some are characters guys but Franco can be both. Yes, he’s annoying. Yes, he needs to go away for a while. But yes, he’s also a great actor.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Where you’ve seen him: Inception, (500) Days of Summer

Don’t miss him in: The Lookout

This is what I mean about not being able to predict how child actors turn out—who knew back in the 1990’s that JGL would turn out THIS good? The turn came in 2005 with Rian Johnson’s Brick, which also starred a guy named Noah Segan, who a lot of people thought would be something. Then 22, Segan showed a lot of promise. Now 27, he hasn’t delivered. JGL, meanwhile, has turned out to be a rare kind of leading man—one who makes you feel good despite bad circumstances. Maybe it’s that smile, or maybe it’s a less-defined, vaguely Jimmy Stewart-ish aura, but JGL is the perfect guy to headline your comedy about cancer (50/50), because he can deliver the emotional weight without making the audience want to kill themselves. But he can also go dark and twisted, such as in Hesher. JGL is old-fashioned—a good actor without any fancy tricks—and he’s just plain fun to watch.

Ryan Gosling

Where you’ve seen him: Blue Valentine, The Notebook

Don’t miss him in: Lars and the Real Girl

So The Gos hides out for a couple years only to reemerge the most in-demand actor in Hollywood. Was it that absence made our hearts grow fonder or would this have happened anyway? I think it was inevitable, whether The Gos took a break or not. Just 26 when he was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for Half Nelson, The Gos has been on everyone’s radar for a long time. He’s talented, yes, but what sets The Gos apart is his taste level. He picks consistently interesting projects. If The Gos is attracted to it, it’s probably good. That doesn’t mean he’s immune to making bad movies—no one is—but that his career is and will be a mix of big and little films, populated by a lot of oddball characters. The Gos has the soul of a character actor with the face of leading man and a metric ton of charisma. He is Bale’s closest competition.

Honorable Mentions:

Ben Foster

Andrew Garfield

Tom Hardy

Eddie Redmayne

Michael Shannon

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Jesse Eisenberg makes The List

Posted in Celebrities, Movies with tags , , , , on April 25, 2011 by Sarah

I’m a list maker, I admit it. I have lists detailing everything from Why Sharks Are Scary (it’s their black soulless eyes) to Things You Can Do With Pam Cooking Spray Besides Cooking (homemade flame thrower). I keep a small notebook in my bag at all times in which I keep track of my grocery lists and my movie-watching schedule, as well as the all-important People To Call For Bail Money. The thing is, I forget things if I don’t write them down. Look at my Freebie Five—I can’t remember from one day to the next who’s on it so I end up with, as my friend T says, a Freebie Thirty-Five.

One list I can remember, because it’s so short, is the List Of Actors I Will See In Any Movie Regardless Of How Bad It Looks. It’s pretty much limited to Cate Blanchett, Steve Coogan (an Alan Partridge movie is coming!), and Johnny Depp. But after seeing the red band trailer for Jesse Eisenberg’s 30 Minutes or Less, I’ve added Eisenberg to list. Check out the trailer:

I openly and often admit my distaste for Aziz Ansari (Parks & Recreation), but I love how he says, “And your first thought was to come to a school full of children?!” Ansari’s range as a comic actor is pretty limited but he does what he does so well that it doesn’t matter. As for Eisenberg—this is the broadest comedy he’s gone for yet. For a dude with a perma-hang-dog expression and who broke out in Noah Baumbach’s depressing The Squid and the Whale, Eisenberg is really funny. In fact, though he’s best known for a dramatic role in The Social Network, Eisenberg’s resume is littered with comedies. It’s a really smart move to balance the high-class Oscar fare with comedies, and that he’s going broader in his humor shows Eisenberg is making a run at mainstream, non-nerdy success.

I support this move. Longevity follows diversity and Eisenberg avoids being pigeonholed by switching between small indies, big dramas, quirky comedies, and now, mainstream summer comic fare. And though he’s not the most classically handsome guy, Eisenberg is growing into his looks and yet he isn’t playing off as a “face guy”. The fact that he’s kind of completely hot is incidental to everything else he’s bringing to the screen. And that would namely be his broken-beat delivery—I love the way his voice cracks and breaks at odd moments—and the ability to signify devastation with just his eyebrows. The best actors can convey emotions with just their eyes—the minutest flickering of lids and flinching of brows says it all. It’s a really hard skill to learn and it almost always has to be an actor’s inborn instinct.

Jesse Eisenberg can have whole conversations without saying word or breaking an expression.

The quantifiable evidence that Eisenberg deserves to be on my list—The List—is that in the last few years he’s made pretty much every other list I’ve made for films. In 2009 he appeared twice on my Top 10 (Adventureland and Zombieland), he showed up on the 2010 Top 10 with The Social Network, and he made my most anticipated of 2011 with 30 Minutes or Less. He also has several other projects coming up that intrigue me, including Free Samples (action is set largely in an ice cream truck and has shades of Adventureland) and Predisposed, which will star the unlikely combination of Eisenberg, Melissa Leo and Tracy Morgan, and is billed as a comedy even though it’s about a mother entering drug rehab.

The qualitative evidence for Eisenberg is my simple enjoyment of everything his does (I thought Rio, while beautifully animated, was kind of overrated but Eisenberg’s vocal work was solid), and the fact that his instincts and interests lead him to make the kind of movies I consistently want to see. So far, he hasn’t made a movie I haven’t wanted to see. So yeah, he’s on The List. Which I’m sure makes him terribly proud.

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The Social Network

Posted in Movies, Reviews with tags , , , , on October 4, 2010 by Sarah

The hype on this movie got so intense just before its release last Friday that it amounted to a guy running into the room and shrieking, “The Social Network is the BEST MOVIE EVERRRRR,” as he wept and rent his clothes asunder. Well, the movie is good. Really good. Even in a year flooded with excellent dramas, The Social Network is a standout. But is it the BEST MOVIE EVERRRRR? No.

From the beginning I had one reservation about The Social Network: I feared writer Aaron Sorkin’s habit of oversimplifying characters to fit his narrative construct. With Sorkin you get superb dialogue and smart characters that usually do simple, borderline stupid things in service of Sorkin’s Idea (see also: Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip). I wondered if David Fincher’s direction, always so nuanced and attentive to environment, could overcome what I consider to be Sorkin’s inherent shortcoming. Answer: Um, kind of.

Fincher’s Harvard is all dark woods, shadowy lighting and gray classrooms. His New York law office, where Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg, Zombieland) is being deposed for a lawsuit in which fellow Harvard students Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Armie Hammer of TV’s short-lived Reaper and Josh Pence of probably-canned TV show The Gates, respectively) and Divya Narendra (Max Minghella, Agora), sue Zuckerberg for stealing their idea for a social networking site for Harvard students (the ConnectU lawsuit), is in the same dark-wood-and-navy-blazer world of Harvard. By contrast, Palo Alto and its environs are sunny open spaces and hip clubs. In the two different depositions settings, New York is represented by a small window with a view of a rainy day while San Francisco’s law office is all big windows and bright light. The west coast frees Zuckerberg’s soul while the east represses it?

Fincher does an able and understated job in creating this world. Zuckerberg is a man of cargo shorts, athletic sandals and hoodies while his friend and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield, Never Let Me Go) is all slick suits and upwardly-mobile success. The lines are clear and almost comically plain between East and West coast and the battle they do for Zuckerberg’s soul, but it works in the context of the movie. In fact, it kind of offsets Sorkin’s oversimplification of what happened when Facebook was founded.

The good guys and bad guys are easy to spot in Sorkin’s script, despite his defense that it’s “up to the audience to decide who is good and who is bad”. Oh please. The “Winklevi”, as Zuckerberg sneeringly calls them at one point, are clearly the bad guys, persecuting Zuckerberg because “for once in their lives things didn’t work out for them”. Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) is a bad guy, spotting the clash of opinions between Zuckerberg and Saverin, identifying it as a weakness, and cutting Saverin out of the group. But this is what Sorkin does. He tells you it’s all very complicated when really it’s very simple.

In Sorkin’s world Zuckerberg creates Facebook to get back at a girl (Erica Albright, played by the newly-minted Lisbeth Salander, Rooney Mara) who breaks his nerdy little heart. And he also thumbs his nose at the Winklevosses, who represent everything he simultaneously loathes and desires about Harvard (popularity and acceptance into elite groups, especially in the form of Harvard’s secret societies known as “final clubs”). Saverin is along for the ride, the money man who keeps Zuckerberg in servers and beer, Parker is the prophet who elevates Facebook into an international game-changer. Well, that’s fine. It creates an acceptable story structure. But it cheapens Zuckerberg’s real-life accomplishment. Why can’t Movie Mark Zuckerberg just be a really smart guy who is a gifted computer programmer, and has the vision and scope to answer the question everyone was asking (how do we bring people together on the internet?) better and more efficiently than anyone else? Why must his actions be to assuage his broken heart?

Zuckerberg doesn’t often strike me as the most likeable guy, but he has expressed genuine remorse and has identified a lack of maturity that lead him to do things he isn’t proud of today (like the Sequoia Capital prank, identified in the movie as Case Equities). Sorkin’s script has no room for such maturation, however, and the Zuckerberg we’re left with is the lonely nerd still trying to get Erica to like him (in the image of Eisenberg alone in a conference room, waiting for Erica to accept his friend request). It just annoys me that Zuckerberg’s achievement, which has changed how we relate to one another, is reduced to the actions of a slighted little boy. Why can’t smart people just be smart?

But we have the movie we have and we must deal with it. The interpretation of Zuckerberg aside, it is a really good movie. Sorkin’s dialogue is as quick and witty as you expect, and Fincher’s direction frames the centerpiece of the film: Eisenberg’s performance. Truly, without Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network is half the movie it is. His Zuckerberg has trouble maintaining eye contact with people, often talks down to his closest friends and never understands why their feelings get hurt, and when you have his attention he will make you wish you didn’t by delivering some scathing set down (“My mind is back at my office where we are doing things no one in this room is smart enough or creative enough to understand”).

Zuckerberg’s emotions are channeled through small facial flickers–the faintest hint of hurt when he looks to Saverin but finds his friend has already abandoned him, or the way his eyes almost pop out of his head as he wills Erica to accept his I’m sorry–and always you can see the ambition burning in him to do something bigger than anyone else has done. The Social Network is already fueling a lot of Oscar talk but the only thing I will support right now is that Eisenberg deserves to be ranked among the best leading actors of the year. His performance is a delight to watch, he is always engaging and he applies a weird charm to Zuckerberg–you really want Mark to learn to make and keep friends.

Also standing out is Garfield who conveys such heartbreaking betrayal when he learns that Zuckerberg has allowed him to be cut out of Facebook. Garfield plays Saverin as such a likeable guy that I found myself chanting, “Go to California,” under my breath. Of course he doesn’t and that is the opening for Parker to drive the wedge between Zuckerberg and Saverin. It’s just that Saverin doesn’t get it. He wants to go to New York City and get advertisers for Facebook to create revenue–Garfield does an excellent job of showing Saverin is simply a different breed than Zuckerberg. He is a brilliant mind, in so many ways just as brilliant as Zuckerberg, but he thinks in a linear, traditional way when Zuckerberg is pursuing a path that twists through never-been-done and shouldn’t-be-possible.

As for Justin Timberlake, I didn’t mind him as Napster creator Sean Parker. It was a good role for him–flashy with little substance. He didn’t detract and Eisenberg and Garfield are so capable that he looks quite good in his scenes with them. I definitely don’t see him getting an Oscar nomination, but he didn’t ruin the movie for me. I actually kind of like that Timberlake was chosen to be the character who represents all the freedom and excess the west coast offers Zuckerberg. And for as much as Saverin harps on Parker’s unsuitability, continually referencing the “drugs and girls” in his past, Parker really does get things done for Zuckerberg. He gets the meetings that get Facebook the money without sacrificing their ad-free “cool”, the concept Saverin doesn’t seem to grasp. But in the end he is tripped up by the drugs and girls Saverin kept talking about, which leaves Zuckerberg alone, his new ally gone because he threatens the image of the company.

Ultimately, The Social Network is what it is–a well-acted, well made story that in no way represents actual events or real people. Worth seeing for Eisenberg alone, it does offer an interesting perspective on a new breed of entrepreneurs who make their money by exploiting our personal lives in a public space. Or rather, allowing us to exploit our own personal lives. And there was an oddly poignant reference to the nature of living your life online when Erica tells Zuckerberg, “The internet isn’t written in pencil, it’s written in ink.” I couldn’t help but think of the recent events at Rutgers University and the rise of “cyber bullying” over the last couple years. Yes, Facebook brings people together in a way not possible before, but it also allows for a new kind of cruelty.

Maybe that’s Sorkin’s ultimate point. Zuckerberg felt left out of the society he so wanted to belong to, so he gave us all a place to forever exclude our peers from our own final clubs.

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