No more Method acting!
With everyone so busy doing year-end and decade-end round-ups of The Way We Live Now, it's inevitable that someone would come along and try to define what Acting Looks Like Now. And that someone is film critic David Thomson, a specialist in the parlor game of presenting his own readings and interpretations as general truth. His article, in the Wall Street Journal, is on "the Death of Method Acting." There are generalizations about how method acting was about trying to locate "emotional truth" (by which Thomson seems to mean overt self-seriousness and agony). And there are more generalizations about the emergence of a "new style," which -- helpfully for us -- "has no studio, no text and little public understanding." According to Thomson, its exponents include George Clooney, John Malkovich, Robert Downey Jr. and Kevin Spacey. These "new style" actors are (mostly, and not always in the past) comfortable with...
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