Since I've been thinking about careers and categories (why I don't know), I'm curious about the opinions of people with more immersion in the industry than I have.

I want to abstract everything out and model it, even knowing it won't fit, and I'd suspect anyone who claimed to have done so successfully.

I want to abstract everything out and model it, even knowing it won't fit, and I'd suspect anyone who claimed to have done so successfully.

Do you mean you want to catagorize everyone who'd fit the action star profile, the screwball heroine, etc?

Do you mean you want to catagorize everyone who'd fit the action star profile, the screwball heroine, etc?

No, not so much. More like identifying who is iconic, and why, and how the things to be iconic in change with the times, and how and why other people avoid the same pedestal/trap.

Denzel is obviously more iconic than I'd thought, although he still gets rewarded for dancing outside the lines -- unlike a Meg Ryan who gets forgotten or crap box office when she tries it.

You shouldn't get that worked up over a Charles Taylor piece, Maysa. I think he's Salon's best movie reviewer by a long shot, but he often has these weirdo tangential potshot pieces like that. And his overly boomer-centric worldview occasionally blinds him. I guess I'm trying to say: decent writer who will leave you scratching your head once a month.

But he's still better than Andrew "Boringly Enthusiastic" O'Hehir or Stephanie "It's All Good" Zacharek. Well, at least to me.

See, I wondered about Denzel in the EW article. I don't think he's a global box office draw along the lines of Tom Hanks or Julia Roberts or Tom Cruise. In Chile at least, I doubt that anyone has seen more than a handful of his movies. I think his biggest hit there might have been The Bone Collector and even that was equal parts him, Angelina Jolie, and the creepy Seven/Silence of the Lambs vibe. I know that Denzel is iconic here in the US. In the rest of the world, I'm not so sure.

And, while I didn't really agree with any of the comparisons they made between the older generation of Hollywood stars and their possible young Hollywood replacements, I got the Denzel = Matt Damon much more than the Tom Hanks = Mos Def. Mos Def doesn't give me a Hanks vibe at all.

Ummm, who's Mos Def?

Mos Def doesn't give me a Hanks vibe at all.

Well, I completely fail to get the Damon/Denzel (well, they both have penises -- it's somewhere to start) I can see Mos Def having a similar early career to Hanks. God prevent him from the late one.

No, not so much. More like identifying who is iconic, and why, and how the things to be iconic in change with the times, and how and why other people avoid the same pedestal/trap.

That sounds really interesting. I've often wondered why certain talented people are forgotten about.

But he's still better than Andrew "Boringly Enthusiastic" O'Hehir or Stephanie "It's All Good" Zacharek. Well, at least to me.

I actually enjoy Stephanie Zacharek because even when I don't agree with her, I enjoy her passion for things. She and Scott Tobias at the Onion are the only critics that I read both for the opinion and for the actual review itself.

No, not so much. More like identifying who is iconic, and why, and how the things to be iconic in change with the times, and how and why other people avoid the same pedestal/trap.

I think the trap the article falls into (not that I've read it) is that it's difficult if not impossible to say anything about who and what now is iconic. I think that's only the sort of thing that can be discerned after the fact. Yes, what we look for in a movie star or celebrity has changed, but I think it's still early to say what it's changed into.

Not to say that speculation isn't fun, or not a worthy exercize, but have serious doubts that most speculation will at all match up with how the current crop of films/stars will be viewed fifty years from now.

I'm not using the same definition of iconic that you are, Sean. It's pretty clear that "Tom Hanks movie" and "Denzel Washington movie" mean something to people that's varying degrees of independent from their actual track records. That's the sort of iconic that interests me.