To me, Bruce Willis either looks smug or he's got his serious "Smell the fart" face on. The only time I didn't dislike him was The Sixth Sense.
Wash: Captain, didn't you know kissin' girls makes you sleepy? Mal: Well sometimes I just can't help myself.
'Our Mrs. Reynolds'
Buffista Movies 4: Straight to Video
A place to talk about movies--old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
Sue - Apr 08, 2005 7:05:07 am PDT #1581 of 10002
hip deep in pie
§ ita § - Apr 08, 2005 7:05:44 am PDT #1582 of 10002
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.
He didn't ruin 12 Monkeys for me, but I didn't like the movie much anyway. I sprained my eyes rolling them at Die Hard, and couldn't make it all the way through Hudson Hawk.
Connie Neil - Apr 08, 2005 7:06:07 am PDT #1583 of 10002
brillig
The Fifth Element !
"Anybody else want to negotiate?"
"Where did you learn to do that!"
"I wonder."
Polter-Cow - Apr 08, 2005 7:10:54 am PDT #1584 of 10002
What else besides ramen can you scoop? YOU CAN SCOOP THIS WORLD FROM DARKNESS!
"Sir, are you classified as human?"
"No. I am a meat popsicle."
Scrappy - Apr 08, 2005 7:15:12 am PDT #1585 of 10002
Life moves pretty fast. You don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
Die Hard is one of my favorite movies, evah. It's incredibly well-written. If you had kept your eyes on the screen instead of ROLLING THEM, you might have seen that, missy.
§ ita § - Apr 08, 2005 7:19:09 am PDT #1586 of 10002
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.
Bah! I stand firmly by my opinion of Die Hard. I appreciate it is an important movie, but if you found the lead anti-charismatic (when he's not written that way), it'd be hard for you to enjoy it too.
Kate P. - Apr 08, 2005 7:22:46 am PDT #1587 of 10002
That's the pain / That cuts a straight line down through the heart / We call it love
The Fifth Element !
How could I forget! Love that movie.
Connie Neil - Apr 08, 2005 7:25:07 am PDT #1588 of 10002
brillig
No, wait, it's "Where did you learn to negotiate like that?" Sorry. And no, I don't own it, I just watch it every time it shows up on TV.
JZ - Apr 08, 2005 7:25:44 am PDT #1589 of 10002
See? I gave everybody here an opportunity to tell me what a bad person I am and nobody did, because I fuckin' rule.
Heh. I am the anti-ita. 12 Monkeys hit me so hard, with the crazy and the sacrifice and the sorrow, that when it was over I sat in the theater SOBBING for a good eight minutes. Not just tears, but big honking gasping sobs with a wet red face spurting liquid out of every orifice but the ears.
12 Monkeys, Mortal Thoughts, Die Hard, Pulp Fiction, In Country, Nobody's Fool, and weird shit like The Fifth Element and challenging, thoughtful failed messes like Billy Bathgate and Breakfast of Champions.
Bruce Willis can do the smirky and the smug, and it's an easy fallback for him, but he makes a lot of choices that force him outside that comfort zone and IMO he succeeds a lot more often than not. And apparently he works deliberately at it; you never hear stories from directors about him the way you do about Jim Carrey, who'll pick a challenging, layered role and then utterly sabotages it with incessant mugging unless the director manages to outwit or exhaust him into a decent performance.
Nutty - Apr 08, 2005 7:27:09 am PDT #1590 of 10002
"Mister Spock is on his fanny, sir. Reports heavy damage."
he's really much better as a character actor than he is as a leading man
Agree with this. I think, actually, that people would appreciate him more if he didn't insist on going back for the paycheck blow-em-ups so often. I mean, I think of him first as a comedian, but that's because I was 10 years old when Moonlighting was on. Most people think of him as Grim Face Action Man, which, dull.