Editorial - The Actors Wasteland of Today

And now for my next editorial, I decide to read about another topic that’s actually only really come into my more prominent thoughts, and that is the nature of actors in today’s movies.

And some of you are asking: why am I writing about this, well I feel this is a big issue in the same vein as Warner Home Video changing their logos on older films and after The Dark Knight, the utter sludge of films that have come don’t seem as interesting nor as well written.

And for this editorial I want to use two examples, the first being Get Smart, here was a wonderful cast, Steve Carell, Anne Hathaway, Dwayne Johnson, Alan Arkin, Terence Stamp (yes folks, General Zod himself), Bill Murray and James Caan and on the crew one of the top action cinematographers Dean Semler, to me that is money in the bank as well as surefire laughs but instead, Director Peter Segal has them fight each other in a series of non stop action, stunts and Computer Generated fireballs, where is the material for these guys, I want them to make me laugh like crazy, not try to kill each other.

Another example is a movie called The Women, a chick flick in every sense of the word and also stars one of my favorite actresses, Annette Bening who was wonderful in Mars Attacks but yet as I looked at the cover sheet for the DVD, all I could think was “Bening deserves better”.

But in closing, both of these examples remind me of something my aunt told me, “Actors are only good as their scripts” and she is absolutely right, especially where Get Smart is concerned, these actors working today can only do so much with the material they’re given and when it’s not there, you can’t help but feel that the time you spend watching a movie that suffers from poor script material could be better spent elsewhere.