Yuku free message boards

http://www.chicagotribune.com/services/newspaper/premium/printedition/Sunday/art/chi-0805_actors_jumpaug05,0,2999421.story

Just give us the good

The names De Niro, Hoffman and Streep used to ensure quality movies. Now which actors deliver consistently?

By Mark Caro | Tribune entertainment reporter

August 5, 2007

People constantly discuss which actors and actresses boast the greatest box-office drawing power and collect the biggest paychecks, but let's tackle a topic that's much more tricky and fun:

Who actually makes the best movies?

That is, whose presence all but guarantees a certain level of quality, even in this heavily marketing-driven era?

First, some ground rules: We're talking just about actors and actresses. Filmmakers, at least in theory, have some control over how their movies turn out. The onscreen talent, by contrast, must weigh the script and filmmakers involved, try to elevate the material through their performances and then hope for the best.

Not even the most celebrated performers have spotless track records. Katharine Hepburn starred in a string of duds ("Mary of Scotland," "A Woman Rebels" and others) that led her to be dubbed "box-office poison." Flops such as "Candy" and "A Countess From Hong Kong" had Marlon Brando's career in the dumps before "The Godfather."

But then there are performers who seem to have a Midas touch over stretches of their careers.

Between 1969 and 1982, Dustin Hoffman starred in the following: "Midnight Cowboy," "John and Mary," "Little Big Man," "Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?" "Straw Dogs," "Alfredo, Alfredo," "Papillon," "Lenny," "All the President's Men," "Marathon Man," "Straight Time," "Agatha," "Kramer vs. Kramer" and "Tootsie." Granted, "John and Mary" and "Harry Kellerman" are no classics, but "Midnight Cowboy" (an Oscar best picture winner), "All the President's Men," "Kramer" (another best picture winner) and "Tootsie" are widely considered to be, and several others have ardent boosters as well.

Nowadays Hoffman remains relatively selective, but he's seen largely as a character actor rather than someone who still can carry a film. He has turned in pleasingly quirky performances in movies such as "Stranger Than Fiction," "I ? Huckabees," "Meet the Fockers" and "Finding Neverland," but "a Dustin Hoffman film" lacks the cachet of those earlier years.

Then there's Robert De Niro. From 1973 through 1984, when you saw a De Niro movie, you knew you'd be treated to a work of serious ambition and, likely, impressive achievement: "Mean Streets," "The Godfather Part II," "Taxi Driver," "1900," "The Last Tycoon," "New York, New York," "The Deer Hunter," "Raging Bull," "True Confesions," "The King of Comedy" and "Once Upon a Time in America."

Of those, "Mean Streets," "The Godfather Part II" (a best picture winner), "Taxi Driver," "The Deer Hunter" (another best picture winner, albeit a controversial one) and "Raging Bull" are consensus landmarks, and many would put "The King of Comedy" and "Once Upon a Time in America" right up there. No one would make similar arguments for such recent De Niro films as "Hide and Seek," "Godsend," "City By the Sea," "Showtime" and "15 Minutes."

Today's standard-bearers

So who can be counted upon for such high standards today? Or has such quality control become an anachronism in a Hollywood run by bottom-line-oriented conglomerates?

John Pierson, a former film sales agent and author ("Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes") who now teaches at the University of Texas, said today's actors have a tough time maintaining quality because many feel driven to take blatantly commercial projects to enhance their ability to make smaller, closer-to-the-heart movies. A few years ago, Pierson said, he would have cited Johnny Depp as an actor whose presence ensures a certain artistic integrity, "but now you've got to question the 'Pirates [of the Caribbean]' thing. Until then even if every movie wasn't that great, he was always worth watching."

Of course, many would defend the "Pirates" movies while scorning such earlier Depp films as "The Astronaut's Wife" and "The Ninth Gate" (both 1999). You're never going to get a consensus for what constitutes a "quality movie."

Still, let's try to come up with ways to measure performers' relationships to quality.

The Hollywood way would be to follow the money: If you attract the biggest audiences and demand the biggest paychecks, then people must think your work is the best.

Tom's cruising along

Despite his well-publicized spates of eccentric, off-putting behavior, Tom Cruise ranks atop the Forbes "Hollywood's Best-Paid Stars" list published in February ($67 million earned in 2006). Runners-up included Denzel Washington, Depp, Tom Hanks and Adam Sandler.

You could construct a different chart measuring performers by how much money their films made. Although high movie grosses often lead to high salaries, that doesn't account for everything.

For instance, Cruise's movies in the 2000s (not including cameos or documentary narration) have grossed $1.03 billion in North America. Depp's have grossed $1.64 billion (with more than $1 billion thanks to the three "Pirates of the Carribean" movies), while Hanks', Sandler's and Washington's cumulative numbers aren't quite at that level.

Now guess whose films in the 2000s have grossed $1.93 billion?

Ian McKellen, take a bow. That's what appearing in three "Lord of the Rings" movies, three "X-Men" movies and "The Da Vinci Code" will do for a sixtysomething British actor.

A recent poll on my Pop Machine Tribune blog asked which actors or actresses signify quality and automatically make you want to see their movies. Readers cited 149 performers, with the top 10 looking like this:

1. Meryl Streep

2. Kate Winslet

3. Johnny Depp

4. Cate Blanchett

5, 6. Leonardo DiCaprio and Morgan Freeman (tie)

7, 8. Christian Bale and George Clooney (tie)

9, 10. Edward Norton and Denzel Washington (tie)

A separate poll asking for the biggest must-avoid performer had a landslide winner: Cruise, despite a pretty credible track record of artistic choices (as can be seen below).

Critics' thoughts

Now we turn to the critics. Metacritic.com collects all published reviews of a particular movie and assigns a number value from 0 (the worst) to 100 (the best) to calculate an average rating, with scores of 60 and above considered a recommendation. (This is far from an exact science.)

I calculated the Metacritic averages of more than 30 respected performers' movies since 1997, and here are the 10 who scored highest (see adjacent table for all scores):

1. Jack Nicholson (based on a mere six movies)

2. Daniel Day-Lewis (based on just three movies)

3. Tobey Maguire

4. Ian McKellen

5. Leonardo DiCaprio

6. Russell Crowe

7. Matt Damon

8. Tom Cruise

9. Meryl Streep

10. George Clooney

Nicholson, of course, didn't have a bad run in the '70s either.

Of course, the key to all of this is selectivity. Judi Dench seems like the embodiment of quality as long as you ignore "The Chronicles of Riddick" and the lesser Pierce Brosnan James Bond movies. "The Queen" may have coronated Helen Mirren, but her appearance in the upcoming "National Treasure: Book of Secrets" isn't likely to help her batting average. Edward Norton may have a reputation as a prickly actor's actor, but he's currently filming "The Incredible Hulk."

That's not to say that "specialized" equals "good" (see "The Good German") or "commercial" equals "bad."

"Cate Blanchett is doing [the upcoming] 'Indiana Jones,'" said high-powered, New York-based film sales agent John Sloss. "It's a Steven Spielberg film. Is it quality? Of course it is. It's different from 'Notes on a Scandal.'"

The commercialism game

But there are some performers who consciously play the commercial movie/personal movie game (George Clooney perhaps most notably) while others have the freedom to do whatever they want (Crowe, Cruise, Jodie Foster, DiCaprio), and some simply make a point of shunning the overtly commercial (Sean Penn).

"Brad Pitt gets to do really serious movies yet is offered every blockbuster and often turns them down," said producer Lynda Obst ("How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days"), author of the filmmaking memoir "Hello, He Lied." "I don't know that his presence in a movie signifies that it's serious, but often it does. Kate Winslet is the first actress who comes to mind. When I see she's in a movie, I'm going to take that movie pretty seriously. We've come to expect an Academy-caliber performance from her each time out. Cate Blanchett that's true for. Meryl [Streep] that's true for. Even when Meryl makes a commercial choice, it's to stretch in some way."

Obst also touted the savvy of Foster ("she never makes dumb choices") and Hanks ("Tom Hanks makes significant choices because he's so smart and knows what's right for him"), and she said Crowe has a leg up because he's "a director's actor" who thus is often offered parts before anyone else.

So could today's actors star almost exclusively in good movies if they wanted to? Well, you can never remove the element of chance, but Sloss certainly feels that actors have as many opportunities as ever to pursue quality, especially given the rise of the high-end specialized movie as a genre -- think "Good Night, and Good Luck," "Babel" or "Brokeback Mountain."

"It feels like there's a much more established mechanism that enables established actors to get into quality movies," Sloss said.

Now if only they could all be as good as "All the President's Men" and "Raging Bull."

How the critics rate the players

Here are the average Metacritic ratings of performers' movies over the past 10 years, on a scale from 0 (worst) to 100 (best):

Adam Sandler: 45.9

Morgan Freeman: 48.3

Nicolas Cage: 50.4

Johnny Depp: 53.2

Robert De Niro: 53.5

Dustin Hoffman: 55.2

Nicole Kidman: 57.1

Christian Bale: 57.5

Helen Mirren: 58.0

Sean Penn 58.4

Al Pacino 58.4

Denzel Washington: 58.9

Naomi Watts: 60.4

Edward Norton: 62.3

Brad Pitt: 62.7

Kate Winslet: 62.9

Toni Collette: 63.0

Jodie Foster: 63.5 (only six movies)

Tom Hanks: 64.7

Judi Dench: 64.9

Cate Blanchett: 65.0

George Clooney: 65.4

Meryl Streep: 65.9

Tom Cruise: 66.1

Matt Damon: 66.7

Russell Crowe: 66.8

Leonardo DiCaprio: 67.3

Ian McKellen: 67.6

Tobey Maguire 67.1

Daniel Day-Lewis: 68.7 (only three movies)

Jack Nicholson: 71.0 (only six movies)

-- Mark Caro

-----------

mcaro@tribune.com