this just in

really interested in acting again. but i get interested in things that just happen to be in my line of site very often so its no wonder i wanna be an actor again. Watched inside the actors studio with jim carey and it was entertaining. talked about playing andy kaufman and i liked it. made me wonder if there was an inside the actors studio with mickey rourke, so i looked it up and there it was! really like mickey rourke even though i havent seen...any? of his early films. something funny though.

He said that he became interested in acting after watching a movie with marlon brando where he played the captain of a ship. he said the scene where he was burnt seemed very real to him and he liked it or at least it was memerable for him. He didnt know who the actor was at the time but it stuck with him. An interesting thing about this is that i was talking to my mom a few weeks ago about her and my dad and how they were different. She is very animated, not as much anymore now that she moves slower and is inhibited because of her increasing reumitoid arthritis afliction, but she is still very vocal in her emotions and physical with her reactions to any situation. i told her that she would be a great actor because she does it all the time. i told her how the acting she did was very mainstream contemporary acting, almost typecast in a way. it was explosive and expectant, with a lot of passion. i told her it was interesting that she and my dad seemed like 2 different actors, because i was now refuring their personalities to acting and actors. i told my mom that i considered her to be more of a modern actor someone fairly popular but not outlandishly at the forefront of breakthrough acting. someone like meg ryan or a type cast actor like tom cruise. i told her that my dad was much more quiet and reserved but with a lot of built up emotion that streams through the cracks of a tougher exterior. I said he was more of a marlon brando or mickey rourke actor, because i thought they were very similar. the difference between marlon brando/mickey rourke and other actors is what i think of as acting.

I think i remember my friend sam once saying to me that he watched an interview or read about an interview with marlon brando and that he didnt think of acting to really be an art or maybe a skill, because it was something that everyone did. and in this is why i think marlon brando and mickey rourke stand out for me as great actors. i believe that a typical actor is acting in a way so that their intention is felt. that is of course the point of acting, to understand your intention and portray it to the audience. but most actors are acting, they know what they are supposed to portray to the audience and i think they let their intention guide them. but i think that a marlon brando or mickey rourke arent led with their intention and they dont seem to be acting, at least in some of their roles. it often feels as though they arent acting at all and that this is simply just the way they are, which it very well might be, but it is much more believable and interesting to watch than someone who has their heart on their sleeve everytime someone cuts them off in the street or in a conversation. less action often makes for better acting i think. that is, less of a certain kind of action.

My acting teacher, who i adored and felt tremendous gratitude toward, feeling as though he was much more interested in the goal of his students understanding and learning the craft of acting rather than getting a good grade, often told us to go bigger or do more. he would say stakes ten, which means that if the circunstances were dire, how would that change the way a line was delivered. i feel like a lot of actors follow this general rule, but fail to acknowledge the ways in which subtle bodylanguage can create a much more real stakes ten than say a screaming person waving their arms in the air. these are things which i feel make marlon brando and mickey rourke stand out for me as great actors. it feels as though they are acting in a very real way and thus feeling the emotions of the character and bringing these emotions from a very real place.

when my teacher told us stakes ten, this was aslo, i should say, to a class of students who had never acted before. well, not everyone was a complete novice. some of the students had been in a few musicals and high school plays. my acting career at that point had consisted of a few years of stage crew in high school with an off stage voice fill in in the production of...something, dont remember. basically i howled off stage. that and i played the king in my 3rd grade class' production of the dragon and the king er something like that. soooo ya i had no experience. but i had been thinking of acting a lot at the time and felt myself in a strange place. i was becoming more and more aware of the way people acted around eachother and interested in the involuntary action of people, the way our bodies can do almost incredible things without thinking about it, simply because we have done them often. for example throwing a baseball to a friend. the action of throwing a baseball to someone is actually very incredible when thinking about it. to be able to get an object from one point in space to another through the action of throwing is astounding when broken down to all the factors involved. the weight of the ball is taken into consideration, the distance it must travel to reach its destination, the force that must be applied to make the object get there, how to manuver ones body and arm in order to make the ball get to the friend. all of these things in just a matter of seconds and its done. and its all done without really thinking about it at all, just involuntary movements and adjustments from the muscles.

When i broke this down, i guess it made me think of the things we do that arent so involuntary, but try to make seem like nothing. for example the way a girl flips her hair when a boy walks by, or the way a chubby guy sucks in his stomach when a woman enters the room, things like that. this is what got me very interested in acting, because of all the very little things that people do to try and get the attention of someone else. a good actor, i believe, understands these things. a good actor understands the way people work and knows that people often act all the time. it is rare however to watch an actor portray someone who is not like that though. this goes back to the marlon brandos and mickey rourkes. i suppose the people they portray are often filled with some sort of heavey emotional burden. They are under a lot of stress and personal anguish and dont seem to respond well to the people around them, there for they have no acting front when it comes to others. others playing in action roles often ham it up, screaming and whatnot or maybe haming it up in the other direction as most villians do, by playing it cool all the time, even when explosions are going off just over their sholder.

anyway i digress, even though theres actually no point in this whole post, and once again, no one reads this so i can say what i want. Well after watching mickey rourke on inside the actors studio which was pretty neat, i saw that there was a link to sylvestor stallone on inside the actors studio. I really liked rocky and thought rocky II was also pretty good and thought that he did a very good job of acting in it as rocky, and i was very influenced by rambo my senior year in college. I believe i watched rambo for the first time the summer before my senior year of college. I watched it at seans house. we made a list of movies we wanted to see and just started watching them. It doesnt seem like we were accomplishing much, but at the time it felt pretty good to get through the list. Most of them were horror films, like the friday the thirteenth films and what not. actually i think we had a few movies that had numerous sequals. thus both rocky and rambo were on the list. there were a few classics like dr strange love and the great escape and north by northwest. unfortunately north by northwest was unavailable to us that summer, but we still saw some good movies. i remember the striking thing about rambo being the way in which it was very different from what i thought and i believe most people think of rambo. hearing the name rambo brings to mind muscles and mindless explosions for the sake of money in the boxoffice. it might have been that way in the later films, but the first one was very different. i felt as though it were a work of art, or a piece of music. a great bulk of the film followed the character rambo through a mountainous wild montana or colorado terrain, with little dialouge and lots of chasing and hiding and later in the movie, shooting and the explosions expected from a rambo film. his acting wasnt horendous and the other actors at times played a very convinsing role. there was a scene where rambo runs through the woods being chased by a group of officers, who find that they are soon being stalked by rambo. he runs passed one of them and cuts him on the leg and it was a much more brutal and real scary situation than any of the other larger than life gun fights and car chases in the rest of the movie. the amount of restraint in the wound that rambo showed the man made it much more real of the kind of damage that could be done. this part just seemed to stand out at me. But the final coup d'etat in the film is of course the final scene where rambo breaks down. The whole of the movie was filled with action from this character who was going berzerk through the mountainous community, capable of killing everyone but still showing some bit of restraint, and remaining silent through all of it. then, he finally just exploded all of the things that had been kept in his head and on his mind for seven years, as he says in the movie i believe. it was much more interesting to see a man who breaks down and cries after seeing him destroying a town with little more than a bat of an eye. it made the movie so much more interesting and it felt to me like the very outstanding beautiful part in a piece of music, much like the way i think of racmaninovs adagio sustuneto or certain sports in paintings that stand out from the rest. it made me think of the relationship between and within singular works of art, like perhaps purposely making most of a guitar piece lack luster to make the dramatic climax that much more intriguing, or the same with a painting. leaving most of the canvas a dull mix of colors so that one specific spot stands out, to make the whole piece seem like it stands out as beautiful.

That scene from rambo was my final monolague for my acting class. I was the last to go and went on stage telling the class that i chose the final scene from rambo. almost everyone laughed when i said this, thinking, i can only imagine, that it would be a goofy hamming it up impression of a guy blazing guns shooting off bullets and one liners. when i had finished most of the class was crying. thats the extent of my acting career however. I might be interested in it and think about it more than i even know, but really that was the only time i acted on stage. I would still very much like to be an actor.

by the way i can remember watching a movie with marlon brando playing a captain of a ship when i was younger, thinking it was brilliant.