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  1. In Memory of LAJ_FETT: Please share your remembrances and condolences HERE

Amph My Year in Art: 2015 Retrospective: MOVIES: Best Female Performance, Top Ten!

Discussion in 'Community' started by Rogue1-and-a-half, Dec 31, 2015.

  1. Ender Sai

    Ender Sai Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Feb 18, 2001
    Rogue1-and-a-half

    The best Dimebag solo, period:



    I don't care if you include stuff; my "how, what" post was about your prodigious output and insight.

    The solo is great for Floods, but the outro is for me one of the most beautiful bits of music ever. I was lucky enough to see Pantera live in 1996 and therefore lucky enough to see Dimebag.
     
    Rogue1-and-a-half likes this.
  2. Rogue1-and-a-half

    Rogue1-and-a-half Manager Emeritus who is writing his masterpiece star 9 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Nov 2, 2000
    I caught End of the Tour. It might be showing up in this thread later. Might. Stanford Prison Experiment played at my local arthouse for a week, but I missed it. It's on my list to catch up to this year.

    That is really great, Ender.
     
  3. Ender Sai

    Ender Sai Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Feb 18, 2001
    Rogue, I really want to see what happens when you sit down with the lyrics on hand for deafheaven's Sunbather and New Bermuda albums and listen to them.

    Just saying.
     
  4. Rogue1-and-a-half

    Rogue1-and-a-half Manager Emeritus who is writing his masterpiece star 9 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Nov 2, 2000
    MOVIES

    BEST FEMALE PERFORMANCE, HONORABLE MENTIONS
    (BONUS: Worst Female Performance)

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    Jessica Chastain – Crimson Peak

    Crimson Peak is flawed and there are still myriad pleasures in it. One of the best pleasures is Jessica Chastain’s increasingly unhinged performance as the mysterious, menacing lady of Crimson Peak. She knows better than any of the other performers what kind of movie she’s in and she commits to the eerie, seventies-style gothic-romance-horror vibe of the film. Chastain is typically excellent; this performance isn’t her most restrained work, but it’s exactly the jolt of ferocity that the film needs.

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    Olivia Cooke – Me & Earl & the Dying Girl

    Olivia Cooke has a rather difficult part to play: a vivacious young girl stricken with cancer – it invites every possible cliché. But Cooke finds a gorgeous truth in her performance, crafting a genuinely charming and funny performance at first and tracing the downward spiral with honesty and empathy. Her final scene in the film is entirely wordless and her performance in that scene, the looks that flit across her face, still haunts me.

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    Greta Gerwig – Mistress America

    There was some fear that this reteaming of Gerwig and Noah Baumbach would be a rehash of Frances Ha, but it’s quite a different film, in tone, in style and in characterization. Gerwig’s performance here is a definite thing of beauty and her character here is more complicated than in Frances Ha; she’s a young woman not so much optimistic as determined to be optimistic, a woman who resolutely lives as if she’s not bitter even though she is and Gerwig layers all of that into the performance. It’s a comedic screwball performance to be sure and hilariously so, but there’s depth there and Gerwig mines it beautifully.

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    Brie Larson – Room

    Larson’s performance as a mother trying to raise her five-year-old son in desperate situations is raw and brilliant. There’s a real truth to every single moment Larson’s on screen; she never feels like less than a real human being. Room is ultimately a film about moving beyond the past and into the future and Larson makes that struggle deeply real, painful, but ultimately winnable without a single moment landing falsely.

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    Gugu Mbatha-Raw – Belle

    As a half-black woman raised in luxury, struggling to find her place in life and her identity, in eighteenth century England, Mbatha-Raw gives nothing less than a star-making performance. The character is complicated, uncertain, angry, sad, confused and, perhaps above all, filled with strength. Mbatha-Raw’s performance wasn’t seen by many people as the film didn’t do well and that’s deeply frustrating. It’s the kind of performance that should be seen by everyone.

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    Carey Mulligan – Suffragette

    Suffragette had clunky moments and didn’t entirely land, but none of that was the fault of lead actress Mulligan who gives another in a string of solid performances as a young mother/factory worker forced to confront the cruel realities of the world and discover a cause along the way. It’s an emotionally raw performance; Mulligan makes you believe the horrible pain of a woman suffering an unconscionably harsh life and the exaltation she feels upon finding a cause to believe in. Even when the dialogue isn’t the best, Mulligan makes you believe every word.

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    Kitana Kiki Rodriguez – Tangerine

    Rodriguez is nothing short of a force of nature in this film. As a transgender prostitute, newly released from jail, she’s on a mission of vengeance against the pimp that betrayed her. The sassy, fast-talking character could easily be a cliché, but Rodriguez treats her with the dignity of being a real person, even as she commits completely to the ridiculous humor and the absurdity of the situation. It’s a performance deeply comic, but also deeply pathetic, in the best meaning of the worst, as in filled with real pathos. It’s layered, energetic, totally committed and super effective. Rodriguez is a trans actress, so will she ever be a star in Hollywood? Not likely, unfortunately. But hopefully we’ll see her again soon in some indie or other.

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    Barbara Stanwyck – Baby Face

    This shocking pre-code film about a woman who sleeps her way up the corporate ladder gives the iconic Stanwyck a shot at her best performance in a career full of them and she’s brilliant. As a destitute woman who discovers that the path to success can be found in the power of her sexuality, she’s absolutely wonderful in a way that’s quite disturbing at times. She’s nearly sociopathic in the way that she manipulates every man she encounters, switching personas at a moment’s notice to be most appealing to the one in front of her at the moment. It’s a brilliant performance, one you won’t soon forget, one that makes Baby Face a film for the ages.

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    Alicia Vikander – Ex Machina

    As the mysterious Ava, a robot perhaps gifted with the holy grail of artificial intelligence, Alicia Vikander landed on me like a ton of bricks. She’s an actress that I was completely unfamiliar with, having somehow missed all of her previous films, even the acclaimed ones. She could hardly have had a more auspicious introduction than this film. It’s a part that requires ambiguity on multiple levels; you have to be drawn into Ava’s world despite your own misgivings; she has to seduce the viewer though the viewer is as aware as the main character that something isn’t quite right. And Vikander doesn’t just play this part to nothing short of perfection; she makes it look absolutely effortless. Few performances this year, ironically, were less robotic.

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    Tao Zhao – A Touch of Sin

    In A Touch of Sin, visionary Chinese director Zhangke weaves together four true stories of shocking violence in modern China; it’s a film that isn’t the masterpiece critics claimed it was, but it’s a strong, if inconsistent, omnibus film. But the story you’ll never forget is the story of a mild-mannered massage therapist, pushed to the edge, and then over it, by the vicissitudes of life and the cruelty of the human beings who manipulate and take advantage of her. She finds the sympathy you need to have for her easily and just as easily flips the switch into terrifying avenging angel when the moment arrives that breaks the camel’s back. But it’s her final scene in the film, a surprising coda to the story, that may land as well as anything else. Though flawed, A Touch of Sin is important and filled with great things; nothing, however, that’s more important or greater than this brilliant performance.

    BONUS: Worst Female Performance

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    Tara Reid – Sharknado 2: The Second One

    Does anything else really need to be said? There are close-ups in this film of actress Tara Reid attempting to emote that are among the most ludicrous images I have ever seen. She seems at times to have been taken control of by some bizarre facial tic seizure. She is not particularly good in the first Sharknado, but her expressions there do occasionally express actual human emotions – not so here. Buzzsaw hand mitigates things only slightly; this performance remains the most incompetent job of acting I saw all year.

    My Year in Art: 2015!
     
  5. Rogue1-and-a-half

    Rogue1-and-a-half Manager Emeritus who is writing his masterpiece star 9 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Nov 2, 2000
    BEST FEMALE CHARACTERS, HONORABLE MENTIONS
    (BONUS: Worst Female Character)

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    Lee English – American Rust

    Philipp Meyer’s American Rust was an interesting, if not entirely satisfying, debut and it isn’t a patch on his second novel, The Son. But he draws some characters with loving detail. Lee English is a woman who has escaped the Pennsylvania steel town where she grew up, but when she finds herself drawn back there by tragic events, the lure of the past is a palpable thing. It’s not the most original character in the world and she’s in a relatively small portion of the book, but Meyer takes us right inside her soul to see the vulnerable parts of the hard-edged woman.

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    Isobel Fairfax – Human Croquet

    Isobel Fairfax is a girl caught up in mysteries at every turn. The mysterious disappearance of her mother when Isobel was so young that she no longer remembers her mother; a strange tendency to slip from the present back to Elizabethan times for brief, strange experiences; a brutally bad Christmas day that she can’t seem to stop living over and over again. But she tells her story with wit, charm and as much pluck as a young lady can muster in the face of such bizarre and haunting events and her sheer, unflagging strength is fascinating and also perhaps a clue to . . . well, I’ll leave a few surprises for you.

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    Audrey Griffin – Where’d You Go, Bernadette

    Audrey Griffin is a compelling side character in this brilliant comic novel by Maria Semple, a high-strung, neurotic, Christian helicopter mom driven to distraction by the absurd antics of the main character, the titular Bernadette. In the sections of the book told from Griffin’s perspective, her voice is pitch perfect, capturing perfectly the rhythms of the Audrey Griffins of the world; but when she reveals surprising depth near the end of the book, it somehow feels perfect.

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    Ifemelu – Americanah

    I found Americanah to be a disappointing novel from Chimimanda Adichie, especially as a follow-up to her epic Half of a Yellow Sun; but the main character, a Nigerian woman who flees her poverty stricken life in Africa to come to America, only to find herself more and more out of joint in a culture she can’t seem to understand, is compelling and interesting.

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    Bunty Lennox – Behind the Scenes at the Museum

    Bunty’s the deliriously unhinged mother of Ruby Lennox, the main character of Kate Atkinson’s debut novel. She’s a frustrating character, frustrating in her realness and in her refusal to cohere into anything reasonable. But as the book progresses, more and more details are revealed and we come to know this woman very well indeed. She’s both a figure of absolute hilarity and deep tragedy and, as such, she’s, if not the main character, perhaps the central one of the novel, which can be described the same way.

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    Ma – Tenth of December

    George Saunders’ Tenth of December is a masterful collection of short stories. The best is called, simply, Home and it details the travails of a soldier newly returned from the Middle East, struggling to reintegrate into normal life. His mother, identified only as Ma, speaks to the story as a whole in that she’s both hilariously funny and painfully awkward. Her scenes are funny, painful and sad.

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    Cassie Maddox – The Likeness

    Tana French’s characters are always finding themselves trapped by their past; in The Likeness, she focuses on a supporting character from her previous book, In the Woods. Cassie Maddox was an undercover officer once and when she was, she created a false identity: Lexie Madison. Now, years later, a woman’s body has been found; the woman looks exactly like Cassie Maddox and she’s carrying ID that identifies her as Lexie Madison. Cassie finds herself thrown back into the past in an exploration of identity, truth, & lies as she tries to discover how a woman that never existed came to be murdered.

    Grace Poe – American Rust

    Grace is probably the character in American Rust that’s the most hopelessly trapped, the most miserable, the most despairing, the worst off. And in American Rust, that’s quite an achievement. A single mother dealing with the fall-out after her son finds himself involved in a murder, she’s a character of real pathos, but she never feels less than the simple woman she is. She isn’t intelligent or articulate or even particularly interesting, outside of her horrible circumstance, but the way Meyer delves into her deep, deep pain is marvelous.

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    Mary Russell – The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, Or On the Segregation of the Queen

    Mary Russell is a likable, intelligent, awkward protagonist; she’s a young girl who suddenly finds herself embroiled in a mystery involving an aged Sherlock Holmes, who has retired to keep bees at a farm near the one where she lives. She narrates the book and Laurie King has her voice down perfectly. She’s a teenager that values intelligence over looks; for that alone, she’s worthy of comment. King gets at the emotional turmoil of a girl thrown into an altogether strange relationship and an altogether strange circumstance really well and the central relationship, of Russell and Holmes, is well drawn and compelling.

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    Marcia Steinberg – Nemesis

    Marcia Steinberg is a supporting character in Nemesis, the girlfriend of the main character. Her struggles mainly revolve around the difficulty she has in understanding the complicated main character and his strange obsession with self-sacrifice. Often, the main character himself doesn’t even catch the struggles, so they exist sometimes between the lines, but we as the reader can seem them clearly. It’s a very small role, but a good one.

    BONUS: Worst Female Character

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    Celia Bowen – The Night Circus

    The Night Circus already took my worst writing award; Celia is one of the main characters, a young woman raised by a wizard in order that she may compete in a vague contest of some kind with a young man raised by another wizard and thus determine the fate of a magical circus. Of course, she falls in love with the young man and moons about the book in about the most annoying fashion possible. This may be the least self-determining character I encountered all year. Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!

    My Year in Art: 2015!
     
  6. Rogue1-and-a-half

    Rogue1-and-a-half Manager Emeritus who is writing his masterpiece star 9 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Nov 2, 2000
    TELEVISION

    BEST FEMALE PERFORMANCE, HONORABLE MENTIONS

    Kate Burton – Scandal: YOLO

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    Burton is always a pleasure to watch on Scandal, and, well, also on every other TV show she pops up, in her recurring role as the scheming Vice President Sally Langston. This episode though kicked things up a significant notch; no spoilers, but when Burton croaks, “I have committed a sin” you believe it.

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    Laura Dern – Enlightened: Sandy

    Dern is a delight on this short lived show as a woman who has returned from a therapeutic retreat filled with new hope, only to find her old world unchanged. On this episode, Dern encounters a woman she met on the retreat and it’s a complicated line Dern’s character has to walk; she wants to still love this woman, but can she? And worst of all, she feels threatened by this woman: has she implemented the life-changing lessons of the retreat better? It’s a nuanced, interior performance, but Dern is brilliant.

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    Laura Dern – Enlightened: The Weekend

    In this episode, Dern attempts to reconnect with her ex-husband, a brilliant Luke Wilson, over a weekend canoeing trip down a river. It’s a rollercoaster of emotions and Dern captures them all: hope, optimism, disappointment, rage, despair, transcendence. Glorious.

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    Diane Ladd – Enlightened: Consider Helen

    The show daringly breaks format to follow Diane Ladd in this episode of the show; as in real life, she’s Dern’s mother. She’s been compelling before on the show, but by letting us spend an average day with Ladd’s character, we get to inhabit her sorrow in a way that’s nothing short of devastating. Ladd’s work in this episode is perhaps the best work of her entire career.

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    Julia Louis-Dreyfus – Veep: The Choice

    Louis-Dreyfus is a comic force of nature on Veep in most episodes but in The Choice she faces a very serious issue: abortion. As she frantically tries to find the perfect political opinion on the hot-button issue, she’s deliriously unhinged, genuinely inspired.

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    Kerry Washington – Scandal: No Sun on the Horizon

    On the backside of Scandal’s third season, no less than forty episodes into the series, the always excellent Washington shows the viewer something new; it’s kind of astonishing that there’s something new in the character of Oliva Pope for Washington to find, but there’s an early scene in this episode where Washington reaches a level of literal hysteria that I honestly hadn’t seen before. Over thirty hours into a performance and she’s still finding new levels? That’s an actress worth her salt.

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    Kerry Washington – Scandal: White Hat’s Back On

    The second season finale of Scandal was a great episode and, of course, no spoilers, but thematically it really put a cap on the season and Washington makes the journey of Olivia Pope over the nightmarish rollercoaster of season two come together perfectly.

    Jodie Whittaker – Broadchurch: Episode 1.3

    As the grieving mother of a young murder victim, Jodie Whittaker ran away with a lot of Broadchurch episodes. Her work in this episode is quite brilliant; the character has become her own and Whittaker invests her with a deep interior life. You’ll see the twist at the end of this episode coming, but then so did she and the final image of her in the episode is pitch perfect.

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    Jodie Whittaker – Broadchurch: Episode 1.6

    There’s an astoundingly great scene in this episode in which Whittaker’s character meet with the mother of another murder victim; her performance in the scene is the stuff dreams are made of. She’s solicitious, wounded and afraid; she wants to care about the woman she’s talking to, but she’s also seeing her own future. Or is she? There’s some really atypical acting from Whittaker in this episode, toward the end of the episode. Great work.

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    Jodie Whittaker – Broadchurch: Episode 1.8

    And finally. The last episode of the show; the killer is revealed. No spoilers. But it’s obviously an episode that’s going to give the murder victim’s mother plenty of space to be emotional and Whittaker nails every second she’s on screen.

    My Year in Art: 2015!
     
  7. BigAl6ft6

    BigAl6ft6 Chosen One star 8

    Registered:
    Nov 12, 2012
    Cooke & Larson are downright fantastic in their respective films, I think I'd give the heartbreaker edge to Cooke. that final scene, holy cats! I did like Chastain in Crimson Peak just because I like watching well known actors basically just play buggity-boo nuts. And Vikander's Danish Girl nomination still bugs me that it's not Vikander's Ex Machina nomination.

    (No room for Dasiy Ridley in Force Awakens? Seriously, that gal is pretty darn fantastic. Her first lines in the movie are space alien gibberish and he freakin' nails it)
     
    Rogue1-and-a-half likes this.
  8. Ender Sai

    Ender Sai Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Feb 18, 2001
    Rogue1-and-a-half, thoughts on Kathryn Winnick as Lagertha in Vikings? Yes, it's nicely produced fluff, but as a strong shield maiden turned Jarl, she is the highlight of the show in my view.
     
  9. Rogue1-and-a-half

    Rogue1-and-a-half Manager Emeritus who is writing his masterpiece star 9 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Nov 2, 2000
    That scene is amazing. Prior to that scene, it was a very good, charming, honest performance. In that scene, it becomes a masterpiece.

    It bugs me that it's not a Testament of Youth nomination. I think it's eligible as it only opened here in the States in 2015. But this list I posted here is only the honorable mentions; mustn't spoil the actual top ten too much.

    She's good. I didn't see the movie until calendar year 2016, so it is, under my rather unique system, not eligible until I do my 2016 year in review. But she's certainly very good; charismatic and energetic.

    Ender Sai, never seen Vikings, unfortunately.

    MUSIC

    BEST MALE VOCALIST, HONORABLE MENTIONS
    (BONUS: Worst Male Vocalist)

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    Phil Anselmo – Official Live: 101 Proof

    There’s something nothing short of astonishing about listening to Anselmo live. His vocals are raw, shredded, pulsing with pure intensity and it feels impossible that he would be able to keep this up over the length of a concert, but he never loses a step on this album, pumping the crowd and the listener in an absolute frenzy with his insane vocals.

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    Beck – Hell Yes

    On Hell Yes, Beck turns four of the songs from Guero over to a couple of dudes to remix and the result is brilliant. Beck’s never been particularly lauded as a vocalist, but I think he’s a master of phrasing and delivery, even if he doesn’t have the greatest range. The remixes leave Beck’s vocals right where they need to: central to the sound.

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    Julian Casablancas – Random Access Memories

    Of all the guest vocals on Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, most people pointed to Pharrel’s two contributions as being the best stuff on the album; great as those are, I think it’s Casablancas who delivers the best vocals on Instant Crush. It’s nothing short of brilliant. “I’ve listened to your problems/now listen to mine;” for his delivery of that line alone, he’d get on this list.

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    Drake – Nothing Was the Same

    Drake is an artist that, for me at least, is constantly poised on the brink of greatness without ever quite crossing over into it. But no one can fault his abilities as a rapper. His songs require a wide range of emotions, more than most hip-hop artists have to deal with. And he manages to infuse his vocals with meaning, while also knowing his way around a snarl, a hook or just a plain old breakdown. Good stuff.

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    Bob Dylan – Another Side of Bob Dylan

    Another Side of Bob Dylan is a troubled album, but it finds Dylan at a transitional moment; the instruments are still acoustic, but he’s heading for rock with purpose. And his vocal performance here is nothing short of brilliant. He amps up from the folky vocals into a kind of reedy snarl on songs like Motorpsycho Nitemare, but he knows how to bring it back down to a simple and effective tone on songs like My Back Pages. Dylan’s one of the greatest vocalists of all time, certainly, even on his weaker albums.

    BONUS: Worst Male Vocalist

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    Joseph Jones – J’ai Ete Au Bal (I Went to the Dance), Vol. 2

    It was my mistake to decide to get into old-school Cajun music this year. There are certainly artists of note there and I found a fair amount of things to enjoy on two volume set I listened to. But there was more to dislike and Joseph Jones’ insanely bad vocals heads the list, I’d say. You can see how Dylan was influenced by this kind of discordant, abrasive singing, but Dylan made something powerful out of it. Jones just slurs drunkenly, screeches like a dying cat and steadfastly refuses to pick a key. Send this guy to the bayou.

    My Year in Art: 2015!
     
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  10. Rogue1-and-a-half

    Rogue1-and-a-half Manager Emeritus who is writing his masterpiece star 9 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Nov 2, 2000
    BOOKS

    BEST MALE CHARACTER, HONORABLE MENTIONS
    (BONUS: Worst Male Character)

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    Dean Caudwell – Indignation

    Indignation is a short novel by Roth, but it features some of his best character work, all the way down to the minor characters. Caudwell isn’t minor exactly, but he’s perfect. Roth captures the pretentious, bloviating university dean to perfection, but still manages to make him human and not a caricature. It’s truly fine writing.

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    Theo Decker – The Goldfinch

    Decker narrates The Goldfinch, a sprawling novel that takes us from Decker’s adolescence to his adulthood. He’s a fascinating character, driven by forces beyond his control to spend his life bound up in a never ending relationship with a stolen painting, a mysterious red-headed girl and an edgy, dangerous Russian. Decker’s voice is strong and keeps you turning the pages, anxious to see where he finds himself next.

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    Everyman – Everyman

    Everyman is exactly that. In Roth’s sparest novel, the unnamed main character stumbles through a life seen through the prism of the body’s frailty and illnesses. Through it all, he remains however and the emotions are sharp and realistic, immediately recognizeable. Which seems to be the point.

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    Bud Harris – American Rust

    Bud Harris’ role in American Rust is a relatively small one, but he’s perhaps my favorite character in the book, a weary, burned out small-town sheriff. He’s given up on just about everything except putting one foot in front of the other. The human connections he finally manages to forge in this book don’t make things better, but only worse. He’s a tragic character in a tragic tale, sick, tired and altogether worn.

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    Sherlock Holmes – The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, Or On the Segregation of the Queen

    Getting Sherlock Holmes right is no small achievement and Laurie King sets herself the task of stretching the detective’s character in interesting emotional ways, while also remaining true to the character’s very specific original characterization. It’s kind of miraculous that she manages it, but she does.

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    Jeff – Tenth of December

    Escape from Spiderhead is a brilliant short story in Saunders’ collection; Jeff finds himself, for his crimes, living out his days in an experimental facility where he’s given drugs and experiences, a human lab-rat as it were. But as the days were on, Jeff finds himself awakening to more than just the routine of his life at Spiderhead; but in the limited confines of his world, what does emotional growth even mean?

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    Frank Mackey – The Likeness

    Mackey’s a supporting character in Tana French’s second novel, an abrasive undercover officer who arrives out of the past to torment Cassie Maddox, the main character. He’s a figure of menace, humor and unpredictability. He’s a live wire, crackling off the page and he’s the perfect character to stir into The Likeness, a book mostly given over to a kind of dreamy beauty.

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    Fu Manchu – The Mystery of Dr. Fu Manchu

    A figure of the yellow peril, a stereotyped version of a Chinese scientist, Fu Manchu is, despite his racist origins, a genuinely compelling villain. He’s a figure of dread that broods over the book, even when he’s not actually present. When he is present, he’s terrifying, a figure of intelligence and passion and mercilessness. When, toward the end of the book, you actually see a glimmer of his real humanity, it’s a jaw-dropping moment. This book is undeniably racist and undeniably pulp, but Fu Manchu is the kind of villain that comes along once in an author’s lifetime.

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    Mike – Wait Until Dark

    In the brilliant play Wait Until Dark, Mike is a charming con-artist, perfectly assayed by Richard Crenna in the film version. He at first seems callow and charming, but as the play unfolds, he reveals surprising depth and intelligence.

    Roat – Wait Until Dark

    As the terrifying villain of Wait Until Dark, Roat remains mostly an enigma; where he comes from, who he actually is, what drives him to the psychotic measures he uses . . . these are all left vague. But that’s part of why he’s so frightening; he’s a force of nature, unstoppable, vivid, visceral.

    BONUS: Worst Male Character

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    Prospero the Enchanter – The Night Circus

    Yes, The Night Circus takes a third “Worst” award, after also taking Worst Writing and Worst Female Character. Prospero the Enchanter is a wizard. Of some kind. Who’s up to something. Of some sort. His character is nonsensical, annoying and basically useless. In a novel packed with stupid characters, Prospero is the worst. This guy needs to be rounded with a sleep.

    My Year in Art: 2015!
     
  11. Rogue1-and-a-half

    Rogue1-and-a-half Manager Emeritus who is writing his masterpiece star 9 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Nov 2, 2000
    TELEVISION

    BEST MALE PERFORMANCE, HONORABLE MENTIONS

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    Dan Bucatinsky – YOLO

    Dan Bucatinsky won an Emmy for his work on Scandal’s second season, but this episode, from the third season, is easily the best work he’s ever done on the show. Too many spoilers to explain why, but he has a chance in this episode to take his character in a new, darker direction and he does it with real relish. Wickedly sharp work.

    Andrew Buchan – Broadchurch: Episode 1.4

    As the grieving father of a young murder victim, Buchan did consistently great work on Broadchurch, emotionally raw, but ambiguous. This episode allowed him a jaw-dropping scene where all the bottled-up rage behind that ambiguous expression explodes.

    Andrew Buchan – Broadchurch: Episode 1.5

    If episode 4 gave Buchan the chance to drop the façade and wear his emotions on his sleeve, Episode 5 gives him the chance to do some of his most conflicted work. It’s a nuanced performance, filled with uncertainty; his final scene in the episode is brilliant.

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    Tony Goldwyn – Scandal: Snake in the Garden

    Goldwyn is solid, if pretty typically unremarkable on Scandal, as the philandering President, but this episode has a scene in it that stands up as the best acting Goldwyn’s ever done; not just on Scandal, but in his entire career. It’s a scene where he finally shuts up and listens; the often bellowing Fitz is silent, but his face says everything there is to say.

    Jeff Perry – Scandal: Any Questions?

    Perry is one of Scandal’s MVPs; as the harried Chief of Staff, he always seems right on the edge of collapsing from exhaustion, bursting into tears or exploding in rage. This episode is racing us toward the season finale, but Perry makes time among all the big events and twists to deliver some of his finer moments. An opening rant says everything I’ve been dying for someone to say and later we see him fade into a pure chill of mercilessness. Perry is always brilliant; on this episode he’s more.

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    Jeff Perry – Scandal: Top of the Hour

    Perry has a relatively minor role in Top of the Hour, thanks to a really great Case of the Week that eats up a lot of the episode’s time, but he’s on this list for basically one scene, a brutally intense face-off with Bellamy Young. It’s Perry at his best.

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    David Tennant – Broadchurch: Episode 1.1

    As troubled police detective Alec Hardy, Tennant hits the ground running with the very first episode of Broadchurch. You expect the Broadchurch case to be the one that destroys him, but when he stumbles into the episode, disheveled, wild-eyed, unbelievably haggard, you know this is a man already destroyed.

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    David Tennant – Broadchurch: Episode 1.2

    It’s another solid performance here from Tennant, but there’s a scene with erstwhile psychic Steve Connolly that allows Tennant to really show his control. It’s a seesaw of emotions and Tennant nails them all.

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    David Tennant – Broadchurch: Episode 1.7

    Time is running out for Tennant’s character in this episode, in more ways than one, and Hardy is driven to act in increasingly erratic ways. Tennant handles his encroaching sickness perfectly.

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    Luke Wilson – Enlightened: Consider Helen

    Luke Wilson was a constantly compelling and welcome presence on Enlightened as the ex-husband of Laura Dern’s main character, but it was ironically in a scene without Dern where he delivers his most vicious performance. The scene is with Diane Ladd, playing Dern’s mother, and while Wilson has managed to keep his character walking that fine line between reprehensible and sympathetic, this scene is his darkest of the season; the writing is sharp and painful and Wilson rises to the occasion.

    My Year in Art: 2015!
     
  12. tom

    tom Chosen One star 8

    Registered:
    Mar 14, 2004
    is the plan for this to take the whole year?
     
  13. Rogue1-and-a-half

    Rogue1-and-a-half Manager Emeritus who is writing his masterpiece star 9 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Nov 2, 2000
    These posts take longer than I thought they would (I'm not sure why I thought they wouldn't). I've got six more posts in the movie category, four more in the book category, four more in the music category & four more in the television category. Jesus. That's eighteen posts. Holy ****. I'm a madman.
     
  14. Rogue_Ten

    Rogue_Ten Chosen One star 7

    Registered:
    Aug 18, 2002
    i honestly didnt hate the night circus
     
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  15. Rogue1-and-a-half

    Rogue1-and-a-half Manager Emeritus who is writing his masterpiece star 9 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Nov 2, 2000
    MOVIES

    BEST MALE PERFORMANCE, HONORABLE MENTIONS

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    Paul Dano – Love & Mercy

    Dano’s performance as a young Brian Wilson is a thing of beauty. Dano looks eerily like Wilson in some scenes, but it’s the mixture of fragility and exuberance that sets the performance apart. It’s much, much more than your typical biopic impersonation; Dano finds the real joy and the real sorrow that exists in the character and expresses it perfectly.

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    Benicio Del Toro – Sicario

    Del Toro is as good as he’s ever been as the mysterious title character in Villeneuve’s masterful thriller. It’s a minimal performance and a surprisingly quiet one. He’s sinister because of what he doesn’t say, how he doesn’t react, what hides behind the layers that Del Toro quietly builds. When he’s finally allowed to take center stage, it’s the explosion the movie’s been waiting for, but he’s maybe nowhere as good as in that final scene. It’s a complicated character, deep and treacherous, but Del Toro navigates those waters like few actors could.

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    Johnny Depp – Black Mass

    It’s a thrill beyond measure to see Depp fully invested in a role and giving it the serious attention it needs. His turn as merciless Boston gangster Whitey Bulger is easily his best work in at least a decade; it’s probably his best work since the nineties. He makes Bulger chilling, terrifying, utterly evil and menacing, but he stops short of making him a cartoon. Even in the most over the top moments, Depp’s Bulger feels frighteningly real. The role allows Depp to once again disappear behind a lot of makeup, but this time, there’s a real performance back there behind it and Depp’s magnificent talent shines through. This is the Depp we all used to love; here’s hoping this Depp sticks around for a while.

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    Murray Hamilton – Jaws

    Hamilton’s performance as Mayor Vaughan in Jaws unfortunately gets lost behind that lead trio of performances, all astoundingly brilliant of course, but he has to make my honorable mentions list because he’s really incredibly good. Hamilton creates a character unctuous, preening, arrogant and altogether repulsive. He’s one of cinema’s most enduring “I just wanna punch his stupid face” characters and he’s never less than brilliant. His final scene in the film, an emotional confrontation in a hospital, allows us to finally see the human side of the ugly character and Hamilton makes that moment land too.

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    Tom Hardy – Mad Max: Fury Road

    Hardy’s performance as Max is instantly iconic; he strips the role of all the Mel Gibson baggage and has made it entirely his own by the time you’re five minutes into the film. And he does it with long stretches of absolute silence; he speaks in words of one syllable when he can and if he can get away with a single word he does that too. And he spends a large portion of the film hiding the majority of his face behind a strange mask. But it’s all in the eyes; steely glares, a wild eyed terror, berserker rage and, ultimately and most surprisingly, a strange tenderness. No word on Hardy’s best performance yet; his career is too full of masterpieces and he’s still too young. But when the career retrospective comes, this one will be in the conversation.

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    Oscar Isaac – A Most Violent Year

    Isaac’s star just keeps rising, thank God, and he took another step into the stratosphere with his performance here as the owner of a heating oil company struggling to maintain his personal ethics while competing in a crooked and dangerous business in the New York of the 80s. Director Chandor and Isaac are both angling for a Godfather II era Pacino feel and damned if they don’t pull it off. Isaac stalks through the movie, dangerous but conflicted, struggling to stay this side of the line, but being pushed at every turn by his competitors, his partners, his wife. It’s a great performance, layered and intense.

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    Ian McKellen – Mr. Holmes

    McKellen as Sherlock Holmes feels like casting so perfect you’re not sure why it took so long to happen. McKellen has made a real career for himself by breathing real life into icons, like Gandalf. And this is another triumph. His Holmes is vulnerable, struggling, afraid; he’s losing the thing that has made him who he is: his intellect, his great mind and as he struggles to come to grips with this and remember a case that has haunted him through the years, we see a Holmes wrestling with failure and loss, like we’ve never seen him before. McKellen’s performance is perfect.

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    Jason Mitchell – Straight Outta Compton

    Of all the ways the Oscars snubbed Straight Outta Compton, I felt the snub of Jason Mitchell the hardest; as Eazy-E, Mitchell gives what was, for my money, the best performance in the film and Straight Outta Compton is built out of amazing performances, built from the ground up. Mitchell finds an easy groove of charisma, but as the film progresses, he finds the complicated emotions behind the persona and as the film winds to a close, he portrays the guilt & regret of the character to perfection. It’s a great performance, a stand-out even in a film composed of excellence.

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    Ryan Reynolds – Mississippi Grind

    If you’d told me even two or three years ago that Ryan Reynolds would end up on a year-end honorable mentions list, I’d have laughed. But he’s finding a smart character actor groove and, after a really fine performance in Woman in Gold, he’s given his finest performance to date, his first genuinely great performance, as a charming, but ultimately desperately lonely, gambler in the overlooked Mississippi Grind. It’s a performance that starts out coasting on Reynolds easy charm and he has great chemistry with co-lead Ben Mendelssohn, but as the film gets darker, you start to see the sorrow. There are some amazing scenes, once Reynolds’ character has begun to understand the hopelessness and pointlessness of the journey of the characters, when he’s nothing short of brilliant, even as he’s sitting quietly, feeling absolute despair in the face of his partner’s desperate optimism. Good for Reynolds; can’t wait to see what he’s going to do in the years to come.

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    Mark Ruffalo – Foxcatcher

    Ruffalo is always solid, of course, but he gives a really brilliant, transformative performance here. Everything about the performance is dead on, from his body language to the powerful emotions of the character. The way Ruffalo moves, walks, sits . . . it’s all in service of capturing a character. And he’s adept at communicating emotions without overt performance; some of the most powerful emotional moments in the film are played wordlessly, but his face and his eyes say it all.

    BONUS: Worst Male Performance

    Bennett Kilpack – Way Back Home

    Way Back Home is an old Pre-Code film that I watched as part of my “early films of Bette Davis” marathon. The main character is a wise old reverend who dispenses “witty” Yankee “wisdom” to the folks in his small town. One of the folks is Bennett Kilpack who plays the single most annoying character I’ve seen in a movie in a good . . . wow . . . a few years at least. The slack-jawed yokel is a stock character, but no one has ever done it worse than Kilpack. It’s the character I most wanted to beat senseless with a crowbar. That has to count for something.

    My Year in Art: 2015!
     
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  16. Reynar_Tedros

    Reynar_Tedros Jedi Grand Master star 6

    Registered:
    Jul 3, 2006
    [​IMG]
     
  17. Rogue1-and-a-half

    Rogue1-and-a-half Manager Emeritus who is writing his masterpiece star 9 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Nov 2, 2000
    BOOKS

    BEST FEMALE CHARACTER, TOP TEN

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    Francesca Bassington – The Unbearable Bassington

    British author Saki was used to satirizing the British upper class by the time he wrote this book, and he lets high society maven Francesca Bassington be the target of some jokes, but as the book delves into her troubled relationship with her son, the book becomes downright heartbreaking. The Unbearable Bassington isn’t Saki’s funniest book, but it’s his best and Francesca remains one of his most finely realized characters.

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    Ellen Bunting – The Lodger

    Ellen Bunting and her husband have just rented a room to a mysterious stranger who acts decidedly odd from time to time; well, you do what you have to do. But what’s Ellen Bunting to do when she begins to suspect that her lodger isn’t just strange. Perhaps he’s the mysterious serial killer known as The Avenger. Belloc Lowndes gets right inside Ellen’s head and lets you feel every moment of doubt, fear, terror and paranoia right with her.

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    Bernadette Fox – Where’d You Go, Bernadette

    As the title character of this brilliant comic novel, Bernadette Fox is an odd duck, forever embarrassing her family and friends with her vibrant, exuberant zest for life. It’s a kind of stock character, but this book brings the character to life as well as it ever has been. Bernadette Fox is a screwball heroine for a modern age.

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    Olivia Hutton – Indignation

    Philip Roth has never been particularly gifted at writing female characters; one excuses this because he is nothing short of astoundingly great at writing males. But Olivia Hutton is a masterpiece of a character. She is, at first, as women in Roth often are, merely the object of desire for the book’s main character. But as the book rolls on, she comes to vivid life, a dark, deeply damaged girl, far from the icon of sexual desire we first took her for. And wait until you hear her recite poetry.

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    Ruby Lennox – Behind the Scenes at the Museum

    Ruby Lennox narrates the story of her strange family in this novel and she’s a great character; she starts narrating in the seconds after conception, strangely able to speak in complete sentences and using words that I even had to look up. But it’s the mingling of her sardonic sense of humor and her uncomfortable awareness of the sorrow around her that makes her come fully to life.

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    Cassie Maddox – In the Woods

    Much as I loved The Likeness, the novel where Cassie Maddox took center stage, I can’t help but love In the Woods even more and, though Cassie is a supporting character in the novel, she’s an instantly fascinating and captivating character; even as her life tumbles around her, thanks to her foolish partner, she keeps a strange focus.

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    Grace Marks – Alias Grace

    Who is Grace Marks exactly? When this book starts, she’s in jail for murder in the late 1800s and a doctor has just arrived to attempt to discover whether she qualifies as insane. But her narratives of the events that have brought her to this place add up to a complicated maze where the truth and the lies can hardly be distinguished. Atwood has created another masterpiece with Alias Grace and the heart of the masterpiece is the masterpiece of Grace herself.

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    Renee – Tenth of December

    There’s nothing like Home, the most devastating short story in Saunders’ masterful collection. Renee is a side character, appearing only briefly, but as the pained sister of the main character, she’s uniquely suited to feel the tragedy of the story deeply, but does she? She’s a great character.

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    Isabel Sherbourne – The Light Between Oceans

    Can’t wait to see Alicia Vikander bring this character to life in the film adaptation. Isabel is a lonely woman, alone with her husband on a small island where he tends a lighthouse. But when a mysterious baby enters their lives, Isabel Sherbourne finds her world turned upside down and the character shifts and changes and frightens and devastates; it’s a brilliant bit of characterization and it’s the author’s debut novel! Can’t wait to see what comes next.

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    Skarthatch of the Keep – The Ocean at the End of the Lane

    I’m not sure where old Skarthatch really should fit in these lists. Female it is, since that’s how we know her for the majority of the novel, but it’s not technically correct, I suppose. The mysterious Skarthatch is a conceptual nightmare, one that only a genius like Gaiman could have created; she’s the only character on this list to explicitly be a villain and what a villain she is. Gaiman renders Skarthatch and her various forms so vividly that you’ll never forget some of the images of her in this book.

    My Year in Art: 2015!
     
  18. Rogue1-and-a-half

    Rogue1-and-a-half Manager Emeritus who is writing his masterpiece star 9 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Nov 2, 2000
    BOOKS

    BEST MALE CHARACTER, TOP TEN

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    Comus Bassington – The Unbearable Bassington

    Here’s the main character of The Unbearable Bassington, a book that’s getting a lot of year-end love from me. He’s a child of wealth, raised to be spoiled, arrogant and repugnant. He’s kind of an idiot and kind of a horrible kid. But as the book progresses and Comus grows into a young man, Saki brings him vividly to life as a young man struggling to find a way back into his family, a way back to the life that he’s alienated himself from with his behavior. Comus is ultimately a deeply tragic character, a young man who wants to be better, but finds that it may be too late.

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    Kyle Boot – Tenth of December

    Kyle Boot appears in the very first story in Tenth of December. He’s a nerdy young kid, you know the kind. But today he’ll have a chance to change everything about himself; because today something odd is going to happen in his neighborhood and the way he chooses to respond is the hinge on which the rest of his life will hang. It’s a story both hilariously funny and also quite suspenseful. It’s a great way to start the book.

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    Bucky Cantor – Nemesis

    Cantor is one of Roth’s finest creations, the athletic teacher in a Jewish neighborhood in New York; he loves his kids, he loves his girl, he loves his life, but when a polio epidemic begins to sweep through the neighborhood, the threat is more than just physical. It’s existential in a strange way and Cantor finds himself questioning everything he’s ever believed. Nemesis is maybe the best of the Roth novels I’ve read and the journey of Bucky Cantor is one of the most emotionally charged character journeys I’ve read in a long time.

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    Simon Jordan – Alias Grace

    Simon Jordan is a young doctor tasked with examining a convicted murderer in order to see if she’s insane enough to be sent to an asylum. But, of course, this task is complicated by his own experiences and perspectives. Atwood climbs inside Jordan’s mind and brings him vividly to life.

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    Marcus Messner – Indignation

    Marcus Messner is a university student during the Korean conflict, but that conflict is nothing compared to the constant war within; Marcus is a guy who can never let things be easy. To say too much about the character would be to spoil details of the story that should be left unspoiled, but Marcus is a figure not as tragic as he wants to be. He’s more pathetic, in the negative sense of the word; he’s frustrated and frustrating, as complicated a piece of work as I discovered this year.

    Mike – Tenth of December

    Well, I’ve talked a bit about Home, the best story in Tenth of December already; the story is narrated in the first person by Mike, a soldier just home from a tour in the Middle East. This isn’t so much a story about the struggle to reintegrate as it is about the despair that settles after the struggle to reintegrate is revealed to be useless. Mike’s voice is laced with bitterness, sadness, annoyance and, in the astonishing final line of the story, an unbearably painful rage. Saunders is good at creating characters; Mike may be his best.

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    David Miscavige – Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood & the Prison of Belief

    In Lawrence Wright’s masterful Scientology expose, he brings the people of the story vividly to life, from celebrities to ground-level workers to the founder himself. But no character leaps off the page with as much electricity as Miscavige, Hubbard’s second in command during Hubbard’s declining years and, after a masterful power-grab, the leader of the Church of Scientology. Wright paints Miscavige as calculating but also explosive, as intelligent as he is merciless, as devious as he is vicious, but also as a puzzling enigma, as, ultimately, everyone on the inside of Scientology must remain. Is he, after all, a true believer using every faculty at his command to protect the true faith? Or is he a conniving manipulator using every faculty at his command to accrue wealth and power? At the end of Wright’s book, you’ll be 95% certain which one, but that other 5% will keep you up for a few nights. And once you realize that other readers are 95% certain in the other direction . . . well, that’s a great character.

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    Boris Pavlikovsky – The Goldfinch

    Pavlikovsky is a supporting character in The Goldfinch, but he’s easily the most vivid character. He enters the story of the main character, Theo Decker, when they’re both in high school in Arizona; Boris is, strangely enough, a drugged out Russian kid with ties to the Russian mob. He only gets more interesting. Should I give more details? I should not. But he’s fascinating, fully realized and he pops right off the page.

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    Tom Sherbourne – The Light Between Oceans

    Tom Sherbourne is a soldier back from war; he’s finally found his peace: an isolated post as a lighthouse keeper on a deserted island with a beautiful wife that he loves. But that peace is to be short lived and Tom Sherbourne will learn to know his wife and himself in a different way by the time the story is through. Sherbourne is a deeply empathetic character; his struggles speak directly to the reader on a visceral emotional level.

    My Year in Art: 2015!
     
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  19. Rogue1-and-a-half

    Rogue1-and-a-half Manager Emeritus who is writing his masterpiece star 9 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Nov 2, 2000
    TELEVISION

    BEST MALE PERFORMANCE, TOP TEN

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    Andrew Buchan – Broadchurch: Episode 1.3

    Andrew Buchan gets some moments to show real vulnerability in this episode, but it also boasts one of his most minimal performance moments and probably his very best of the entire season; for that scene alone, the first of the episode, he’s got to be on this list.

    Andrew Buchan – Broadchurch: Episode 1.8

    The final episode of season one and no spoilers from me. What can you say about the performance of this central character without giving anything away about the episode? Just this: phenomenal.

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    Guillermo Diaz – Scandal: Boom Goes the Dynamite

    Guillermo Diaz sort of revolutionized television acting for me with his incredibly grim, incredibly committed turn as the damaged Huck in Scandal’s second season. The extent of Huck’s damage has certainly been hinted at before, but it’s in this episode that we get to see the character at something like his most vulnerable and his most terrifying.

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    Guillermo Diaz – Scandal: Seven Fifty-Two

    Until, of course, this episode. The pure emotional devastation of this episode, still probably Scandal’s best episode, is nothing to laugh at. It absolutely lays waste and the episode stands or falls on Diaz’ performance. Needless to say, it doesn’t just stand, it soars. This is acting like one rarely sees and one of the most emotionally grueling hours I saw last year.

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    Jeff Perry – Scandal: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

    Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is its own kind of brutal, but it’s Jeff Perry’s Cyrus on the rack this time and the performance here is right up there with Perry’s finest in the entire series. No spoilers for this amazing episode, but it’s as good a flashback episode as the show’s given us (except for Seven Fifty-Two, of course) and Perry’s stellar work anchors the entire thing.

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    Jeff Perry – Scandal: White Hat’s Back On

    Second season finale finds Perry in excellent form. It’s episode where the plot could easily overwhelm the characters, but with Perry on hand, that won’t happen.

    Jeff Perry – Scandal: YOLO

    By the time YOLO is over, even Cyrus can’t pretend that he’s anything but the devil; but, in case you’ve forgotten, the devil doesn’t just consign others to hell – he suffers there himself, the first and greatest tormented soul. Perry finds that in this brutal episode.

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    David Tennant – Broadchurch: Episode 1.4

    It’s hard to believe the level of acting Tennant is able to bring to the part of his troubled detective in Broadchurch’s first season. When he enters in episode one, he appears to already be damaged beyond repair; so it’s down to Tennant’s genius that he’s able to make Hardy’s descent even further down believable. You thought he was broken before? Watch this.

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    David Tennant – Broadchurch: Episode 1.6

    Tennant’s acting just keeps getting better and there’s a particular emotional moment that I find most actors simply can’t get at all right; to tell you what it is would be to spoil this episode’s climax, but suffice it to say that Tennant gets that moment as right as anyone I’ve ever seen.

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    Mike White – Enlightened: Lonely Ghosts

    It isn’t enough for Mike White to be co-creator of Enlightened; he also wrote every episode and directed a fair chunk. But he also turns in a brilliant performance as Laura Dern’s awkward friend Tyler. In Lonely Ghosts, perhaps the most purely transcendent episode of the first season, White reveals Tyler in a new way; it’s a nuanced, emotionally true, minimal performance and it’s some of the best acting of the entire show.

    My Year in Art: 2015!
     
  20. solojones

    solojones Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Sep 27, 2000
    I do not watch Scandal. However, Broadchurch is one of my favorite shows ever and I full agree about all the performances you've pointed out. Absolutely stunning stuff. Tennant is a much better actor than most people seem to realize. They think he was just fun in Doctor Who, and don't realize even there what skill he showed in having an internal life and drama beneath the frivolous exterior.

    I take it you haven't seen Series 2 yet? Do tell your thoughts when you do. While I was very worried about how they could possibly do a second series of such a show (which was originally a miniseries), I thought they knocked it out of the park.
     
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  21. Rogue1-and-a-half

    Rogue1-and-a-half Manager Emeritus who is writing his masterpiece star 9 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Nov 2, 2000
    I'll have to check it out. I was likewise skeptical. I thought the first season was just a perfect little novel on television, you know, just a great unit unto itself. And then I've heard fairly mixed things. But I'll check it out. You have good taste. And a lot more Broadchurch in this post. Including a performance that seems to be overlooked because of the great performances by Whittaker, Buchan, Tennant and Colman. See what you think about that one.

    TELEVISION

    BEST FEMALE PERFORMANCE, TOP TEN

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    Olivia Colman – Broadchurch: Episode 1.1

    Olivia Colman’s brilliant, emotionally raw performance as Detective Miller was one of the best things about the first season of Broadchurch. In this first episode, we see her as a competent woman plunged into the kind of case she thought she’d never have to deal with, a brutal child murder among people that she knows and cares about. Colman’s performance is nothing short of excellent.

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    Olivia Colman – Broadchurch: Episode 1.8

    Colman’s performance in the season finale takes everything up a notch, just as it should. It’s astonishing, without a single false moment.

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    Laura Dern – Enlightened: Pilot

    Dern is excellent throughout the first season of Enlightened, but the Pilot calls for the biggest range. We have to see her pre-breakdown/mid-breakdown/post-breakdown. And she nails them all, probably most terrifying mid-breakdown. It’s a far cry from the kind of subtle work she does in the rest of the season, but it’s undeniably compelling.

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    Laura Dern – Enlightened: Lonely Ghosts

    Lonely Ghosts gives Dern one of the strongest single-episode arcs of the season. As she tries to reintegrate herself into the good time group she used to party with, she realizes that things have changed, in many ways, some good, some bad. It’s a wonderful episode and Dern’s work in the final montage is her most sensitive of the season.

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    Katie Lowes – Scandal: White Hat’s Back On

    Katie Lowes was an inexperienced actress when she got the very important role of Quinn Perkins on Scandal and she hadn’t put a foot wrong for the first two seasons. And then she got this episode. Talk about a killer performance. Quinn’s just gone by the time this episode is over; there are two really fantastic scenes here toward the end of the episode. Lowes has never been better.

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    Pauline Quirke – Broadchurch: Episode 1.7

    Secrets are coming out in the penultimate episode of Broadchurch’s first season and none are more brilliantly handled than the final truth about Susan Wright, the strange, menacing figure played by Pauline Quirke. Her performance in this episode is nothing short of breathtaking. She’s been very good; in this episode, she’s nothing short of truly great.

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    Kerry Washington – Scandal: Boom Goes the Dynamite

    It’s hard to play the lead in a series like Scandal; it’s hard to keep a central character fresh and compelling over seasons like this and even harder to find moments of real character change, but Washington does it in this episode from midway through the second season. There’s a real character realization in this episode, a powerful epiphany that culminates in what is probably her finest acting of the first three seasons, a beautiful monologue that ties together her season-long story with the case of the week. Breathtaking.

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    Kerry Washington – Scandal: Top of the Hour

    It’s quite a job swinging Scandal into the second half of season 2 and it wasn’t ever quite as good as the first half, but Washington does more than her best in this episode. If Boom Goes the Dynamite featured some her subtlest work in a beautiful resonant character arc, this episode just gives her moment after moment after moment to unleash the kind of powerful acting that holds the show together.

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    Jodie Whittaker – Broadchurch: Episode 1.2

    The typical pick is, I guess, the first episode when you’re looking for Whittaker’s best work as grieving mother Beth Latimer. But I pick episode 2; the grief and loss has really started to settle in and Whittaker finds the weak stumbling of a woman barely able to remain functional. Brilliant.

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    Bellamy Young – Scandal: Mrs. Smith Goes to Washington

    Young is typically wonderful as the overachieving First Lady on Scandal, forever plastering on a smile and powering through the **** to make sure she gets what she wants. But this episode allowed her to show us all the rage boiling under that plastic smile. A final scene, a near-uninterrupted monologue as a tipsy Mellie tells her husband exactly where he can (and can’t) get off is a tour de force.

    My Year in Art: 2015!
     
  22. Rogue1-and-a-half

    Rogue1-and-a-half Manager Emeritus who is writing his masterpiece star 9 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Nov 2, 2000
    MUSIC

    BEST FEMALE VOCALIST, TOP FIVE

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    FKA twigs – M3LL155X

    M3LL155X is an EP released last year by iconoclastic artist, FKA twigs. The EP conjures a real atmosphere of strange, off-kilter darkness and the production is a huge part of that. Twigs has the chops to be a straight ahead R&B singer, as you’ll here when she gets the high notes on this record. But she’s too busy creating something entirely different; she takes her already unique voice and twists it, turns it, chops it and distorts it to create a sound like little else. It’s one thing to have a great voice; it’s another to know how to use it.

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    Lady Gaga – Artpop

    Of late it seems that people are discovering that Lady Gaga actually has a great voice simply because she took the makeup off. I’m not sure of the connection there exactly; even when she’s doing her crazy performance art things, she’s got a great voice. But it’s more than just her range. It’s the way she delivers the vocals. It would be more fitting to say that she has multiple great voices: a snarl, a sneer, a high octane roar, a slurred groan. Listen to Dope; it’s all in the phrasing, the accents, the raw emotion.

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    Lorde – Pure Heroine

    Lorde has a unique, preternatural “voice” in her song-writing as well. But it’s the sound of her actual voice that I’m talking about here. When Royals blew up, I remember thinking that it had been a while since I’d heard a female voice that strange on the top of the charts. It isn’t about her range, because she doesn’t exactly have a huge one; it’s not about the strength of her voice, because she doesn’t particularly have that either. It’s about the strange quaver, the odd tones, the brilliant phrasing. Lorde delivers the goods in a way only she could.

    [​IMG]

    M.I.A. – Matangi

    M.I.A. remains a great talent. She’s turned some people off of late with the abrasiveness of her sound, but it’s a clear artistic vision and she’s probably saying “good riddance.” On Matangi, M.I.A. uses her voice to its most strident effect. The music is loud, intense, dissonant; M.I.A. matches it with her voice. She’s a great rapper, with a lot of energy, and she’s always been in your face, but she’s never been as assaultive as she is here. Her voice is strident, harsh, abusive. Even when she settles down to actually sing, as on Come Walk With Me, there’s the hint of a straining fury waiting to be released.

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    Janelle Monae – The Electric Lady

    Monae has the most generally aesthetically pleasing voice of any of the women on this list. She’s just a good old-fashioned R&B belter with a clear, high-pitched vocal. Her control is nothing short of stupendous and her tone is just . . . well, clear is the only way I know to say it. It’s just clean. But she has a good grasp of phrasing as well. Monae’s voice is one I’m always glad to hear.

    Bonus:
    Worst Female Vocalist

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    Odile Falcon – J’ai Ete Au Bal (I Went to the Dance), Vol. 1

    Falcon only has one track on this album, which is a collection of Cajun music ranging from the twenties to the eighties. Falcon’s recording is an old one, of her squawking out a song in French acca pella . It’s one of the most annoying things I’ve ever heard, this thin, reedy, out of tune voice just squealing and snarling without any backup. Thank God, it’s only a bit over a minute.

    My Year in Art: 2015!
     
  23. Jabba-wocky

    Jabba-wocky Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    May 4, 2003
    I think you're forgetting the best option of all:

     
    Rogue1-and-a-half likes this.
  24. Juliet316

    Juliet316 Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Apr 27, 2005
    Et,tu, Wocky?
     
    Rogue1-and-a-half likes this.
  25. Rogue1-and-a-half

    Rogue1-and-a-half Manager Emeritus who is writing his masterpiece star 9 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Nov 2, 2000
    Dammit, I remembered that just a couple of days ago and I was totally going to find a way to link to it. Now I'll have to wait a while again until it's cooled off again. :p