Search found 2 matches: Jack Nicholson

djross wrote:On Saturday, Jack Nicholson will turn 80. No actor has embodied a spirit of freedom, individuality, intelligence, romance, vulnerability, culture and charm in quite the way he did, both in art and in life, and in particular in the remarkable series of performances he gave between 1970 and 1975

Here here! Nicholson is a kind of walking legend - an entire era of film, film history, and film craft living and breathing as a real person, putzing around somewhere in Los Angeles, intimidating local residents with a wink and a smile. It is a tall order to arrive at a persona so ubiquitous. It's such a unique position, I don't necessarily blame him for embodying the stereotype his mid-career films only alluded to (who else could do what he did in The Departed and make it seem so natural? We don't question a thing.)

I'll always remember his smiling Joker on the back of the VHS tape for Batman, giving me nightmares in my toddler years I'm still recovering from as an adult. That's cinematic authority. I'm now enjoying going back to his lesser-known work (like The Shooting/Ride in the Whirlwind) and seeing even then there's a nuance of generosity evident even in smallish roles.

djross wrote:On Saturday, Jack Nicholson will turn 80. No actor has embodied a spirit of freedom, individuality, intelligence, romance, vulnerability, culture and charm in quite the way he did, both in art and in life, and in particular in the remarkable series of performances he gave between 1970 and 1975:

Five Easy Pieces (1970)
Carnal Knowledge (1971)
The King of Marvin Gardens (1972)
The Last Detail (1973)
Chinatown (1974)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)

Nicholson in his prime was both a Hollywood star and an outsider, and I would venture to say that there has never been an actor whose persona has contributed to the quality of a movie in the singular way that Nicholson's did – not only, but especially, in the half dozen films listed above, made with Rafelson, Nichols, Ashby, Polanski and Forman. More than anything, what he exudes is something like a feeling for life.

I like the last two on the list the best, but The Departed should be on there too, though he didn't have a leading role in it (because there wasn't *a* leading role). And if you search for him on IMDb, you'll see The Shining below his name as the movie they think most people would associate him with. Yeah, he says "Heeeer's Johnny", but still, it's pretty much just a horror movie and my least favorite of Kubrick's stuff. And Shelley Duvall should have used her head like Anna Kendrick did in The Accountant, and laid the toilet tank lid into his face at that precise moment. OMG!.....scenes we'd like to see.