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Monday 17 June 2013

Worst Supporting Actor 2003: Alec Baldwin - The Cat in the Hat

Alec Baldwin received his only Razzie nomination to date for portraying Larry in The Cat in the Hat.
The Cat in the Hat is a very strange film. Its whole content is meant for children. But this version is completely inappropriate for them. So its biggest problem is that it doesn't know who does it want to be for. Therefore there are some very embarassing moments that make this film bad.
Alec Baldwin plays the biggest bad-ass in The Cat in the Hat. He is trying to ball the mother of the leading characters (played by Dakota Fanning and Spencer Breslin), but he hates her children, especially the one played by Spencer Breslin and so he's trying to suspend him to some camp (or somewhere, it's not important).
If you believe it or not, there's not any purpose for Baldwin's character's behaviour. We never know why he wants to be with Fanning's and Breslin's mother. We never know, why he hates her children. It is happening, because the screenplay says so and that's all. Therefore it's extremely bad character to play.
Many other actors would try to find this reason and somehow reflect it into their performance. But Baldwin doesn't do it. He doesn't care about this fact. He plays his part very self-consciously. And that's a big problem. He is extremely overacting, which wouldn't be so bad in this kind of roles. But he plays as if he wanted to be the main star of this film. As if he wanted to be the only one to shine. And that's the worst thing he could. An actor should know, where is his place.
So because of this self-consciousness he never has got a chemistry with some of his colleagues. And there's nothing worse than this for an actor.
I hope Baldwin won't be reading this review, so that he won't feel offended and he won't try to contact me publicly. But, just in case: Usually I adore Alec as an actor (I also enjoyed his so much criticised Oscar hosting.), this is just a performance that just didn't impress me, at all...

Saturday 15 June 2013

Next Year: Worst Supporting Actor 2003

Don't worry. I'll finish best supporting actor 1998 soon. Right now I just had a crazy idea that I simply had to carry out. What if I reviewed the acting nominees for Razzie Awards, instead of Academy Awards? So right now I'm going to review the nominnes for the worst supporting actor 2003 and then I'll rank them (the first is the worst performance and the last is the best performance).
At the beginning I chose the year that will hopefully be easy to do. And who knows? Maybe I (and you) will like it so much, that I'll get stuck with this idea for the future of this blog. So here are the first nominees for my experiment:

Al Pacino - Gigli
Alec Baldwin - The Cat in the Hat
Anthony Anderson - Kangaroo Jack
Christopher Walken - Gigli and Kangaroo Jack
Sylvester Stallone - Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over

So write your predictions for my pick, or ranking in comments. You may also write your ranking of these performances. And you may write even your opinion about this idea of mine...