An Ode To Colin Farrell, The Best Actor
No one cares about your Leos or Afflecks or Pitts. Give me Colin Farrell every time.
Maybe the best scene in (the perfect) In Bruges begins with Brendan Gleeson’s Ken readying himself to gun down Colin Farrell’s Ray. He waddles up as the music crescendos and just as he steadies his pistol, Ray pulls out a gun and puts it to his own head. It’s as dark as humor can get as the two begin to bicker over who’s allowed to kill Ray and who isn’t.
There’s no one better in Hollywood at playing twitchy and dog-tired than Farrell. All in the same breath, he’s depressed, angry and confused, while simultaneously giving the smallest of nods to understanding why this is all so funny in the grand scheme of things.
This isn’t a one-hit wonder of a performance. Farrell has been maybe the most consistently great actor—in my humble opinion—of the 21st century. He has near-impeccable taste working with all sorts of auteurs from Yorgos Lanthimos to Martin McDonagh to Steve McQueen to Sofia Coppola to Michael Mann to Steven Spielberg.
He even gives a knockout performance in Scrubs. Get you a man who can go toe to toe with Tom Cruise and Zach Braff.
This year is thankfully the year of Farrell as he’s in two of the more hotly-anticipated films of the next 12 months with Matt Reeves’ quickly approaching The Batman as The Penguin and Kogonada’s After Yang, a contained sci-fi story that’s already getting rapturous reviews.
Colin Farrell has no Oscars to his name, but that almost feels like a badge of honor at this point. The man makes interesting choices, works on great movies and even when it doesn’t all come together, you can’t say that he didn’t give it his all.
Perhaps it’s The Lobster—a deeply upsetting love story—that put him back in the public consciousness after a bit of meandering, and although it’s Farrell in the kind-of-titular role, he plays this one stoic and meek, a far cry from the aforementioned In Bruges or Minority Report or The Beguiled.
The man has range.
The reason I’m writing this now is because The Batman is going to be here before we know it. The hype machine has certainly already started with Robert Pattinson and Zoe Kravitz being hot together in Paris, and I don’t want us to skip over Colin Farrell who will certainly be going for it.
The man made 81 minutes standing at a phone booth exciting. He’s a magician.
It’s come to our my attention here at Aerial Shot that the Pulitzer Prizes will be reopening for the 2023 awards in December. If you’ve met me, you know that I hate to be late to things, so I decided to do some hard-nosed investigative reporting to answer a question we all have had at one point or another: Who is Maria Menounos?
You know her. She’s the AMC Noovie girl. Menounos shows up before the trailers start and guides you through the world of entertainment. Sometimes it’s a new TV show you haven’t heard of, other times it’s a movie you haven’t heard of. Maria Menounos is our generation’s Walter Cronkite with more denim jackets. But, like, who is she? How’d she become our connection to the stars? How much is she getting paid for standing in front of a green screen and reading some sentences?
We’re all innately aware of the facts that she’s not a skirt girl and that she loves pranks, but what you may not know is that Menounos is also an actress. Remember Fantastic Four with Jessica Alba and pre-Captain America Chris Evans? The Noovie star played “Sexy Nurse” in that one. She also was Jules in One Tree Hill and the aptly-named Maria Menounos in Entourage. This is all fascinating, but these are all side gigs to her AMC world-domination.
As the Noovie host, Menounos has become ubiquitous in the world of cinema. She’s a welcome face and also … the brains behind the operation, which is her own face. Don’t think too hard about that sentence.
Doing my due diligence, I found an interview with Larry King in which Menounos states that she pitched the idea of having a “pre-show” host and that was that. If only we could have been a fly on the wall during that meeting. Kinda the 21st century’s Paris Peace Accords.
Anyway, that’s who Maria Menounos is. A reporter, television personality, professional wrestler (?), author, businesswoman, face of cinema. She’s a modern-day Renaissance woman.
Pulitzer committee, let me know what time I should show up for the awards luncheon.
Movie Rec for No Reason
I haven’t watched this movie recently and there’s no tie-in for recommending it right now, but you should watch Thoroughbreds. It’s available on VOD and I have it on Blu-ray if you want to stop by. I saw this one back in 2017 in an empty theater with minimal expectations and a “why not” attitude. It reintroduced me to Anya Taylor-Joy after The Witch, before her megastar-breakout role in The Queen’s Gambit, and brought Olivia Cooke into my life as a consistently great performer. This role for Cooke is certainly different than what she does in Sound of Metal. Barely over 92 minutes, this dark (and bloody) comedy is an inside look at what happens when rich teens get bored. It’s impeccably made and really, really fun.