depression

Don’t Laugh: Comic Actor Jason Segel Deserves an Oscar Nomination

June 26, 2015 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Sacrilege! Could Jason Segel of TV’s How I Met Your Mother and Forgetting Sarah Marshall merit a Best Actor nomination? Yes!

Segel’s performance as brilliant but troubled Infinite Jest novelist David Foster Wallace in James Ponsoldt’s The End of the Tour, opening July 31, could be forgotten under the thundering hooves of autumn Telluride and Toronto Oscar vehicles. Think of Chadwick Boseman’s James Brown in Get on Up, an Oscar worthy performance that opened last year on August 1 and was all-but-forgotten in last year’s competitive Best Actor race.

Appreciating the bromantic duet between Segel’s Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg’s (compelling) Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky for a second time at the Nantucket Film Festival increased my passion for Segel’s performance. He restores Wallace not as that author you should have read (and probably didn’t) but as a brilliant writer who might not have been the most brilliant conversationalist or company.

With very little action, and articulating lines that are often intentionally inarticulate (Donald Margulies wrote the emotionally satisfying script), Segel creates a multi-layered portrait of a petty, generous, dog loving, soul searching, depression coping, American TV addict. His bandana-wearing Wallace struggles to carve out an authentic life in Bloomington, Indiana far away from the Manhattan literary buzz, which his character describes as the sound of egos rising and falling. What’s strong about the performance is that very lack of ego. It doesn’t take long before Segel loses himself in Wallace, alternately charming and antagonizing both Eisenberg’s Lipsky and the audience.

It will be an uphill battle for Segel. And one fought previously by actors who have made their reputations first as comedians: Steve Carell (Foxcatcher), Will Forte (Nebraska), Robin Williams (One Hour Photo), Bill Murray (Lost in Translation), Eddie Murphy (Dreamgirls), Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig (The Skelton Twins), Whoopi Goldberg (The Color Purple) and even Jerry Lewis (The King of Comedy). The buzz that started at Sundance continues here.

Outtakes: Bill Hader, the voice of Fear in ‘Inside Out,’ Rattled Bones in ‘The Skeleton Twins’

May 20, 2015 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Hader in a wig with Wiig

Bill Hader is a worrier who defuses the tension with humor, and more worry. In honor of the acclaim Inside Out is receiving at Cannes where Hader is the voice of Fear, I’m reviving the longer interview I did with him during Oscar season. If you haven’t seen him in The Skeleton Twins” yet – rent it! Rent it now! Hader deserved an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Milo, the suicidal gay brother in The Skeleton Twins opposite Kristen Wiig. It was a case of The Academy being challenged to recognize that great crossover from sketch comedy into darkly comedic drama. So I started out asking Hader about his escape from the sketch comedy and the result was some pretty intelligent improv:

Bill Hader: The difference between working at SNL and the first time I got to play a dramatic role, I really got to go in depth. Sketch comedy is by definition pad and pencil and quick sketch. With Milo, this was really the first time I got to get in depth with a character. Most of it was drawing form people that I knew, gay friends of mine. Because Milo attempts to commit suicide, I actually had a good friend from high school who had attempted suicide freshman year at college. I called him and after we made small talk he told me he had attempted to slash his wrists with a razor blade in a bathtub. We had an open and blunt conversation about it and he gave me some insight. He didn’t consider himself depressed just feeling like he had no other way to turn at college, missing his family and he wasn’t doing well, and drinking too much. He told me that the minute you start actually doing it this weird final, primal switch flipped in his head. He started screaming for help, And I told the director that. We did a couple of version of that scene but when we did the full panic attack we realized it’s hard to start the movie like that so, instead, we went for the in between version.”

What other preparation did you do, Bill?

BH: What I also did was a learning process, reading the script and then working with all these great artists, like the costume designer, on what he’s going to wear, the wristbands to cover up the scars, the bands Milo likes, and the Production Designer on what his apartment would be like. You do all this research and you show up on set, and you have all this knowledge and then it’s just reacting to people like Kristen [Wiig] and Ty [Burrell] and Joanna [Gleason] and Luke [Wilson]. You’re just listening to people but you have all this info. I never worked that way before and it was really rewarding.
[Related: Sundance Scoop: Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader Pair Up as ‘The Skeleton Twins]

What surprised you about playing Milo?

Was how strong the guy was. There’s a scene with Ty Burrelll [who plays his former high school teacher and first lover] where we get in a fight in the movie. I’d always seen that as a scene where Milo is trying to get his way. This is the first person Milo ever had sex with. He has that power over Milo. And when we were rehearsing it, I realized the status had changed so we blocked it that way where I stood up over him looking down at him. The words were still the same but it changed the whole dynamic of the scene. You do all this research and it’s just reacting, in that moment I was surprised and scared. It really came to life. I’d never had that kind of a moment before in acting. For me that was the first time where the character was leading me instead of the other way around. It’s true. I’m not behind the wheel anymore and Milo is. After that, it feels false or stale or wrong when you struggle for the wheel.

Web Exclusive: Kenneth Branagh on “Wallander”

January 1, 2012 By Thelma 1 Comment

Kenneth Branagh, Wallander, Menkell, Mystery Fiction, Sweden

Brood, Branagh, Brood (BBC)

My husband and I are rabid readers of Scandinavian mysteries, from Henning Mankell’s Wallander series; to rising Norwegian star Jo Nesbo, whose “Headhunters” was made into a brilliant movie; to the Stieg Larsson millennium trilogy. I couldn’t talk to Kenneth Branagh about My Week with Marilyn, without discussing his title role in the broody BBC hit TV series, Wallander.

Thelma Adams: OK, do the Swedes have as many ways to describe depression as there are snowflakes?

Kenneth Branagh: My experience of going there to research, and do the location recces, was to meet Swedes that very quickly were ready and able to get into deepish philosophical questions. They were quick on the draw with the deep stuff. And they had a very deadpan sense of humor, often aware that the world could see them as over-serious. They rather tease the Brits. They regard us as tense and uptight. They’re asking: how do you feel about the landscape we’re in? And what do you feel about death? And you’re really still in the cup of tea stage. In southern Sweden with its great flatlands, you do become introspective. They may well be pondering and considering depression more than other people do. They have long, cold dark winters in which to do it.

TA: What effect does that have on the character you play?

KB: Wallander is compelled and hypnotized by death in the novels. He was appalled and magnetically drawn to discover the reasons why people commit what seem like random acts of violence. He was motivated by deep moral and spiritual revulsion. He doesn’t believe in an eye for an eye. He’s appalled by cruelty. He’s trying to understand why in order to prevent it.

TA: He’s also typical in detective fiction in that his personal life is a wreck.

KB: To a large extent he is absolutely spent by the empathic connection to violence and the victims; it leaves a personal life which is a wasteland. We just finished three new films. In one, he ends up in a counseling session forced to say I don’t think you can do what I do and not end up like that.

TA: Does playing such a dour empath leech into real life?

KB: I am better at firewalling. The first season was very exhausting as we tried to find the man and this approach to the films. Although I’m better at leaving him at work, the actual material has become darker in film number nine. Even on reading the last film on this last series of three, I rang the producer and said ‘Oh, my god, hat is so bleak I can’t believe it.’ But it’s bracing, darkly illuminating as an actor and a viewer.

Movie Review: The Beaver

May 6, 2011 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Mel Gibson,Jodie Foster,Mental Illness,Beavers,Puppets,Depression,Mental Illness

(photo cred:Summit Entertainment)

Us Rating: ***

Mel Gibson plays Walter, a seriously depressed exec, in this insightful dark comedy. Kicked out by his wife (Jodie Foster), he finds a ratty puppet in a dumpster and — yikes — starts talking through it like a ventriloquist uses a dummy. Gibson excels as a man fighting mental illness, managing to project anguish even in the company of the stuffed animal. But the tightly wound Foster is less believable in her role — and their sex scene (which includes the puppet!) is just too awkward to watch.

Scandinavian Mysteries: What Color is your Bummer?

November 6, 2010 By Thelma Leave a Comment

What snow is to the Eskimos, depression is to Scandinavian mystery writers. There are endless ways to describe it. I’ve long wanted to write an essay on the topic but, well, it bummed me out. So, here, then, is the first in a series of excerpts. This one from chapter two of Danish writer Leif Davidsen‘s political thriller Lime’s Photograph, narrated by fictional papparazzo Peter Lime.

“”As usual after an assignment, I felt rather empty and depressed. Not seriously, just a feeling of the blues, that something was over and with it the knowledge that, with the passing of that particular second, I had taken a step closer to death.”

I invite you to send me similar passages from Scandinavian mysteries, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series included. But, please, don’t download the entire PBS Mystery series Wallender.