Best Supporting Actor.

ignore the suit.
focus on the brilliance.

Okay, so um, where are the great Supporting Actor peformances of the new millennium? Though I love my choice for the best Supporting Actor of the new millennium (Tim Robbins in Mystic River - suck itttt), I doubt he'd even make #10 on my list of the Best Supporting Actors of the 1990s. It's true, this has hindsight helping me, but think about all the incredible supporting male performances we'd had by the beginning of 1997: all the Glengarry Glen Ross boys, Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs, Samuel L. Jackson and Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction, Ralph Fiennes in Schindler's List, Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspects (and Se7en - which I haven't seen, and quite frankly, which I refuse to see), Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, Edward Norton in Primal Fear and The People vs. Larry Flynt, Gene Hackman in Unforgiven, Leonardo DiCaprio in What's Eating Gilbert Grape?, Jack Lemmon in Short Cuts, Martin Landau in Ed Wood, Sean Penn in Carlito's Way, Don Cheadle in Devil in a Blue Dress...

though, if you're willing to deem the movie eligible, Jeffrey Wright and Al Pacino in Angels in America could easily go toe-to-toe with any of those performances...

Death of a Fucking Salesman

it takes brass balls to sell real estate.

...AKA Glengarry Glen Ross, suffers from the same problems a lot of stage-to-screen transfers have: it still feels like it'd be so much better on stage (I do love its jazzy score and the constant blue-tinted images of the train moving), but who cares when the acting's this good - it is, quite frankly, the best ensemble acting ever. The two highlights: Alec Baldwin who appears here in only the best cameo ever, and Jack Lemmon. This is the man that gave us Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, Days of Wine and Roses, The Odd Couple, and Save the Tiger (no, he didn't deserve that Oscar then, but it's hardly an embarassing performance to say the least and he deserved it other years, that's for damn sure!), among sooo many others, and this is probably his best performance yet. He's utterly heartbreaking. You won't find a better Willy Loman anywhere than Jack's Shelley Levene. This movie wouldn't be at all special, or probably even all that good, without the acting - but what else does it have?

Movie: B- Acting: A+ Overall: B+

the best cameos in film history.

1. Alec Baldwin, Glengarry Glen Ross
2-infinity. Don't really matter

Yeah, I mean it