Support Overthinking It by becoming a member for $5/month!
Peter Fenzel and Matt Wrather have spent literally hundreds of episodes overthinking different movies and TV shows, but have never really turned the overthinking on acting itself. So they try. But what’s their motivation?
Subscribe: iTunes Other Apps
Is there a standard reference for those melodramatic poses? If there’s one in the public domain to track down, it might be a handy reference for those annoying times that something needs to be illustrated.
Regarding August Wilson’s Twentieth Century series, Netflix has a presentation of his 1920s play, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” though the importance of the play was eclipsed by it being Chadwick Boseman’s final release. I felt like it was marred by that weird “the actors are precisely in the stage play, but the stage is replaced by a more realistic studio lot” middle-ground that never makes anyone happy, but not having the opportunity to see it anywhere else, it’s worth the two hours, and hopefully they’ll make more.
One approach to acting that we don’t see enough of (though I guess we see it in stand-up routines and arguably improv) is the way that certain people, especially children, tell stories. Often, they’ll relive the events that inspired what they’re trying to get across, while distancing themselves from it, while trying to embody it, while also trying to keep the story on track. It’s “not acting,” because that’s not what the profession involves, but it’s also definitely acting. I don’t know if it’s streaming anywhere (looks like Sundance Now and AMC+), but I ran across my Liyana (https://www.liyanathemovie.com/) DVD from an ancient Kickstarter campaign, and it’s a great example of jumping between realism (it’s drawn from their traumatic experiences) to melodrama (it’s actually about a fictional character) to not acting (they’re writing) to other modes.
Another old Kickstarter find is “Terminator the Second,” a stage presentation of Terminator 2, with every line (or, in extreme cases, every phrase in a line) drawn from the works of Shakespeare. That also has an interesting interplay of acting styles, since it needs to be a movie and it needs to be a Shakespearean presentation, but it also can’t be either.