criticisms of zendaya's acting in the odyssey seem to me to be both racist and premature (why comment on a performance you have not seen?) but beyond that, I find most criticisms of acting I see of late to be exhaustingly unstudied. The majority of opinions seem to stop merely at whether or not the actor created in the specific viewer a) a suspension of disbelief and b) an emotional reaction, and while those criteria are good and well, I find that they are as much about the viewer as the performance. On the other hand, rarely do I hear people discuss the physicality of performances, whether an actor has favorite bodily tools and uses them well, whether their line delivery is varied and nuanced or uncommunicative, whether the performance decisions they make are interesting, straightforward, flat, compelling, what relationships, history, and context they imply with their choices. I find it very frustrating that film criticism writ large feels that a close read of the script is sufficient as a close read of the film, or that a frame for frame parallel can be understood solely as visual stills, and I would argue that the reason a great many actors are discussed readily as celebrities and cultural figures and not as actors, ie, not as audience projections of a celebrity they like but as active craftspeople participating in a massive group project, is largely because people have no practical working idea of what it means to be acting or what tools, techniques, and frameworks an actor should have at their disposal to do the job, and what function that job has in the larger artistic project of a film in terms of conveying, yes, plot and character, but also theme, tone, mood, context, style, and emotions, where they are in fact working in concert with cinematography and set design, script and score. I am tired of the whole of an evalution of someone's performance summing up to a judgement on their appeal as a celebrity; I am tired of fickle praise for the popular and unpopular, whenever those poles trade places; I am thoroughly weary of generationally good artists reduced to their relative star power; and above all I am Sick To Death of people telling me that this is a stupid craft to care about. "Why must a movie be “good” ? Is it not enough to sit somewhere dark and see a beautiful face, huge?" Go sit in Times Square and stare at a jeans ad then. I go to a movie, and I expect a genuine attempt at art and craft.
