Random thoughts on Jennifer Connelly

[lucybun]

So, I was reading a wonderful fic recently by woe_in_a_hoodie over at Sherlockbbc, in which the movie Labyrinth is featured.  I, therefore, pulled out my DVD and watched it again for like the thousandth time.  I loved that movie so much when I was little.  I remember making my dad go rent it all the time until my brother figured out how to hook up two VCRs so that I could make a bootleg copy for myself.  I am aware of how that not only dates me, but how terming me and my brother as bootleggers makes us seem way cooler than we ever were.  Anywho, as I was watching, I noticed the fact that Jennifer Connelly really didn't give a stellar performance in this movie.  Don't get me wrong,  I wouldn't change it for the world, but she didn't really set the screen on fire.  Now I think it's safe to say that she's probably considered one of the better movie actresses of the day.  I don't know that I'd call her a "movie star" really, but I think that has more to do with how she seems to avoid the whole celebrity scene than how she's viewed as a talent.  It would be easy enough to say that this was one of the first movies she'd ever been in so her talent was still raw, in its infancy maybe.  But, I don't know how true that is.  My point (finally) is that I find her to be one of the most sporadically good actresses I've ever seen.  It's not just that she's been in some bad movies; that's even happened to Meryl Streep...I'm looking at you She Devil.  No, it's that her actual performances seem to vacillate between fantastically good to really quite bad.  For instance, she gave  wonderful performances in A Beautiful Mind, Requiem for a Dream, and  Creation (a movie I saw just last week in which she gave a brilliantly understated performance).  However, I remember her performances in Blood Diamond, Mulholland Falls, and Dark City as being quite awful really.  I enjoyed all of these movies, but she was just subpar in all three.  I thought that maybe it was just that she was paired with some pretty heavy talent in these, e.g. Leonardo DiCaprio and Nick Nolte (Blood Diamond and Mulholland Falls, respectively).  I suppose any flaws in your acting are probably much more noticeable when you're sharing the screen with people of that caliber.  However, she held her own quite beautifully with Russell Crowe and Kate Winslet (Beautiful Mind and Little Children).  She's really a puzzle to me.  I won't even go into the fact that I was put-off her for years by the fact that she reminds me of a very beautiful version of the not-so-beautiful girl to whom my brother used to be married.  That's an entry for another day.  Maybe I can have the most oddly specific livejournal ever dedicated to an actress that isn't a fansite.  I shall mull that over as a possible New Year's resolution.  Anyway, here's my attempt at actually journaling here.  My more artsy friends have been encouraging me to do this for a while in between sipping on their organic soy lattes and playing endless rounds of hacky-sack.  I have resisted admirably so far, but finally got drawn into this whole LJ thing by first reading some truly, awesomely wonderful fanfic and then attempting writing some of my own.  I thought I'd give a try to actually just journaling here to see how it goes.  So, thank you Jennifer Connelly for inspiring my first rambling journal entry.  All this having been said, if you haven't seen Labyrinth, watch it immediately; and if you haven't read "The Top-Secret Livejournal of Sherlock Holmes," go read it at :  http://community.livejournal.com/sherlockbbc/1495641.html.  So, oh stranger, if you've somehow stumbled across this entry in the vast desert of LJ that is just a small corner of the vast wasteland that is teh internets, I hope you have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.  God bless us, everyone!