There has never been a better time to be a bad actor

It's this second type of bad acting — reputable bad acting — that's leading the present flowering of the form. No longer the preserve of amateur musicals and pornos, bad acting has come in from the margins. It enjoys both critical acclaim and mainstream popularity. Bad acting, in short, is now a legitimate pursuit of the professional cultural elite. True, this is nothing more than my opinion; whether something constitutes good or bad acting is entirely a matter of personal taste. But look at the recent output from the streaming services and you won't have to work hard to find actors actoring.
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Emotional inauthenticity of this variety is not the only sin committed in the new golden age of bad acting. Gestural gimmicks and silly voices are all present in equal, if not greater, number. Winona Ryder's crazy facial contortions — eyes dilating, nose pinched, mouth aquiver — gave the first season of Stranger Things much of its emotional vibrancy, but she returns to the gimmick so often in the second season it's as if she's permanently one frame away from dissolving into the "melting Nazi" gif from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Remove the dialogue and Ryder's scenes could easily pass as stock patient footage in an ad for medicine to fix opioid-induced constipation

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There has never been a better time to be a bad actor

A lot of the writing is God Awful as well.....There are for me two main angles here, One is that we increasingly suck at our work but I talk about that all the time so let's move on to #2 shall we......that our suckage is cheered and adored. We have seen this is music for some time, bands to go out and put on a crap show on purpose, there were the grunge bands and before that a lot of Punk which clearly was going for the "We are so bad we are good" vibe, and now it has spread everywhere. I am increasingly finding that stuff on Netflix for instance ( and I am talking about the movies not their stuff, because I have rarely watched made for Netflix fare, and it sounds like maybe I would not like it if I did) is so bad that I cant finish it, I get 15 -30 minutes in and the movie becomes unbearable, often these movies rate pretty well on Rotten Tomatoes too. Many times these movies I cant finish I decide are drivel, they are pure fantasy and not well done fantasy at that, it like some high schoolers got together and said "This would be such a fun scene to shoot" so they do, even though the scene makes no sense and even though even if it did make sense it would not fit in with the rest of the movie. What I see on the screen so often now looks like people who are just screwing around, not even trying to say anything or make anything of quality.


Why do we cheer the crap? Why is there so much crap in America now? Is Hollywood ever going to try to get back to doing good work, even if maybe they have to cut back on the production rates? Would that work....if Hollywood attempted to do less but better could they even pull it off?

Pick a question, or make one of your own.

This is, to be clear, no bad thing. As the beast of TV content expands and the plots grow flabbier, it's becoming clear that bad acting — especially reputable bad acting, with its furrowed, methodly earnestness and pretensions to intellectual depth — can be just as enjoyable to watch as good acting. "Virtuosity is for the arrogant," says Jude Law in The Young Pope. But stunt voices, patchy accents, fake emotion, and — since acting is, first of all, a job — professional incompetence: These are pleasures open to everyone.

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I say no, I say that profession incompetence in America is way out of control, I say that it sucks and I want to know why Hollywood sucks so badly but more than that I want to know why we cheer on the suckage....why we seem to have so little interest in better....why dont we hunger for quality anymore?