Chris Scott

I saw “Yes Man” yesterday and I must say—I was very impressed. Jim Carrey captured his role perfectly, and once again proved himself to be the master of faces. I have noticed from Jim Carrey’s acting that he has mastered non-verbal communication, mostly from the use of facial posture. Of course his script, pronunciation and body movement are usually good as well; most of the comedy comes from his face.

I think that is a key characteristic of any actor/actress—to have excellent non-verbal communication. The quality of the material is left up to the writer, the actors’ job is to deliver the writer’s material. When it comes to movies and TV, I like to value the acting over the material (script). Imagine if anyone else (other than Jim Carrey) took the role of “Ace Venture: Pet Detective”? It’s hard to imagine that anyone else could communicate what Carrey did.

Imagine if you read the script before watching “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,” my guess is that you would probably excuse the material as poor. This goes to show that the quality of a film is largely left up to the quality of its actors.

This is why I don’t always expect good movies from highly acclaimed directors like Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese. The best movies often come from the doing of underdog directors, and their success is left up to contributions from well-allotted actors.

Take a look at M. Night Shyamalan’s latest work. I used to be a huge fan of his movies; “The Sixth Sense,” “Signs,” “Unbreakable” and “The Village” are among my favorites. Yet he continues to surprise me with poor productions such as “Lady in the Water,” and “The Happening.” I’m not going to go so far as to say that a movie’s success entirely depends on the level of acting, but I will say that a movie cannot be successful without excellent acting. You never hear people say “WOW! That was an excellent movie! Except for the acting sucked …”

I believe the formula goes like this: Acting–>Material–>Success.

You may think that this is an obvious point, but consider that formula re-written: Material–>Acting–>Success. It won’t work.

Good acting can make good material, but good material cannot make good acting. The actor is the interpreter, and a good actor is a good interpreter. It is the actor’s job to decode the script and display it to the audience, and despite what many people may think, the audience is not the main interpreter, but mostly just a receiver.

Although the audience has a small level of interpretation, the level of interpretation depends entirely upon the medium. In my opinion, you’re less capable of creating your own interpretations from mediums like TV and movies, and more capable from reading books, articles and the like. That puts television and movies in a much different category because of the fact that we are more vulnerable to adopting the intended interpretations of its producers and actors than that of our own.

If a medium is text based (like books & articles), the acting is really in the words themselves. There is no in-between or mediator to make interpretations for you. Your view on the meaning of those words determines interpretation, and is therefore more likely a self-interpretation.

Right now you are making a self-interpretation of my article. You have pre-conceived biases and meanings attached to every word, combination of words and principles formed by those words. Your interpretation is largely your own. I can alter the result of that interpretation with my choice of words, but I can never intentionally form your own interpretation. Yet if I wrote a play to convey the same message, there would be less room for your interpretation and more room for mine. I think this is why parables, metaphors, similes (or any expression that simplifies a complex thing using comparison) are so powerful; the audience is often forced to hear the author’s interpretation. It’s like the closest thing you can get to actually ‘showing’ the reader and it mimics what a TV show, movie or play would do.

Anyway I’m speaking out of my rear here (much like Ave Ventura does), and my original point was that Jim Carrey is a master of communication, specifically comical communication. He displayed that well in “Yes Man,” and had me laughing profusely. Yesterday was a groggy, rainy day (in fact the whole week was) and I really needed something like that to tickle my funny bone. Amazing what you can get for a dollar!