Red Black and Blue
Brownlow Medallist
minimalism is the emperor new clothes.
a drawing of a can of soup is not effing art
a white wall with a plain white table does not make a satisfying dining room and
some slightly raised eyebrows with little expression and dialogue that an 8 year old can understand is not great television.
It’s nothing to do with minimalism. The scene is natural, full of movement and clutter. For the characters it an exercise in emotional restraint, which is far truer to life than any bombastic drama. An 8 year old wouldn’t understand the ramifications of any of the subtext. They certainly like dragons though.
There’s an old video of Oliver Reed talking about how to act, he says it’s easy, you just need to be quiet for a bit and then explode. That is what people have perceived as their baseline for good acting for years, “I could have been a contender”, when it’s the easiest trick for actors to pull off. Restraint is where it’s been since The Wire, that is the new bench mark.
Dont get me wrong, battles were enjoyable. But action sequences only work in the context of the world they exist in. The last 3 seasons were full of dragons and action. Yet no one likes them, because they lost their subtlety and world building.
Ultimately part of what good writing is is the ability to communicate subtext, to say one thing and have it convey another meaning, good acting is pulling off that doublespeak effectively.
Season 1 of the boys did that well,
Elizabeth Shue was particularly good as was Karl Urban and to a lesser extent Antony Starr, the later more obviously switching between personas.
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