In my review of Enough Said, I write that the performance of Albert by James Gandolfini was the perfect role for his final movie. Albert was such a likable character in that movie. There were no hidden agendas. The man had some flaws, but those flaws weren’t any worse than the flaws you or I have. I wrote that review when I believed Enough Said was Gandolfini’s final movie before he passed away. I still love his role in this movie, but I’m so glad there was still a movie in post-production that I did not know about. The Drop was a fantastic final film for him, and it could earn him a posthumous Best Supporting Actor Academy Award nomination. In this film, Gandolfini returns to what he is most known for as an actor. He’s a little shady, and there always seems to be more about him than meets the eye. With that sly smile of his eyes, his under-the-breath chuckle, and his ability to say something to one person that is so very endearing one minute, but something to another character that is so brutally honest that it makes the person who is speaking feel stupid the next, Gandolfini is a master of disguising his characters and their intentions. He may have turned in the best big screen performance of his career with his final one.
Continue reading The Drop (2014)
Category Archives: James Gandolfini
Enough Said (2013)
It is unfortunate that director Nicole Holofcener (Friends With Money, Lovely and Amazing) Enough Said was the last film that James Gandolfini (television’s The Sopranos, The Last Castle) completed before his untimely death, but what a lasting impression he will leave with the mass public in the most real and honest movie of 2013. Gandolfini has frightened us on the big and small screens for the last 20 years. He has played some of the vilest characters and some of the meanest. Like me, you might go into this movie thinking Gandolfini and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in a romantic dramedy. There’s A) No chance it will be good, and B) Even if the critics somehow give it a positive review, there is no way I will give it a chance because it will be so unbelievable. Just like with Gandolfini as some mobster, hard military man, or hitman, we think of Louis-Dreyfus as the queen of goofy television comedies like Seinfeld, Veep, and The New Adventures of Old Christine. There is no way this movie could ever work in the world, right? Well, I will say unequivocally that this assumption is wrong. This movie is not just good. It is great. The chemistry between Gandolfini and Louis-Dreyfus is not something that just gets by. It is something that works effortlessly.
Continue reading Enough Said (2013)