Summing up: weekends around here have turned into an outpost for clip jobs. For awhile there, that meant posting stuff that was actually good, more recently it's turned into a celebration of bad music.
Today we break that precedent! No bad music. Instead--bad acting!
Two classic examples today (and oddly, neither one involves Shatner), starting with the hilarious final scene from the 1966 campfest The Oscar. You get a brief glimpse of Tony Bennett's one and only dramatic role, but this belongs to Stephen Boyd, who devours far more than the minimun daily requirement of scenery. Boyd was never what you'd call a subtle actor, but honestly, after watching this, it's hard to believe he ever found work again.
Wow, that was...really bad. It's like a master class in the Art Of The Thespian compared to this, though, one of the most-mocked scenes in cinema history. Neil Diamond gave himself the lead in the inexplicable 1980 remake of The Jazz Singer, and his mumbling non-performance is in utter contrast to the jaw-droppingly overwrought hysterics of Sir Larry Olivier--because really, who better to portray an elderly cantor than a patrician Englishman? Maybe Olivier was really something on stage, but almost all of his film work displays an utter inability to scale back his tendency to play to the back row, and that combined with his generic mittel-European accent...He and Diamond barely seem to be from the same planet, much less father and son.
Oh, and did I say no Shatner? I lied.
