Morgan Freeman was robbed that year at the oscars
Damn was he good in his role! I almost couldn't believe how credibly he was playing the old man towards the end.
The Morgan Freeman we have seen in the last 10-15 years was never has good as this one. I mean sure, he is undoubtedly a good actor, but in most, if not all of his roles lately, he has been playing the exact same character over and over to such an extent that i came to think that, as good as he was indeed playing it, he only had one character in his repertoire. Happy to see it is not the case at all! Before becoming this variation of the same character he has become, Freeman was a versatile actor with a wide-range.
What i am saying about him is true for a lot, if not most, of other leading name actors out there and especially after a several years-long career, they all tend to become a caricature of themselves and loose all creativity. Either that, or the idea that an actor can reinvent himself virtually endlessly and portray an infinite amount of roles is a mere Hollywood myth.
My take is, at the end of the day, de Niro is playing de Niro, di Caprio is playing di Caprio, Hanks is playing Hanks and Day-Lewis is playing Day-Lewis. But before that fateful transformation into a caricature, there seems to be a short period of time around the beginning of their career when all those stars were at their peak creatively and artistically delivering oscar-worthy performance after oscar-worthy performance. Unfortunately however, this glorious period fades generally right when the star in question becomes such a superstar that he thinks he isn't a human anymore, he is a god. That's when everything goes down the drain.
This doesn't apply to every single A-lister out there, but i do think there's a clear tendency, and it's true for probably all forms of art, from singing to dancing to painting; stardom is to the artist what the sun was to Icarus.
Anyway, pretty good movie, very touching, the ending had me in tears. Chateaubriand said "La vieillesse est un naufrage", which translates into "Old age is a shipwreck" and as beautiful this movie was, i still think this to be terribly true. The only fair thing about old age is that we will all have to go through it... if we're lucky! Jesus, how depressing... Anyway.
8/10
People who don't like their beliefs being laughed at shouldn't have such funny beliefsī²