Is Ben Foster the Best Actor in American Film Today?

posted by Jett Loe

UPDATE: Our Ben Foster Podcast Interview on ‘The Messenger’ is Now Online – Click Here to Listen or Click Here to Subscribe for Free to the Podcast and have the interview downloaded automatically.

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He just may be.

Watching 3:10 to Yuma I couldn’t take my eyes off him.  I kept thinking ‘who is this guy’ during the film.  It takes something real special to burn up the screen when you’re surrounded by Christian Bale, (link NSFW), and Russell Crowe.

Was reminded of Minority Report, when ‘new to the big screen’ Colin Farrell blew Tom Cruise away with his intensity – of course it helped that the character he was playing was ambitious, a threat and possible replacement of Cruise.  Unfortunately for some, Farrell’s career as a leading man hasn’t panned out, but here’s hoping he segues gracefully into a sturdy, yet interesting character actor.

Ben Foster is something else though.  Look at the shot above.  Brilliant torment, he could be playing Van Gogh.  Unfortunately he’s stuck in the aggressively bad vampire flick 30 Days of Night.

30 Days is one of those films with ‘CSI Syndrome’ – you know the type, where people have jobs like ‘Fire Marshal’ and yet are absurdly, impossibly beautiful.  So much so that you can’t concentrate on the film because you’re thinking – if they’re so good looking wouldn’t they have left their small Alaskan town and got a job in modeling?

Anyhew, this terrible film is graced with the presence of Foster who, using the latest CGI technology, has obviously been digitally inserted from a different, much better film.

I don’t know why he’s in 30 Days, unless a) he lost a bet, or b) he belongs to some super-secret league of character actors who’ve made a pact to only appear in bad pictures.  I’m hoping it’s ‘b’, cause that be cool.  They wouldn’t even have to make a pact – it would just be nifty if character actors had a secret society – do you think they would excommunicate Richard Jenkins cause he carried a picture?

Regardless of the reason why he’s there, Foster is the best thing in the movie.  As in 3:10 there’s a sense of history, of torments unknown, of character forged from terrible hardship, of an abandoned child desperately trying to piece together an identity from the scraps he’s been left from some unnameable terror.

I can’t wait to see his next movie.  I’m hoping it’s a serious drama that will really challenge him and give the cinema something new.  Let me just look it up on IMDB.

Oh.

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(Re: losing a bet and having to appear in a movie; the leader of the vampires in 30 days?  Danny Huston.  What?)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 at 4:43 pm. It is filed under Blog, Character Actors, Horror, Jett Loe, Jett Loe Reviews, On Acting, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.