Alternative Rubrics

I was explaining to my eternal companion my scale of actors, who are in my opinion better or worse, and why they might be A-list as opposed to B, C etc.
My scale is the Peter O'Toole scale of actors, with a given actor more or less like Peter. Had I been exposed to Richard Burton at an earlier age, however, I might have picked him, but then again I might not. I haven't really seen anything of Richard's I liked much unless it was Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf with Liz Taylor. He was pretty good in that, but natually Liz was better, as she was better than he in The Taming of the Shrew another play they brought to the big screen. Richard does however score a high Peter mark for being a diva, for truly throwing himself into the role, and most of all for believing totally that this is what the audience wants to see, him flopping all over the screen like a mouse in a trap. I should say like a horse maybe, but I wanted to capture the energy without evoking the muscular structure of a horse. The problem with my similie is that a mouse is small, but Richard and Peter are both larger than life when they come onto the screen. They simply suck the marrow from the celluloid.

Let's take two similiar (in my mind) actresses, Glenn Close and Meryl Streep. I would give Glenn a higher Peter rating for her gravity, her divaness, and her scene chewing ability. Meryl on the other hand, I rank as a high B actress, someone who doesn't have the gravity, someone who at best is a housewife on a farm, badgered by forces she can't control. In Devil Wears Prada which I saw Saturday, she does a good job, but she's never truly evil. I think that's more the fault of the director and the screenwriter of course, so in a sense she wasn't allowed to be as cold as maybe she is capable of, but at the same time there's that elusive quality of 'gravity,' which I don't know how (yet) to explain better.

While we're on the topic of alternative rubrics, I had a rubric related to my reading on my commute. My commute at one time was approximately 30 pages long, measured by the number of pages I could read during the trip. Of course this wasn't very scientific but it was fun while it lasted, which was approximately 350 pages.

Ok I'm done now. I'm off to read Wil Wheaton's blog.