The Ultimate Walt Disney Company Performances Bracket -- Round One, Day Twenty-Seven
I've been dreaming of a true love's kiss...
It’s not time for us to consider Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, despite what that photo may imply! (Talk about a missed opportunity for cross-promotion, huh? How is it that Steven Spielberg wasn’t convinced by Bob Iger to redo that classic show with Daniel Day-Lewis? I’m sure that would have been an extremely easy thing to convince these legendary figures to do!)
Anyway. Votes. You have to do that (voting, that is) four times today. In this post! Let’s go!
(4) Amy Poehler, Inside Out vs. (61) Tina Fey, Soul: Two very talented stalwarts from Saturday Night Live who each have experience at the Weekend Update desk, and they each voiced a lead character in a Pete Docter-directed Pixar film! Fun coincidence!
But it’s Amy Poehler all the way here. (And not just because — at least for me — Fey’s work in Soul has always felt inadvertently tilted towards the uncomfortable, as when you hear her voice coming out of a Black man’s body. Not Great, Bob!)
(29) James Marsden, Enchanted vs. (36) Denzel Washington, He Got Game: As noted yesterday, I think there are three MVPs in Enchanted, and James Marsden is the last of them. (You know how unfair it feels that Marsden didn’t get to morph into an action star a la Chris Pratt? Prince Edward feels an awful lot like a regal version of an Andy Dwyer type, and yet here we are with Marsden stuck in the godawful Sonic the Hedgehog movies.) Denzel Washington is one of the greatest living actors, and He Got Game is a solid drama, but I’m giving this one to Marsden. How about you?
(13) Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln vs. (52) Jeff Bridges, Tron: Well, this one’s pretty much a slam-dunk, right? I know, I know, some folks are heavily into the Tron series (whatever floats your boat), but look at it this way. When it was announced Daniel Day-Lewis would play the 16th President of the United States in a Steven Spielberg film, I imagine many of us thought “Well, he’s going to win the Oscar for that, right?” And so he did.
He’s going to win the poll today, right?
(20) Ben Kingsley, Iron Man 3 vs. (45) Owen Wilson, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou: If you know me well enough from my time on Twitter, then you may know that my favorite moment in any Marvel Cinematic Universe movie is when Tony Stark realizes that the Mandarin is actually a very soused British actor named Trevor Slattery. (Some people, I have come to understand, dislike this twist. But some people like anchovies on pizza, so who knows.) Ben Kingsley is not an actor whose work always hits the mark, but when it does, it hits big time. (Not Disney-related, but there are few more terrifying performances in the last 25 years than his work in Sexy Beast.)
So while Owen Wilson is fine in The Life Aquatic (a movie I have always wanted to like more than I do), I am very comfortable in giving the vote to Ben Kingsley. How about you?
There’s an alternate universe somewhere where James Marsden is a big movie star. He has serious leading man chops, but also range. His work on Westworld on HBO is criminally underrated (other actors deservedly get most of the credit on that show, but he’s an unsung hero). And yeah, he’s amazing in Enchanted, too. Heck, I liked him in the Sonic movies.
I remember first watching Soul and wondering why Tina Fey had to be 22 when Tiffany Haddish was right there. Who didn’t want to see her voice a Pixar character, right? With recent news, I’m glad she never got to do a role that so many children would see, but there’s no reason Fey should have played the role.