I HID THIS UNCOMFORTABLE PIECE OF METAL UP MY ASS FOR TWO YEARS: Over at Matt Zoller Seitz's The House Next Door, Jeremiah Kipp lists his five favorite Christopher Walken performances. Then he kind of cheats and gives us eight more. It's a nice reminder of how great Walken can be in highbrow (The Deer Hunter), middlebrow (Pulp Fiction; Catch Me If You Can; that Fatboy Slim video), and lowbrow (SNL) fare. One performance that I'd mention but that Kipp didn't (and this is definitely in the latter category) is Walken's Secretary Cleary in Wedding Crashers, where Walken economically gives Cleary gravity, sympathy, and humor without ever slipping into the kind of self-parody that his contemporary DeNiro did in late-career ATM withdrawals like Meet the Parents.
I can't think of another actor who I think does so well across the movie-quality spectrum. Baldwin is a little light in the highbrow department, and while at some point I may have conceded Gary Oldman, he kind of lost his mind a little about 10 years ago. Thoughts?
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