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Music
Louisville lips
The two women behind Freakwater have a story to get off their chests.
By Jeff Stark
[09/07/99]

Music Review
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With a new score for the original "Dracula," Philip Glass and the Kronos Quartet allow the children of the night to sing once again.
By Stacey Kors
[09/07/99]

Movies
When good actors go bad
Robin Williams is a comic genius. So why has he become unbearable?
By Stephanie Zacharek
[09/03/99]

Movie Review
"Chill Factor"
Chemo-terrorists! Car crashes! Ice cream men! But not even Cuba Gooding Jr. can thaw out this late-summer dud.
By Stephanie Zacharek
[09/03/99]

Music Review
Sharps & flats
The "Stigmata" soundtrack stars Smashing Pumpkin Billy Corgan and his experimental art of demonic composition.
By Michelle Goldberg
[09/03/99]

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The assumption is that singers are cast for their marquee value rather than their acting skills. But for decades, singers have often proved to be relaxed and natural in front of the camera, approaching a role as instinctively as they approach a song. Just scan this short list of musicians who have turned in performances ranging from good to sensational: Frank Sinatra, Willie Nelson, David Bowie, Dean Martin, Queen Latifah, the Ices Cube and T, the Wahlbergs Mark and Donnie, Bette Midler and Al Jolson.

In the movies -- which are far more intimate than the stage -- it's possible for performers to get by on presence and personality. Some of the most delightful people ever to appear in the movies -- Sophia Loren, Brigitte Bardot, Clark Gable -- have really been more personalities than actors. (And some first-rate actors, like Garbo or Bogart, have been more remembered -- and loved -- for their presence.)

That movies are a place for personalities to shine may be at the root of why directors and producers have looked at the alter egos singers project on stage and seen the potential for them to translate those personas into various roles. Some of those translations are obvious, like the laid-back hipster Frank Sinatra portrayed in musicals and comedies, the gangsta kingpin Ice-T plays in "Trespass" or the coal miner Levon Helm plays to moving perfection in "Coal Miner's Daughter" (a character who might have come right out of one of the Band's songs). Others, like Marc Wahlberg's shining young porno stud in "Boogie Nights," are nearly satirical extrapolations of singers' music personas. Others, like Sinatra's junkie in "The Man With the Golden Arm," are unexpected and startling.

Movies should be a place for non-actors to shine, and not just singers, but comics and perhaps even some athletes. In "The Princess Bride" the pleasure of watching the late wrestler Andre the Giant has nothing to do with acting and everything to do with him as a personality, the way he reacts to the other actors with his sleepy eyes and slow, sweet smile, or the absurd joke of watching Wallace Shawn, Mandy Patankin and Robin Wright cling to his 500-pound frame as he hauls them up a cliff-side. You have to wonder how many other untapped personalities are out there, ready to bring the peculiar pleasures of their own presence to the movies. One of the things that's keeping singers from the screen is that the movies have all but abandoned musicals. But even a pleasant, lightweight musical like last summer's "Dance With Me" can give you a taste of what we're missing, in Vanessa Williams' performance (she's billed as Vanessa L. Williams to distinguish her from another actress who shares her name). It seems to me a real loss that someone who can sing and dance -- and whose acting has grown in each picture she's appeared in -- as spectacularly as Williams can, and who's drop-dead stunning to boot, is working at a time when movies don't seem interested in those talents.

Certainly not all singers have come to life in front of the camera. Playing a bored, self-involved rock star in "Performance," Mick Jagger acts like a bored, self-involved rock star -- until he performs the sensational "Memo From Turner" and just about leaps through the camera lens (that is to say, until he gets to be "Mick Jagger"). Bob Dylan is a cryptic, mumbling mess in one of the most cryptic of all movie roles in Sam Peckinpah's "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" (it's his score for the movie that teems with emotion). Elvis Presley never found a way to translate his onstage energy to his acting roles (though given the roles he was offered, who could blame him?). And there are some performers whose personalities seem suited to only one peculiar role. What makes David Bowie so touching in "The Man Who Fell to Earth" is that he seems -- and looks -- like an alien who's landed among mortals. (Though, to be fair, his appearance in "Absolute Beginners" brought that slack movie some performance rhythm, and his Pontious Pilate in "The Last Temptation of Christ" wouldn't have been out of place in a David Lean epic.) Some performers are so idiosyncratic that it's nearly impossible to imagine them expressing themselves anywhere but in their music. I wouldn't be anxious to see Van Morrison or Captain Beefheart or Nina Simone act. Even a straightforward performer like Bruce Springsteen, whose stage patter and interviews are often good-naturedly goofy, might be too loose if he were deprived of the tension and drama that make his live shows so riveting, so simultaneously exhausting and exhilarating.

Singers making their first appearance in movies often have yet to learn the ways in which professional actors protect themselves. They haven't learned how to structure a performance to keep from burning themselves out. That lack of protection is precisely what makes Bette Midler's movie debut in "The Rose" so electrifying; watching her you feel there's a danger that she might short-circuit at any moment. But there's an utter absence of vanity in the way she presents herself as both ravaged and willing to be ravished by the audiences who've shown up to groove on her misery. (Courtney Love has some of the same effect in "The People vs. Larry Flynt." But in that movie you get the uncomfortable feeling that the director, Milos Forman, is one of the people grooving on her dishevelment; his lumpen style does nothing to help her shape the performance.)

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