Day 19 - Best movie cast
This is where my, up to this point, unspoken rule of picking a different film for every day of the meme is coming in handy. Since I already talked about some of my all-time favorites films containing some of my all-time favorite casts such as Serenity, Love Actually, Moulin Rouge, Lord of the Rings, and Clue, the pool of movies to choose from gets that much smaller.
And yet when one thinks of best ensembles, one should immediately think of Robert Altman who has given us movies with large casts and made them shine. His last film before his death in 2006, A Prairie Home Companion, put the likes of Meryl Streep with Lindsay Lohan, Woody Harrelson, Lily Tomlin, Maya Rudolph, and Virginia Madsen showing off the director's skill in putting together interesting and effective ensembles.
With that said, I actually picked another Altman film with probably an even better cast than the one I just listed and it's more or less because it's one of my favorite films (and cast) of all-time. Gosford Park came out in 2001 and the cast list is just phenomenal. It would be too much to name them all, but I will point out that the movie had Maggie Smith, Helen Mirren, Michael Gambon, Ryan Philippe, Emily Watson, Clive Owen, Kelly Macdonald, Tom Hollander, Stephen Frey, Eileen Atkins, Kristin Scott Thomas, and many many more. While Altman was surely adept at directing this massive cast, it was the Academy-winning script by writer Julian Fellowes that really showed off each member of the cast without making the film feel crowded. It's no surprise then that the cast won the Best Ensemble Award at that year's Screen Actors Guild Awards.
As a sidenote, this film was distributed by USA Films which is now known as Focus Features. By the end of this meme, I should really count how many films I mentioned this past month were released by Focus Features.
Oh God, this movie is just brilliance. I love seeing it recognised because so many don't like it.
ReplyDelete