bluetoast

I've been hearing this everywhere, but are people completely forgetting A Time to Kill, Contact, Dazed and Confused, hell even Tropic Thunder? Sure he did a ton of romantic comedies, but he's been in good things all along.

Yes over the last 2-3 years he's been doing better work, and a couple good movies per year, but it's not like it wasn't in him.

Mr. Salty

I haven't read that anywhere. Maybe you can post some examples.

majorjoe23

I think there was some MM backlash starting around 2000 or so, but I still think he was great in A Time to Kill.

Count Dooku

2001 The Wedding Planner
2003 How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
2005 Sahara
2006 Failure to Launch
2008 Fool's Gold
2009 Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (which I like)

He was in other movies of varying quality, but he basically spent an entire decade playing the lead in shitty romantic comedies.

Count Dooku

Pick up any magazine or watch any TV show that discusses M McC's Oscar prospects.

Or find his SAG acceptance speech from a couple weeks ago.

Giantrobo

I'm guessing it's because of "True Detective" and "Dallas Buyer's Club".

Why So Blu?

He's always been good. It was the fact that he was doing all of those lame romcom flicks that pissed people off.

JumpCutz

It actually pre-dated that work. It really started with his work in Killer Joe, Bernie, Mud, and Magic Mike.

Shannon Nutt

I don't think people are saying he finally got "good" - more like he finally stopped cashing paychecks and made smarter choices with his roles. This seems to have started right around the time he made LINCOLN LAWYER. It also seems to have started around the time he made the decision to get married - so perhaps we can thank Mrs. McConaughey for the 're-branding' of his career.

inri222

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/new...falcone-666370

How Matthew McConaughey Changed the Narrative of His Career

"Mud" producer Lisa Maria Falcone on the 44-year-old actor's turn from rom-com lead to acting tour de force: "I see this intensity in his eyes, you know this guy is going to kill it."

Lisa Maria Falcone, the Mud producer, describes how the 44-year-old actor's commitment to his craft catapulted him from rom-com lead to acting tour de force.

For most of his career, Matthew had been put in a box as a comedic actor or a romantic-comedy leading man, and obviously, he was very successful doing that. But he had the guts to say, "Hey, you know what, I am a great actor, period, and I want to stretch." He had so many other opportunities for much better paydays, but he said he wanted to do Mud, to do it for scale, and he gave his heart and soul. So he took on this small project for very little money, and he camped out on that island [in the Mississippi River], the site where the movie was shot. He didn't want to stay in a hotel because he really wanted to become this character. That says a lot about a person and his respect for the craft.

His recent roles -- in Magic Mike, Mud and Dallas Buyers Club, for example *-- illustrate the kind of maverick spirit he has. A lot of actors are not capable of moving outside of their comfort zones and taking risks because it's too scary. But when I speak to him, and I see this intensity in his eyes, you know this guy is going to kill it because he's ready and he has removed all doubt. There was a scene in Mud that stands out: when he is hitting the sand, and he's hitting it extremely hard to the point where his hands were bleeding. You know, most actors will have somebody stand in in a similar situation. But no, he did it on his own. He pretty much was his own stunt man. He is so unique. On the one hand, he's a family man, but at the same time, he'll do whatever it takes to be the character. And it wasn't about his ego because there was none. It was strictly about a man who enjoyed the process of doing something that he loves without having somebody else write the narrative of his career.

bluetoast

Which is precisely what I acknowledged in my opening post, yet that article fails to discuss his dramatic roles prior to this resurgence.

inri222

http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/movi...3OM/story.html

McConaughey: An actor’s rebirth

Five years ago, Matthew McConaughey generated headlines mostly for his bongo-drumming playboy persona, frequent state of shirtless-ness, and famously sculpted physique.

Today, the man who has materialized inside a Manhattan hotel suite to talk about his new film, “Mud,” has been radically transformed from his former party-boy days. After flaunting his chiseled body in hot pants and a half shirt in 2012’s “Magic Mike,” the actor underwent a dramatic physical change last year — shedding more than 45 pounds — to portray Ron Woodroof, an AIDS-stricken, drug treatment crusader in the forthcoming drama “Dallas Buyers Club,” due out in the fall. Gone are the once-sprawling set of pecs, cascading locks, and facial scruff that helped land him the title of People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive in 2005.

McConaughey, who has gained back some of the weight, still cuts a handsome figure, but he sports a slimmer build and a leaner, clean-shaven mug. Yet his dreamy Texas drawl and unfussy introspection remain, as does his easygoing bonhomie and the thousand-watt smile that could charm the habit off a Benedictine nun.

McConaughey’s physical transformation also reflects the onscreen reinvention that he’s been busy crafting over the past several years. He was once best known for his breakthrough role as skirt-chasing stoner Wooderson in the cult classic “Dazed and Confused,” and for dramas like “A Time to Kill,” “Lone Star,” “Contact,” and “We Are Marshall,” But the 43-year-old actor had become mired in empty-calorie rom-coms — “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days,” “Failure to Launch,” “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past” — playing his signature role of the roguish yet charming womanizer.

Then, last year, McConaughey began popping up in intriguing little indie gems like “Bernie,” “Killer Joe,” and “The Paperboy,” in parts ranging from a scarily sadistic cop with a fried chicken fetish to a closeted journalist with a dangerous yen for S&M. He even tweaked his own beefcake persona, creating a fully fleshed portrait of a sleazy-yet-seductive male strip club impresario in “Magic Mike,” a performance that earned him a best supporting actor award from the New York Film Critics Circle.

His latest film, “Mud,” finds McConaughey as a heartsick fugitive-drifter hiding out on an island in the Mississippi River, inside an old power boat that somehow came to rest high in the branches of a tree. When his title character is discovered by two teenage boys, he befriends them and enlists their help to reunite with the love of his life, Juniper (Reese Witherspoon), and to elude capture by some very bad men.

“The McConaissance,” as one glossy magazine dubbed his reinvention, even extends to his formerly free-spirited personal life. The actor, who’d once been arrested in Austin after cops found him at home loudly banging on his bongos in the buff, is now the married father of three children, all under the age of 5. There’s little time these days for impromptu road trips in his Airstream trailer or surfing sessions with buddies like Kelly Slater.

Of the career shift, McConaughey says it wasn’t about wanting to shed certain perceptions that the public had of him or fears of Hollywood pigeonholing. It was simply a desire to challenge himself as an actor.

“I was still receiving scripts that I liked. But it was stuff that I felt like I could do tomorrow or next week. There were some action films. There were some romantic comedies. But then I felt like, ‘You know what? I’m starting a family. I’m going to be a dad and hang around and get a homestead going. So I’m going to wait for something else to come my way,’” says McConaughey, in town on a short break from filming a new HBO series, “True Detective,” in New Orleans with his buddy Woody Harrelson.

“I was looking for something that was going to move the floor a little bit. Shake me. Scare me a little bit. Make me go, ‘Whoa! I don’t know what I’ll do with that role, but it’s turned me on. I’m attracted to it. Let’s go do it and find out.’ . . . And what happened is, because I said ‘no’ to some things that I probably would have taken before, all of a sudden, cyclically, these other things came back to me, and I started getting calls from [directors] Billy Friedkin, Steven Soderbergh, and Lee Daniels about these roles.”

When those parts did come his way, McConaughey credits his wife, Brazilian model Camila Alves, with pushing him to take the leap of faith — because he was reluctant to put his young family through the stress of shooting a bunch of films back-to-back.

“My wife was the one who goes, ‘Well, if you really want to do them, grab your cojones and let’s do it. I got your back,’ ” says the actor, flashing a blissful smile, clad in a snug, camel-colored leather jacket over a white T-shirt. “So we said, ‘Well, let’s get it on.’ And the family packed up and came around wherever dad went. . . . It’s hard to keep career, your love life, your parenthood life, your health, and your friendships all at a good level. Family life would be moving down into the debit section if I didn’t have them with me.”

Ever since director Jeff Nichols (“Take Shelter”) saw McConaughey’s performance as the mythic sheriff Buddy Deeds in the 1996 John Sayles film “Lone Star,” he had always pictured the actor playing Mud in the moody coming-of-age story that he was envisioning.

“It’s in the boys’ hands to decide whether or not they want to go back to the island to help Mud. So I needed somebody that was extremely likable. He had to be a compelling figure. And Matthew’s an innately likable guy,” says Nichols.

McConaughey says that he became enchanted with the mangy mysticism and mythic qualities of Mud, as well as with the film’s thematic explorations of the transition into manhood and the influence of male mentors, both true and false. To tap into Mud’s enduring love for Juniper, the actor thought back to when he was 14, the age of the two boys in the film — “before I knew better or knew worse about love, before I had my heart broken,” he says. “Because that’s where Mud lives.”

Does he identify with Mud’s perspective? “Matthew is much more pragmatic than Mud,” McConaughey responds. “But I know that side of Mud — and I know that side of myself.”

When the actor arrived on set halfway through production in Arkansas, having coming straight from filming “Magic Mike,” he asked the crew for a tent and a sleeping bag, so that he could camp out on the island. “He just wanted to be there by himself for a few nights, thinking about his character and the script,” Nichols says. “You always hear horror stories about actors wanting to go back to their trailer and not knowing their lines and all that. . . . So I was like, that’s rad. I knew then he was definitely the right guy for the job.”

McConaughey, who will be seen this fall in Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street,” might be in the middle of a career reinvention, but he’s still an actor with a clearly defined (albeit shifting) public persona — one who many moviegoers feel that they know intimately. So what’s the biggest misconception that we have about this likably mellow dude?

He considers the question for a moment, then leans forward and says, “Sometimes I’ll hear people say, ‘Oh, but that’s just you. You just rolled out of bed this morning and did that — just kind of off-the-cuff, you gave that performance.’ And I’m like, no, I work my butt off to make it appear that I rolled out of bed and just did that.”

bluetoast

No need to paste the entire article when the relevant quote will suffice. Too much clutter man!

GoldenJCJ

Pretty much. Case in point, where was this thread in the mid 2000's?

duff beer

I thought he was pretty good in TCM 4. Although Viggo was bomb in TCM3.

GuessWho

This may be the first time a Clive Cussler adventure book was ever labeled a "romantic comedy"

bootsy

I never thought he was bad. I like him in U-571, Frailty, and Reign of Fire along with the movies bluetoast mentioned. He just needed more consistency instead of a good movie and then two bad movies and then another ok movie. Now he's on a nice run.

Count Dooku

I know it is better described as an action comedy, but it does have Penelope Cruz in it and I just assume there is some romance between the leads.

Nevertheless, my statement is valid as written. Note the word "basically."

Why So Blu?

"California!"

Oliver Clothesoff

Yeah, for a long while, he was the best thing in a lot of bad movies.

inri222

Filmography w/RT rating

N//A - 2014 Interstellar
77% - 2013 The Wolf of Wall Street
93% - 2013 Dallas Buyers Club
80% - 2012 Magic Mike
98% - 2012 Mud
43% - 2012 The Paperboy
78% - 2011 Killer Joe
90% - 2011 Bernie
83% - 2011 The Lincoln Lawyer
26% - 2009 Ghosts of Girlfriends Past
00% - 2008 Surfer, Dude
83% - 2008 Tropic Thunder
11% - 2008 Fool's Gold
49% - 2006 We Are Marshall
24% - 2006 Failure to Launch
22% - 2005 Two for the Money
39% - 2005 Sahara
29% - 2003 Tiptoes
42% - 2003 How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
40% - 2002 Reign of Fire
73% - 2001 Frailty
82% - 2001 Thirteen Conversations About One Thing
17% - 2001 The Wedding Planner
68% - 2000 U-571
64% - 1999 Edtv
62% - 1998 The Newton Boys
76% - 1997 Amistad
63% - 1997 Contact
00% - 1996 Scorpion Spring
11% - 1996 Larger Than Life
67% - 1996 A Time to Kill
93% - 1996 Lone Star
00% - 1995 Glory Daze
73% - 1995 Boys on the Side
17% - 1994 Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation
35% - 1994 Angels in the Outfield
94% - 1993 Dazed and Confused

Goat3001

Yep. He's always been good and I can't blame the guy for making shitty romcoms and making millions of dollars. We'd all do the same thing, given the chance.

Goat3001

Angels in the Outfield got 35% on Rotten Tomatoes? I guess 65% of critics are dead inside.

Mike86

I think the problem before is he was just the pretty boy playing fluff roles whereas lately he's been taking on more roles that have substance to them. He wasn't necessarily a bad actor before he's just choosing better projects.

Rockmjd23

Wow he really went a whole decade where he did not headline a good movie.