Hey just wanted to stop by here to say that I love your movie reviews.

This is an ongoing debate. Which is more difficult: Acting like a normal person, or acting like a very strange person? The former being the leading man and the latter being the character actor. Most actors enjoy the character parts much more, even though the big bucks are made as a leading man. I will say, however that it can be equally as daunting a task to play the everyman character. The type of character that Hanks plays and Cruise plays and well, just about every leading man with a quick wit and nice smile. While the character role allows the actor to really dig into the psyche of an individual most would find odd, how does one play a character that would otherwise be thought of as a normal guy. Most actors choose to play themselves in this instance, and rightly so, although they are often criticised for "just being themselves." But, what non-actors don't realize is the word "acting" is a misnomer. Actors are trained, not to act, but to become. If you have to play a guy on a train, act like you would on a train. If you are playing a retarded guy, act as if you are retarded, not like a retarded guy you know down the street. Actors are trained to act like themselves in any situation. So, if you are transformed then you are really only acting like you would act had you lived that life. This is especially hard to do if you are portraying a real person since you aren't creating as much as you are mimicking. I think the trick here is to go through the process like you normally would and then encorporate the idiosincracies of that particular individual only after the fact. Since I've never protrayed a real person (or at least a real person in the modern era with TV, video, etc.) I've never had to deal with this.

You probably didn't need to hear all of that, especially since it only vaguely dealt with the topic of the review, but I wrote it anyway.