James Ransone.

b. 2nd June, 1979.
Last week with Art Hindle I was talking about a guy whose overacting detracted from the quality of the films he was in, but James Ransone often acts 'big', overacts, appears borderline hysterical onscreen, and it works, dammit. You probably recognise the guy as Ziggy Sobotka in series two of The Wire, or as Corporal Josh Person in Generation Kill. He's also shown up in Treme and Law and Order. I loved him as Ziggy - such a pathetic character, who wanted so hard to fit in and be one of the boys, but whose tantrums and idiocies got in his way. He was funny, but there was also a lot of frustration at not being able to be cool no matter how hard he tried that I really empathised with. 
      I first saw Ransone in John Waters' A Dirty Shame, where he plays a character aroused by dirt (he chews lovingly on a used tissue Tracy Ullman's character tosses to him), and since then have been rewarded with many "hey it's that one guy" moments. I got to see Larry Clark's Ken Park recently, which I liked, but I especially loved Ransone's psychotic character, Tate. The Scrabble game with his grandparents that devolves into triumphant screamed accusations of cheating is a particular highlight. The film also contains some fairly explicit masturbation and nudity courtesy of Ransone (I was going to include that as the picture for this week, but then I felt like a creeper.) I think he shows up nude quite a lot in general, and is also getting handsomer and handsomer with age. Hence the culty following he seems to be accruing: for more photos of the man than you can shake a stick at, check out this tumblr Fuck Yeah, James PJ Ransone!  It's just full of shirtless and broody.

Art Hindle.

b. July 21st , 1948.
I do love horror movies, and one of my all time favourites is The Brood (d.David Cronenberg, 1979.) I've watched it many times but still find it pretty scary - it's about a father, Frank Carveth, whose wife is in an experimental psychiatric facility, where patients are trained to allow their emotional pain to manifest as physical afflictions. Whenever Carveth's wife feels hurt or wronged by someone, mysterious deformed children show up and bludgeon them to death. Like all good Cronenberg, the film makes you feel really disgusting about your own body, and aware of how vulnerable your mental health can be. There are some wonderful performances in this movie as well - Samantha Eggar as the disturbed Nola Carveth, a great child performance by Cindy Hinds as her daughter, an ice cold and creepy Oliver Reed as the psychiatrist. But what the film really needs to hold it all together is a well-played, grounded portrayal of Frank Carveth, who is one of the only sane and responsible characters in the film. The fascinating flaw of The Brood is that Art Hindle plays Carveth, well... kinda terribly. His eye rolling and scenery chewing and hammy yelling are particularly embarrassing next to the gravitas of Reed. I have a lot of affection for this frightening little movie, and I even have affection for Hindle's ridiculous performance, but a lot of the blame for why this isn't a great movie rests on his shoulders, in my opinion.
      Hindle is from Toronto, and was encouraged to pursue a career on the screen by his uncle, character actor Michael Kane (not Michael Caine, as the IMDB claims.) He's been in many, many films from 1971 to the present, most of them Canadian, and is best known for his roles in the TV series Paradise Falls, and the 1978 Phillip Kaufman version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which his acting is serviceable but not outstanding. I first saw him in a horrible made for TV movie called Liar, Liar (1993) (not the Jim Carrey comedy.) It's about a father who is brutally sodomising his children, and when his eleven year old daughter reports the abuse, no one believes her.  The father is played with much creepy intensity by Hindle. For some god-unknown reason we were shown this film in our Social Education class in highschool, leaving us all traumatised.