Well, like Quint said, she finds the right tone for the material. ("Man, Mrs. Dalloway is so great. I wonder how I can make it better? I know! I'll make it literal, tedious, and pandering!")

Lord knows I'm no great judge of acting, and I've only seen a handful of Meryl Streep movies (all of them from the last 20 years or so), but yes, I've always found her gratingly mannered and phony. On my second watching of Adaptation (a movie I adore) I noticed something akin to that "click click click" Berger refers to. Like in the scene where she's at the dinner party and goes to use the bathroom--she spends much of the scene laughing in a really phony manner (well, OK, that's probably deliberate) and then she catches sight of herself in the mirror, and CLICK! Suddenly she's ANGSTY AND TORMENTED!!! And she oversells every frickin' beat. So yeah--I'm perfectly willing to believe she was once the brilliant actress everyone says she is, but I haven't seen it.

Yeah! Prankster shows again that whatever he thinks, I think the opposite of!

Yeah, that's pretty ridiculous right there. Streep was awesome in Adaptation.

Were this Poker I'd be calling, Streep's hysterical in Adaptation. I think the sudden shifts were deliberate given that well, everything in the film was surreal.

(Shrug) What can I say? Whenever she's on screen, I can feel the effort. I'm by no means saying she's a bad actress, but in anything I've seen her in (which, again, is not *that* much), she doesn't feel even remotely natural, and she seems to pitch every emotion just a *bit* too high.

Here's the scene I'm talking about. You don't find that a little...mannered?

Yeah, no. I've seen Adaptation a bunch of times. If I'd thought she was "mannered," I wouldn't have initially disagreed with you.

I really didn't care much for the film, but Streep had nothing to do with that. In fact, I wanted more of the straight adaptation stuff with her in it than the Charlie Kaufman stuff, if anything.

Agree, actually. I loved The Orchid Thief, and the snippets of it that actually made it onto the screen were really good. Perhaps I'm just a traditionalist, as I felt much the same way about Tristram Shandy (the straight adaptations of Sterne? Great! Especially the hilarious "Uncle Toby and Widow Wadman in the garden" scene. The aimless bits in between with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon milling about on "set"? Not so great).

SISTER! I thought the same thing about Tristam Shandy.

To make Prankster feel better, I now strongly disagree with Amelia and Mort. (On Adaptation, which is freakin brilliant. Never seen Tristam Shandy.)

Oh, it's not that I hated Adaptation or anything; I just liked the Orchid Thief bits more than I did the Kaufman stuff, that's all. (Okay, except for "The Three" and "The Deconstructionist". Those are gold.) Mind you, I've only seen it the once, and that was when it first came out, so I should probably give it another look one of these days.

I think both Adaptation and Tristram Shandy (I haven't seen the latter, either) were specifically about how you couldn't really adapt the source material straight--the filmmakers had to get all deconstructionist and explicitly delve into the storytelling process to deal with the themes of the story properly. Charlie even talks about how we get pretty much all of The Orchid Thief that's adaptable on screen, and it's not enough to make a movie by itself.

Well, I found the two people who didn't like Hurt Locker.

Both college friends, one posted on Facebook that it earned a C from him. The other responded that parts of it reminded him of Charlie Sheen in Navy Seals.

Haven't seen enough Meryl Streep movies to judge her acting, but what people are saying about her, I feel about Sean Penn. Every time I see him in a movie, he seems to be screaming out, "I'm acting! I'm doing a brilliant job of acting!" Totally a subjective call, I know, but it always feels like a performance. It may be good. It may be brilliant. But it never quite feels natural to me.

Danny Trejo, on the other hand...