Halle Berry in Monster’s Ball, for sure.
Good lord, what a terrible performance. One of the worst stinkers in cinematic history.
And she won an Oscar for it!
It was the first time I realized, “Wow, the Academy Awards are really just a bunch of stupid bullshit.”
Boy, how that’s proved right year after year!
I’ve lived in milieus of both rural and urban poverty. People don’t look like Halle Berry. Perfect abs, perfect skin, and the facial structure of a Victoria’s Secret model. Dressed-down but sexy, clearly a gym rat, and salon-fresh hair. Perfect breasts, perfect butt, and not even one charmingly uncommon distinguishing feature (big ears, crooked teeth, moles, freckles, or a mustache).
In truly poor neighborhoods, there may be one striver in a hundred who is genuinely put together (and I don’t mean flashy, ghetto fabulous, or trailer park chic). These people stand out, like a fly in a glass of milk. They still don’t look like Halle Berry, who has coasted on her good looks basically forever.
In Monster’s Ball (not a terrible movie, actually a good one), Berry plays a broke single black woman, her husband on death row (Puff Daddy, no shit!), just dealing with a life of hopelessness from which there is “no way out.” Her poverty is a prison, just like Billy Bob Thornton’s world is a prison, both literal and metaphorical (he plays a prison guard). Gag, choke, throw-up-a-little-in-mouth.
Halle Berry goes all down home in this one. She looks like she read a textbook in Ebonics, then leaned in until she fell over.
Watch Halle talking “he just eat all ‘dat red gum ball,” and “he be scarfin’ up all dat’ Popeye’s fried chicken” after a couple pulls on some whiskey. She’s talking about her obese son: is it believable at all that Halle Berry and her string of attractive husbands (six-pack abs, salon-style hair, daintily plucked 5 o’clock shadows) would produce this child? I don’t think so.
Check out the video. Halle is playing it straight, while Billy Bob Thornton seems to barely be holding in his laughter. Whether he’s in character or whether he just can’t believe what he’s witnessing, we may never know. But he’s definitely making the same faces I make when I’m watching this scene.
This scene was hilariously gratifying.
A REAL howler!