Everyone’s mourning Donald Sutherland by naming really great movies, and I want to point out that he was also the best thing, often the single redeeming thing, in some lousy movies that people still love because Donald Sutherland.
Bon voyage to the weird, the unexpectedly elegant, the orthogonally sympathetic characters who came out of his encounters with otherwise broken stories.
No actor, however amazing, can save a script from being bad. But some actors can find something in scripts whose good qualities are buried deep.
In Moonfall (d. Roland Emmerich, 2022) he has a one-scene cameo in which he explains to Halle Berry that there's a government conspiracy covering up the fact that the moon is hollow, and for the couple of minutes he was on screen I legitimately believed I was watching a good movie
I watched that movie deep in quarantine and ultimately ended up playing a drinking game with myself where I took a drink if I correctly predicted the next line of terrible dialog or absurd plot twist, and it was actually wildly entertaining. It's not GOOD, but it's the right kind of bad.
It is, but I would argue that though it is a movie of its time and FUN, it is not actually a particularly good movie (and it benefits a lot from nostalgia from the TV show) and that Sutherland made it immeasurably better than it would have been otherwise.
I saw the movie before I saw the TV show; I was disappointed by the show at first because it wasn't as goofy/the vibe felt all wrong!
The film mocks, inverts, & employs teen horror tropes of the 70s-90s. Totally cool if that's not everyone's thing! But I think it hit what it aimed for.
I also saw the movie first - and look! I love it! I think it's goofy and brilliant. I don't want to give the impression that I didn't enjoy the hell(mouth) out of it!
Just that it's not exactly Serious Actor Oscar Season fare. You can tell he was having a blast which makes it all the better!
I remember enjoying Eye of the Needle (1981), a WWII spy thriller, mostly because of his performance. Sometimes I think I'm the only person who ever saw it.
I'm one who saw it over & over again in the days when it ran frequently on subscription tv at my aunt & uncle's house where I babysat my cousins. That, and Fort Apache: The Bronx (Paul Newman), and Silent Partner, starring Elliott Gould, which brings us full-circle back to Sutherland....
Space Cowboys is wonderfully predictable and has about a billion plot holes you could drive a truck through. But the cast, including Donald Sutherland made it fun and enjoyable. Which I think was the point.
I wouldn't say I love the movie because of him since it's very cheesy, but he plays an arsonist in Backdraft, probably the only scene I still remember from the movie.
Also an odd cameo in JFK.
That scene! The rest of the movie is a frankly homophobic grab bag that’s better expressed in the famous Onion JFK headline; but he comes in with a soliloquy that turns a catalog of (some) very dubious facts seem like the most obvious observations in the world.
he’s one of the great actors of my lifetime. I’m glad that he lived a full complete lifespan and that he had a great career. I’m still very sorry to think of him being gone.
1993's 'Younger and Younger'
Donald Sutherland plays slick, cool and flashy self-storage business owner Jonathan Younger, who after the death of his wife Penny (Lolita Davidovich) takes on his son Winston Younger (Brendon Fraser) to run his company while being haunted by her ghost.
