Touch of Tucci
Everyone should have a cinema spirit guide. It could be a writer, actor, director or even a costume designer. Whatever the title, this guide is someone who will lead the way to great film experiences. A cinema spirit guide will be unique to each individual, as tastes in movies varies so widely. Choose your guide based on what brings you joy in film, not by what the masses on Twitter will give you the least amount of grief about. My guide has found success in comedy and drama, excels in acting, writing, directing and producing, and is unpredictable in role choice, but predictable in deftness; my cinema spirit guide is the great Stanley Tucci.
If you are not familiar with Stanley Tucci, allow me to make a few recommendations for your education: Big Night, The Pelican Brief, The Impostors, A Midsummer Night's Dream, America's Sweethearts, Big Trouble, Road to Perdition, The Core, Robots, The Devil Wears Prada, Julie and Julia, Easy A, Hunger Games (and many more). Thanks to my guide, I have seen films that I might not have otherwise (The Whole Shebang) and films that I was intending to see anyway (Captain America) were made all the better by his presence. Even when his role is brief (Muppets: Most Wanted), I view his decision to partake in the project as his stamp of approval, which means it also has mine. Though not every movie Cinema Spirit Guide Tucci has led me to has warranted a place among my DVDs, I have yet to regret screening any of them.
I would like to offer a word of caution: choose your guide wisely. Do not go choosing someone willy nilly just because of a general undefined fondness. Having a Cinema Spirit Guide means that you will see a movie based solely on their presence. If you follow a false guide into a movie you didn't really want to see, you will regret it FOREVER (or at least be out 9 dollars). Let me put it this way: how often have you had this conversation...
"Do you want to go see Blah Blah Blah?"
"I don't know, it looked kind of awful."
"But So-and-so is in it!"
"Okay!"
On a side note, if your Cinema Spirit Guide wanders away from the movies into other projects, it would behoove you to follow them. Often your aligning judgment will lead to delightful surprises in other areas. For example, I highly recommend The Tucci Cookbook.
Once you have truly found your guide, I would encourage you to follow him or her even if it seems you are headed somewhere you would not expect. On that note, it would appear that the next place my guide is steering me is to Transformers: Age of Extinction. Unexpected as it may be, I still intend to follow my guide, slushy in hand. Tucci has yet to lead me astray and if this path includes Optimus Prime, so be it.