ManWithPez

I'm uncertain, but it appears he's concentrating on using his heat vision.

Surely you saw this coming.  Hot Nerd Crush on Monday was Mary Steenburgen, Tuesday’s movie review was Time After Time…so who else was the Hot Nerd Mancrush going to be?  None other than Malcolm McDowell, that’s right.  Suffice it to say that I’m not altogether certain that time has been all that kind to Mr. McDowell.  Doesn’t stop me from appreciating what a great actor he was back in the day.  He’s still pretty, of course, but it’s more of a regal, older man thing.

Of course, most people know him as Alex DeLarge from A Clockwork Orange.  I’ll be honest with you.  I’m not a huge Kubrick fan, but I can’t decry McDowell’s performance in the film.  It’s not everybody who can act as degenerate as Alex and still manage to garner sympathy from an audience.  I’ve already mentioned his wonderful performance as HG Wells in Time After Time, so I won’t go into it more here, but, it is simply amazing to watch him and David Warner work together.  How Wells manages to completely not fit in in the future, and yet is still successful in his task of tracking down Jack the Ripper.

I hate it when the cat gets up on the bed like that!

Two more films where McDowell has performances of note were in Cat People and Blue Thunder.  If you recall, the premise of Cat People was just a bit fucked up.   Okay, so this brother and sister team turn into black panthers (the cat, not the militants…that would’ve been an entirely different movie) when aroused, but have to kill to turn back into humans again.  So, Malcolm’s character Paul wants to nail his sister so that it’s not all…weird.  Yeah.  Strange film.  Good, but strange.  In Blue Thunder, McDowell plays a cheeky helicopter pilot who seemingly can’t wait to kill Roy Scheider.  That’s not cool, man…not cool at all.  Also, he does get the coolest line in the movie:  “Follow my leader.”  Sweet!

In 1983 (You can tell from the opening sequence) Malcolm was in a film called Get Crazy, wherein he did hid best Mick Jagger impression.  I would tell you to find and watch this hilarhious film…except, you can’t.  It’s never been produced on DVD (mainly due to music rights, I’m certain).  His song “Hot Shot” is too funny, especially when he becomes depressed about his lot in life, and begins to sing it much slower.  Also, he gets a bad dose and hires his own penis as the new manager for his band.  I’m telling you…if you look around the internet, you can find it .

Yep...total wanker right there.

He’s done a lot of geek work.  I mean, for nothing else, he’ll go down in history as the one being in the entire universe who finally killed that bastard James Kirk in Star Trek:  Generations.  He was the often talked about, but little seen bad guy Linderman on Heroes.  He was the voice of Metallo in the DC Animated Universe (specifically Superman).  Frankly, I’m looking forward to seeing just how much better he’s going to get now that he’s got some years on him.  He’s one of those actors who, when I see his name in the credits of a movie, I relax a little.  He’s not always great, but he is always entertaining.

So, Hot Nerd Mancrush #6:  Malcolm McDowell.  One hell of an actor, one hell of a pretty boy back in the day, and has starred in so much nerdbait that not to mention him would have been criminal.  Go check out some of his stuff.  It’s worth it!

Tags: Man, Nerd

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 8:00 am and is filed under Celebrity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.