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Owen Pallett Collaborates With Natalie Portman, Others For Times's "Fourteen Actors Acting"

11:05 a.m. · December 9, 2010 · by Chris Chafin

If you’re like me, you’re a member of this country’s wine-sipping, cardigan-wearing, arugula-eating elite. Congratulations! We should play polo some time. And, if you’re like me, there’s nothing you enjoy more than chamber music, The New York Times, and Fine Acting. Well, lucky you! All three have come together in the “video slideshow” "Fourteen Actors Acting" currently running on the Gray Lady’s website, featuring some likely Best Actor/Actress nominees performing over music by Owen Pallett. Watch James Franco make out with himself (not joking!), Javier Bardem smash some plates in impotent rage, or Tilda Swinton just weep and weep and weep. Also featured in the lush black-and-white clips are Natalie Portman, Vincet Cassel, and Michael Douglas.

Each video is movingly scored by Pallet, who is no stranger to emotional orchestral work. He’s worked on operas, film scores, with Arcade Fire, and, of course, on his own music (first as Final Fantasy and later under his own name). That work reached a sort of culmination in this year’s Heartland, a masterpiece of symphonic pop that is much closer to the first word of that description than the second. 

Check out "Fourteen Actors Acting" at The New York Times’ site.