10 Ways Halle Berry Can Get Her Swag Back

The year was 1999. Halle Berry—the charismatic and gifted actress who'd gotten her start in Spike Lee's Jungle Fever and impressed critics in the 1995 drama Losing Isaiah—was hot on the heels of her award-winning, powerhouse performance as the titular character in the HBO biopic Introducing Dorothy Dandridge. With her career at its hottest point, Berry appeared unstoppable. She joined the impressive cast of the first-rate 2000 superhero film X-Men, won an Academy Award for her work in Monster's Ball, and became a Bond Girl with 2002's Die Another Day.

And then things changed. Gothika, Berry's 2003 supernatural thriller, got trounced by critics despite earning $141 million at the box office. Those same financial perks weren't present for the infamously horrible Catwoman, which, unfortunately, cost a reported $100 million and barely clawed its way to an $82 million intake. Since then, Berry's résumé has left much to be desired: Perfect Stranger, New Year's Eve, Dark Tide (yes, a killer shark movie), and January's Movie 43, a shoe-in for the inevitable "Worst Movies of 2013" lists.

Her latest film, the WWE-backed thriller The Call, looks like a strong contender to join Movie 43 on those lists. Can something be done before she stars in a Lifetime or, gasp, cuts rugs along with Pauly Shore on a future Dancing with the Stars season? Try these 10 Ways Halle Berry Can Get Her Swag Back.

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Written by Matt Barone (@MBarone)

There's nothing wrong with starring in the occasional horror film, as long as it's, you know, well-made. None of the genre flicks that Halle Berry has made, though, are any good. At all. Find us someone who'd recommend Gothika or Dark Tide and we'll show you a liar.

Sadly, Berry's latest movie, The Call, gives every impression of falling into that same category, even if its director, Brad Anderson, has the chops to make a damn good creep-show (see: Session 9).

Maybe she's a big fan of scary movies, and, if so, that's great. It's just too bad that she's proven to be incapable of picking the right ones. It's time to leave the straight-to-DVD fare to no-name actresses who've never won an Academy Award—well, except for Hilary Swank. She can have them too.

We're living, and watching the tube, in a real golden age for television. The names of current programs speak for themselves: Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Homeland, Breaking Bad. More than ever before, prestigious filmmakers (i.e., Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, and Michael Mann) and top-shelf actors (see: Jessica Lange and Kevin Bacon) are spending less time on movie sets and more hours shooting TV shows.

Plus, female TV characters are at an all-time high when it comes to quality. From Claire Danes on Showtime's Homeland to Kerry Washington on ABC's Scandal, great actresses are garnering some of the best reviews of their careers by playing complex, fascinating women on the small-screen.

If Halle Berry knows what's good for her, she'll start setting up meetings with the brass at networks like AMC, FX, and HBO with the quickness to land herself TV's next great, Emmy-friendly creation.

In case you haven't heard yet, Bryan Singer—who directed the first two excellent X-Men movies—is going to direct X-Men: Days of Future Past, the sequel to 2011's X-Men: First Class. And all of the key players from First Class cast are returning, including Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy, and Oscar-winner Jennifer Lawrence. Even cooler than that is the news that many of Singer's old X-Men friends are on board as well, namely Hugh Jackman (as Wolverine), Anna Paquin (as Rogue), Patrick Stewart (Professor X), and Ian McKellen (Magneto).

But what about Halle Berry as Storm? Last week, Singer announced her official involvement on Twitter. Wise move on her part—at this point, she's not going to do much better than co-star in a surefire box office hit alongside A-listers like Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, and Hugh Jackman. Now all she has to do is figure out some ways to not be little more than a "Hey, look who it is!" footnote in an already crowded ensemble blockbuster.

Whether she knows it or not, Halle Berry's post-Monster's Ball career slide has turned her into a punch-line. And how can celebrities fight back against jokes made at their expense? By getting in on the joke.

With all of the viral video opportunities that Funny or Die provides, it'd be wise for Berry to lampoon herself a bit to show people that she's aware of the situation and ready to remedy it. Any of the following could work: Berry goes on a series of SyFy movie auditions, gets into a hair-pulling match with Debbie Gibson, and delivers lines like, "I had get naked to win an Oscar for Monster's Ball, so why not shoot harpoons at MegaShark to win an Emmy?" Remember, acceptance is key.

It's not like Berry hasn't shown her tongue-in-cheek sense of humor before. In 2005, after headlining the universally reviled Catwoman, Berry went in-person to accept her Golden Raspberry award at the Razzies. Clutching her Best Actress Oscar statue, she gave a great speech: "First of all, I want to thank Warner Brothers. Thank you for putting me in a piece of shit, god-awful movie... It was just what my career needed." Let's see more of that.

History probably won't be too kind to last year's expensive flop Cloud Atlas, the Wachowski siblings' (The Matrix trilogy) and Tom Tykwer's (Run Rola Run) ambitious adaptation of David Mitchell's multi-plot novel about how people of all generations and time periods are connected. The film's exact budget hasn't been divulged, but, regardless of that, its skimpy $27 million domestic box office intake didn't even flirt with recouping profits.

Which is a shame, really, because, despite its at times bloated narrative and unevenness, Cloud Atlas is a must-see, if only to witness filmmakers and actors giving their all to a complicated, boundary-pushing passion project.

It's also the most interesting movie that Halle Berry—who plays six characters, including one white woman and an Indian woman—has been involved with since 2003's X2: X-Men United. She got to work with three of Hollywood's most daring directors, stretch herself as an actress, and share screen time with Tom Hanks. Theatrical bomb or not, Cloud Atlas represents everything Berry should be doing. In other words, it's The Call's polar opposite.

Attention, Quentin Tarantino: We've figured out who should star in your next movie, whatever it might be. May we present to you Halle Berry, a talented but misguided Oscar winner who's in serious need of the kind of career rejuvenation you gave to John Travolta in Pulp Fiction.

Rather than the breed of character Travolta played in that cinematic masterpiece, however, Berry needs to play someone like Inglourious Basterds villain Hans Landa, or Django Unchained's Calvin J. Candie—you know, intelligently written, multifaceted baddies that are perfectly suited for scene-stealers like Christoph Waltz and Leonardo Dicaprio.

Berry has played a variety of heroes, from super ones (Catwoman, the X-Men movies) to an NSA agent/Bond Girl (Die Another Day). Yet she's never gone the antagonist route, and something tells us that she'd, no pun intended, kill it. Her face in the picture above seems to confirm that, don't you think?

Whenever you're done staring and you've wiped the drool off your chin, have a look at this picture taken of Halle Berry during last month's Academy Awards ceremony. She's captivating. And now it's time to let the world know once again that she's one of the most beautiful women in it, a knockout who, time and time again, has re-set the precedent for what it takes to do an unforgettable magazine spread. Granted, we're talking about high-end mags like Vanity Fair, Esquire, or GQ—not KING.

The best part about this strategy: The photos would accompany an insightful and candid narrative profile where Berry addresses all of her naysayers and comes clean about why she voluntarily starred in movies like Gothika, Dark Tide, and The Call after winning an Oscar.

Filmmakers love having that one go-to muse. Think Martin Scorsese and his early days with Robert De Niro and recent ones with Leonardo DiCaprio. Or Steve McQueen and his Hunger/Shame star Michael Fassbender. Or, deeper into the indie world, Jeff Nichols (Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter, and the upcoming Mud) and his good pal Michael Shannon.

The benefits are just as exciting for the actors as they are for the directors who get to build a relationship with gifted performers. If Fassbender, for instance, slips up and makes a few underwhelming studio movies, he can always give McQueen a call to get the old magic back.

That type of working relationship would do Berry plenty of good, and, fortunately for her, there's a large pool of on-the-rise directors out there just waiting to spark up such a fruitful rapport. How about Best Director nominee Ben Zeitlin, he of Beasts of the Southern Wild fame? Agents must be kicking kittens and slapping old ladies in order to get their clients some face-time with the suddenly in-demand, 30-year-old director. Hopefully Berry's handlers have injured the most felines so far.

Just because Halle Berry's career has lost its prestige in recent years, that doesn't mean that she's a wrap. In fact, based on Hollywood history, she's primed to make a serious comeback if she plays her cards properly. And all she needs to do is use Ben Affleck's story as inspiration.

Back in his "Bennifer" days, while dating Jennifer Lopez, Affleck had about the same degree of industry respect as Adam Sandler, except that Sandler's crappy movies actually turned profits. The Oscar winner (for writing Good Will Hunting with buddy Matt Damon) was on a painful losing streak, marked by disasters like Daredevil, Gigli, Surviving Christmas, and Jersey Girl.

Things looked really grim for your boy Ben. But then, wisely, he decided to step behind the camera and start directing—three superb movies later (Gone Baby Gone, The Town, and this year's Best Picture winner, Argo), Ben Affleck is now one of Hollywood's most respected players.

Taking cues from Mr. Affleck, Halle Berry should attach herself to a lo-fi independent project that needs the name recognition to get made and direct it. So what if her first directorial effort doesn't get the same wide theatrical release that Gone Baby Gone did in 2007? The words "Independent Spirit Award winner" and "directed by" look mighty fine when found within someone's filmography.

In 2010, Halle Berry starred in the little-seen biopic Frankie & Alice, in which she played a stripper fighting against her own dissociative identity disorder. It's a character that any Hollywood actress would kill for, because, on paper, it's shameless Oscar bait—instead of going "full retard," you go "full schizo." Unfortunately, of the 14 critics on Rotten Tomatoes who actually bothered to review it, the dreary and hackneyed Frankie & Alice only received two positive critiques.

The other 12 pointed out that the film reeked of Berry's transparent efforts to get back onto that Academy Award stage, and rightfully so, though all she ultimately got was a questionable Golden Globe nomination.

Still, Frankie & Alice is notable for being Berry's first project as a producer, and that's a role that she needs to play more now that she's 22 years into her career. If all her agents will send her are scripts for crappy genre flicks Dark Tide and The Call, she might as well start playing the background and pushing stronger projects, ones with challenging characters to inhabit, to fruition.