Should special effects only be used to service a film’s story, or is it perfectly fine for movies to feature extraneous spectacle? That’s a debate that comes up often among cineastes, but ultimately there’s room for both functions. Sometimes, in cases like Jurassic Park and The Matrix, both categories of effects may even faultlessly coexist in the same film. Yet there is one kind of effects employment that’s intolerable to all film-loving parties: the gratuitous exploitation for the sole purpose of brazen gimmickry. It’s this kind of effects work that goes beyond spectacle. It’s not so much a show as a show off.
For one example of this cinematic sin check out Karina’s review of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, in which she references a scene featuring an inessential and irrelevant rocket launch in the background of an otherwise intimate moment between two lovers on a sailboat. Actually, that’s apparently only a minor citation in a “a film about the feat of its own whiz-bang, Frankensteinian digital imagery, drunk on its own accomplishment to an extent that feels quasi-ethical.” Hardly the first movie to commit such a crime, sure, but Benjamin Button seems to be the most thoroughly guilty exploiter since Forrest Gump (both films, incidentally, were scripted by Eric Roth).
So, in (dis)honor of Roth’s repeat offense, let’s take a short look at the worst exploitations of special effects in the last 15 years:
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It’s more difficult to be convincing as a real person when acting on film than on the stage. The camera can get closer and your image ends up projected many times larger than life size. So, despite giving a Tony Award-winning performance as Richard Nixon in the theater version of Frost/Nixon, Frank Langella was not initially thought of as worthy to reprise the role in Ron Howard’s movie adaptation of the play. Part of it was that he’s not a big name, but another reason was that he looks nothing like Tricky Dick.
Ultimately, Langella did get the part, and while he doesn’t resemble the former president, he apparently does a bang up job in the role. But the transition could easily have been as awkward as Ralph Bellamy’s reprisal of his Tony-winning portrayal of Franklin Roosevelt in Sunrise at Campobello. In the film version of that play, Bellamy’s vocal impersonation comes off more like a Scottish brogue (he sounds exactly like Sean Connery, in fact) than FDR’s signature “Locust Valley lockjaw.” Instead, Langella is on track for an Oscar nomination, and is sure to join the following actors who also gave convincing performances as world leaders.
As a handicap, SpoutBlog has limited the selections to modern era leaders whose real persona exists on film/tape and are therefore more easily comparable to actors’ representations.
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