On hulu.com, there is an hour-long video called "The Best of Abbott and Costello Live." Around the 50-54 minute mark, Abbott pushes Costello backwards. He staggers into the side of a waitress who is cleaning a nearby table. She proceeds to do a stime over the table and flying dishes, and sits up, straightening her blouse. Costello comes behind her to see if she is ok, and she reaches up and throws him with a seated version of Kesa Nage. It is things like this that make old movies so wonderful. Old movies use no bad language, no raunchy jokes, and no flashy fancy martial arts moves. They stick to the unadorned jujitsu throws, and make us laugh with a bucket of nails and a mouthful of milk.
Now for my observation of new movies. They're good. They're entertaining. But what's with the actors who accidentally slip into past roles? Take Orlando Bloom. He played Legolas, a sharpshooting archer elf. Then he was cast in Troy. Ok, good he's got a nice role he can sink his teeth into and he actually kind of looked masculine in it. But all of a sudden his character has a bow and arrow. And then all of a sudden, he was wearing the Legolas face. Ok we mess up, it happens to all of us, but why didn't the director catch it and refilm? Here I am, and the movie has brought me to ancient Greece, and my brain suddenly is expecting him to shout some Elvish curse at an orc.
It happened again last night. Zachary Quinto plays Sylar, the evil bad guy stealing the superpowers of our favorite genetic mutants (Heroes, not X-Men). We watch with baited breath as he seduces our favorite character only to pick their brains (quite literally) to gain more understanding and power. So then last night I went to see Star Trek (first time in a theater since maybe August with Dark Knight) and there's Zachary Quinto playing Spock. Excellent job. But then, Uhura follows Spock into the elevator, and looked him in the eyes asking, "What do you want from me, Spock?" Something about the way he looked at her, made my brain scream, "He's going to cut open your skull and absorb your powers! RUN!!" Then the moment was gone and he was Spock again.
What do you think? Do you think this is something actors do accidentally? Or do you think this is something my brain creates because I have seen them in other movies before?
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Old Movies Vs. New Movies
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2 comments:
Probably a little of both. There are only so many looks a person can have before they have to start recycling them. The more you see the actor the more it will seem like the looks run together in a Derek Zoolander like frequency. Sometimes we find that an actor/actress fits a certain part so perfectly that we could never imagine them in any other roll or for anyone else to be cast for that character (eg. William Shatner, Mark Hamill). This is in fact exacerbated by the fact that Sylar is a cold blooded psychopath who doesn't often show emotions, and Spock is a Vulcan, (it's funny how that word is in spell check) ruled by logic and trained since birth to suppress emotion. That doesn't give the actor much leeway in the looks department. I never really felt like they mixed up the characters in "Star Trek" but I know what you mean about "Troy". But what can you do? That's how the legend goes. The legend is that Achilles falls to an arrow struck in his heel. If I had my way Orlando Bloom would not be in any more major movies... he's not particularly talented.
In theory, the looks an actor shows should be a reflection of what's going on internally as the actor connects to the character. If an actor is truly connected to the character, then theoretically we will not see evidence of past parts they have played because their mind is not going there. So, for example, the way Legolas holds a bow is going to be different from the way Paris holds a bow (and in fact the difference between a Greek bow and an Elvish bow will also play a part in it) so theoretically if Orlando Bloom is properly connected to the character of Paris then you won't see evidence of Legolas even if the bows look similar. But there is so much margin of error in that idea that its really impossible to tell for sure whether it works that way or not. (The teachers at Rutgers will tell you it does!)
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