Friday, May 25, 2012

Movies, actors, directors, fans

There is a vast difference between performers and those who watch them.     An actress or actor  memorizes lines, plays parts, is involved in all the work that goes along with creating a role and a story.    If we're talking about movies, as we are, the scenes are often (usually) not shot in order, many scenes are shot multiple times (often with variations), there are many many hours of waiting and acting and rehearsing.  Special effects, green screens, the sets, all the things the performer sees and deals with that the viewer never does. So there's much more to a movie than just one performer or even all of them.

 In short, what a viewer sees is nothing like what the performer does and experiences in creating something.
 



It's not just one actor or actress involved in a production and likewise to a viewer's experience, it's all the actors and actresses in the movie that contribute to their experience.   There's much more to everything than just each single performer obviously.    Howe each acts, how each role is portrayed, and all the roles as a synergy.    Then the movie itself.   Any inconsistencies in the story or technical errors in the production detract, as do any number of other things.   Is the plot nonsensical, where there's no willing suspension of disbelief to be had?   Do the actors and actresses not exactly fit the roles? 

None of which really matters to the point we're making here.   In a manner of speaking.

A performer (actor, actress, movie star, celebrity) in a movie has acted.  They've worked at a craft, a job of sorts.   It was work to at least some extent, it involved a number of other things, and in most cases that 90 minute or two hour production took tens or hundreds of hours and tens or hundreds of people.     Plus for each performer, it's just one role, one character in one situation and set of circumstances.   Each performer is likely nothing at all like that character, they may have even disliked or forgotten the role by now.   A day, a month, a few years.   They have in their minds certain ideas of the movie and their role in it, just like they do about anything they've watched, be it from themselves or another performer they know or what they've done in real life, read, heard, seen on the movie screen, seen on the stage and seen on a television screen before they were a performer.   Although they've got the experience of working on something, when they later go see it that "inside information" has to compete against what they experience as a viewer.    

All in all, Harrison Ford might be quite a bit like Bob Falfa or  Han Solo (in Episode IV at least) but he's not them.   Not Indiana Jones or James Marshall or John Book or Jack Trainer. 

On the other hand, the important part.   What a viewer sees.  Hears, feels.  Experiences as they watch and listen and enjoy.    It's not making things or viewing and critiquing a performance as a whole or as each piece.   It's  vicariously living through an experience that a movie provides.    The big screen, surround sound, another world.

What a viewer "sees" is all something built in their own mind from the external.  (Except in cases where the initial work was a book they've read, or they've spent too much time reading about the movie.)   This is not  real; it's invented.   It exists only in the imagination. An imagination.       The factual part is boring, sitting in a chair, with a photographic representation of a fantasy, frames presented at 24 per shown three times.      No, the imagination part is the grand part.   The fantasy becomes so much more; it becomes more real than real is.   It's set in stone inside the one place a person can usually always be sure of, one that never changes or does so only on the will and whim of the person themselves. 

So when others attempt to take that fantasy that is so very much more real than anything can be and then those others respin it in their own way, the odds are they'll never come close to what anyone's imagined, mabye not even themselves.  Paying homage, reworking, rebooting, reimagining, making a veritable near carbon copy.     Obviously deep-seated internal visualizations and emotions do not adjust and adapt easily.    More so when it's something people have been waiting for or has been in the works for a long time, especially for long established stories and characters.


It's one thing when you take something like Star Trek and turn it into something... like Star Trek also. A Captain Kirk who acts at least somewhat like a Captain Kirk, not one who runs away scared from any challenge or stands and makes jokes about people's mothers.    (Imagine a reboot that's more like Airplane than it is like Next Generation.)     Or if you send up spy flicks, taking a James Bond (and a whole lot of others) and turning that into an Austin Powers.   There will be those unhappy or upset about changes or additions or how things are handled, but there's another issue here.   There's no shortage of serious spy or spoof spy movies, books and TV shows, neither is there for Science Fiction.      But imagine if there had been no other spy movies since Sean Connery last played Bond, and no other scifi movies since the  1966-1969 TV show went off the air.     And then somebody made a new version that was ostensibly  a spoof of the show but was actually a social commentary about how the world was 40 years ago, one which bore little if any resemblance to the original.  Was filmed and directed in a quirky little way that didn't have universal appeal.    Some people might not take that too well.

So all in all, if you're an actor who watched reruns of a melodrama when you were 10 or a director who watched a melodrama when it was first on when you were 8?    Your opinion about how good you think your recreation that's nothing like the original  is; that carries about as much weight as the brainwaves of those watching it and thinking about how bad you stunk it up does.   Nothing at all, except in your own mind.

For the other matter, how popular something is and how much money something makes, neither is an indicator about how good or bad something is.    Take for example the movie Titanic or the television show The Beverly Hillbillies or the competition American Idol.      It's only all what you make of it, and nobody has an incorrect idea about their own perceptions and subjective opinions.     Just like they say about the ten million flies.

No comments:

Post a Comment