Mold breaking
Sep. 11th, 2010 11:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravensweptAlrighty then, let's do this.
Characters are who we make them. On the written page, a person is as energetic, as evil, and engaging as we make them to be. If we don't do our jobs right, the character can be seen in a different way, one that's the opposite of what his or her role is supposed to be *coughEragonsociopathcough*.
Then there are actors. These are real life people who for some ungodly reason are paid enormous sums of money to protray people they aren't for two hours. There are good and there are bad. But what's interesting, and where two meet, is when an actor needs to be an already established character.
Ideally, but not always, the actor (or actress, actor is just shorter to type) becomes the character as we know them, how the writer made them. Sometimes, as with the cruisifing worthy The Last Airbender, the characters are mangled beyond what fans and anyone with half a brain and ten minutes of the show know, and become little more than that character in appearance and name only.
The strangest times come during the writing phase, when even having written a character one way it easily is seen in another, and it doesn't take away from the story or characterization at all. It may even add to it. And it's not because of the writer having changed how they do things, it's still about how the reader intruprites it.
Somewhere in there I lost my thinking point, but I've been thinking about actor (and their lady counterparts) and how they are like written characters. Blank until given form. And how the form they are given is often the same goddamn thing again and again.
The actor themselves become their own perpetuating archtype, brought on only because of who people already know them as instead of having them change how an audience sees them.
Some are good at it. Johnny Depp for one is well known as playing the eccentric, quirky guy, often as a pale and goth-like figure, but still comes across as varied. Heath Ledger, before his death, made sure he wouldn't become a self-stereotype after hitting it big with 10 Things I Hate About You, disappearing from film for a year to avoid anything similar. When he came back, off the top of my head; a retro faux-midevil jouster, a bi-sexual cowboy, a Brother Grimm, and the motherfucking Joker. Robin Williams is all over the board, playing versions of himself, often in bad "this was for the paycheck" movies, to hit or miss degrees. Then he breaks out and does something like One Hour Photo which just makes him creepy as hell, but it works.
Compare that to some of their counterparts; Jon Heder, after Napoleon Dynamite when he does manage to get someone to take him on, plays the same stupid Jew-fro'd loser with strangely the same speech tics as his last character. Michael Cera is fast becoming, if he isn't already, much the same only his stake is in the mopey, kinda-cute-in-that-incredibly-dorky-way-if-you-squint way since Juno. Jim Carrey, bless his comedy attempts, tries to be something more than a weaker version of Jim Carrey from Ace Ventura, but his dramatic takes are varied and not his best work, and he's often called back to be, once again, Jim Carrey, a man of stretchy faces, odd sounds, and voice impressions.
Women get the shaft in my view, as their writing and characters are often done by men who get by on how they've written women for their past work, ie not all that impressively. It's gotten to the point that female roles are appaulded for being even a little man-like in depth and character. Fuck that.
One thing about being a big name, however, is the bigger your name (and subsequent pay) the more power over your role you have. So at some point, you'd have the freedom to expand a character if you thought it's do better.
Julia Roberts has such power, but only changes the character so it's basically her, just larger than life. This is a personal peeve, but I can't stand her as an actress. Fuck that she won an Oscar, like it's that impressive she played herself, again, only this time throwing in hints of a Southern accent. And I don't think she's won many fans with Eat Pray Love, regardless that it's the woman who wrote it that acted that way.
Okay, I'd like not to go off on that tangent. But here's the thing; I want her to play a good role. I truly want to see her in a film that would validate her win. What I want is for Julia Roberts to play a villian.
There's a re-cut trailer out there (which I graciously link to here; go ahead, watch it... you back? alright then) where My Best Friend's Wedding was recut so Roberts character comes off as the psycho villian of the picture. Maybe even the villian protagonist. Awesome.
It things like that that make me rethink how I work some characters out. Yes, there are stereotypes and tropes that can be easily filled into the blanks to make a character. But it's using those same ideas and going in the opposite direction that can make them interesting, more so if it's just one trope played with instead of piling on more and more tropes just played straight.
Simple is often more complicated in terms of character design than trying to shovel more and more details on to them to create "depth". It's not depth, it's a pile of crap you have to wade through to find whoever it is at the bottom.
Characters are who we make them. On the written page, a person is as energetic, as evil, and engaging as we make them to be. If we don't do our jobs right, the character can be seen in a different way, one that's the opposite of what his or her role is supposed to be *coughEragonsociopathcough*.
Then there are actors. These are real life people who for some ungodly reason are paid enormous sums of money to protray people they aren't for two hours. There are good and there are bad. But what's interesting, and where two meet, is when an actor needs to be an already established character.
Ideally, but not always, the actor (or actress, actor is just shorter to type) becomes the character as we know them, how the writer made them. Sometimes, as with the cruisifing worthy The Last Airbender, the characters are mangled beyond what fans and anyone with half a brain and ten minutes of the show know, and become little more than that character in appearance and name only.
The strangest times come during the writing phase, when even having written a character one way it easily is seen in another, and it doesn't take away from the story or characterization at all. It may even add to it. And it's not because of the writer having changed how they do things, it's still about how the reader intruprites it.
Somewhere in there I lost my thinking point, but I've been thinking about actor (and their lady counterparts) and how they are like written characters. Blank until given form. And how the form they are given is often the same goddamn thing again and again.
The actor themselves become their own perpetuating archtype, brought on only because of who people already know them as instead of having them change how an audience sees them.
Some are good at it. Johnny Depp for one is well known as playing the eccentric, quirky guy, often as a pale and goth-like figure, but still comes across as varied. Heath Ledger, before his death, made sure he wouldn't become a self-stereotype after hitting it big with 10 Things I Hate About You, disappearing from film for a year to avoid anything similar. When he came back, off the top of my head; a retro faux-midevil jouster, a bi-sexual cowboy, a Brother Grimm, and the motherfucking Joker. Robin Williams is all over the board, playing versions of himself, often in bad "this was for the paycheck" movies, to hit or miss degrees. Then he breaks out and does something like One Hour Photo which just makes him creepy as hell, but it works.
Compare that to some of their counterparts; Jon Heder, after Napoleon Dynamite when he does manage to get someone to take him on, plays the same stupid Jew-fro'd loser with strangely the same speech tics as his last character. Michael Cera is fast becoming, if he isn't already, much the same only his stake is in the mopey, kinda-cute-in-that-incredibly-dorky-way-if-you-squint way since Juno. Jim Carrey, bless his comedy attempts, tries to be something more than a weaker version of Jim Carrey from Ace Ventura, but his dramatic takes are varied and not his best work, and he's often called back to be, once again, Jim Carrey, a man of stretchy faces, odd sounds, and voice impressions.
Women get the shaft in my view, as their writing and characters are often done by men who get by on how they've written women for their past work, ie not all that impressively. It's gotten to the point that female roles are appaulded for being even a little man-like in depth and character. Fuck that.
One thing about being a big name, however, is the bigger your name (and subsequent pay) the more power over your role you have. So at some point, you'd have the freedom to expand a character if you thought it's do better.
Julia Roberts has such power, but only changes the character so it's basically her, just larger than life. This is a personal peeve, but I can't stand her as an actress. Fuck that she won an Oscar, like it's that impressive she played herself, again, only this time throwing in hints of a Southern accent. And I don't think she's won many fans with Eat Pray Love, regardless that it's the woman who wrote it that acted that way.
Okay, I'd like not to go off on that tangent. But here's the thing; I want her to play a good role. I truly want to see her in a film that would validate her win. What I want is for Julia Roberts to play a villian.
There's a re-cut trailer out there (which I graciously link to here; go ahead, watch it... you back? alright then) where My Best Friend's Wedding was recut so Roberts character comes off as the psycho villian of the picture. Maybe even the villian protagonist. Awesome.
It things like that that make me rethink how I work some characters out. Yes, there are stereotypes and tropes that can be easily filled into the blanks to make a character. But it's using those same ideas and going in the opposite direction that can make them interesting, more so if it's just one trope played with instead of piling on more and more tropes just played straight.
Simple is often more complicated in terms of character design than trying to shovel more and more details on to them to create "depth". It's not depth, it's a pile of crap you have to wade through to find whoever it is at the bottom.
no subject
on 2010-09-13 02:36 am (UTC)Completely agree, and it's why I don't believe there are bad cliches. It's not what they are, it's what you do with them.