#finding jack

The air is chill in nowhere, but it is colder yet still in everywhere. The mountains are alive with all manner of creatures. Though no sign yet of Jack

In the afternoon, we approached the ruins of what we think was an ancient mill. One of the doctors is from this area, I will write to him upon my return asking for the history. Perhaps it will tell us where Jack is.

Florence and Alice, how I miss you so! The ache in my heart outweighs the ache in my legs and shoulders. Stay for me. Will you?

The night was colder but warmed by the knowledge my friends were safe. It appears that we may have a stow away

Septimus, I beseech you!

Anyway, that is all you have to say.

Yours

I mean, look at the eye-mask effect and the line under the eye along the cheekbone:

That hand-drawn, animated Jim Hawkins could be channeling James Dean’s ghost

There’s this weird trend in Hollywood at the moment: de-aging. 

See in the past, when Hollywood needed a younger version of a character, a younger actor was hired. It’s how we get amazing performances like Robert De Niro as young Marlon Brando in The Godfather Part 2. 

Nowadays though we don’t bother with that. Now what we do is film the old actor, cover their face in CGI and make them look young again. 

I don’t know why we do this. It’s a more difficult, more expensive process than just hiring another actor, as well as removing all the excitement of watching a new actor's interpretation of a character. On a personal note, I hate watching de-aged performances, because I don’t believe them. It’s hard to believe the emotions on a face, when the face is CGI. It’s why De Niro in the Godfather works, and De Niro in The Irishman doesn’t (sorry). 

But the problems stem further than that. Nowadays we can dig up dead actors with a digital shovel and make them dance in front of the camera. Did you know there’s a new James Dean movie coming? He certainly doesn’t he’s been dead for nearly 66 years. No one asked him if he wanted to be in the film because he’s dead. And some actor who I could believe watching is out of a job. 

I find this very uncomfortable. What if Dean doesn’t want to be in Finding Jack? What if he would’ve thought the script sucked and turned it down? We’ll never know, but we will get to watch his digital corpse get puppeted for our own amusement. 

Jack: *smiles

Me: *falls off bed and giggles uncontrollably

Me: *dies

Okay maybe I’m late to the outrage train here.

But let me be the next person to say 

NO

WHAT

BAD

Bad on so many many levels

First off, bad for actors everywhere, because they’re saying “posthumously cast” as if that’s actually James Dean. They’re listing ‘‘James Dean” in the credits! But it is not James Dean, it is a really convincing puppet. So what does that mean for all living, human actors? If I can animate your likeness convincingly enough, you’re no longer you. You’re a name and face I can slap on anything I want. Letitia Wright could be shooting Black Panther 2 in one part of the world, while Letitia Wright could be posing for a close-up in a completely different part of the world via computer imagery. They’re both Letitia Wright! Who cares if one is cobbled together by pixels? If it looks and walks and talks the same way—

Oh but WAIT a minute! It does not look, talk, and walk the same way! It can’t. Especially not the James Dean-puppet. 

I mean. Digitally insert someone else into a movie, and maybe the mistake wouldn’t be so glaring. But you can’t put James Dean on the casting list if all you have is pixels. You know why? Because James Dean was infamous for being really sucky to work with for most directors. They’d tell him to say one thing and he’d say another. They’d tell him to go stand over there and look at the camera and he’d go stand over there and look out the window. And it was gold. The other actors were confused and the directors were happy to get his disobedience on film because it was better than what was in the screenplay! He freaked RONALD FREAKIN REAGAN out when they did a TV show together because he wouldn’t stick to the script.

Here’s an excerpt from what the director of his last film, Giant, experienced with James Dean, as told by a Texas-attitude coach:

And that, ladies n’ gentlemen, is THIS:

Which is, by the way, the bumper image for Giant.  You cannot take James Dean, who was a creative genius, and make him from scratch. There’s something human about really good actors that comes across onscreen, and when they act just a little different from what’s written on paper, or put their own spin on what’s written on paper, and cameras happen to catch it, almost by accident? That’s movie magic! Digitally puppeting the actor who was literally known for refusing to be micro-managed is bad and horrible.