quoperative

This haiku was inspired by a certain social networking web site:

My status is dumb
No I will not join that group
Zero friend requests

If this resonated with you please provide a response in the form of a haiku…

It is with much sorrow and shame that I must retract my previous rantings about Disney and the state of hand-drawn animation.  According to this post from March 2007, Disney is working hard on a new hand-drawn feature for release in 2009 called The Frog Princess.  If you chuckled to yourself that it’d be funny if was set in Quebec, you’re not that far off. The film takes place in New Orleans, making the “Frog” reference just slightly derogatory. But as this article points out Disney’s really made strides in reducing racism in their movies today to a level that most bigots would have considered acceptable 40 years ago.  Baby steps, guys.

There certainly is. The woman who’s hilarious misadventures made this 1998 film a box office hit, and thousands of other females that we see in countless Hollywood blockbusters every year, are in fact performers merely portraying roles on screen. This horrific discovery has raised a lot of questions about the authenticity of today’s films and their leading ladies.

The truth is, there is very little that is real about them. According to witness accounts, if you stay in your seat after a movie is finished and sit through the entire credits you’ll discover an alarming fact — that any similarities between the women in the movie and any persons living or dead is purely coincidental. It would seem as though the people who make movies are intentionally meaning to fabricate roles that are utterly fraudulent and fictitious.

But why? Are the lives of ordinary people not interesting enough to be condensed into a 90-minute movie? “They most certainly are”, said one film researcher, “I would say that most people’s lives easily generate enough ‘A’ material to produce a motion picture’s worth of entertainment at least once every two weeks. Not an Oscar-worthy effort, but something decent that would get 45% on Rotten Tomatoes.” If that’s the case, then why are film studio executives needlessly resorting to using imaginary characters in their movies over real people?

“It’s an issue of cost and feasibility”, said Charles Williams, vice-president at a production company in Los Angeles, “Yes, we could send crews to a woman’s house and film her for a few days until a plot revealed itself, but at that point she may or may not choose to continue on that plot trajectory. Even if she does, it might take weeks before she makes it through the standard confrontation and resolution, providing us with the required plot points to produce a feature film. There’s just too much uncertainty. Using actors lets us circumvent those hurdles.”

For most movie-goers, uncovering these questionable practices is a painful and unsettling experience. “I was so fond of Sgt. Callahan in ‘Police Academy’”, says Ruth Williams, a self-confessed film junkie, “I wanted to introduce her to my son because he has trouble meeting girls and she seemed like a very nice person. I contacted the movie studio and when I was told that her real name was Leslie Easterbrook and she was married, well I nearly had kidney failure.”

“It’s completely unreasonable to expect movie audiences to ‘suspend their disbelief’ to this extent for an entire film.”, says George Dellum, a freelance movie critic, “I mean, the concept of experiencing the entertainment provided by a feature-length movie while simultaneously looking past the glaring fact that the leading female is an actress portraying a fictitious character just seems ludicrous to me.”

Mr. Dellum continues: “Where does it end? Using computer-generated graphics to stage events that didn’t happen or places that don’t exist? That’s doing a real disservice to the hard working production teams that have literally — in the case of Demolition Man and Starship Troopers — traveled across space and time to bring back the movies we love to watch. If we lose that authenticity that’s a movie-watching experience I don’t want to be a part of.”