Are child actors really actors?

I listened to a debate on the radio.

Are child actors really actors? Is it fair for adults to have to compete with child actors?

Listen to it here:

http://www.cbc.ca/q/blog/2013/01/07/should-child-actors-be-nominated-for-oscars/

I don't know how I feel about it.

Child actors have to be coached, but look at Oscar winner Natalie Portman. Couldn't act her way out of a paper bag. Look at her in those Star Wars movies. She can do a decent job if she has the right director, otherwise, as one critic said, she can look utterly stranded on screen.
 
As it happens, I was reading about the British boy actor Desmond Tester. Alfred Hitchcock blew him up in the movie Sabotage (1936). He was cute in his way, playing the heroine's little brother who lives with her and her husband.

I was shocked to learn that Tester was 17 when he appeared in Sabotage. He looked about 11. I think it's why they called him a "boy actor" and not a "child actor". I wonder if he had to shave his legs.

There was the British boy actor Jack Wild who looked about 12 when he was 19. There was Ralph Macchio who was initially recruited as an actor only because he looked much younger than he was. He was sixteen when he played a twelve-year-old on TV and in his twenties when he played a fifteen-year-old.

It's one reason former child stars can have such a hard time making the transition to being adult actors---they're usually very short. Look at Jonathan Taylor Thomas or David Faustino.

Lillian Gish was 28 when she starred in Broken Blossoms. She thought she was too old for the role. The character was supposed to be very young, maybe twelve. Gish said in an interview that she told DW Griffith to get a ten-year-old to play the part---they always look older on camera anyway. He told her that a ten-year-old couldn't give him the performance he wanted.

I don't know what any of this tells you. That acting doesn't come naturally to children, otherwise they wouldn't get much older kids to play child roles.

Look at The Little Rascals and tell me those kids weren't acting.


Buddy Hackett, discussing his Oscar vote around the time that Haley Joel Osment was nominated for The Sixth Sense, said that he never voted for child actors because you never know what's going to happen to them. They disappear in a few years. Look at Tatum O'Neal or Justin Henry who was nominated for Kramer vs Kramer. But that's a different issue.

What happens to an actor in a later stage of life has nothing to do with it. Look at Joan Crawford in Trog, or  Bette Davis in Bunny O'Hare, or Ernest Borgnine on Airwolf. Lawrence Olivier starred in a movie produced by the Unification Church.

I always thought that TV series were taking a terrible risk casting young children. Puberty is a cruel mistress. If the show's on the air for more than a few years, you have no idea what they'll end up looking like.

My manifesto

Here's my manifesto. I couldn't think of any ideological basis for it, so it's just a checklist with nothing to justify it. I couldn't think of a good name for it. Dogme 95 had its "Vow of Chastity" so I was going to call this a "Vow of Impotence", but thought better of it.

The idea is to make very cheap movies, and not as stepping stones to bigger and better things. Take the pressure off. Make movies that will make small sums of money. Be a filmmaker, but do so unencumbered by any hope for success:

1. No fund raising! No investors! Especially family members! Don't make your parents suffer for your art!

2. Film only with consumer camcorders that cost less than $150. This would include used or refurbished camcorders even if they cost more than this when they were new.

3. Use only the built-in mic on the camcorder. If it's inadequate, use subtitles, inter-titles or voice over to take up the slack.

4. Never get permission. Film where you want. Just don't make a spectacle of yourself and people will assume you're just some jerk annoying his friends with a cheap camcorder.

5. It's none of my business, but make genre movies. Serious dramatic elements should be in the subplots

6. Use music, but never pay for it. Either use music you think you can get away with stealing, use public domain music if it exists, or look for music from the Soviet Union or some other country that wasn't part of the International Copyright Convention.

7. Edit on whatever free software came with your computer.

8. It's not mandatory, but movies should be 50 to 65 minutes long. Long enough that people think they're getting their money's worth, but don't over do it.

9. All videos must be distributed either as internet downloads, on community access television or as dvd's burned on a home computer.

10. Sale price on dvds should be about $4 plus postage and handling. The postage and "handling" charge should be enough to cover the cost of burning and mailing the dvd and the $4 will be pure profit.

Justin Bieber, marijuana, photographer killed

I'm surprised anyone cares if Justin Bieber smoked marijuana. Or Miley Cyrus. Or, really, anyone else unless it's some recovering drug addict or an anti-drug crusader, or a nine-year-old.

A photographer chased Bieber's car which got pulled over by cops. Turned out a couple of Bieber's friends were inside. Bieber himself wasn't present. The photographer stood out in the street taking pictures and was hit by a car and killed.

The photographer had claimed in a phone call to have seen Bieber smoking marijuana from a pipe in the car.

A friend of the dead photographer told reporters that the death was Bieber's fault because getting a picture of him smoking marijuana would be irresistible to any paparazzo. And how was a 29-year-old man supposed to know not to stand in the middle of a busy street?


I worked with a young woman who had fled her small town. She came here, to the city. Not the big city, but to the city. She explained that everybody knew her business where she was from. She would come home in the afternoon and find that her mother knew about anything she had done that day.

It's why people in small towns never stay home on vacation.

Johnny Carson liked vacationing in Europe because no one there knew who he was. The Tonight Show was briefly broadcast in Great Britain, but they only showed the interviews. The Brits couldn't understand why Ed McMahon was always sitting there.

I don't know how popular Justin Bieber is outside of North America, but he needs to find some place he can relax. Someplace with lax drug laws.

Bought some CDs

I never download music illegally. But the way musicians have suffered because of it, I decided a while back to start buying CDs. 

Until recently, I had only bought a few CDs. One was Tiny Tim, one was Three Penny Opera. And that was about it. I don't listen to music.

Now, whenever I hear musicians perform, if they have CDs for sale, I'll buy one or two.  

I had my suggestion for the illegal downloaders. To make up for their crimes, even if they have no use for CDs themselves, they should give them on every gift-giving occasion. It's money they would spend anyway, and they owe it to the musicians they've been ripping off. Some of these people brag that they've downloaded tens of thousands of tunes. They ought to have a pretty good idea what to buy for whom.

If they won't even do that, to hell with them.

You don't like it here, go to Russia!

Gerard Depardieu has received Russian citizenship and Brigitte Bardot is threatening to apply.

Depardieu is having tax problems in France and Bardot is an animal rights activist. Putin has done more for animals---banning seal hunting, for example. Putin piloted an ultralight plane to lead birds in migration and RT, the Russian news channel, is showing him with researchers getting a blood sample from a Siberian Tiger in the wild.

Good for Russia! I'd move there myself if I could. If I spoke Russian. Hospitals are free, you get a month's vacation a year. Most city dwellers have dachas---summer cottages. You can buy a new car for under $8,000, university education is dirt cheap---one college charges $10 a month to live in a dorm and they provide textbooks. If I had children, they'd be learning Russian.

The disadvantages are----well, if you desecrate a church by forcing your way onto the altar and performing an obscene song and dance while church members demand that you leave, you can be criminally charged. But you can participate in a public orgy on the floor of a museum without legal impediment. They get a lot of snow. Billionaires go to prison for not paying taxes, but that's a good thing.

Ishmael Reed on Django Unchained

Read the full article here:

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/12/28/black-audiences-white-stars-and-django-unchained/

Ishmael Reed is always interesting.

Just a bit from the article----you should read the whole thing:

...I would loved to have been present at the marketing meetings about this movie. The cynicism must have been as thick as cigar smoke. Jamie Foxx has been promoted as the star of “Django Unchained,” and has assumed the role as movie defender–the same role played by Viola Davis in the promotion of the equally offensive “The Help.” Foxx serves as a buffer between the producers and the wrath of blacks like those who attended a recent showing where the film’s writer and director Quentin Tarantino reportedly faced hostile questions from a black audience.

The real stars of “Django Unchained,” however, are Waltz and Leonardo DiCaprio. DiCaprio is master of a plantation where Django’s wife Broomhilda (seriously), is being held, and has apparently been passed around among the “Mandingos” who are trained to participate in slave fights for the entertainment of DiCaprio and his friends. The movie’s “star,” Foxx, is there for the audience that used to sit in the balcony at southern movie houses. He performs in a movie within a movie. A sort of “Harlem On The Prairie.” This was an ingenuous bit of marketing. “Django” was the talk among blacks during two Christmas parties that I attended, lured to the screen because Foxx was featured in the promotion...

The middle of  “Django” showcases Waltz and DiCaprio. They engage in a lengthy dialogue which includes references to Beethoven and phrenology, during which Foxx’s Django alternates between scowling and looking completely dumbfounded by the civilized talk. The DiCaprio character believes that there are wrinkles in the brain that cause blacks to be docile. Tarantino’s fictional blacks apparently lack that part of the brain that makes one compassionate. While some blacks are being brutalized other blacks go about their business. In one scene, a black woman is being whipped while nearby a black woman is enjoying herself on a swing.

Foxx’s role in the movie is confined to frowning and murdering lower class whites who, in this film, seem to be responsible for all of the brutality during slavery, while the planters stand by helpless and embarrassed by one of their number, the lone psychopathic, who, like the Nazi played by Ralph Fiennes in “Schindler’s List,” revels in cruel misdeeds. In one scene after two blacks have engaged in a brutal fight leaving one dead, one of the fiendish slave master’s friends shows that he was really turned off by the exhibition and has to have a drink.

...

Throughout the movie,Tarantino reminds us that the Foxx character is unique. Comic book white racists, when reacting to Django, say things like “I ain’t never seen a n—– like you.” Or “I ain’t never seen a n—– on horseback.” In case you didn’t get the message it’s said twice in the movie that Django is “one in ten thousand” blacks. It might have been “Django” producer Reginald Hudlin who introduced Tarantino to the “Talented Tenth” concept originated by W.E.B DuBois. I wish that Hudlin had written the movie. As it stands, Foxx is chained to this stupid screenplay.

 

Cecil Brown on Django Unchained

An essay by Cecil Brown on the movie Django Unchained posted on CounterPunch.com.

Read it here: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/01/01/hollywoods-nigger-joke/

From the essay:

We realize that all that had gone before, the shots of the black slaves, the sad music, the spiritual music and lyrics—all of that was just a set-up, a pretext. The real text, the underlying message was the punchline that Blacks in slavery were fools and cowards.

Throughout the rest of the film, this is Tarantino method: begin with a serious treatment, suck the audience in,  and then, he hits you—Bang!–with a punch line that catches you off guard.  The problem with the ethnic joke is that the joke is always on the black man, who, has no recourse to respond.

And...

Where I saw the film, at the AMC theater, in Emeryville California, the audience was the same one that had voted for Obama. When I waited in the long line to see the film,  people’s faces were glowing with expectation. The hype about Jamie Foxx and Sam Jackson and Kerry Washington was like voting for a Black man for President.

But after seeing the film, their faces were empty, their eyes were blank. Sure,  they had laughed at the scatological humor, had flinched at the gruesome ugly scenes, had been insulted by the self-deprecating humor, and had been lifted up by  the antics of the “bad nigger”... 

For many of them, Tarantino had delivered. In essence, they had their cathartic laugh, and yet they still felt  dirty from  the guilty pleasure. Their empty faces were drained understanding. They had been used, and they were beginning to know it. You could see that they had been bamboozled.