jezebel.com: Hollywood sorcery can be wonderful. CGI can make the Hulk not look like Lou Ferrigno, or it can ensure that your favorite actor doesn't have to risk disfigurement to wrestle with a mountain lion. It can also extend the legs of fairly tall actress just a teeny-tiny bit so that when she uses them to fend off Leonardo DiCaprio, it looks like Leonardo DiCaprio would have to hire a ski instructor named Rolf and a Swiss mountain dog just to set up base camp on the actress's knee. This is what the American cinephile demands — subtle body distortions that make us all look askance at our movie dates and wonder, "Why are my date's legs so freakishly short? What's wrong with them??"
6 comments:
The firs thing that popped into my head with this article was the .gif file of and image of Santa clause being transformed into a lusty beach babe in Photoshop, or visa versa, that same image then appeared in the "related" section of the same website, probably not a coincidence. I am conflicted as to if i mind this sort of editing in film. CGI, as most people think about it is used to make huge explosions and space battles, not to subtly alter out perceptions of beauty. Film producers should do whatever they need to do to make their film more attractive to the public, but is raising the bar of "beauty" really worth it?
This kind of thing really frustrates me. Actors already struggle to attain this impossible physical standard of beauty, which is so overwhelmingly unrealistic. Especially in a field where individuality and passion for the work should be focused upon, these minute tweaks of appearance seem so insignificant and so ludicrous to me. I think that as a society we should be striving to portray truth and reality onscreen, not the perfectly smooth facade of a person.
To be honest, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the video editing had been done. It annoys me but doesn't surprise me. My response to this is the same as when I look at "Ripley's Believe It Or Not." A lot of the things look so really but so fake, and I just think who would ever want to do this. Making me believe that it all photoshopped.
The worst part of this is that the actress probably didn't know that this even happened until after the movie had previewed. I can only imagine how strange it must feel to find out that the studio you worked decided that your legs aren't long enough. Not your acting, character work or intonations, no. Your legs. I agree with Isabel that the film industry is promoting the wrong kind of mentality by focusing on ridiculous details like this.
I think that it's important for those kind of things to be written about. I know how much ads are photoshopped, but for some reason it never occurred to me that the same thing happens to movie stars in the actual movie.
This seems like so much money and so much work for something so insignificant. Her legs are plenty long enough already- we all know that physical attractiveness is a major reason that certain actors get certain roles, and they work very hard to get to that level of physical perfection. There's really no need to add to that. I really know nothing about how CGI works, but I do know it's a very complicated and sophisticated technology, and it seems so unnecessary to use it for something that's not even really noticeable. In addition, we all know images in magazines and advertisements are completely distorted, but I feel that most people assume that while the actors in films are ridiculously made up and are wearing super-flattering clothes, their basic body shape is what it is in real life.
I don't think I'm as strongly opposed to this as many people on the blog. In something like a magazine shoot or an interview, I do feel opposed to the amount of photoshopping used, especially when it's at the point of completely distorting someone's body. But The Wolf of Wall Street isn't meant to be showing the audience Margot Robbie, its showing us a character. Lena Dunham talks all the time about techniques she uses when filming Girls to distort herself and make herself look heavier and her body more awkward. This isn't about the woman's body, its about the character. The film is meant to capture a very specific world and honestly, as an audience member its unlikely that her legs looking microscopically longer than they already do is going to impact your own body image. In situations where media is aiming to capture real women, I do think there should be more of an effort towards actually having women look like themselves. But this is for a piece of art, and the standards are therefore different.
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