Comments | butterfly: Emotional Responses and Actors.

butterfly

Emotional Responses and Actors.

Jun 08, 2005 09:02

So, I'm an emotional-arc whore. Seriously, if you can pull off the emotion, then I'm there. I will gladly explain away any plot holes or discrepancies so that I can buy the story. All you have to do is give me genuinely believable emotion and I'm willing to be very flexible ( Read more... )

acting, writing, television, opinion, essay, personal

Comments 4

silly_cleo June 8 2005, 16:41:54 UTC

Yeah, I have to say I would totally agree with every word of this, it's why I have any emotional reaction to The X-Files at all.

Except I'd disagree in the examples you've used. I cried like a baby with both Farscape AND Lord Of The Rings, so I don't think citing the acting on Farscape as what made it not work for you is really fair. It's like the various people who hate Wes/Fred saying they hate it cuz it has no chemistry. It not working for YOU doesn't make it bad acting or the actors not clicking, it just means it didn't work for you.

butterfly June 8 2005, 16:45:12 UTC

Well, I did try to say 'for me' and 'personally' as much as possible.

For me, actually seeing the John/Aeryn relationship completely took any amount of emotion out of it (except loathing). My mental image and the choices of the actors were so at odds that I couldn't emotionally adjust and, in the end, didn't want to.

silly_cleo June 8 2005, 16:49:23 UTC

That is true, so I'm sorry for not picking up on that.

Huh. I'm always really curious about your dislike of the John/Aeryn relationship seeing as it's something I love so much and yours is an opinion I think quite a bit of. So do you have specific examples of what your mental image was and how it differed to what the actors/directors chose to do? Cuz, and again I was being unfair with my previous post, I know you like both Ben Browder and Claudia Black as actors.

butterfly June 8 2005, 17:08:28 UTC

Oh, don't feel bad about defending your guys -- Tolkien fans would probably not be thrilled at my light dismissal of his work, either. Critically speaking, I think that John/Aeryn was well-written and well-acted, but I just hated what it made of the characters. Emotionally, they rubbed me just the wrong way.

It's hard to remember how I pictured the episodes -- I can remember being devastated by what was happening to John and getting drawn in by the lines, but the specifics of what I thought are drowned out by what I saw on the screen.

Partly, it was just that I disliked the seriousness of Aeryn. Claudia's features are very stark and, in combination with the drama of her lines, Aeryn always came across as over the top and melodramatic to me -- I enjoyed Aeryn much more as a character in her moments of lightness or quirkiness (I loved her in Crackers Don't MatterAnd Ben Browder brought a... dependency to his work with Claudia that just rubbed me the wrong way. I always did feel that, without Aeryn, John was falling apart and I ( ... )