Josh Tyler over at cinemablend.com has posted a scathing rant on Hollywood’s ever increasing reliance on visual effects to put butts in the local multiplex (lemme tell ya’ they’re not coming for the stale popcorn). Tyler calls today’s filmmakers “lazy” amongst other things for leaning to heavily on CGI when they should be spending the time and effort to shot real stuff like they used to. As Josh puts it “Why bother to spend time planning anything, when you can just send in a bunch of nerds on computers and have them fix everything?” Now I’m not the guy to blindly defend to overuse of VFX in the film industry today. Just check out the opinion category on the Blog if you need confirmation. But I think Josh kinda goes a bit too far in laying all the failings of the art of cinema today on a handful of overzelous digital monkeys. It’s the marketing machine that requires (nay demands!) that each blockbuster be bigger and badder assed than the last. Can you really see a big studio springing the cash to put up posters in every city, town, village and hamlet from San Francisco to Baltimore for a movie with Transformers made from muppets instead of CG? Even though Tyler’s rant is oversimplified and misdirected in its critism, (isn’t that the definition of a rant?) I can agree that all the big Hollywood tent-poles have become exhausting to look at. Do I really need to put that much energy into getting emotionally connected to a talking Polar Bear? The fact is you can’t really blame VFX guys for this, they’re just trying to cover up for bad writing. Just like Ice T said “I don’t know why a player wanna hate T, I didn’t choose the game, the game chose me”. Awwww, yeah.
LINK to rant on Cinema Blend (via VFXPlanet)
