Think Cameron would have been as convincing with her love of this man? |
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When you're about to become a parent, there are all kinds of people who start to give you advice. They come out of the woodwork at every angle, advising you on everything from how to properly swaddle your baby to how to handle a toddler who's getting out of control to the sage bit of wisdom about how everything you know gets thrown out of the window once your precious child becomes a teenager.
What most people don't tell you is that once you have a child, you've now got to throw away the majority of your quality movie viewing hours. That the cutting edge shit, the sexually explicit shit, the dripping blood and gore shit and anything that contains the word shit more than the allotted singular use is now going to cost you more. It's going to cost you to hire a babysitter, it's going to cost you time off your normal sleeping pattern as you sneak the DVD in the dark, late at night after your little gift has arrived.
You're also forced to hand over your theater going time to shit. Not any of the good shit listed above, no. The shit that the studios pump out and label as family flicks. The shit that has no shit in it, but might refer to a "doodie" or two. The shit that removes the barely cutting edge Vin Diesel from his fast car and attaches a duck to his unfunny ear.
I've always been someone who willingly has watched anything. I'm more than happy to admit that a couple of the movies that I favor highly are "children's" movies. However, those favorites usually aren't ones that I was forced to watched simply because they were something that My Midget was interested in. Most of the movies that I've watched since she was born have been illuminated by the holes that I see based on my new view of the world. When you become a parent, as cliche as it might sound, the way you see things really changes.
For example, I now am leery of animation. I used to be more willing to watch "cartoon" flicks over other family movies. It seemed that if I had to watch something that was void of biting humour, it might as well be wrapped in a colorful package. However, the number of animated flicks that I've watched since I born my little one has grown. Having a larger pool to judge from starts to make you cynical, even of the bright and shiny fairy tales.
The recent SHREK phenomenon is a good example. The first installment of the unwitting franchise (when it was first released, the producers had little faith that it would be popular based on the grumpy lead, and factoring in that the original voice actor, Chris Farley, had died during production of the film) was released the year immediately preceding my daughter's birth. She was 6 months old when I took her to see that movie, cradling her in my arms 
Adore me, you will! |
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and laughing even after she'd long since fallen asleep.
Mike Myers was best known from Saturday Night Live, the Austin Powers movies and the Wayne's World movies. He wasn't perceived as being a voice actor for a children's movie. A great deal of parents protested the message behind the movie, saying that it encouraged children to be gross, rude and disrespectful. However, there weren't enough of those parents bitching, as the movie grossed $42 million in its opening weekend alone and over $265 million domestically in its original run, as well as spawning two sequels.
Taking a chance on Myers, an actor who was really a comedian and a sketch artist at that, was still risky during a time that studios were still employing veteran voice actors. In addition to Myers was actress Cameron Diaz, another person who had little established credit in voice acting. She's cute and all, but much of where Diaz's charm lies is in her crooked smile and glowing Malibu Barbie looks. It's not really an aspect that carries over in her voice.
But it turned her into a power player, someone who was able to broker to get her (now former) boyfriend cast in a role in the third installment of the Ogre series. Justin Timberlake is better known for vocal performances than his former sweetheart, but none of those had been for reading lines. Call me a cynic, but I don't feel that being a lead singer in a boy band prepares you for headlining an animated movie.
Therein is my problem with children's movies, particularly animated ones. Where we used to have actors whose sole talent was being able to create distinctive voices for the little animals and other characters, now we have a big dick waving battle on who can get the bigger name. Gone are the days when a man like Mel Blanc, the venerable voice behind most of the Looney Toons characters, could make a career out of a unique and (now) under-respected talent.
Instead we've got Nicole Kidman carrying over her breathy, childlike voice (I dare you to close your eyes and listen to her as Happy Feet's mom and then as Satine in MOULIN ROUGE! and tell me that you can tell a difference) into a role as a penguin. I can't even lay the blame entirely on actors that I don't care for. Hugh Jackman had vocal roles in HAPPY FEET as well as FLUSHED AWAY in the same year. And as nice as it is to drool over him as Wolverine, a voice actor he is not.
Tell me who Chris Sanders is. I'll tell you that he gave one of the most moving performances in the last five years. I'll tell you that you know who he is even if you don't think you do. I'll tell you that he caused me to love a character made of ink and paper more than other actors have made me give a flying f*ck 
"I'm loved more than Justin! Narf!!" |
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about a flesh and blood character based on a real life person. I'll tell you that Stitch just wouldn't have been Stitch without Sanders providing the vocal performance for him.
You might be able to place the name Barry Humphries as the man who is better recognized as Dame Edna, that wacky looking bird who's really a dude. But did you know that he is the one voice that causes my daughter to both shiver and giggle at the same time? Did you know that if you've seen the movie, you've mostly likely quoted his character more than once over the years? Sure, Ellen was perfect as Dory but Humphries is the second most memorable voice from FINDING NEMO as the lead shark, Bruce.
What about Rob Paulsen? 273 entries in his profile, including voices in everything from ANT BULLY to JIMMY NEUTRON and no one knows who he is. Well, you don't until I tell you that he's the man behind Pinky from "Pinky & the Brain." Or Cree Summer, a woman who people assume started off on the television show "A Different World," but really was voicing Care Bears long before that and has been doing everything from Suzi in THE RUGRATS movie to characters in those Barbie DVD movies that those of us with daughters have had to sit through.
My long winded, sometimes off-topic point is this: I watch certain actors in certain movies because I get to see them. I tolerate Owen Wilson as much as the next person, but he's far better suited to assaulting my vision with that nose than to forcing me to sit through him painfully chew up lines as a car. Great, everyone can recognize the voice and spends most of the movie associating the character to the guy that they know from other movies. But come on! That isn't supposed to be the point!
We're supposed to be taking our children to see movies which tell a story, perhaps attempt to teach a lesson, and give us something to talk with them about. If we're spending the entire time thinking about who does what in their non-animated time, we're being distracted from the (minimum) $12 that the studios just sucked from our pockets so that we could take our children to the movie that they've oversaturated their market with and caused them to turn into some subliminally f*cked up little monster who thinks their life is over if they don't get to see the movie.
I mean, it's bad enough that I have to eat shit with a smile just to make my kid happy. At least don't try to dress it up and think you're convincing me that it's lasagna. I'm not fooled. Pretty soon I'm going to start demanding my money back. That, and convincing other people not to spend theirs in the process. I DO write a column, you know.
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| Neglected Foster Child of Hollywood |
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Not-so-gentle musings from the girl who is saving room in her uterus for Tarantino's spawn.
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| AwesomeZara |
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