A Movie's Resurrecting James Dean Using CGI, For Some Reason
The directors of the upcoming movie adaptation of the novel Finding Jack by Gareth Crocker were evidently so unimpressed with today's stock of living actors that they awarded a role to James Dean, who died in 1955 at the age of 24. As an 89-year-old corpse, he's booking more gigs than most of the struggling actors in LA.
We already live in a world in which Whitney Houston's holographic ghost will tour/haunt venues across America. It was only a matter of time before legendary actors got the chance to star in movies they have no idea they're in -- and not because they're too high, but because they're too dead.
The messed-up part of it, other than the general ghoulishness, is that unless Dean's performance is entirely generated by a super-advanced AI that can accurately replicate how he expressed the nuances of emotion, it won't really be him. It'll be some real actor festooned with ping-pong balls wearing a digital James Dean skin suit who'll be doing the heavy lifting, all while that mask gets the headlines. Let's say, hypothetically, that the resulting performance is Oscar-worthy. Who gets the Oscar? The mo-cap actor? The special effects house? Do they simply toss the statue on Dean's grave? Or do they give it to the guy doing his voice, which will be someone completely different?
All of this raises an important question: What the hell is the point of all this? The filmmakers are so infatuated with the past that they're going to bring in like 60 people to breathe life into one dead guy so he can play a supporting role in a movie, when they could save a lot of time and money by hiring one living actor whose talent doesn't need to be generated with cyber-necromancy. The future is stupid!
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