Monthly Archives: September 2024

Voice Actors are not Interchangeable

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I had intended to write this yesterday but when you wake in the morning in the midst of a migraine your day is pretty much trash.

Monday, we learned that the talented performer James Earl Jones passed away at 93. With a career and noted performances well before his ascendency to fan stardom as the voice of Darth Vader in Star Wars, Jones was a unique talent.

Jones was also not the person Lucas had in mind when he wanted someone to vocally perform for his space fantasy adventure, his first choice was Orson Welles. Jones proved to be the right choice. His voice was lesser known but nothing in the man’s multidecade history indicates that he was ever difficult to work with. Would Star Wars have reached the same heights with Welles providing the voice? Probably. The nation culturally was ready to turn the page on the cynicism of the 70s and Star Wars provided that new direction and escape, but I do think that Vader would have been lessened with another voice actor.

Vader wasn’t the only character transformed by their vocal performer.

C3PO is famously vocally performed by the character’s suit performer Anthony Daniels but that was not the intention.  Daniels had been hired to be the body on set, much as David Prowse had been Darth Vader on set.

Instead of a prissy English butler, C3PO’s conception of a character was closer akin to an untrustworthy used car salesman. Go back and listen to his dialog in the original film and note just how mean and cutting it is. 3PO is not a nice and likeable character as written, but only becoming endearing due to Daniels’ performance. It is my understanding that when they tried to record the lines as originally envisioned, everyone heard the disaster it was, and the role was then given to Daniels.

We often think of voice actors as lesser. That is unfair and probably due to the preponderance of terrible dubbing of foreign language films. In those case the artists are rarely given the time or direction to craft a real performance, a gross disservice.

Voice actors deserve the respect and admiration of the audience, and they are never interchangeable.

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Series Review: The Decameron

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It is 14th century Italy, and the black death is ravaging the cites. The scope and scale of the pestilence is breaking civil society, and many believe that divine judgement is upon humanity and the end days are close at hand.

In this setting a collection of nobles and their servants greedily accept an invitation to fortified country villa to be the guest of Visconte Leonardo to either wait out the pestilence or spend humanity’s final days in comfort and luxury.

Netflix

The Decameron, very loosey based on the 14th Century manuscript, is a black comedy satirizing class structure, religion, and the endless human need to gain the upper hand on one another even as everything falls apart.

All of the characters of the series are duplicitous, scheming, and concealing secrets from one another. The humor is dark with death ever present. The tone of the show is not for everyone, but I enjoyed taking the series to be sort of a dark twisted comedy version of Corman’s adaptation of The Masque of the Red Death.

While very few of the cast were known to me save one secondary character, the actors performed their parts well and brought in my emotional engagement. The only thing that marred the production value of the program was the CGI flames utilized in some scene in the final few episodes, but I will not begrudge any production that errs on the side of safety.

The Decameron is pleasant, funny, and not without a few points to make. It streams on Netflix.

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Booths are for Cruising.

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When the story broke that the MAGA and Trump backed candidate for Governor of North Carolina Mark Robinson, a pol that frequently rants about pornography, was in fact a loyal customer of porn shops in the 1990s and early 2000s I had little interest. The story struck me as merely another example of the blatant hypocrisy so often seen in crusading extremist politicians. But then one detail came to my attention, not only did he visit these shops five or more times a week, but he was a regular customer of the booths.

Now, for several years in the 1990s I worked in a adult shop selling toys, magazines, and renting out porn to the customers. Like any business we had our regular customers and for someone to shop there five or more times a week would certainly be memorable. Also like nearly all of the adult shops we had the ‘arcade,’ a dozen or so closet sized private booths. A couple or the booths were fitted so that someone could rent a video, we’d load it into the player, and they would watch it in the booth, but that was not the majority of the booths. Most played an endless loop of porn on a number of channels and the customer just fed money into the machine and cycled the display to what struck their fancy.

But the real purpose of the booths was not to watch porn.

After all this was the 90s, video tapes players were in nearly every home, rentals were easy, and a cramped stuffy booth was hardly comfortable. Anyone interest in the porn would be far more comfortable at home.

No, the booths were for cruising.

Cruising is anonymous sex in public and semi-public places. Public Parks at night, airport bathrooms, and video store booths. Men, and it is always men, make their discreet eye contact and then follow each other into a booth, feeding the machine for the privacy to engage in sexual activates, afterwards going their separate ways.

Mark Robinson, in addition to his rants about pornography, his holocaust denial, and other unpleasant public stands is also blatantly homophobic.

I do not know that Robinson cruised the booths but it would hella shocking for someone that dedicated to the booths to not have.

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