Jason Rowan
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Are These Stars for Real? (Not at All -- They've Been Airbrushed!)
In the Golden Era of Hollywood, re-touching photographic stills of movie stars was the standard. The layers of illusion that the studio machine wrapped around the already striking actors was impressive; makeup, ingenious lighting, and delicate, highly sophisticated airbrushing were applied by teams of trained experts. The image you saw of Joan Crawford was unquestionably removed from what the woman would look like without makeup or manipulation. But the limits of the technology -- and the skill and intelligence of the artisans who produced the final images -- kept the bounds of physical reality within check; the stars, while greatly idealized, still looked like themselves.
In the digital age, all that has changed. The explosion of outlets for celebrity imagery (ads, music videos, television commercials and magazine covers) have created a much larger market for retouching, and the digital retouching program Photoshop has met this need (albeit with frequently calamitous results). The ever-increasing celebrity frenzy and fixation on looks promoted by magazines like US Weekly and The Star and sites like Pink is The New Blog have driven standards into a strange, otherworldly zone. The preponderance of plastic surgery, truly heroic dieting and physical training, and overzealous Photoshopping have created a new generation of idealized and, in some cases, not-quite-human images of celebs. While plastic surgery requires some degree of serious contemplation by even the most hardened Botox-junkie, to have your Photoshopper remove every last trace of individuality from your appearance you need only say the word.
Here are just a few of the more notable -- if not notorious -- digital facsimiles.
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2. Catherine Zeta-Jones
John Waters said of plastic surgery, "I'm against it. If it's bad you look like someone who moved to Los Angeles and never made it, and if it's good you look like someone else". Apparently, judging from Photoshop Disasters' coverage, Cosmetics company Elizabeth Arden wanted Victoria Beckham for its Colr Intrigue Effects Lipstick campaign. When it couldn't get her, it hired Zeta-Jones instead, and 'shopped her up until she looked pretty much exactly like La Posh. This is how bizarre things get when the connection to physical reality is completely severed; you do indeed wind up looking like someone else.
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3. 'The Women'
Featuring an array of women over 40, and several over 50, the DVD packaging for 'The Women' has nary a wrinkle in sight. In fairness to the Photoshoppers, if you watch the trailer, it appears that the women have all had their lines permanently banished to Botox-land (along with their ability to express emotions). Unlike European counterparts like Catherine Denueve, the post-Baby Boomer Hollywood actresses seem to have missed the whole growing-older-gracefully thing. When age- and expression-erasing surgeries combine with the desperate illusion that these women are untouched by time's passage, you get the poster for 'The Women' and the phenomenon known as Photox.
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4. Shirley MacLaine
The marketing images for the Lifetime movie 'Coco Chanel' feature Shirley MacLaine in a virtually Vaseline-lensed piece of lines-free visual fiction. And she's not playing a young woman! Are we really supposed to accept that a woman who has led such a long, rich life doesn't have laugh lines?
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1. Dane Cook
In his MySpace blog, Cook took on the designers of the poster for 'My Best Friend's Girl,' in which Kate Hudson, Jason Biggs and Cook all seem to be lit from completely different sources and photographed on continents apart. Cook called the poster "so glossy it makes Entertainment Weekly look wooden", going on to say, "The left side of my face seems to be melting off. I guess I am looking directly into the Ark of the Covenant?" When the celebs themselves are revolted by their overly idealized images, you know things have gone too far.
Best Blu-ray Discs of 2008 2
'The Dark Knight' The gist: Probably the most ambitious and the darkest of all superhero movies, Christopher Nolan's 'The Dark Knight' bursts at the seams with ideas, plots and visual elan. The initial bank robbery sequence is worth the price of admission. A legitimate sense of dread, action sequences that stun jaded audiences, Christian Bale's Armani wardrobe and Heath Ledger's wildly ...Best Blu-ray Discs of 2008 3
'Bottle Rocket' The gist: Wes Anderson's graceful debut (co-written with co-star Owen Wilson) has an easy, oddball charm. The ambling, post-adolescent drift of these characters looking for some kind of fulfillment has its own logic that has made the film iconic for misfit dreamers of all stripes. There's a sweetness and authenticity to Anderson's first film that isn't as evident in some of ...Best Blu-ray Discs of 2008 4
'WALL-E' The gist: Perhaps the first great film to emerge during the Blu-ray era. Pixar's dazzling creation almost demands the medium's hyper-veracity -- the intricate details of a post eco-apocalyptic world, filled with trash and one scrappy robot, is astonishingly beautiful in this format. Both deeply charming and sweet in the classic Disney sense while managing to be wildly subversive and ...Best Blu-ray Discs of 2008 5
'Firefly: The Complete Series' The gist: Joss Whedon's episodic western-in-space was too beautiful to live -- a thoughtful, quirky, ambitious series that never made it to the end of its first season on Fox in 2002. But avid fans and a persistent curiosity about the show led to the 2005 feature 'Serenity,' which tied up the loose ends in fine form. Fusing old-timey talk with grimy spaceships ...Best Blu-ray Discs of 2008 6
'Before the Devil Knows You're Dead' The gist: Sidney Lumet's emotionally gritty film explores the consequences of a bad idea taken to much worse extremes. A dark tale of buried resentments that ultimately destroy a family, 'Devil' features bracing performances from Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Marisa Tomei and Albert Finney. A riveting combination of family drama and suspense ...
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