Alice (back in Texas again?) was not that smitten with Troy, which I haven't myself seen and have no plans to see, until I take a look at it on the telly (if that is convenient). My favourite reason she didn't much like it was this one:
… in history, everything was brown, because colours cost too much, and this is dull on the eyeballs, …
See also The Gladiator. But I don't think it's that colour costs too much. I think it's that colour makes everything look not like XXX BC, but like XXX BC as filmed in 1960. and you wouldn't want that.
Later she says this:
Also I am worried about the small number of people who keep acting in every single movie I watch these days. There don't seem to be enough actors to go round. Half the cast of Troy looked like they were also in Lord of the Rings, and playing the same characters as well. Just dying your hair and removing the elf ears is not enough to make us think you're someone else, Orlando Bloom. We know who you are. And we know Brad Pitt is a crazed egomaniac, Sean Bean is Captain Sharpe, and all those dark wide-eyed feisty girls who look like Natalie Portman and Keira Knightley are actually the same person as each other.I don't think it was always thus: there used to be Stars and Everyone Else. Now there is a whole (albeit small) Acting Class. …
I don't know what I think about that, or even if it is true. Surely the old Stars were just as much the same from film to film as anybody is now.
I wonder if it is anything to do with getting older. When you are young (I realise that Alice is quite young now, but in the past, I surmise, she was even younger), you see a few Great Stars, and lots of old people. As you get older, you see more Stars. When you reach a hundred they all look like Stars, and there is no Everyone Else who are, compared to you, not Stars.
Plus the Stars don't look as great as those old Stars did, when you were a kid. Everyone just just looks like ... Everyone Else. The Stars merge into a great big acting company. But it's you, not them.
Just a thought.
