My Blue Heaven.


First-time writer-director Kerry Conran tries to go the Lucas route and digitize full environments in The World of Tomorrow, a forthcoming film described in Player-speak as “Flash Gordon meets Indiana Jones.” I dunno…hopefully Gwyneth and Jude are better blue-screen actors than Samuel L. Jackson and Natalie Portman.

4 thoughts on “My Blue Heaven.”

  1. Jackson and Portman are fine blue-screen actors. It was the material and the direction that was wrong. Let’s just hope that Kerry Conran is a competent writer-director.

  2. I agree that Lucas has to take a lion’s share of the blame for the poor performances in Episode 2. But I still submit that not only did Jackson and Portman seem much more wooden and stilted than Ewan MacGregor or Liam Neeson, they were also putting work that was far below their usual output. Some of that has to be because of the bluescreen factor.

  3. If any of this film is actually set at the 1939 World’s Fair, I’ll probably levitate, or something. I’ve been collecting photographs and memorabilia from that fair for years, and oddly enough it’s near the top of the list of places I want to go when they invent The Time Machine.

    I don’t think the problem with Lucas is necessarily just the bluescreen factor, but rather his nascent inability (or simply lack of caring) to work with actors. He seems more consumed with creating a perfect digitized world than with directing the actors within it to act with emotion and motivation. If Conran turns out to have a natural talent to direct actors, we might not have a problem here.

    I’ll go see it, anyway.

  4. What Chuck said. Blue screen simply ISN’T a factor at all. An actor trains and works hard to reach into his imagination to pull a performance. This is very necessary when you have a black set behind you and you need to use the fourth wall to create objects to make the character and the situation believable. Even a film actor must react to an object or off-camera creature that doesn’t exist in the frame (particularly in this age of digital effects).

    Ewan McGregor worked, but he wasn’t really acting. He was essentially doing a fine impersonation of Alec Guinness from the Ealing comedies. But even he was operating well under the bar of what he was capable of.

    And I’d throw Liam Neeson into the Jackson-Portman camp. Really, it was a criminal waste of talent.

Comments are closed.