turtlesareneat@piefed.ca 1 week ago
This is just a trope everywhere and it’s absurd. Like Project Hail Mary. Yep, a school physics teacher is chiseled and looks like a shaggy sex teddy bear dog. Just like every other physics teacher I’ve met. Yep.
So, I was watching ‘The Getaway’ with Steve McQueen. That movie was made when McQueen was one of the top box office draws in the world. He takes off his shirt and, to me, he looks a little scrawny.
A while later, I’m watching a movie where the shirtless guy is supposed to be a middle-aged lawyer with a minor drug problem. Looks like he could throw McQueen through the wall.
Harrison Ford went on an intensive regime of exercise with a famous fitness trainer in order to get into peak physical condition for Temple of Doom:
If you watch the movie, you’ll see his abdominal muscles as he’s breathing heavily. Not disagreeing with you, just pointing out that his physique is a bit more impressive than what a single photo might indicate. Definitely not the modern, roided-up action star physique. I wonder if he was even getting pumped before shooting, like modern actors do.
Some other examples are Christopher Reeve as Superman, Tom Selleck as Magnum PI, and Erik Estrada as Ponch in CHiPs. All were seen as strong, fit leading men in the late 70s and early 80s. Schwarzenegger is probably the main reason that roided-up physiques became so mainstream, along with WWF/WWE. Both exploded in popularity around the early 80s.
A friend told me that he wanted to buy his nephew a Luke Skywalker action figure; he wanted the lad to have the same one he’d grown up playing with.
When he went to the store, the figure they had was bulked up. Looked nothing like the real Mark Hamill.
I know, I would prefer if actors were undisciplined fat slobs who give you the performance they feel like giving you between KFC buckets. That’d be more real
Brendan “Fatso” Fraser was such a terrible actor in The Whale, you could really tell he had one hand in a KFC bucket at all times. I’d much rather watch my favorite actor Dwayne “The Rock-Solid” Johnson muscle the emotions off the screen with his giant Johnson. Muscle is discipline and discipline is good acting, it is known.
zerodawn@leaf.dance 1 week ago
In the case of Project Hail Mary they have an “answer” as to why. The book directly explains it and the movie nods at it in a scene where he writes “Muscles?” on the white board, but its the coma robot, Armindo. It was meant to work their limbs and apply electrical stimulation so they wouldn’t atrophy on the trip.
Initech_vs_Initrode@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
Not only that, but when the main character wakes up at the start of the book, he is baffled as to why he’s so muscular. I guess the problem with the movie is that he wasn’t visibly skinnier during the classroom flashback scenes.
zerodawn@leaf.dance 5 days ago
The problem is they had a seven-ish hour pre cut, a four and a half hour directors cut, and the two and a half hour theatrical release. The original pass on the movie probably explains everything. If I’m being honest I’d gladly give up the karaoke scene for the 10 or so 30 second explanation scenes we could have had in it’s place.
Initech_vs_Initrode@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
Yeah, I enjoyed the movie and thought it was a pretty decent adaptation, but it’s still an adaptation of a hard sci-fi book for general audiences. The start of the book, where he’s coming up with ways to figure out where he is, using Newtonian physics and common objects, was a ton of fun for nerds like me, but would be boring af for regular audiences.
It reminds me a bit of Contact. The book is amazing. Sagan explains how one might communicate with an alien intelligence, starting from the basics of detecting signals, to communicating basic logic and mathematics, to communicating engineering diagrams. Pretty much none of that was covered in the movie, but it was still a good adaptation.