frelling_tralk | (no subject)

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I've just wasted way too much time on http://actualteenadultteen.tumblr.com/ lol, they put together a picture of an actor playing 16 or 17 alongside a picture of what they actually looked like when they were were that age. It's so weird to see Hollywood's example of what passes for teenage in tv and film

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I always thought Sarah and Alyson passed okay actually (well Sarah was only 2 or 3 years older than the part anyway), but Nicky and Charisma were ridiculously obvious when they were both close to 30 and still playing 16/17 wtf. And Joss did hire an actual teenager for the part of Kendra unusually, but Bianca Lawson is 31 in the second pic and still playing a teenager...

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No, he shaves the hairline to look that bad ;) Quite the dedication ;)

Sometimes it surprises me that I cannot guess peoples age anymore. But such thing does explain them.

Was that when she was playing Kendall?

Very big 80's hair *g*

And sorry I should have mentioned that he wasn't an actor from the Buffyverse, that's Joshua Jackson who played Pacey on Dawson's Creek

I think tv and film teenagers have given a lot of us distorted pictures of how young people are supposed to look! I've always been hopeless at guessing people's ages anyway though

That picture of Charisma is going to keep me entertained all day.

Hee I was surprised by it too. And Nicky looks so different as well! With Nicky and Charisma I guess they had to use old yearbook photo's because they started acting when they were already out of their teens

Like Kristen Bell, OMG! was she a precious tiny thing or what? Hard to believe she was 16/17 in that pic.

yes. She was 13 when she first started playing kendall.

On the one hand, I find it amusing. On the other hand, it's really disturbing. Especially Bianca Lawson on Pretty Little Liars, that was just plain wrong to me.

Wow I never realised before that she was that young then, I always assumed that she was 15/16 when she won that role!

It is a little bit disturbing when you look at these full-grown adults playing teenagers and then compare that to wha a teenager would actually look like. In many cases it's baffling to me when they cast as old as they do. For Smallville they cast mid 20's Tom Welling to play Clark Kent and then gave him lots of sexy moments to appeal to the audience, but he was techniqually supposed to be 14/15 when the series began and they were giving him those shirt-ripping scenes...

All I can think of when looking at Charisma's teenage hair was that great line from Angel: "The government gave me bad hair!"

She did have a lot of bad haircuts over the years in Angel too lol

My God, that Tumblr is a time-thief! I just couldn't stop clicking next.

Hee, same!

Sometimes when they hire 25 year olds to play teens, and then 35-40 year olds to play their parents

*lol* Have you seen the original version of The Manchurian Candidate (1962)? Angela Lansbury was only three years older than Laurence Harvey - who played her son.

Both the Lawrence Olivier and Mel Gibson versions of Hamlet featured actresses playing their "mothers" who were no older than the actors were. Which might work fine in theater but movies? not so much.

she came off as quite mature compared to most 17 year olds?

I was surprised when I read Eliza was actually 17 at the time - basically the only actor who was the age they were supposed to be playing. Her styling, makeup, clothes, body etc had a LOT to do with that of course; it's how they get 13 amd 13 year old models to look like young adult women. On some level though I think it worked for the character because it implied that a hard life of defending herself and taking care of herself had prematurely aged her on one level emotionally. (but that's also a stereotype of poor working class kids; esp black or hispanic girls who are thought to be "sexually precocious". Faith is actually IMO a repository for a lot of those beliefs, she's the stand-in WOC, without the actual complications of race. Esp after they muffed-up Kendra big-time.)

I know the writers were responsible for failing to adjust MT's behavior to fit her actual age, but that also works for me on some levels, or at least i can fanwank that handily. 1) What would a bunch of monks know about teenagers?
2) Dawn has "memories" of her previous 14 years that have no basis in physical reality; her whole arc is about making herself "real". She has to grow up in a hurry.
3) Baby of the family, designed by the monks to be coddled and over-protected. A more mature-seeming, independent girl would have resisted that. Then after Buffy's death, of course everyone feels sorry for the sisterless, motherless girl and will tend to coddle and overprotect because the habit is already there. And as we've seen, the SG doesn't deal well with grief, for all the death in their world.

I occasionally glance at ebay and wonder if I should get the btvs dvd's, which set, does it matter, etc (being unemployed I shouldn't even consider it, period.)

Oh, the Bargaining commentary annoyed me to pieces.

I tend to dislike commentary tracks on principle. It's a bunch of people shooting the shit and almost nothing to do with what I, as a viewer, is actually interested in knowing. EIther the people who do the tracks don't know what people want, are talking off the cuff and are bad at it, or forget the viewer entirely so they can pal around.

I can think of three films (not tv shows) where I actually enjoyed the commentary track: The Hours, with Nicole Meryl and Julianne - not in the room with each other at the same time but that actually was better; they weren't talking to each other but to me, the viewer, and they didn't talk over the more important passages of dialogue. The others are American Splendor and Under the Tuscan Sun (I liked the director's commentary better than the film itself.)

Never knew SMG was not a natural blonde!

Sarah is the only natural brunette I can think of off the top of my head where I think she looks as good or better as a brunette; it just suits her, or at least the warmer honey-toned shades in btvs and the ringer. NOT the paler, almost platinum color she's got for the new series The Crazy Ones, which washes her out.

Like I said just upthread to falafel, Sarah is about the only natural brunette who I think looks good as a blond (but I've never gotten the big deal about blond hair generally). But not the pale washed-out shade in The Crazy ones as you mention.

Looking at the darker blonde in season 1 and then the really bleached blonde for season 2, there was no way to expect us to buy that Buffy had always had that golden-blonde hair colour that she had in season 5

The hair color is bad enough (almost too golden blond, like silk embroidery floss.) but the facial structure of the girl in TwoTW is all wrong - her face is very square (Sarah's is quite round) and that's just for starters. Her forehead seems a bit squat, the top of her head flat, the nose wrong. And she's in very very bright light so there's no fudging the fact that in no way could that girl have ever been Buffy(Sarah).

But I saw the entire series in three weeks, so the memory of Killed by Death was pretty fresh; I wondered why they went for such a completely different looking little girl. Did they think no one would notice?

And weirdly when she cut her hair for the flashback in Restless she still looked almost that young again!

Actually she was wearing a longer wig in Restless but you're absolutely right - I thought she looked exactly like her S1-2 self in that scene. it did't look like a wig at all. (Compared for instance to the wigs she wears on flashback scenes for HIMYM but I don't think they're even trying, really.)

I completely bought Sarah and Aly in the early seasons esp 1 & 2 as teenagers. Sarah looks like a cute little round-faced baby compared to later. S5 marks a significant shift IMO (

blackfrancine noted this once re: Buffy's elegance in later seasons.) I think Sarah is five years older than Buffy in real life? Even in S4 though she still seems very young and small but in S5 on that changes and she looks closer to Sarah's real age. that actually works thematically because Buffy's been through a lot of hardship in addition to having to take on the role of parent to Dawn. And of course I could not have watched Buffy have sex with Spike in S6 if she looked younger. Bangel was squicky enough as it was.

I generally enjoyed Joss's commentary for Bts, but it does seem like a lot of people agree to do a commentary without the faintest idea of what it entails. Usually there's a lot of awkward dead air because sometimes there just isn't that much to say about a lot of the scenes, unless you personally wrote and directed it all

It does tend to take the wind out of my sails sometimes lol when you're all 'oh there's no way you can expect us to ever buy that actor as 17', but then on occasion there really are 16 and 17 year olds that look a lot older then you would have thought. I didn't think that Eliza looked all that old, especially in the early season 3 episodes, but I certainly wouldn't have put her at 17 either. A lot of it was in how confidentally she carried herself, whereas Michelle did more have that awkwardness and gawky body language that we generally associate with teens

And heh I did fanwank it to an extent in season 5 because it was understandable that the monks would would to implant memories and instincts to make the people around Dawn be over protective of her, and there seemed to be the occasional wink to it even with Dawn complaining that at 14 she's old enough to be a babysitter, or Buffy not wanting Dawn to go across the street to see her friend because 'I don't like you hanging out with someone that short'. It was mostly season 6 where it started really bugging me with Tara still asking Dawn if she wants her pancakes made in funny shapes when Dawn was pushing 16 that season ffs, although I suppose it can be argued that the protective urges towards Dawn just naturally carried over from how they remembered always treating her

Edited 2013-07-29 19:33 (UTC)

They can be good. The Breaking Bad commentaries are worth the price of admission. I tend to like David Fincher's commentaries, too.

The Buffy ones... I liked Normal Again and that might be about it. The thing about Bargaining is I have the same problem I have with Joss's S6 and S7 comments. They have this "aw, we know it sucked, guys!" vibe to them and it pisses me off. They obviously didn't think they sucked when they were writing them.

Not to get off on a rant about it, but that's someone's work, you know? That's someone who got up at 4am and did the make-up, built the set, whatever on a miniscule WB/UPN budget. And you OK'd it. You OK'd the actress who played Veruca and you OK'd the edit so don't make fun of the vocals after the fact. It's just completely and utterly unprofessional and it makes me wonder if this is the kind of stuff they want memorialized on a DVD, just what it might have been like to work with them.

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