Michael Dawson

Nic Cage confuses me as an actor. I think generally he has made a career out of being outrageously OTT and relentlessly mugging for the camera. But then occasionally he puts in a really great performance like in Adaptation or Kick Ass (I loved the way he channelled Adam West whenever taking the guise of Big Daddy).
Is he a good actor? Or was it just that his bizarre style worked in those movies?

Excellent and well informed article, a great read!
I’ve always preferred prosthetics and animatronics for the exact reason you say here, they just look and feel more “real”. Giving actors something physical to work with must make their job easier. It’s one of the many reasons why the Star Wars prequels feel so empty and vacuous, because the actors have no sense of their environment or even at times what other characters are in the scene with them.
Also some traditional effects can look a little wobbly at times but they just have more character and charm than CGI. CGI has it’s uses as you say for post-production tweaking but I’d rather see effects like those in Cronenberg’s The Fly than those in Man of Steel.

I watched Batman Forever over and over as a kid and I have always associated that theme music with Batman. I’d never really thought about before reading this article but actually, to me that is the definitive Batman music and looking back it’s a great score.
Really good article!

Funnily enough I actually found the show became more bearable the longer the season went on, despite everything I wrote here! And yeah I agree with the frustrating nature of Maggie and Jim. A will they/won’t they romance is often more interesting for the viewer because it’s frustrating, but in an exciting way. When it defies logic as it does here, it becomes frustrating in a “this is badly written” sort of way

I can see your point both about the dialogue and about the lack of originality in the West Wing. I guess I found the dialogue a lot more irritating in The Newsroom and through the course of writing the article was trying to figure out why.
Personally I think Sorkin should stick to writing movies. His scripts for both The Social Network and Moneyball were absolutely brilliant and arguably better than anything he has written for TV.
Interestingly in both cases the plot and characters already existed in the books. He didn’t have to come up with them, he just had to translate them onto screen and he did it superbly.