Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Why Doesn't Miley Cyrus Sound Like a Hick When She Sings?


I just saw Miley Cyrus speak for the first time this week on SNL and Fallon, and I had no idea that her normal speaking voice was so...

...lets not pull punches - she sounds like a hick.

Where the hell does her accent go when she starts singing?  Lets not blame the obvious here - Autotune.  This is a phenomenon I've heard with other singers, particularly British/Scottish/Irish where their thick natural accent is completely lost when they start to sing.

Other times, its plain as day, such as with the Cranberries, or Little Talks, or George Strait.

What's going on?

There are two interesting explanations for this phenomenon.

The first starts by looking at what we talk about when discuss speech accents.  In particular, the tone, meter, altered phonics, syllabic emphasis, and even vocabulary all go into what we consider an "accent".  It also turns out that when you sing, pretty much all of this is overwritten by the song.

So, if the song isn't written for an accent, it usually disappears because the constructed nature of singing a song removes the inclination to turn words into your natural sounding speaking voice.

The other explanation is more physiological.

Basically, the parts of the brain that control speech are not the same that control singing.  On interesting effect of this is that people with a speech impediment (such as stuttering) can lose this impediment completely when singing.

Monday, October 7, 2013

The Sad, Sad History of Female Led Comic Book Movies - Barb Wire (1996)

I'm not going to give a full run down on why this film failed.  It's a lazy film, poorly acted, terribly written, and a plot poorly lifted from one of the most beloved films of all time.

And Pam Anderson... a declining Pam Anderson at that.

Suffice to say her tits couldn't act their way out of a paper bag, and they are collectively a much better actor than the monstrosity they are attached to.

This movie was so bad it killed the comic book it came from almost immediately after the film was released, which is likely the most important thing that came from this movie.

Next Up: Another Time Jump!  Catwoman (2004)

The Sad, Sad History of Female Led Comic Book Movies - Tank Girl (1995)

We continue to analyze why female led superhero movies have failed over the last 30 years, and why these failures are not indicative of the gender of the lead, but rather a whole slew of problems unique to each project.

Last time we dug through the ashes of Supergirl to discover what went awry with Kara Zor-El's turn at the big screen.  The upshot of the story is that Supergirl attempted to ride the coattails of a Superman franchise that was already compromised and on the way out.  As a spin-off of this franchise, Supergirl was met with the same production issues and studio meddling that had plagued the Donner era Superman films while adding little to nothing to the previous films.

Eleven Years.  Between Supergirl and Tank Girl, ELEVEN years lapse. This has less to due to the failure of Supergirl, rather the collapse of the whole Superman franchise had soured Hollywood on superheros in general.

It took the publishing of The Killing Joke and The Dark Knight Returns in order to bring studio interest in making another superhero film.  This time with Batman (1989) as an anti-hero with a significantly darker tone than both the Superman franchise as well as other film and TV versions of the caped crusader.  The astounding success of the film caught the movie world off guard, and Hollywood's echo chamber responded predictably by trying to find new comic book characters to turn into the next blockbuster.

Rather than go with established DC and Marvel characters however, the studios turned their sites towards a new cropping of independent publishers that had developed over the last few years such as Image, Mirage, and Dark Horse Comics.  These smaller publishers offered fresh characters and stories, as well as embodying the darker corners of the comic world that had made Batman so successful, and offered their adaptation rights significantly cheaper than the big two.

Films ran the gambit from new classics like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to much older properties like The Shadow and Dick Tracey.  However, few of these films were very successful, and none would match the success that that the first Batman enjoyed.

One of the titles that had generated interest during this period was Tank Girl.  Tank Girl embraced tenets of punk rock, particularly the growing influence of women in punk culture that would evolved into the Riot Grrrl aesthetic.  The comic was a mix of influences, styles, and formats, and included significant breaks from comic norms.

This break from norms turned out to be the film's ultimate undoing.  Its an ambitious film for sure, but all the elements that made the independent comic work on page completely fell apart on the screen.

The title character is the obvious place to start, and how poorly Tank Girl's character translated to the screen.  The comic version was highly stylized, aggressively lewd and vulgar, and featured over the top costuming, weaponry, and (for lack of a better word) accessorizing - with a brash attitude to match.

Translating this character to live action presented problems, and both the stilted dialog and Lori Petty's acting did not do any favors to making the character more than a calculated cardboard cutout.  Petty's overly aggressive sneering performance made for a major misfire on the titular character.

Being an unknown property with little star power (when you most famous actor is a hip-hop star buried under kangaroo makeup, there might be issues afoot) didn't warrant the kind of budget needed to really bring the highly visual comic to life.  Unfortunately, even with effects and makeup folks taking pay cuts to work on the film, the resulting film is barren, cheap looking, and just ugly.  Also, the property was unknown, the marketing for it was non-existent, and the Riot Grrl style that the film hoped to connect with was still in formation and would not reach mainstream maturity for many years.

It is also apparent that these issues caused the production significant problems, so much so that there were sequences that weren't filmed and had to be created using illustrations and animation.  I'm reminded of the wisdom of Mark Borchardt:

"There's no excuses, Paul. No one has ever, ever paid admission to see an excuse. No one has ever faced a black screen that says: "Well, if we had these set of circumstances, we would've shot this scene... so please forgive us and use your imagination." I've been to the movies hundreds of times. That's never occurred."

Except for Tank Girl.  Next on our tail of woe for the women of comic book world: Barb Wire.