The film “You People” was released on Netflix last month to little fanfare. The romantic comedy features Jonah Hill and Lauren London as a couple dealing with unsupportive parents as they navigate their relationship (David Duchovny, Nia Long, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Eddie Murphy). The film is the kind of run of the mill stuff you’ve seen again and again on Netflix. Think “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner” with a worse script and uninspired acting. It’s hard to ruin a romantic comedy, but stop reading if spoilers bother you. At the end of the film London and Hill are married and share a kiss… But they actually didn’t. Not really. On the Brilliant Idiots podcast actor Andrew Schulz reported, “There’s a hilarious thing. I don’t even know if I should share this s**t, but the final scene, they don’t even kiss. It’s CGI. Swear to god.” Schulz claims the two stopped a few inches from each other’s face and CGI did the rest. Judge for yourself in this short clip. Kiss is around 1:50 Now CGI has been used for a lot of things, like giving Jeremy Renner the use of his arms in Tag after he broke them in a stunt gone wrong. But it seems extremely strange that CGI would be used in a situation that could be solved by acting. What do you think about this kind of CGI usage? Are there any other example you can think of where CGI was used to do something simple that the actors could have accomplished themselves?
On Thor: The Dark World, Natalie Portman's schedule didn't allow here to make it to shoot Thor kissing Jane at the end of the movie. Chris Hemsworth brought in his wife, who put on Jane's clothes and a wig, and it's Chris and his wife who actually do the shot of Thor kissing Jane. No one has explained why the filmmakers CGI'ed this shot in You People. Maybe they didn't shoot it to begin with, maybe the footage they shot didn't look great. Reshoots are absurdly expensive to do, when you consider everything involved to do anything on a Hollywood production, from union issues to insurance. And the talent may not care or be available to meet the film's deadline, having already moved on to their next project. It's not unlike saying why can't bands just record all-analogue, instead of digital and fixing the stuff in post. When studio time is expensive and there are deadlines, you go with what works and gets the job done. Finicky fans can get obsessed with some sense of "authenticity," but I think the people who actually make the stuff are more focused on getting the job done.
I truncated the interview but there’s a strong implication from Andrew Schulz that this wasn’t a case of not capturing a shot on the shotlist but rather an intentional choice to not shoot the kiss once the shot was set-up. Now maybe the idea was to cut before their lips meet and show the wedding attendees reacting instead. Given the leads have zero chemistry it’s temping to believe they didn’t want to do the kiss in the first place and attempted to cut around it. If I was the director I would probably want the shot just in case to give me options in the edit. Either way the result is interesting. Portman’s double in Thor: The Dark World was much more believable. “You People” looks incredibly jarring once you realize the trickery.
