#idk it just bothers me bc i'm just sitting there like... the fallhöhen could be so much bigger if you just didn't.... do that

[airenyah]

glad you enjoyed 😊 (also i apologize for the many typos, i was really tired that day and definitely couldn't be bothered to proofread hahaha)

anyway, as i've said this is really just the tip of the iceberg. there are many important things that i haven't even mentioned yet, such as actors actively listening to each other (this is pretty difficult! and you can tell when actors aren't listening to each other and that's usually a bad thing → unless the character is supposed to not be listening. again it's all relative to the specific scene).

on that note: "wahrnehmen". a word that means to perceive, to (take) note. the "actively listening" point falls into that, an actor has to take perceive their co-star's words, but not just that, they have to perceive every single sound (actively hear and notice it), they have to perceive every single thing they look at (actively looking at it and taking note of it), they have to perceive every single touch whether they're the one doing the touching or the one being touched (actively feeling it), etc... actually i have an example of this (surprise surprise it's bad buddy and ohm again. so much brainrot even after a year has passed help me). i'm going to talk about this at the end of this reblog in this separate post though, because i want to point out some other things i've mentioned as well

you also have to mean everything that you say or do. if you don't mean it then you will come across as a person reciting some lines and going through the motions rather than a "living" character (i don't really know how to put this, i hope this makes sense hahaha. i'm trying to say the character seems like a real living person then)

i also didn't say a single thing about conflict, the importance of which was really hammered into my head by both my camera acting teacher and my mom (their fave sentence on this topic: "where's the conflict?"). even my voice teacher has talked about this (the feedback he gave to my colleague on her monologue? he was missing some inner conflict which would have made the monologue a lot more captivating). and conflict doesn't mean the obvious conflict written into the plot, the script (that's the scriptwriter's problem). in acting this conflict is the inner conflict a character has that isn't necessarily in the script and it's an actor's job to find that conflict and show it to the audience. a character portrayed by an actor who shows a lot of conflict will be more interesting than a character portrayed by an actor who doesn't show conflict (you can see the difference really well if you compare the 2009 kdrama "you are beautiful" with its taiwanese remake! and comparing these two versions also showcases really well how boring it is when actors keep doing the same thing over and over. i actually had a whole analysis project going on about this with a friend and i wish i could sit you down next to me and go through it with you as well)

a beautiful word that i stole from my monologue teacher is "dagegenspielen" and it's yet another one of those where i have no clue how to best say this in english. the literal translation is something like "to act against" or "to play against". basically it's when an actor is going against the plot/the genre in a very specific way. for example when they are in a tragedy but they don't act or behave in a tragic way (last year i was doing the "wherefore art thou romeo" monologue. and in the beginning i struggled a lot and my beloved monologue teacher would constantly tell me "your acting is too tragic! the audience knows this is a tragedy but juliet doesn't know it at this point, so why are you being so tragic?"). a tragedy is already very heavy from the plot alone and if an actor then portrays every scene in a tragic way too then it will just get exhausting for the audience. so it's an actor's job to lighten the tragedy and make it easier to digest for the audience, giving them a break from all the drama. besides, the actual tragic scenes will hit you even more that way (my monologue teacher would talk a lot about "fallhöhen" aka the hight of the drop. if you bring your audience up to a happy place then the drop down to the sad place will be much higher and it will hurt a lot more. but if you're already in the sad place then the audience might slip and fall on their butt which might sting for a moment, but they'll immediately get up and continue on, not thinking about it ever again. but bring the audience up to a high point and let them fall, that'll be much more painful and they'll take a while until they've picked up the pieces after the drop)

god this is is already getting so long again and i haven't even mentioned communication yet. as an actor you are never alone on stage or in front of the camera. you have to create relationships with every other character. that refers to the characters that are currently in the same space as well as characters that are not in that scene at all. but not just characters! you have to create a relation(ship) between your character and every single object they interact with, in fact with the whole world around you (this is where the point of actually perceiving everything comes in!). once you have learned how to look out for it, it gets really obvious when an actor is only in their own bubble and doesn't communicate well with their co-stars (my camera acting teacher would always talk about "futter geben" - feeding your co-stars. if you offer a lot to your co-stars they will have a much easier time to respond to you and take it further)

honestly, there are so many more things i take note of when i analyze acting, but it usually comes to me as i'm watching something. i mean this got even longer now but trust me, there are things still missing that i'm forgetting about right now or that i can't explain. also i'm not sure that all of this even makes sense to someone without experience. it really botheres me that i can't just sit everyone reading this down and show some clips and point very specific things out, comparing them with other, similar scenes and concepts, etc.... but this is a tumblr post, so this will have to do

I appreciate everyone's good advice to just drop the damn thing, but for some reason I feel compelled to keep watching Candy Color Paradox, and then complain about it. It's feeling like my experience watching War of Y, although they are very different shows, in that I'm fascinated by it's successes and failures. And I now want to find out what the show ends up saying (either intentionally or not) about the morality of paparazzi journalism. I did notice that two minutes after I paused to write my last post Kaburagi was questioning the ethics of what they did and how it impacted their subject, so I have some hope that the show is at least trying to say something.

However to avoid polluting the tags with my negativity for people who are enjoying the show, I'll keep my criticism below readmores.

Before I get into that, are the editors at the magazine trying to match-make Kaburagi and Onoe? 🤔Because they keep singing the praises of each of them to the other one. 👀

I think the biggest problem for me is that I just don't think the actors are very good. According to MDL they're both idols and don't have much previous acting experience, and I can tell. They're both trying their best, but there is this awkward amateurism to their acting that is distracting me and makes the characters feel less real. I'm just now watching the scene with Congressman's secretary, and it's clear just how much more comfortable this older actor is on screen (at least before he sexually assaults Onoe). He moves and talks and inhabits his body in this unselfconscious way that is engaging to watch. And in the scene when Onoe is talking to his bartender friend, Masayan, my eyes kept being drawn to the bartender, even though all he was doing was listening and nodding. But he just seemed so much present and real.

I bring these two other (much more experienced) actors up because it affirmed for me that it wasn't just my imagination. Both young actors have this tentativeness to their physicality, which really doesn't work for the supposedly cool and dominating Kaburagi, but neither does it feel like it matches the awkwardness that Onoe has. It feels like the actor's own awkwardness, rather than the character's, somehow. It doesn't help matters that they both seem made-up and styled like idols rather than journalists. They just both look so young.

They're not terrible, they both have some nice moments, and Onoe's face especially is growing on me. I think he's the stronger actor, actually, he has this wonderful wide-eyed way of looking at Kaburagi that temporarly creates the illusion that these two have chemistry. The roles I suspect are actually deceptively hard to do well, balancing complex emotions with slapstick comedy. I'm not an actor, but I imagine that's something that requires a lot of experience to pull off well. But it does mean that the chemistry isn't really there, that Kaburagi's philosophical musings feel shallow instead of like insights into a moral crisis, and that Onoe's panic about falling in love doesn't ring true for me.

And oh my god that final sex scene in the car, there was no connection there, it felt like they were each in their own world, not like they were reacting to each other. Which I get, it probably feels much safer for the actors to approach it that way. But it's so obvious on screen. At least a JBL is willing to portray sexuality on screen, I guess? Next step is helping inexperienced actors get comfortable with it. (Eternal Yesterday and Utsukushii Kare were on a different level all together, production and direction wise, and the actors in Old Fashion Cupcake are such pros that they probably could have managed it on their own, though I imagine they had support. And thus concludes the list of JBL I've seen that have attempted more than dead fish kisses.)

The other problem is a mismatch of my expectations and what the show actually is. I keep wanting it to be more serious; it touches upon these complex issues—the sexual assault, ethics in journalism, Kaburagi's feelings about trading sexual favors for information—and then glancing right off of them. Whereas I keep hoping for them to dig in. But it seems very devoted to it's yaoi roots, particularly with a sexually aggressive seme and a blushing maiden uke, and not interested in going much deeper.

And since this is my space to vent, I just watched another show where a completely untrained person was miles better at tailing people and taking covert photos than than these two are. The shows are completely different in tone and budget, so perhaps it's not fair to compare, but it did make me laugh. (I don't want to spoil that show, though it's barely a spoiler, but it's this one for anyone curious.)