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The other day my wife and I were coming into the house where we passed some of my mom’s planters on the porch. Being the holiday season, they were filled with two beautiful poinsettias. Bich (my wife) remarked, “How does mom keep real flowers looking so good out here?” Knowing that couldn’t be possible, I examined them closer and saw that they were indeed fake.

But they were fake in the most clever way. The tips of many flowers were slightly discolored. A couple other flowers looked dead, their petals faded to a deep purple. Other petals had the bright green color of new buds. By liberally adding imperfections, whichever company made those fake poinsettias knew how to make fake flowers look real.

It reminded me of some movies I’ve seen, where things look maddeningly too perfect to be real. You know what I mean. Watch an old movie musical like “Oklahoma”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048445/ or “South Pacific”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052225/ and you know those “outdoor” scenes are really shot indoors, on perfectly crafted sets with perfect lighting and a bright blue scrim for a sky. There are some clever linking scenes of expansive *real* outdoor scenes, but you can instantly tell when they cut to the set.

For these old movies, this is forgivable. The early color film specifications required special mixes of very bright light that you just can’t reliably get outdoors. Plus, when you’re shooting something as complicated and fantastical as “The Wizard of Oz”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032138/ it’s not practical to shoot only when the weather is right and the sun is up. Yet I still cringe at those stupid shots in the woods surrounding the witch’s castle of that owl and those crows with the glowing red eyes. They are such obviously cheap halloween props from Spencer Gifts that it begs the question: Why didn’t they just shoot some real crows?

The human mind is extremely sophisticated at recognizing reality because we do it every second of every day. Rarely are we fooled, because we’re trained from birth to recognize extremely minute differences that shout out *real* or *fake*. CGI is getting extremely good, but even I could instantly tell that was not the _real_ Tobey Maguire climbing up the side of the building in “Spiderman”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0145487/ . There was just something about the way he moved that didn’t look quite…right.

Does anybody else think the old puppet Yoda was more charming than the new CGI Yoda?

!/images/19.jpg (Old Yoda)! !/images/18.jpg (New Yoda)!

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