Appearances

Spoiler Alert: Gollum isn't real. I have met the guy who helped bring his pixels to life. Sure, it all started with actor Andy Serkis romping about a green stage with ping pong balls attached to his body and face. Then months and months of layering with computer generated pixels brought us the tortured performance we saw on screen. Movie Magic.
At last month's Coachella Music Festival, deceased but not dead rapper Tupac Shakur showed up to perform a couple of songs with Snoop Dog and Doctor Dre. Well, a digitally generated version of Tupac Shakur showed up, thanks to James Cameron's visual effects department. The same guy that made us believe that Leonardo DiCaprio was the King of the World brought life to the dead. Pretty neat trick, but it's nothing really new.
Fred Astaire was dancing on the ceiling with a Dirt Devil back in 1997. John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart and Grace Kelly have been brought back from the Great Beyond to shill for light beer and diet cola. And anyone who watches The Daily Show knows that you can stick anyone in front of a green screen to make them appear to be in any exotic locale.
Which brings us to the reality of our president's visit to Afghanistan this past week. The story is that he landed there in the middle of the night and left before dawn, just to add weight to the speech he gave on the anniversary of the death of Osama bin Laden. Was it necessary? Was it expensive? Was it computer generated? It might have been less expensive if he had been photo-shopped into Bagram Air Base, but that would have been wrong, right? Even so, the doubters among us wonder why the special effects crew working on Mitt "Thurston Howell" Romney's campaign couldn't have made the Rudy Giuliani look a little more lifelike in their photo-op in front of the fire house in New York that same day.